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in the wild but from time to time speechlessly revealing knowledge to people through tracks left just outside the village's civilized order, presents an image of truth as an enigmatic, extra-social potency complementing the more legalistic and verbally articulate truth of the Nommo, which can be compared to the formal social efficacy described by Steiner, Lienhardt, and Finnegan (see Douglas 1975: 127). Evans-Pritchard's and Horton's view of divination as intellectual explanation and the definition of truth that this implies as the verifiable accuracy of a verbal proposition thus bears practically no resemblance to this aspect of the divinatory truth of the Pale Fox. Given the importance of secret knowledge and the prominence of non-verbal forms of learning in much West African ritual (see, e.g., Bellman 1984 and Jackson 1983), I would argue that a conception of truth as potent paraverbal enigma is likely to be a constantly recurring alternative to the more public, legalistic truth of clear definitions. Divination procedures, accordingly, may embody and reproduce either or both of these alternatives. |
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Divisions of Oracular Labor |
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Like Evans-Pritchard's analysis of Zande witchcraft and Nuer lineages (see Crick 1976:117), the paradigmatic status which his study of the Zande poison oracle has been accorded has shaped subsequent anthropological interpretations of divination in a more constraining manner than he probably intended. His emphasis upon the logic of the Zande use of the poison oracle can be attributed not only to his critical views on Lévy-Bruhl's concept of "pre-logical" mentality but also to the fact that this technique happens to be characterized by the highly analytical, "either-or" selection of binary distinctions. Although the methodological procedure of the poison oracle is by no means universal among African divination systems, it has been used to authorize not only Zande social hierarchies but also an overemphasis upon intellectual aspects of divination in anthropological explanation. Its "logical" qualities have been seized upon by those who give primacy to "rules" or ''rationality" (e.g., Ahern 1982 and the contributors to Hollis and Lukes 1982), while its legalistic nature has been seized upon by those who give primacy to "legitimation" (e.g., Park 1963). Common to both of these modes of analysis, as Devisch has observed, is a concern for "order," for "regulation" at the social and "regularity" at the cognitive levels, which "reflects the models used by the authors, a moralizing hermeneutic, a positivistic and pragmatic philosophy," and which fails to take account of the symbolic nature of divination (1985:64, 51). |
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Turner cannot be accused of ignoring divinatory symbolism but he too can be said to have overemphasized its univocal rationality in Ndembu divination, which he describes as "a mode of analysis and a taxonomic system," a dualistic, intellectual, and highly verbal ritual form which "proceeds by a sequence of binary oppositions, moving stepwise from classes to elements" (1975: 1516). He contrasted what he perceived as the fragmented and somewhat "paranoid" but nonetheless "rational" sifting of evidence in divinatory ritual (24) with the nonverbal experiential wholeness characterizing revelatory ritual, the latter beginning with "authoritative |
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