[EthanHeilman]

>However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians".

I think you are reading into the motivations of the authors without evidence. It is much more likely that they conclude that bullet-proofing spells are a false belief because everything we know about physics and ballistics contradicts it.

[bradfordarner]

Certainly a possibility.

I totally agree with you that is seems downright ludicrous to think that a spell will cause bullets to bounce off of someone. We have to take the author at their word that such is actually the belief of those using the spell. (My experience in Africa would tell me that may be a rather naive understanding of the villagers' expectations of the spell's effectiveness. From what I've seen in Africa, it seems more likely that the villagers believed that the bullets would miss them or go around them; it just strikes me as a little too stupid to be believable.)

All of that seems irrelevant for the conclusions that the author is trying to reach. The belief is labelled as "false" without any evidence given for such being the case until the conclusion where it is written as "(false) belief". In other words, the word "false" is an unnecessary modifier. Hence, it seems like it is being used as a rhetorical device rather than a meaningful addition to the article.

[aidenn0]

If the gri-gri actually work as advertised (i.e. the beliefs are true), then there is no paradox for why it is adaptive.

If tribe A is immune to gunfire and tribe B is not, then tribe A will win and in a region with sufficient inter-tribal warfare, we will observe only tribes that are immune to gunfire.

[hordeallergy]

My experience in Africa is that anything will be believed. Look up Dr beetroot. Or zuma, the prostitute, and the shower.