“Divination—‘Adaptive’ from Whose Perspective?”, 1983-07 ():
…1957 suggests that a pattern which would break up hunting habits in a random fashion [eg. the use of scapulimancy divination for choosing hunting locations] has survival value (ie. adaptiveness) because it functions to maintain hunters and caribou in an ecological balance. The Moore hypothesis has remained current in the literature. It has by default become a minor anthropological classic because no anthropological researcher to this date has challenged or explored the hypothesis further and because its path of argument appealed to ecological/ infrastructural determinists. It is the purpose of this paper to show that the hypothesis claims to explain behaviors that do not and have not existed, and that it shares with other materialist explanations of ritual the pitfalls of teleology centering primarily around such concepts as function (ie. consequence) and adaptation (ie. group survival).
We will show that hunters do not randomize their behavior, that caribou populations do not fluctuate according to human predation, and that scapulimancy apparently is not selected because it is ecologically advantageous. We shall also show that there is no cross-cultural evidence of divinatory random devices producing randomized subsistence behavior, but rather that people manipulate divination with the explicit or implicit intervention of personal choice.
We suggest that Naskapi scapulimancy is a decision-making device which is used during ecological crises to re-establish harmony between individual hunters and the supernatural world believed to control the game supply. Beneficial consequences of the ritual do not include a homeostatic balance between hunter and prey.
[On a historical note, Moore served in WWII in, presumably among other roles, “counter-intelligence operations in Italy”, and 1957 discloses “This paper is an indirect outcome of a program of laboratory research on problem solving and social interaction, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, Group Psychology Branch.”
Given the game-theoretic reasoning, it is possible that Moore was inspired by WWII operations research—especially convoy tactics and anti-submarine warfare—where both hunter and hunted resort to mixed strategies as the Nash equilibrium. (See 1984 for background/examples.) As most of this OR work was classified long afterwards and may well still be classified (and any such origin would be unpopular with anthropologists), Moore would have concealed the intellectual origins of the idea.]