Belief has in the past often been coupled with *ritual, as one of the two pillars of
*religion. However, since the late 1970s the theoretical emphasis on †practice has given
greater prominence to ritual, with belief now held in the background. The work of
Sperber (e.g. [1982] 1985), among others, cast doubt on the notion that *symbols have
specific meanings, even in the context of structured sets of symbols. For Sperber, as
indeed (though perhaps in different senses), for Evans-Pritchard and Needham, the
concept of ‘belief is dependent on the knowledge of the word which describes it. Only
those who have a concept of belief themselves have minds which exhibit the properties of
belief. Talal Asad (1983) criticized anthropological accounts of belief from a more
historical point of view: the emphasis on belief as an interior state was, he suggested,
specific to a modern, private Christian religiosity.