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Belief systems can ensure the acceptance of social conventions, and thus the requisite degree of predictability in the operation of a social system. Rappaport (1971a, b) suggested this can be effected through rituals of sanctification. These ensure the acceptance of important messages or conventions by imparting to them some of the unquestionable nature of the ultimate sacred propositions: to the extent that a message is sanctified, it will be accepted unquestionably as true. As Rappaport has noted, when people accept messages as true “their responses … tend to be predictable”. It follows, therefore, that messages likely to be sanctified are those which function to elicit

responses that must be predictable so as to permit the orderly operation of society. These messages include both directivesand several kinds of more general propositions. The importance of acceptance of directives emanating from some kind of authority is obvious, especially in societies where actual political power is weakly developed. It follows that ritual can be expected to have been well to the forefront in early endeavours to aggregate dispersed groups and keep them so.

Propositions likely to be sanctified concern general attitudes. These, serving as a general guide to behaviour, are often termed ‘values’. Sanctification of this kind of proposition has long been recognised by anthropologists and sociologists studying religion. Drennan noted that it is precisely this which Geertz (1957:426-427) is discussing when he said:

Religion, by fusing ethos and worldview, gives a set of social values what they perhaps most need to be coercive: an appearance of objectivity. In sacred rituals and myths, values are portrayed not as subjective human preferences but as the imposed conditions for life implicit in a world with a particular structure.

Closely related to the sanctification of values is the sanctification of persons and institutions. Drennan (1976) provided the example of this when a chief is said to be

descended from a god he is associated with ultimate sacred propositions, and some of the unquestionable nature of their legitimacy is imparted to his person; thereafter, whatever statements he may issue partake of this legitimacy. Also likely to be legitimised are ‘messages’ containing information that is either unverifiable or requires special

competence for verification. Statements of fact, therefore, that the receiver cannot verify at all (or cannot verify until after he has made his response) are likely to be sanctified. One of the most important types of message likely to receive sanctification concerns social conventions dealing with economic matters (e.g., the ways in which goods are distributed among members of a social group). As these may seem highly arbitrary, they are likely to be sanctified to “transform the arbitrary into the necessary” (Rappaport 1971b:35). Such messages may be either propositions concerning the social conventions or directives involved in execution, their nature varying on the level of control from which they are emanating.

For the social system to operate, Drennan saw it is necessary that those participating in ritual accept conventions and pattern their activities accordingly. He asked what it is that motivated them to do so, noting, for example, that even if an economic explanation is accepted to explain the emergence of administered society, it fails to explain the

emergence of the cognised models that enable such a system to operate. (In this context, and referring to the highlands of Mesoamerica, he said it seemed highly unlikely the people accepted that social conventions granting higher status to a restricted set of individuals and requiring that their directives be obeyed, because of realisation that it was necessary in order to maintain a system of economic symbiosis.) Conventions maintaining a social system include many relatively specific directives for behaviour, the relation of which to the overall maintenance of the social system is not intuitively obvious to the participants; neither are the large-scale social, economic or ecological advantages of the particular form of social organisation.

Since there is a large number of possible alternative social conventions, the advantages of which are not apt to be perceived by members of a group, those that seem arbitrary are not likely to be universally accepted. Furthermore, unless there is a high degree of acceptance of conventions and the specific messages concerned, group responses are unpredictable. Successful group operation depends on some minimum degree of orderliness or predictability; hence, to the extent that conventions seem arbitrary but orderliness is necessary, some mechanism for assuring the acceptance of the social conventions and the messages concerned with them is required (Rappaport 1971a:68; 1971b:32). Drennan maintained that where physical coercion is required to ensure this,

existence of an administrative structure capable of wielding a certain amount of power is implied arbitrary.

Rappaport (1971b:31) contended that messages emanating from higher levels of control are more abstract, and therefore likely to seem more arbitrary to those who receive them than those emanating from lower levels of control. This comes about because “the range of differences possible in the regulation of the components of a low-order system, such as a production system, is probably narrower than in higher-order systems”. It was noted earlier that a major source of the seeming arbitrariness of social conventions is the recognition of apparently equally feasible alternatives.