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cultures, we must question why these mocking comments about divination exist at all. One is forced to recall Evans-Pritchard's critical observations. |
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Another theme emerged in Britain which contributed to the limitations of divination studies. Whether as a defensive response to the French ethnologists' revelations of complex African cosmologies or as an independently developed position, British anthropologists did not accept the existence of coherent, autonomous systems of knowledge in Africa. As Forde states in the introduction to African Worlds, "there need be no complete integration of belief and doctrine, still less the domination of conduct in all spheres by a single system of beliefs or basic ideas" (1963: vii). A "nationalistic" interpretation of the differences between French rationalism and British empiricism may seem overly simplified, but that is exactly what several scholars maintain, as became apparent in the discussions at the 1960 conference that fostered African Systems of Thought and in Richards's review of the book (1967).
19 |
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Whatever the causes, British study of African cultures demonstrates the continued domination of positivist functionalists' assumptions. Concerning anthropologists' ambivalence toward religion, Gell observed that "there has always been something scandalous about magic, fascinating and repellant at the same time" (1974:16; see also Lewis 1974). Some anthropologists' response has been to deny religion a central role in African cultures. Obviously anthropologists should not debunk others' beliefs (as illustrated above), but the alternative is not necessarily "a conversion experience" (Turner 1975:32) or the use of a ''mystical idiom" when discussing divination (Evans-Pritchard 1968:320). |
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What we do need is increased reflexivity by anthropologists and more attention paid the anthropology of knowledge (Jackson 1978; Crick 1982). For example, a comparison of Christian and Jewish scholars of African religions might be very informative (Evans-Pritchard 1960:16). Westerlund (1985) demonstrates the value of comparing theological studies by Anglophone (usually Protestant) East and West African scholars and those by Francophone (usually Catholic) Central African scholars. Surely Richards's attempt (1967) to answer why the French find symbol systems and cosmologies in Africa while the British only encounter social systems and subsistence patterns must be pursued further.20 Perhaps Douglas is correct in depicting British anthropologists as diviners delving behind formal appearances to find the reality of unrecognized contradictions of ideal social interaction (1979: 13839). She develops this comparison in praise of British anthropologists, but Jules-Rosette uses the analogy of social scientists and diviners as they each seek meaningful patterns in apparently random and contradictory elements to critique Western scholarly prejudice when it validates its "oracular reasoning" with a "veil of objectivity" (1978:56368). Similar observations about the "authorizing process" in truth making by these "specialists" are raised in this volume by Shaw and Fernandez. Others have also compared anthropologists and diviners; Turner humbly observes that his work on the Ndembu "may perhaps be said to reveal an anthropological diviner in action, at the beginning of a long seance that has by no means been concluded" (1975:30).21 |
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