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outside the culture and creates it. The diviner does not act as the defender of the norm, nor as the judge. For the diviner, the consultation is an achievement of spiritual transcendence. |
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On the bodily level, by discerning the submitted problem with the help of his divinatory capacities inherited in the uterine line, the diviner develops an almost physical or umbilical bond with the afflicted individual and the clients (recall that the intermediary object has rested on the afflicted individual's navel). He prefigures in this way the restructuring of the bonds with the uterine life source. Through these uterine life-giving bonds, as well as through the symbolism of "the chicken on the point of laying an egg," the divination affirms itself as self-generative of new life. By means of his clairvoyance, which reactualizes the initiatory trance-possession, that is to say through his corporeality, the diviner gives support to his being the subject of enunciation. But the process involves more than this. |
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In his corporeality the diviner appears as the agent and the locus, the author (the psychic subject) and the scene of an innovative meaning production. In all these aspects Yaka divination is a resource of identity and existence for the diviner as well as for the afflicted and/or the clients. The divination shows how the fundamental symbolic process of world construction among the Yaka operates and how the sociocultural order finds its origin in this process and profoundly imposes itself on the bodily experience in a mutual modeling of each other. |
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The internal approach I have adopted succeeds in showing how divination more than any other institution repeatedly reveals the conventional character of the Yaka culture and society and especially how, when challenged by misfortune, it renews itself. |
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The oracle and its corollaries (the curse and ritual intervention) are founded in a higher-order system of basic values from which they draw an axiomatic, etiological model. Neither oracles nor rites prove their veracity by discursive reasoning; rather this veracity stems from linking up the problem situation to an axiological metasystem that is beyond any doubt. The oracle brings about the meaning of the unknown by laying bare the hidden coordinates of the problem situation in reference to the relevant higher-order axiological system, and allows in this way for efficacious intervention. This axiomatic metasystem generates and maintains itself as a self-defining reality, and is also an implicit expression of the conditions for healthy societal and individual life. My internal approach does not invoke extrahuman referents to account for the authoritative veracity in the oracle's articulation of meaning. |
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Yaka divination includes an ethical approach to the conditions for social life and does not propose to the individual an ideal for behavior. The oracle does not consider a problem such as sickness, affliction, anomaly, or death as the effect of a failure to correspond to an ideal, nor as something which compromises an ideal of human life. The oracle, and even the jurisdiction, speak of omission when the meaning of the actual problem is seen in the light of a former similar problem |
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