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distinguishes three causative agents: spirits, having a diviner in the family, and witchcraft, which are further subdivided in some descriptive detail, whereas the Digo diviner confines himself to two kinds of witchcraft, one producing physical and the other mental distress. |
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Such differences of detail in the diagnoses of the three diviners represent their individual creativity. It is, however, a creativity which operates within the successive frameworks I have suggested: jumbled ideas and metaphors that suggest various possible interpretations give way to their ordered sequencing and to more limited interpretations; they are finally superseded by an unambiguous classification of the causes of the sickness and the material needed to cure it. |
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This process of semantic disentanglement and clarification runs parallel with the idiom of movement from a wilderness to a set place and time. Taking the cases as a whole, this "spatial" idiom can be expressed as follows: |
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The victim, or perhaps we would say his soul, wanders aimlessly outside his body and home. The spirits wander too. They are always "unsettled," as diviners say. But it is part of their nature to be so. The human patient, whose nature it is not to be disembodied but rather to be settled in time and place, joins up with the spirits and with them frantically travels from one part of the body to another. Though the journey is frantic, it does at least exhibit a rough sequence. It always starts from the head and moves downward to the area of the genitals, and in the intermediary area of the trunk, alternates probingly between heart, stomach, chest, solar plexus, back, joints, hips and legs, usually linking up again with the mind. |
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Once the victim's source of pain has been located, the spirits, through the mouth of the diviner, can advise on its cure. In concentrating their advice on a fixed bodily area the spirits are themselves settled, at least while the remedy is effective. |
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In advising on the curative materials and methods to be used, the spirits order and classify, and so are turned from wanderers into busy bricoleurs. Indeed, the suggestion may now have become clear from my summaries of the divinations that the unraveling of ideas and their ordered reassembly as diagnosis and potential cure well fits the description of bricolage given by Lévi-Strauss (1966:1622). |
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It is true that it is the diviner (or his spirits) rather than the patient who converts "debris" and "chaos" into "order," or we might properly say, jumbled thought into sequential thought. But the patient is not only figuratively carried along the paths from wilderness to settlement; he is also a point of reference and guidance along the way. That is to say, by his nods, cues, and statements of agreement, the patient helps the diviner, encouraging him to proceed from one possibility to another. So, while we may think of the patient as being led to a cure by the diviner, the patient also guides the diviner in this attempt to reach a satisfactory diagnosis, converting an unmanageably large number of interpretations into a more limited number. |
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