Limited-omniscience deities deter cheating only within their perceived range

Evidence

Even chiefdoms—groups that are larger and more hierarchical than hunter-gatherers, but much smaller and socially less stratified than states—do not necessarily have full-scale Big Gods, though their supernatural powers are more than what is found among hunter-gatherers. These then, are “intermediate” deities that have not fully transformed into Big Gods. 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 tests the mechanism the reader cares about: watchful deity deters cheating proportional to perceived surveillance range — the empirical grounding for the Big God monitoring claim under the fumi-e / Rodrigues analysis.
• QUESTION: Kalou-vu’s spatially bounded omniscience is a striking natural experiment on how perceived knowledge range modulates moral behavior — worth tracking down the McNamara fieldwork and its anonymous game design.