”Rice Effect” by Brandon Schall

In the Philippines rice is an important part of their culture. If a meal does not include rice in it then the meal is not complete. When harvesting the rice the people have a colorful ritual that goes with it. The celebration is to encourage the rice to grow. There are two forms of the ritual, the first is the older version which is called the animistic rice ritual. The newer version of ritual is called Christianized rice ritual. Both processes play an important part in making the rice grow. They believe that if one of the rituals is not performed then the rice will not come out properly. This is strange to me because our culture does not eat rice or anything else at every meal. The one thing that makes sense to me is the ritual part because I believe that you can change the outcome of things by continuing to do the same thing year after year.
http://0-www.jstor.org.read.cnu.edu/stable/1177363