In Mozambique one is often told things about albinos that can hardly be interpreted at face value. These are not, properly speaking, fictionalized narratives of a connected series of events, but rather they are evidence of propositional attitudes pertaining to refer to statements of fact, that is, they are ‘beliefs’. Although they are not told to you as ‘lies’, the fact is that the people who narrate them are often uncertain as to whether they are true. Upon hearing them, I was immediately challenged by the following question: if these beliefs do not meet up with the test of disbelief, what then is the significance of both conveying and holding them?

For a long time the concept of ‘belief’ and its relation to that of ‘knowledge’ has been a source of theoretical concern for anthropologists (see Needham 1972). Malcolm Ruel has argued convincingly that the Christian heritage hidden in our anthropological toolkit has made us susceptible to a number of ‘shadow fallacies’ concerning belief, of which he identifies four: 1) the notion that belief is a central part of all religions; 2) the notion that a person's beliefs form the ground of his or her behaviour; 3) the notion that belief is essentially a psychological condition; and, finally, 4) that ‘the determination of belief is more important than the determination of the status of what it is that is the object of the belief’ ([1982] 2002, 111–12).