|
|
|
|
|
|
|
stores of medicines, bebobe, whose use may be for good or for ill. As is frequently said, "Nto na nto na eboke te ngake" ("To each man, his own medicine" or, in variants of the same expression, "his own leaf" or "his own tree"). Medicines from neighboring villages, ethnic groups, and dispensaries are sought out by traveling villagers and brought back to the village. They are individually owned by the person who brought them and may be exercised for the benefit of others, often for a fee. One may know the medicine for healing broken bones, another for relieving neck stiffness, another for making infants walk, another for curing spirit possession, another for giving an enemy sickness, and another for seizing thieves of garden crops or of domestic or trapped forest animals. Specific medicines for good fortune in hunting monkey, elephant, and buffalo are found among local villagers or among neighboring Bale, Bua, and Ngbandi ethnic groups, respectively. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Ownership of such power can be dangerous to its possessors. The greatly feared pomoli, for example, guarantees spectacular success in killing forest game to the individual hunter who employs it for private gain; but in exchange, members of the hunter's lineage will, one by one, die the slow wasting death of the trapped animals themselves for as long as the medicine is employed. In view of its prevalence and ambivalent valence, bebobe ("medicines") is a favorite one-word explanatory tool used to account for the unusual power of a chief, a witch, or a highly successful curer or hunter. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Given this wide range of potentially menacing powers in Pagibeti life, divination is a useful adjunct to prayer to Nyombo, filial piety, and the collection and use of powerful medicines in the successful negotiation of everyday life. There exists no cover term for what anthropologists label as the class of divinatory practices; each has its own name. And, while there is no specialized term for or role of diviner, there is a named role for those few individuals who have the reputation of being especially skillful and powerful users and possessors of medicines (nganga nkisi), some of whom may also divine. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Oracles are the characteristic form of Pagibeti divinatory practice. The simplest oracles are the involuntary ones. If, on departing for the hunt or for the garden, or on a trip to a neighboring village, one should sneeze, the bulk of the air is experienced as passing through one nostril or the other; if it passes through the right nostril, one's fortunes will be bad. Dissenters from this interpretation argue that it depends on the individual, that if after sneezing through the right nostril one has good fortune, then that nostril becomes the auspicious one for that individual. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Another involuntary oracle is that of stubbing one's toe as one sets off on an outing. Generally, the right foot is considered auspicious or neutral and the left inauspicious, with dissenters insisting that only experience can decide which foot is "good" for an individual. Outcomes are taken seriously; a hunter, for example, will defer a hunt until the next day should he stub his left toe before exiting the village/garden zone and entering the forest. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dreams, too, may be oracular.4 A dream in which one peers down into a deep hole may presage a death in the lineage. Dreaming of an animal while in the |
|
|
|
|
|