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banned, women may accompany men, and the specific form of esuma or bad air which can be given by village eyes (ndeye) and thus close the forest to the private hunter is said to be inoperative. |
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Finally, the disposition and distribution of meat contrasts sharply in private and public hunts. The private hunter downplays or conceals the number of game killed and largely limits the distribution of the meat to his household and lineage. Much of the meat is sold for household gain. Animals killed in the raised nets of paye leka communal hunters are not even kept by the individuals who killed them. Rather they are carried back to the camp where they are turned over to the huntmaster. He tallies them, displays them publicly to assembled hunters, and oversees the butchering and distribution of the day's kill. Small portions, including the head and neck, intestines, and limbs, are given to the individual killers of the animals in the order of their arrival at the scene of the kill, but the bulk of the meat is retained by the huntmaster and carried back to the village. None of it is sold. It is distributed among village households in proportion to the number being hosted by that household. The meat, in short, is publicly accounted for and publicly shared. |
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The salience of the open and public character of all aspects of the communal hunt accounts in part for the previously cited, anomalous pantheon of forces which Apagibeti most frequently name in the mbolongo oracle as responsible for closing the forest, namely unknown deaths, unknown pregnancies, and unknown eating of first kills by mangodo. A death which has occurred but is not yet publicly known by the hunters can close the forest. A pregnancy in the village, not yet publicly known by hunters, can close the forest. The unknown eating of any part of the hunters' first kill by a mangodo (he whose upper teeth erupted first) can close the forest. |
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Less frequently cited causes of misfortune, such as angry words, curses, or witchcraft, follow much the same logic. Once publicly identified by the mbolongo oracle, the esuma, or bad air, they created around the hunters is dispelled and the forest is opened again. Even witchcraft obeys the logic of differential evaluation depending on the distinction between public and private knowledge. Though their power when privately employed is uniformly destructive, witches are viewed positively in at least one context; namely, when a publicly known witch is enjoined to use his power to call animals near to the village to be killed by hunters and feed the village, ending a time of hunger. |
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This essay displays, I trust, the value of taking variation within the corpus of a peoples' divinatory practices seriously, as a conscious object of study. By situating apparently anomalous divinatory techniques such as the ntiseye boko or mbolongo within the context of the practice in which they are embedded, in this case that of the communal hunt and of its aim of wakening and opening the forest, such variation becomes intelligible. The significance of such variation when seen within the context of the larger daily practices of which they are a part, such as the communal hunt, can lead us to an understanding of the ideologies which both structure and are created by the practice itself. |
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