¹ Based on archaeological evidence of the discovery of bears' skulls purposefully arranged in a circular fashion within a Swiss cave before the period of Wurm glaciation (Campbell 1989: 2). ² It is a peculiar feature of Christianity's influence on Occidental thought which requires belief as a requirement for membership in a religious tradition. In ritual practices generally, regardless of the culture, it is always a matter of conjecture just what is actually happening inside the minds of its participants. Earlier ethnographers such as Frazer, Tylor, and Robinson-Smith may have fearlessly skated onto the thin ice of intellectual projection of beliefs to tribal peoples, but contemporary anthropologists must trace ritual actions and orientations through a major range of social activities and other customs of the entire society before venturing any hypothesis about what a people may or may not "believe". ³ A sign of how far anthropological thinking has "run" with a more dynamic view of power, ideology, and hegemony is evidenced by Firth's 1972 criticism of Cohen's article as "reductionistic" since Firth believes Cohen ignores the "whole range of problems concerned with men's conceptions of their social order in moral and aesthetic terms..." (1972:87) as if these latter categories developed autonomously!

⁴ Other relevant studies in the anthropology and ideology of death would include Palgi and Abramovich (1984), Watson and Rawski (1987), Danforth (1982), and Aries (1981).

⁵ This very issue has been at the center of the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe photography exhibit of late 1989 and early 1990, and the resulting campaign by Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate to impose guidelines on the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding art projects that conform to some kind of "standard of decency" (i.e. a consensual ideology of morality).

⁶ That the topic remains "hot" is evidenced by the success of Bellah et. al.'s Habits of the Heart (1985), advocating a return to "bibilical republicanism". The forthcoming sequel, The Good

Society , is equally prescriptive (if no substantial changes are made from the advanced manuscript copy I read as a participant in one of Bellah's seminars) and is echoed by articles appearing in mainstream publications usually reserved for secular politics, such as Glenn Tinder's "Can We Be Good Without God?" in the December 1989 Atlantic Monthly.