We appear to be mostly in agreement, and specifially on the point that in practice archeologists probably necessarily do the exact economic analysis I'm advocat

We appear to be mostly in agreement, and specifially on the point that in practice archeologists probably necessarily do the exact economic analysis I'm advocating. I suspect the friction point may be about whether the idea or meaning of a ritual is an encompassing abstraction for general social shared experience vs. a specific sub-category of experiences that I am saying requires sympathetic magic. My view ignores whether there are rituals that are not sympathetic magic, and I'd posit there aren't, and that ones that don't have it are are just habits. However, the exceptions others point out should show the limits to that heuristic as well. Very much agree some science has been ritualized, which imo de-sciences it, and to me this discussion of our relationship to meaning is a really important idea at the root of this question. It's related to what we deal with as hackers, which is whether our abstractions are meaningful and powerful tools for illuminating complexity, or just a layer of obfuscating jargon. A criticism I think we might agree on is crappy social science and theory papers are like a "Chinese Room," where the authors have taken opinions, transliterated them into something that gets published using some stats and p-hacking and formal methods, but it's as though they have never had "real" understanding of the subject or material, and the crossover is that this chinese room meets sympathetic magic pattern resembles the category of ritual I was describing. It's helpful to refine this stuff, thank you.