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curse in the distant past. This means that the granduncle or the great-granduncle of the sufferer receives the compensation so that he might remove the threat of the curse, turn back its fatal effects, and realize reconciliation symbolically: the uterine link is no longer the source of ill, but is now life giving and life promoting. Now the conditions are fulfilled for efficacious ritual intervention which dramatizes good health, renewed fertility, successful hunting, and so on. |
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Who Is Speaking in the Oracle? |
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As Zempléni noted (1982:8), the diviner who pronounces the oracle's inspired words declares himself and is by definition declared not to be the subject of enunciation. It is not the diviner himself who speaks in his own name, unlike the diviner-prophet who mixes "inspired" messages and statements in his personal name (Devisch and Vervaeck 1985). But, while it is true that the oracle as etiological discourse removes the diviner as subjective source of the enunciation, as the one who discloses and informs all by himself, it seems that the diviner is the agent of the corporeal drama with its self-generating meaning. The oracle does not annihilate the psychic and metaphorizing subject. |
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It seems to me that the problem situation is voiced nonverbally through the diviner's body or corporeal drama before it is translated in the light of the axiological tradition and in function of the questions from the etiological registers and the clients. The subject of enunciation is constituted by the intertwining of anomaly and norm, of deficient and normal, of social, cosmological, and bodily domains, and actualized through the diviner's corporeality. The initiatory trance and the heightened sensory capacities of the diviner (the keen sense of smell and the receptive introvertive listening linked to the clairvoyance) are the agents of and the place in which the intertwining takes place. This intertwining is brought about by the diviner's extreme transcending of limits, thereby negatively affirming the necessity of such limits and norms congruently on the social, cosmological, and bodily domains. |
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On the social level the diviner outlines the relations that reconcile the afflicted, the clients, and the uterine forebears. The diviner's extreme transgression of the norm and the limits of the cosmological level reestablishes, with regard to the problem situation, the pertinency of the traditional values and norms. This trangression indirectly offers normative models that help to interpret the meaning of the problem situation and the solution to it. In other words, the diviner violates the norm or transgresses the limits in such an extreme way that he thereby embodies both the norm and the limits, and their transgression. He sets the measure of transgression, simultaneously evoking the necessity of limits and norms. By embodying both the extreme limit-transgression and the reference to the center (namely, the conventional order of norms and values), the diviner is able to dialectically intertwine, in a hierarchical relationship, center and margin, the norm and its violation. He is thereby able to capture the creative potential at the margin by its extreme violation. Like the culture hero, the diviner both situates himself |
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