I was rather embaressed it took me so long to realize what was going on, at which point I looked at the name again and smiled, but I think this is more than just framing. The most salient thing about magic, and to a lesser extent about things labeled ritual and ceremony is that they are based on false beliefs and flat out do not work, or if they do work they are placebo effects or otherwise not done for any physical effects. The parts where what was being described clearly worked as intended didn’t, upon reversing the frame, seem to change much at all for me.
Because of that, I feel like this passage doesn’t say the same things in a different frame. Instead, it makes additional explicit and implicit claims that completely change the… I was going to say way things should be looked at, but it seems right to say framed. Whether we have good evidence that these ‘rituals’ actually work matters and it matters a lot. It makes me wonder whether the frame primarily follows from those beliefs or if those beliefs primarily follow from the frame, or what this passage would look like if the anthropologist still viewed them in the primitive frame but avoided assuming or implying that what they were doing didn’t work.
No doubt some of the marginal money would be wasted, but that’s always true and is true now. Science is and would be worth it even if the haircut was immense, and I don’t see a reason that the additional spending would be that much more wasted.
Also, the begging scenario you describe isn’t particuarly scary. If giving more money to scientists meant there were more scientists each with the same funding levels we have now, that seems like a perfectly fine outcome. If it meant there were more fundraisers seeking money for science and each raised the same quantity of funds, that also seems like a fine outcome.