- Radin argues for the tension between the social structure and the individual even if forces beyond human rationale move them: “We discover that no individual is ever allowed to proceed on even a private war party unless his dream experience has been communicated to the chief of the tribe or else to some highly respected elder. Such men are always exceedingly devout. They certainly may be expected to take religious sanctions at their face value” (Radin 32).
- Alongside this, Radin argues that man needs repetition, ritual, and hierarchy: “Primitive man, in short, does not consider the deities or a magical rite as conditioning reality but as an accessory to it, as constraining it. Both the deity and the rite are aids for the proper functioning of a series of habitually connected individual or social events. The religious and magical content seems the all-important factor to us who are mere spectators; to primitive man they are, as we have said, simply aids, stimuli for the attainment of a goal” (Radin 33).
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