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to the concerns of positivist logicians, they would find applications of "truth" connected with notions of "the binding word," such as the oath, the vow, swearing, and witnessing. Witnessing, for example, refers in many types of legal procedure not to verification by an eyewitness but to a person's sworn declaration of solidarity with one of the parties and of his or her statements. Such a declaration helps to establish truth not by virtue of any logical properties it may have, but by its power in this specific context to authorize a transformation in social reality. |
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With the reality-defining potential of these and other such "performative utterances" we are of course familiar in Africa from Finnegan's researches (1969). In a similar vein, Lienhardt (1961) has stressed the social creation of truth via ritual speech among the Dinka. The speeches made at Dinka sacrifices, for example, by redescribing past events as the participants intend them to have been, reshape the participants' experience of the past so as to affirm what the Dinka see as more fundamental truths, such as kinship unity and ascendancy of life over death. "In Dinka thought," Lienhardt wrote, "it is this kind of truth which is arrived at and stated by a communal intention" (1961:247). |
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Divination is clearly another such truth-constructing process in which, through the public reclassification of people and events, a particular interpretation emerges as the authorized version of "what really happened." Yet in many instances ethnographically, notions of divinatory truth embrace much more than this performative social efficacy. Another alternative sense of truth is implied by the close association in West Africa of systems of divination with a trickster figure, typically an anthropomorphized animal who flouts formal rules of social and cosmic order and often takes the role of a rival creator who, through his haphazard (and often purely accidental) transformations of the world in the time of myth, acts as an antithesis to the principal creator-deity, though in a humorous and entirely non-satanic manner (see Pelton 1980). |
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In Dogon myth (Griaule 1965; Griaule and Dieterlen 1954), for instance, the Pale Fox (Yurugu) upsets the harmonious universe of dualities set up by his father, Amma, the creator, and Amma's well-balanced twin children, the Nommo, by virtue of his birth as a single and therefore lonely being instead of a twin. The Pale Fox's loneliness tempts him to commit incest by raping his mother, the earth, but through this central breach of order he gains knowledge of the "second word" of Amma, which possesses nyama, creative power, but which precedes the "third word" through which Amma gives man the power of speech. |
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Whereas the Nommo twins embody light and verbal articulacy, and preside over legal judgments and formal ritual, the Pale Fox, through his knowledge of the second word, is the unwitting agent behind divination. Dogon diviners lure foxes to the margins of villages by leaving food for them there, having first marked out squares on the ground over which the foxes run at night, leaving cryptic patterns of footprints which the diviners decipher the following morning (Griaule 1937; Paulme 1937). Mary Douglas argued from this that the Dogon "situate real truth . . . in the shadowy realm of the Pale Fox," while formal appearances are placed "in the daylight world of Nommo" (1975:130). |
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Thus the figure of the Pale Fox, this delinquent son of God wandering alone |
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