Some questions on the utility of transmission biases in ethnographic research

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Acknowledgments

I thank the Aarhus University Research Foundation and a Culture in Schooling grant (Issachar Fund #TIF0206) for generous support. I also thank Karl Frost, Hugh Turpin, and Connor Wood for our conversations over the past few years on some of these issues. Many thanks go to Theiss Bendixen and Aaron Lightner for their feedback on a draft of this commentary.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2023.2291222)

Notes

1 Here, I take “ethnography” to be: “the processes and products of research that document what people know, feel, and do in a way that situates those phenomena at specific times in the history of individual lives” (Handwerker, 2001, p. 7).

2 In a field example, Singh et al. (2020) asked individuals to evaluate two hypothetical shamans and the “CREDs question” was whether or not shamans’ observance of taboos indicated their beliefs. Perhaps this method reliably taps into the kinds of psychology posited to underlie CREDs (to my knowledge is has not been verified), but it tells us nothing about transmission of beliefs or corresponding behaviors. As the authors admit, much of these findings are consistent with expectations borne from signaling and other theories that attend to ritual communication (Rappaport, 1999; Soler et al., 2014; Sosis, 2005). If ritual costs reliably convey general trustworthiness (Hall et al., 2015; Purzycki & Arakchaa, 2013), the inference that individuals believe in what they are verbally expressing does not appear to be a very dramatic leap to make. This particular case study points to the demographic structuring of belief-behavior sets’ distributions. It would be curious to see if a similar study with hypothetical peers would yield the same result; observing shamanic taboos when one is not a shaman might seem like folly and/or attention-seeking (see below).

3 Incidentally, this might be a more convincing domain for a CREDs scale adapted for local relevance than parents’ religiosity. The challenge, however, is how to measure variation in CRED exposure in such a context.

4 Presumably, Parsana operates in a context where everyone already believes cows are sacred (Ѳ = 1). In such cases, through time, Δ_ϕ = 0 as the model specifies no updating to beliefs when both share the same Ѳ state. Yet, observers might weight the cost of the practice, c, as especially high, so perhaps this outweighs any perceived consistency between Ѳ and x (i.e., b < c), a state assumed to be typical of the world.

5 https://www.ecaglobal.org/. Accessed January 10, 2023.

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Funding

This work was supported by Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond; Culture in Schooling (Issachar Fund) [grant number: TIF0206].