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ents were aware of the differing skills and orientations of spirit and book diviners and they chose their specialist accordingly. Suspecting certain explanations for their troubles, clients selected a diviner who was particularly sensitive and competent in that area. Clients did not choose between two different systems of divination so much as between different alternatives within a single system of understanding. |
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In January 1971 I tape recorded a consultation between an older man and a gourd rattle diviner. As the consultation proceeds, it becomes clear that the man has come to divine the reason for the sickness of his baby granddaughter, his son's child. The problem is said to lie with his co-parents-in-law, that is, with his son's wife's father and father's brother. The bride's father's brother, appearing in the divination, claims he made a bridewealth loan to her father, who should have repaid it when his daughter married. When he failed to do so, the man cursed his niece to have a sick child. Later "little spirits" were also diagnosed. The session began with the deafening noise of the rattles, drowning out what the diviner was saying. When the rattles stopped, the diviner (D) spoke to his client (C). |
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D (gourd rattles): Big Man . . . they are saying that the case is at home, it is in the home. |
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C: That case, I do not know it. But if I were wise I would not [need to] come. |
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D (interval of gourd rattles): They say we should send away the matter of moaning [sickness]. |
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C: Let the moaning come. |
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D (gourd rattles): They are saying that the sickness is contesting with a child. Is it true? |
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C: When it catches the child, it has caught you. |
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D: Isn't it so that children are of many types. There is a real child which came from your body. There is also the child who came from the child you produced. Do you send this one away too? |
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C: The child who is removed [the child of your child] is also your child. |
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D (gourd rattles): Big man, messages are coming here too. They say that perhaps where there are dead people . . . Perhaps they will appear. But let us first speak with the living person; he also talks with the dead. That's who he talks with, it is not to say that he talks alone [implying that a living person invokes the ancestors in a curse]. So there are many types of living people. There is . . . the father of this person, the mothers of this personperhaps the father's sisterperhaps the grandmotherperhaps the sister of the motherperhaps the brotherso I want to know who first said 'thank you for asking.' He answered and said another thing on the side of women, except I am on the side of men. I said no you are his mother's brother. You may be his father, or his brother or his elder; no, on the side of uncles, leave itand the side of grandmothers, leave it on the side of the brother also leave, but go where it says father. |
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