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diviner might be influenced by previous knowledge or local gossip, whereas a distant one would have to find things out using the power and authority of books or spirits. Because the diviner was not supposed to learn about the case in the ordinary way, he or she could not simply ask the consulter for the relevant details. The dialogue had to be carried on with the other voice; the diviner merely mediated. Likewise the client could not know the truth until it was revealed by the divination. In this case, the grandfather declared his ignorance: "if I were wise, I would not come." In two other recorded consultations, the clients also began by expressing their uncertainty. One consulter said that "thoughts fail us. . . that is what we want you to tell us, where it comes from and where its source is, where it ends and where it is going." Subsequently, this same person rejected all the suggestions made about the cause of the misfortune, pushing the divination in the direction of the curser she and her son suspected (see the case of the Dry Tree, Whyte 1990). Like Pharaoh, for whom Joseph divined, Nyole clients often had very definite preconceptions about what was false and even about what was true. But in principle the client could not know until the divination had created certainty. |
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Logically, it was divinatory authority, the spirits or Arabic book, which contained the truth about a case. But these sources were obscure and ambiguous; they had to be interpreted through the joint efforts of diviner and client. In Nyole divination, uncertainty was thus set up and emphasized so that it might be resolved. Obscurity took various forms. Book diviners read aloud in Arabic, which their clients did not understand. Gourd rattle diviners drowned out conversations with spirits by the noise of their pebble-filled calabashes. Sometimes they pronounced indistinct words in the growling or shrill voices of spirits; sometimes they seemed to be speaking strange languages. And even when they spoke in audible Lunyole, their meaning was often elusive. They used special idioms, circumlocutions, metaphors, and allusions. In the grandfather's case, the agent speaking to and through the diviner talked of millet seed to be repaid after the harvest; in case the client had misunderstood, he then explained that he was referring to a bridewealth loan which was to be returned when bridewealth was paid for the daughter of that marriage. Another common feature, which added to the confusion, was that the diviner regularly suggested that what he and the agents were saying might be untrue (cf. Werbner 1973:1421). |
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Parkin (1982; see also his essay in this volume) has shown how divination constructs simultaneities and then, through a process of sequencing, creates order out of confusion. In the grandfather's case, the diviner sometimes presents a number of possibilities at once, as when he says that "there are many types of living persons" and mentions a number of potential cursers. This confusion of possibilities must then be worked through, one by one, establishing causal chains of motivation, obligation, course of action, and result. |
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Sequencing was achieved through a dialogue in which diviners encouraged their clients to comment upon the suggestions made by the Arabic books or the spirits. One diviner confided to me that the most difficult clients were those who were not accustomed to divining and did not realize what role they had to play. In |
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