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of social life (Devisch 1985a:70ff.). The oracle connects the submitted illness with some recent infringement or abuse, or some quarrel involving the sick person (e.g., arising from uncles failing to fulfil their duties) and also with an analogous situation in the history of the uterine descent. This connecting of present and historical situations is not causalist but metaphoric and brings to light an important dimension of the meaning of the problem. It is as if reference were made to the self-maintenance of social life and to a unifying, all-embracing, and axiological horizon of meaning and order. The oracle metonymically throws light on other phenomena, in linking them with the present family quarrel. |
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Among the clients and in popular etiology, this metaphoric reference is readily interpreted in a causal deterministic way: it is claimed either that the affliction is a direct retaliation for the wrong committed by some uterine ascendants threatened by a curse or that the family quarrel led the elders to reassert their status through sorcery. Jealousy, envy, offended honor and anger are seen as the motives for malevolent acts drawing on extrahuman avenging or bewitching powers. Any act of illicit sorcery is already threatened by the curse of an ascendant, so for popular interpretation it is unimportant whether affliction is the direct result of sorcery or is the retaliation of an act of sorcery committed by an ascendant of the victim. In all these cases, it is through the uterine ties that one is most vitally threatened with and suffers from misfortune. |
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The divinatory session is ended by a verdict and a prescription: one party (e.g., the agnates, or the uterines of the first generation) gets accused of sorcery or of the infringement that has reactivated the curse from the past. Blame may be put on the other party (e.g., the uterines of the second ascendant generation) as well for their having angered the first generation. The prescription will be about a sacrifice, a restitution, an uncle that one has to contact, or a cult that must be organized. The clients then organize a hunt to test the oracle's veracity. The same system of values underlies the divinatory and therapeutic approaches, so that the therapy will aim at the actualization of these values in the form of a rite of passage. Ritual form is then given to the patient's symbolic death and rebirth via cult-specific metaphors. But the case's singular history only particularizes the first stage of the therapeutic intervention during which the kin groups redefine or readjust their mutual relations and their relations vis-à-vis the afflicted person. |
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The oracle's approach to the relationships between persons, patridescent groups, uterines, and affines is schematic and general. It seldom accuses an individual as individual, but usually agnatic or uterine kin groups and their leaders. By connecting a current problem with some form of familial discord, or with an analogous problem situation in the uterine ascent, it leads to a general all-embracing dramatized redefinition of the basic kinship relations. Any ritual intervention in a problem situation reflects the divinatory interpretation of the problem. Since any problem, even sickness (whose somatic aspects are, however, not minimized), is seen as a neglect of the reciprocity between kin, the ritual unraveling of the problem always begins as follows: a ritual compensation is offered by the sufferer or by his residential elder to the representative of the uterine forebear who uttered the |
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