A god’s deterrent effect scales with its perceived omniscience

Evidence

My anthropologist colleague Joseph Henrich, who does his fieldwork on the remote Yasawa island in Fiji, reports that the local deity, sometimes referred to as Kalou-vu, is believed to have omniscience, but a limited one. He perceives things within village boundaries, but not beyond. If someone commits theft within the village, Kalou-vu might know about it. But Kalou-vu would not be able to track down the same moral transgression if it was committed on the main island. This led Rita McNamara to wonder whether Kalou-vu deters acts of cheating. In her fieldwork among Yasawa villagers, she found that Kalou-vu, similar to the Christian God, discouraged cheating among some in an anonymous game held in the village. But this was only to the extent that the villagers thought Kalou-vu and God were supernatural punishers. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 399

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s Big God mechanism claim: deterrence requires perceived surveillance range — which is exactly what Rodrigues’ omniscient gaze supplies and the fumi-e trampling destroys.
• SEED: The bounded-omniscience god (sees the village but not the main island) is a striking image for an essay on how surveillance range maps onto moral enforcement reach.