ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns both ritual and communication, to be sure, but perhaps in a relationship one to the other that is different from that of other contributions to our discussion. It focuses on two examples of what we might term, initially, "private" and "solitary" rituals of individual humans in the two small-scale societies where the author have worked. An individual in each case has a conventionally structured, yet very out-of-observation encounter with cosmic alterity—with what we might even term "nature"—and comes away from the encounter culturally endowed for a new phase of life; indeed, in the second case, with the locally understood quickening power of life itself. To be sure, we in the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim traditions understand prayerfulness as one kind of ultimate private moment that leads us to ritual.
