Indigenous Rainmaking Ritual Failure Attribution and Intergroup Blame in Botswanan Kalanga Villages: A Vignette Experiment on Causal Schemas and Collective Punishment

The unresolved problem is that rainmaking failure is simultaneously a causal puzzle and a social accusation: when rain does not come, the ritual's failure must be explained, and explanations distribute blame. Existing work on African indigenous ritual has documented symbolic and functional dimensions of rainmaking but has not specified the attributional mechanisms that convert ritual failure into intergroup sanction. Because no observational data are used or claimed, the contribution is conceptual and methodological: it specifies the estimands, the identification assumptions, the variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64), and the power properties of the design. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells for cluster counts of 8, 16, 24 and 32 and effect sizes of 3, 5 and 8 percentage points; 52 clusters are required for 5 percentage points at 80% power. The framework reframes rainmaking failure as a site of causal-schema conflict with measurable consequences for intergroup blame.