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Don't think that by going off to another country you will resist themyou must be curedyour body must be treated . . . and then you will be somebody, settled with a job and money and able to face people. . . . The day for the treatment is next Tuesday, 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. |
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With this divination, we also have an initial amassing and overlapping of ideas: man and woman, loving and longing, following the shoe, getting sick. My translated abstract misses the polysemy of certain words used: kimako means sympathy, sorrow, astonishment; thamaa means hope, longing, lust, penis; ku-kola means to overcome or penetrate. The word used in divination for woman is figa, which normally refers to one of three stones making up a stand for cooking pots; the word used for man is the normal word for five (tsano), which admirably projects the five-limbed image of masculinity. The word for shoe (kirahu) carries the meaning also of wandering and therefore of random sickness. Conflicting innuendos are created through such polysemy, which heightens the ambivalence of concept. The listening client can try and judge for himself but may not be certain of what precisely is being proposed, while the diviner himself can always retreat from an unpromising lead and take up another through the use of the same words. |
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The theme of uncontrolled wandering follows on easily from such ambivalence. It occurs first in undefined outside space, then in pursuit through different parts of the body, eventually settling, in this case, on the genitals. But the young man is clearly mentally as well as physically distressed, and so his mind's wanderings are described. The physical and mental troubles are each explained by a different kind of witchcraft. |
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Finally, there is a well-ordered list of requisites for cure, interspersed with more direct admonitions not to wander. The subject of wandering may at any one time have been the sickness, the pain, the victim, the aggrieved relative of the victim, or even the agent causing the distress. The admonition not to wander places these phenomena (the subjects of wandering) in fixed rather than indeterminate relations to each other. |
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In the final case of divination, which I will summarize even more briefly, a Giriama woman about ten years past childbearing age treats a young man who has also come on his own behalf and who suffers from continual stomach pains, which, the diviner comes to assume, necessarily affect his sexuality. |
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The diviner opens with a short song in Giriama, which is mutually intelligible with Digo: "The spirits are coming with sympathy, and we are traveling along with that sympathy, and with our human hope." The spirit switches from song to speech. |
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We [i.e., the spiritsthough perhaps the plural pronoun is used to denote respect for the client, who is a member of an adjacent generation and therefore a "father"] have stood with a female, but the sick person is a male. . . . Isn't that so? [The client agrees and the diviner responds with song.] |
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