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oracle is to bring out a dimension of the problem not yet actualized. For example, the appropriation of someone's goods is said to be theft only when its illicit character has been established by the oracle's revealing that its harmful consequences are impermissible. By referring an event to a higher-order axiological principle or axiomatic etiological model, the oracle brings about the meanings of specific problem situations that are submitted to it. The symbolic articulation process in the oracle produces a meaning that surpasses conventional conceptualization and popular cause-effect reasoning. It gives way to a structural causality instead of a linear one. The diviner's oracle has compelling power over the clients inasmuch as it is performative, i.e., offers a self-validating, authoritative interpretation. It is as if the problem were self-revelatory and its meaning not fully to be grasped by conventional categorical thought. The meaning production in the oracle flows into an intervention which is not according to any predetermined strategies within the family and which therefore cannot, in advance, be politically manipulated. |
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The detailed oracular diagnosis, by applying a relatively uniform etiological grid, situates the afflicted individual in his family and network of matrimonial exchanges that connect him with the uterine source of life. It mentions the events leading up to or constituting the problem situation and then connects these events with past events (e.g., abuses) of a similar nature already repaired, and so enables the clients to intervene in the present problem situation in analogous ways. |
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The articulation process follows a pattern of assumptions which by their use in context reveal a structure rather than a content of meaning, and thus the oracle deals with submitted problems in a somewhat stereotyped way. These assumptions form a higher-order axiological system predefining, as it were, the different conditions under which social life is possible. A study of some twenty-six oracles (Devisch 1984:37ff.; 16774). compared to the 180 others noted in the field, has revealed that the diviner employs the following etiological model in dealing with a particular case. |
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A first etiological assumption, applied in divination, concerns the uterine transmission of physical life. It is a basic assumption that life-giving and innate life-promoting or life-harming forces are inherited by the individual from the mother, the mother's mother, and the mother's mother's mother. The latter is said to connect with the uterine life source. These uterine ties "link the individual to the uterine source of life and well-being" (m-mooyi kuyingudi myakala) that he/she benefits from and will transmit when the time has come. Only offspring of the same mother share in the same life, but they can differ from each other by the selective (uterine) inheritance of different "innate characteristics" (yibutukulu). Physical handicaps and exceptional skills, such as clairvoyance and the capacity for divination, are attributed to this heredity. Agnates cannot pass on fatal hereditary characteristics to an individual, nor kill him/her through sorcery, without the complicity of the victim's matrikin. |
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For the Yaka, the tree, particularly its stem and branches, symbolizes the links with the source of life. Each branching reflects a matrimonial alliance by which a household cedes a woman to another lineage for transmitting life. One can say that each individual's uterine ascendance comprises as many networks of life trans- |
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