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side of a law, of a prohibition, the infringement of which is sanctioned. Therefore, not only are these cults a ritual frame in which these curses are articulated in a traditional form; in their sanctioning effects they also provide an etiological framework of the illness and consequently a therapeutic framework. Curing the victim from such a curse and sanction equals initiating him into the corresponding cult. Each cult links up, across lineage boundaries, all the individuals who have been cursed within this frame. |
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As for cursing, it is unthinkable for the Yaka that any individual should have the right in his own name to judge the acts of another, certainly not to wish his death. Rather a curse is based on evidence which exceeds any individual motivation. When wronged, the reciprocity between kinsmen seeks to repair itself and calls for revenge. Thus a curse which calls down self-evident unavoidable vengeance acquires the force of prohibition, since ill will come with its transgression. In the same way that the existential interdependence branches out through matrimonial alliance, so the curse threatens uterine descendants, prohibitions being transmitted in the same line. The following argument in the oracle could appear circular since it links ill with the infringement of a law/prohibition, and also with a curse which is the conditional formulation of the prohibition. But the circularity is only superficial because the curse by its conditional formulation includes a kind of oracle; the realization of the condition makes the effect unavoidable. "If it is true that a theft is punished" is the stereotyped opening of a curse; then, in applying this axiom to a concrete case ("If I myself have stolen, I should die"), the curse metaphorically refers to a general and higher-order rule going beyond the single case which the thief cannot avoid ("keep an eye on him/her'' is the end of the curse). It is through this general rule that the elements of the structural triad law-infringement-sanction are hierarchically related in the etiological and axiological metasystem. One element evokes the other insofar as it is applicable in a given situation. More concretely, the curse presents the story of inevitable recurrence: it is the story of the existential interdependence of kinsmen which always will reassert itself, of life overcoming restraints, of evil calling for vengeance, of social order constantly restating itself. Parallel to the logic of the curse, the Yaka divinatory etiology not only expresses a structural causality but also actualizes a value system. The oracle draws on certain assumptions and evidence, as is shown by the association the oracle establishes between present and past afflicition. In a performative and metaphoric way, the association provides the major signification of the affliction. Concretely, the oracle orders the facts according to the interlinking structural model: exchange-law/prohibition-infringement-curse-sanction-affliction or death. |
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There is no attempt within the oracle to give a causal interpretation of the "how" of events. Employing what I term a structural framework, it gives a semantic reading of the facts that characterizes the submitted problem, uncovers a meaning, and prepares an intervention to be efficacious. The meaning of the problem does not lie in the higher-order metasystem but in referring to it and in the unique semantic or metaphoric interconnecting of events, acts, and persons that were unconnected before, i.e., that belong to different semantic structures and patterns |
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