Another point my teacher made when she presented this article was the power of words like "ritual" and "ceremony" to dismiss a foreign society's customs as "rel

Another point my teacher made when she presented this article was the power of words like "ritual" and "ceremony" to dismiss a foreign society's customs as "religious rites", detaching them from any functional purpose or cultural context. (In modern terminology, one might refer to this as a form of "othering".)