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proaches to divination have drawn their influence is Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937). His aim in this study was to challenge Lévy-Bruhl's characterization of ''primitive" thought as "pre-logical" by demonstrating the internal logical consistency of Zande ideas about oracles and witchcraft, but he saw this logic as based upon false premises and was moved to exclaim: "And yet Azande do not see that their oracles tell them nothing" (33738). He explained this by pointing to what he called "secondary elaborations of belief" in Zande thought, in which the failure of oracles is attributed to such additional mystical contingencies as the breach of a taboo, ghostly anger, or sorcery, thus forming protective explanatory layers which prevent the primary conviction of the inherent truthfulness of the poison oracle from being questioned (330). |
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The fact that he was concerned at all to provide an explanation for the Zande acceptance of oracular truth was, unsurprisingly, a function of the epistemological politics of Evans-Pritchard's own intellectual environment: |
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I have described to many people in England the facts related in the last chapter and they have been, in the main, incredulous or contemptuous. In their questions to my they have sought to explain away Zande behaviour by rationalising it, that is to say, by interpreting it in terms of our culture. . . . They ask what happens when the result of one test contradicts the other which it ought to confirm if the verdict be valid; what happens when the findings of oracles are belied by experience; and what happens when two oracles give contrary answers to the same question. |
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These same, and other, problems, naturally occurred to me in Zandeland, and I made enquiries into, and observations on, those points which struck me as important. (1937:313) |
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As the terms "incredulous" and "contemptuous" indicate, the premises from which these "common sense" assumptions derive carry an emotionally charged normative weight which protects them from critical scrutiny just as effectively as secondary elaborations protect Zande assumptions about oracles. Although Evans-Pritchard's intention was to challenge such unhelpful (and pejorative) oppositions as "rational" versus "mystical" mentalities, the fact that he did so in terms of the "internal logic" and "false premises" underlying Zande ideas allowed an unexamined positivist ideology to continue to frame comparisons of Western and non-Western modes of thought. |
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This rationalist aspect of Evans-Pritchard's writing was developed further in Horton's renowned comparison (1967) between African traditional thought and Western scientific thought in terms of the Popperian dichotomy between "closed" and "open" intellectual predicaments. Horton argued that while Western science is constructed upon choices between alternative theories, through each of which the world may be explained, predicted, and controlled with varying degrees of accuracy, African traditional thought is characterized by an absence of theoretical choices. Since there are no alternatives except conceptual chaos, the existing system of thought must remain unquestioned, and therefore requires the protection of such devices as secondary elaborations of belief. A further form of conceptual defense described by Horton is that of "converging causal sequences," in which |
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