|
|
|
|
|
|
|
any one of several possible causes (such as witchcraft, ancestral punishment, or spirit attack) may be responsible for an identical misfortune. If one causal connection proves to be invalid (for instance, if a sacrifice to a particular spirit fails to restore a sick person's health), the conclusion is merely that another causal connection must be the right one; the conceptual system from which these causal sequences derive is not itself doubted. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Like Evans-Pritchard, Horton approached divination as an exclusively intellectual explanatory activity. Furthermore, it was viewed as central to the maintenance of the "closed" intellectual predicament, firstly because it provides the only available means of "going over the head of the evidence" by selecting one out of several converging causal connections as the "right" explanation (1964:9; 1967: 170). The second reason is that it permits considerable scope for secondary elaborations, since fruitless diagnoses can easily be attributed to the sensitivity of the divination apparatus or the incompetence or fraudulence of particular diviners without bringing the entire system of ideas behind such diagnoses into question (1964:15; 1967:171). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
That such processes constitute a crucial aspect of divination is not in question. This kind of analysis is not inaccurate but partial, in that it represents divinatory procedure as a purely intellectual exercise as well as marginalizing the role of interests and power in the production of both Western scientists' and African diviners' explanations. In the case of Western science the strongly normative tendencies which make this conceptual framework itself a somewhat "closed" system are ignored (as Horton has recently acknowledged [1982:211]), while in the case of African divination the issue of the impact of individual or group interests is limited to the question of dishonest diviners and thereby reduced, via the "secondary elaboration" argument, to a mere mechanism in the defensive intellectual armory of the "closed" predicament. Evans-Pritchard, on the other hand, acknowledged that the truthfulness of the Zande poison oracle in local contexts derived from the defined infallibility of the oracle of the prince. And yet, despite his assertion that confidence in the poison oracle would not be maintained were it not underpinned in this way by centralized power (1937:343), he paid scant attention to this authorizing process. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Intellectualist analyses are, inevitably, "authorized" forms of knowledge in our own subcultural environment as academics, and it is intriguing, as Malcolm Crick has observed, that "anthropology here incarnates a Western philosophy of mind, and values highly those intellectual gifts which are useful in academic life" (1982: 290). So embedded is the template through which our own discourse acquires its truth value that we tend to allow definitions of "what is true" in terms of verification to eclipse questions of "what truth means" in other situations. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Truth as Performative Efficacy and Cryptic Potency |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
More than thirty years ago, Franz Steiner (1954) argued that if anthropologists addressing issues of truth and knowledge were to cease restricting themselves |
|
|
|
|
|