Why would you assume that they're not concerned with testing it? Again, this isn't a case like that of prayer, where the religious believer's investment is minimal, and the potential return unlimited. The Native Americans are investing resources sufficient to bury them if they don't get sufficient return, so it would seem to me that it would be in their best interests to have some concern with whether or not their ritual actual does what it says it does. Even if there always is a return, if that return is guaranteed, then it's in their best interests to test the correlation simply because freeing up those resources will subject them to fewer problems.
Just as the rain dance began to develop a self-fulfilling structure to protect its claims from refutation...
Account for that process. How would a ritual of this sort develop a self-fulfilling structure? Presumably, during the stages prior to the development of that structure, the ritual would fail quite regularly. So with so much disconfirmation in the early stages, how would the ritual survive long enough to develop a structure that protects against disconfirmation? Or, to put a finer point on it, if the culture could maintain the ritual through the early stages, when so much went towards disconfirming it, why would it concern itself with shielding it from such disconfirmation?
(Little hint here: if the purpose of the ritual were not really to produce rain, then we'd no longer have to account for that stage when disconfirmation were a recurring problem.)
The fact that ekstasis is produced doesn't mean that this is the reason they perform the dance--rather, this is yet another "structure" that allowed the rain dance to persist as a method for producing rain. The self-fulfilling structure prevented it from being discarded by disconfirmation, and the ekstasis prevented it from being discarded by boredom or overwork.
I still don't think you understand the basic form of ekstasis. You don't go through ekstasis and then go back to whatever you were doing. Ekstasis is a form of total mental collapse and loss of personal identity from exhaustive fatigue. It's typically followed by a period of unconsciousness, and usually requires a period of recouperation. So it's entirely unlikely that ekstasis "prevented boredom or overwork" -- it is, itself, the product of overwork -- and there's almost no chance that the dancers went through ekstasis and then continued the dance afterwards. I don't see that ekstasis has any functional place in the dance save as its culmination and climax, and if we're to take seriously the contention that rain dances continue unabated until the actual advent of rain, then it follows that the two phenomenon occur more or less at the same time.
it is easy for us to say that it is obvious that the dance does not produce rain, but it is not so obvious to someone who has not taken a science class or learned about evaporation and so on.
The primitive society will not know the scientific models which explain rainfall, but that does not warrant the conclusion that they're ignorant as to the status of rain as a natural phenomenon. That's another mistake that was made frequently during the early period of antrhopology, and which was corrected as later anthropologists insisted on the application of a more rigorous scientific method to the field. As I pointed out in another thread, the primitive societies which build their religions around the symbols from their mode of life often have an extremely sophisticated understanding of the workings of the natural world -- they have to in order to survive. The mythological use of those symbols is usually a secondary layer that works in concert or in addition to their technical layer, not in place of. So it's just as likely that the Native Americans in question recognized rainfall as part of the cycle of seasons -- and why shouldn't they, since they recognized the role of seasons in other parts of their social mode?
they don't notice that the structure makes it impossible to "test" the truth of their claim for the simple reason that the ritual is not SUPPOSED to provide a test.
I think that they would notice. It doesn't take an industrialized mind to recognize that you can do any action until a desired result occurs, and nothing that we know about the pre-industrial mind would lead us to suspect that it would mistake that until as a cause. As of yet, I can see no way to explain how a self-fulfilling rain dance would develop and persist, save to assume that they cannot or simply don't want to question the ritual. Even if we assume that, we're faced with very serious and disconcerting questions as to why they cannot or don't want to. If they cannot, then we have to recognize them as developmentally different, and that raises all sorts of worrisome problems. If they simply don't want to, then why? What about that particular ritual makes them willing to expend so many material and personal resources without question.
An obvious answer to that last question, given our present discussion, is that the ekstasis makes them want to preserve the ritual. And once you've assumed that, you no longer need to insist on their unwillingness to question. They can still question the correlation between rain and dancing so long as the questioning does not interrupt the production of ekstasis.
So why would people waste their time praying when doing nothing would lead to the same outcomes? Because prayer also produces pleasant sensations...
Not also produces pleasant sensations. As I've tried to explain before, true ekstasis is not simple an intense feeling of pleasure. It can just as often be a horrific experience, and that's part of the experience that is preserved in ekstatic religions.
But I will agree that prayer as a ritual is reinforced by pleasant sensations. And those pleasant sensations are in direct relation to the underlying claim of prayer: that it allows the believer direct contact with God.
But we're never really going to agree on prayer, because you continuously fall back on the view that prayer is a form of confirmation by comparison. I say it isn't that at root -- it's a form of contact with God. Christian prayers can just as often contain no requests at all, only praise and thanks. In which case, the prayer offers no grounds for confirmation and disconfirmation. Prayer, ultimately, isn't a terribly good analogy to the rain dance ritual because they differ in so many respects.
This structure just makes it seem as if prayer works.
And I say that prayer rarely ever functions on a self-fulfilling structure -- even given the instances where the person does receive some benefit they requested in the prayer, there are a disproportionate number of examples where the prayer offers no basis for confirmation or disconfirmation, as with non-request oriented prayer or delayed benefit requests ("Now I lay me down to sleep...") which cannot be confirmed in this life. And what's notable about these instances is that belief persists despite the lack of confirmation. Shermer would argue that the strength of confirmation bias outweighs the instances of disconfirmation or uncertainty, but I'd say that it's equally explicable by assuming that confirmation plays almost no role in the persistence of that particular ritual -- it's requires so little investment, and is so well intergrated into their whole religious belief, that they need not question it at all, unless someone else imposes a Test situation on them.
I could argue that the fact that they will believe they have spoken to God regardless of the outcome after the prayer is evidence that they do not trust its efficacy and thus the prayer serves some other function, perhaps stress relief.
It's all about the claims. Very few Christians provide a testable situation with prayer. The claims they make for prayer is not that it will result in something tangible, but that is allows them to communicate with God. The Native Americans, on the other hand, are claiming a causal relationship with tangible effects in the world. There is literally no test for the efficacy of prayer unless you change the traditional claim into something it is not. There's a pretty easy test for the rain dance, and it's one that's likely to occur even if the practictioners don't deliberately make a test of it.
Clearly, such a thesis is silly when applied to prayer...
It's silly because the examples are not analagous.
