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Putting an end to the oracular session is "cutting the ngoombu" (-zeenga ngoombu). On a social level the different groups that were involved in the conflict are now becoming disentangled. On the cosmological level the diviner reestablishes the norm. Through his clairvoyance's extreme breaking down or surpassing of ordinary forms of knowing, he calls for the reestablishing of boundaries between here and there, me and the other, present and past. His clairvoyance reactualizes the initiatory trance at each session. By confronting the problem situation and the norm and by dividing the groups into those who "receive charcoal" (-kala mundiimba) and those who "receive kaolin" (-kala mupheemba), i.e., into those who are most to be blamed and those who are less involved, the oracle links up the different groups concerned instead of exacerbating the discord. |
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For the oracle, the diviner is mainly drawing on his corporeal capacities, which are transmitted in the uterine line. Congruent with this, it is no surprise that the diviner inscribes the afflicted individual's problem in the history and axiology of the uterine line. The oracular interpretation finds its source through the intertwining of intellect and senses in the act of clairvoyance, as well as through the intertwining of body and language in the modulations of the voice during the initial phase of the oracle. |
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An Oracle: Summary and Text |
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Suuta is the afflicted individual, i.e., the main subject of the oracle. She died shortly after her father died and immediately after giving birth to her first child. The oracle interprets the meaning of her death in connection with sorcery in a collateral patriline and with curses. A curse has been uttered against sorcery by one of her father's uterine ascendants and it has acquired the force of a prohibition. When Suuta's father was fatally ill, his brother Mbela cursed all those who caused the illness. But Mbela's curse was hypocritical, because he himself was involved in the sorcery. Of its nature the curse is based on the utter hostility between, on one hand, the curser whose rights (or those of his primary kinsmen) are infringed and, on the other hand, the cursed who infringed those rights and who are consequently damned. Therefore, any collaboration between the hostile parties can lead to the destruction of the curser. By bewitching his brother, Mbela turned his curse back on himself and even on his classificatory daughter for having claimed her bridewealth. The oracle's interpretation of Suuta's death connected it with the hypocritical curse, with sorcery, and with the lack of required ritual compensation for her father's death and with the absence of familial reconciliation after his death. |
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Diviner (very highly strung, his eyes starting from their sockets): Where are the sorcerers hiding who want to make so many difficulties for me? Where is Suuta? [He repeats the name five times.] Didn't she die because you used the bridewealth wrongly [i.e., took it yourself after a hypocritical curse]?
1 I see that Suuta went to Kinshasa. When she came back she was pregnant |
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