ABSTRACT
That in ‘tribal society’ certainties were produced by ‘closed systems’ in the form of dogmatism, was a conception which since the 1960s flooded the social sciences (Popper 1962). But there were some pockets of resistance in social anthropology, arguing that rationalism and scepticism exist in tribal societies as much in parallel to dogmatism as they do in London (Douglas 1973). Unfortunately the debate came to a halt. Only a few studies tried to find out empirically how certainties are created. The plausibility of beliefs and our routines of dealing with them stem from daily life.1 We have knowledge about certainties but this knowledge is practical and only rarely verbalized, because it is uncommon to thematize it. Once someone asks you about that, the easiest way of getting rid of the embarrassment is by pointing to ‘tradition’. (This applies not only to people near the Equator; ask administrators in Europe about the ‘why’ of some odd rules of bureaucracy and they will say ‘because it always has been done like this’.)2 How, then, are certainties created and maintained?
