Further, ghosts are not considered ancestral dead, but identities who are impersonal, unidentifiable, unpredictable, inimical, or malignant. Such acts as ridding houses of the spirits of the dead or foiling ghosts, are common, but they are magical acts rather than rites of worship and reverence. Attitudes toward ancestor worship vary among primitive societies. In Polynesian societies where social rank depends on the nearness on the descent from the gods and their successors the ancestors, the attitude is one of reverence and expectation of help and guidance, but it involves little worship. Malaysian family rites were addressed to diseased kindred who were thought to be always close by and always concerned that the traditional way of life should remain the same.
Ancestral cults are very common in most of tropical Africa.
Here family members include the ancestors as well as the living. The elder members control the juniors as the forebears controlled them. The basis for such control is the continuity of family ties. At intervals the recent dead are established by rite among the ancestors. Each clan has a mythical pair of founders, whose son, as the oldest of ancestors, stands as the absolute ruler of all ancestral spirits.