Routine

The best single observation anyone has ever made about superstition was made a century ago, in a place with no stadiums, by a man watching fishermen.

Bronislaw Malinowski was a Polish-born anthropologist who spent the years from 1915 to 1918 in the Trobriand Islands, off New Guinea, doing something then novel: not reading about a people from a veranda but living in the village, learning the language, going out with the canoes.

The scenes between are imagined: the tent at the edge of the settlement, the heat, a notebook going soft in the humidity, a European in the wrong clothes crouched on a beach before dawn because that is the hour the boats go out. What is on the record is what he saw once they went.

The Trobrianders fished in two ways.

Inside the coral lagoon, fishing was calm, reliable, almost domestic work. A man poisoned the shallows or netted the fish, and the lagoon paid out its wage with the regularity of a garden. You could see the bottom. You could see the weather coming. A bad day meant a smaller catch, not a funeral.

Beyond the reef was the other fishery: the open sea, where the catch might be enormous or nothing, and where weather and current could kill you.

Here is what Malinowski noticed, and published in 1925.

For the lagoon, the Trobrianders had no magic at all. Technique, yes, and skill, and knowledge handed down; ritual, none. For the open sea, they had an elaborate system of it: rites performed, formulas recited, observances kept, the full machinery of enchantment.

Same men. Same species of fish. Same afternoon sky. Often the same stretch of beach, an hour apart.

Set the two departures side by side, which Malinowski did not do and I am doing for the convenience of the argument. The lagoon party wades out talking about nothing much, the way men talk on the way to reliable work. The open-sea crew stands still first. Something is said over the canoe. Something is observed that has to be observed. Then they go.

The magic did not attach to fishing. It attached to uncertainty. Where a man's competence settled the outcome, ritual was absent; where luck and danger settled it, ritual bloomed exactly there, along the seam where control runs out.

Once you have this observation you cannot stop seeing it, and you should not try. It explains where ritual lives in every trade. Farmers have rain rites, not weeding rites. Sailors are notoriously superstitious; ferry captains are not, or not at the same voltage. Gamblers blow on dice; accountants do not blow on ledgers.

And no modern territory maps the pattern better than sport, which is why this season belongs in this volume.

An athletic contest is a machine for manufacturing exactly the Trobriand seam: enormous stakes, genuine skill, and a residue of outcome that no amount of skill can lock down. The batter who has done everything right still fails most of the time. The kicker's perfect strike still meets the wind.

Sport is the open sea with bleachers, and athletes, the most practiced and competent people in it, deck themselves in ritual precisely because their competence cannot reach the last inch of the result.

So the season's subject is that seam, and the two different things human beings build along it.

Because not everything performed at the edge of control is superstition. Some of it, we now know, is engineering: sequences that genuinely steady the machinery this volume's last season watched break.

The fisherman's rite and the golfer's fixed waggle look alike from the stands. One claims to move the sea. The other claims only to settle the sailor.

Telling those two gestures apart, with evidence, is the whole work of the next seven episodes, and the story starts about as far from the open sea as it is possible to get: in a laboratory box in Indiana, with a hungry pigeon inventing a religion.