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mention was made about the client's attitude, yet in nearly all of his entries, he noted the consulter's acceptance of the divinatory conclusion: "They replied, true, this is the second time we have divined [the agency of] the clan spirit," or "They replied, true that is how it is." |
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The autonomy of the client was brought home to me in discussing the causes of death with a spirit diviner. I asked him why sorcery was always said to be the cause, and whether spirits could kill people. He replied that they could indeed, but that his clients would not believe him if he found that their relative had been killed by spirits rather than human enemies. They would just go to a diviner elsewhere, he said. Apparently clients could be very stubborn. A man once told me how he had gone to consult a gourd rattle diviner on a certain matter. After two hours, she still had not found an explanation that seemed acceptable to him. So he left, refusing to pay the divination fee. |
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The knowledge and opinion of the client is essential inasmuch as the Nyole view of misfortune is based on a relational concept of the person. As long as relations to spirits and people must be examined and treated, the diviner must rely on the opinions and experiences of those involved. |
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Who Divines and Defines for Whom? |
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The diviner and client together work out an interpretation of misfortune and a plan for realizing it through appropriate thereapy. Suffering should be alleviated through appreciating and adjusting relations to senior kin, ancestral and clan spirits, enemies, and peripheral spirits. Divination is an arena for defining social identities which may later be enacted in ritual where representations are made real (Geertz 1966:28). Although uncertainty may not be completely resolved (see Whyte 1990) and the prescribed rituals may not actually be carried out, still the person who goes to divine potentially has a very important form of power: the ability to define reality for others. Because divination is the legitimate way of knowing, the consulter goes home with a privileged view of who the suffering person is and a strategy for enacting the vision of the sufferer's identity. From this perspective, the important questions about divination are not only what happens and how in the divining hut, but what implications divination has in the world outside it. |
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Knowledge is power, we say, and access to knowledge through divination is a means to maintain it. Evans-Pritchard (1937) states this explicitly in describing the monopoly of older men over the Zande poison oracle. This gave them power over younger men, but more especially over women. Evans-Pritchard declares the poison oracle to be a central mechanism of male control: |
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When we consider to what extent social life is regulated by the poison oracle we shall at once appreciate how great an advantage men have over women in their ability to use it, and how being cut off from the main means of establishing contact with the mystical forces that so deeply affect human welfare degrades woman's |
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