|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Many African peoples maintain that "real" knowledge is hidden, secret, available only to certain people capable of using it properly. Frequently that knowledge is only revealed through divination. Thus we return to the basic issue which this volume addresses: how can we possibly gain an understanding of contemporary African peoples and their ongoing search for sufficient knowledge to complete their life patterns unless we try to understand their sources of knowledge, their ways of knowing? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All who have contributed to this volume intend to convince others to reconsider their relegation of divination to a peripheral and exclusively religious role in culture. We especially hope that African scholars will reject the biases which have so misrepresented African epistemologies and will return to their own elders to ensure that African systems of knowledge are part of the total record of the human enterprise. We reaffirm p'Bitek's challenge that "the African scholar must endeavor to present the institutions of African peoples as they really are" (1970:7), and we hope this collection of essays contributes toward that end. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
1. This volume developed from a panel on divination systems at the 1981 African Studies Association meeting, where Alden Almquist, Rudolph Blier, John W. Burton, and Piet Meyer first presented their papers. My sincere thanks to Mark Whitaker for his helpful comments on this introduction. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2. See Evans-Pritchard (1966:155-61) and Ray (1976:2-7). As Evans-Pritchard concludes, "It was in such a climate of Comtism, utilitarianism, Biblical criticism, and the beginnings of comparative religion that social anthropology, as we now know it, came into being" (161). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3. There was, for example, Bouché-Leclercq's monumental Histoire de la divination dans l'antiquité, 4 vols. (1879-82). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4. Douglas (1979) also suggests correspondences between the surrealist poets and the Dogon of Griaule and his collaborators, and Clifford explicitly develops the idea in his discussion of "Ethnographic Surrealism" (1988). Griaule, one recalls, first published on the Dogon in surrealist journals such as Minotaure (1933). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5. Elsewhere Evans-Pritchard observes that American anthropologists all regarded religious belief as illusion because "religion is superstition to be explained by anthropologists, not something an anthropologist, or indeed any rational person, could himself believe in" (1966:162). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
6. Even today, accounts such as Grindal's (1983) and Stoller and Olkes's (1987) are exceptional, as most anthropologists do not publish their paranormal experiences (see Lewis 1974 and Long 1977: 371-96). They also avoid work on divination by parapsychologists, such as Stanford (1972). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
7. For more thorough comments on the personal and professional dimensions of this complex individual, see Beidelman (1974), Lienhardt (1974), Douglas (1981), and Burton (1983). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
8. Interestingly, van Binsbergen and Schoffeleers raise the issue of their contributors' religious faith but conclude that the papers reflect no clear influence (1985:36). A survey |
|
|
|
|
|