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Mediumistic Divination among the Northern Yaka of Zaire:
Etiology and Ways of Knowing |
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Mediumistic divination among the Yaka of Zaire reveals significant congruences between organizations and acts of people, on one hand, and unusual events, misfortune, illness and death, on the other. In referring the problem situation to a higher-order system of values and norms, divination allows for a meaningful interpretation and outlines the conditions for effective intervention. The concern of divination among the Yaka must be placed in the context of kinship and particularly in that of uterine relations. (Yaka diviners may be male or female, so the following applies to both masculine and feminine diviners.) Problems arising along agnatic ties are related primarily to politics; as such they are dealt with in courts and councils. Because the role of the mediumistic diviner is transmitted only through uterine heredity, divinership is the privilege of certain matrikin. Whereas political power and customary law go together with agnatic descent and are concerned with judicial and economic affairs, divination concerns the diagnosis and meaning of existential problems with a view to their management. Jurisdiction draws on societal rules spelled out in proverbs and sayings, whereas divination implies an axiological grid in relation basically to uterine life-transmission. It is the role of the divinatory oracle to interpret symbolically the meaning of given forms of affliction and anomaly, or of the unavoidable conflicts that result from differences between individuals. While the political leader, in consensus with a council of elders or customary judges, can arbitrate in disputes where there is a common rule, the Yaka diviner draws on clairvoyance and can point with authority to the complex intertwinement of a social, moral, and physical onset of sickness, ill luck, or death. The divinatory oracle often discloses that the disease or other |
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