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This view, that the patient guides the diviner as well as being guided by him, suggests more than a mutual dependency of the two roles. It suggests that they may be seen as mirror images of each other. The further implicit idea that each person is both doctor and patient is reinforced by the process through which diviners achieve their position in the first place. They first suffer severely as a patient and then, as part of the cure, are instructed by a diviner's spirits to seek certain plants and medicines in the bush, thereby also coming to possess divinatory powers. Only a few patients become diviners, but all diviners were once patients. It is as if in order to become a psychotherapist, one would first need to be a schizophrenic patient and become a psychotherapist as part of one's "cure." Indeed, the parallel may be not without significance. |
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Just as divinatory diagnoses suggest bricolage, so also the idioms and language used to describe the patient's distressed state suggest at least some features of what we call schizophrenia: disembodiment, personal withdrawal into a "private" world of spirits, the creation of a "false self" which denies the diviner's "real" identity, and what I continue for the moment to call jumbled speech. Yet, once again, these are features which are as much, if not more, the creation of the diviner as they are attributable to the patient. Both the patient and the diviner participate willingly in this diagnosis, with the patient allowing himself into the "private' spirit world of the diviner. Also, both appear to be in control of the way in which the diagnosis proceeds. It may well be that cultures like those of the Swahili and the Giriama provide structured events and roles by which what we call schizophrenia is legitimized and thereby brought under the control of those who suffer from it. Be that as it may, it is not here my intent to claim that the diviner and patient are in some degree schizophrenic. What is interesting is that the diagnostic themes in the divinations appeal to thought and speech processes which, when very marked, we would label schizophrenic. |
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Does this mean, then, that divinatory diagnosis is both bricolage and schizophrenia? Or, to put the equation another way, that bricolage (or myth-making thought, as Lévi-Strauss alternatively calls it) and schizophrenic thought are basically the same thing? Schizophrenic thought has moreover been viewed by some scholars as resting on a basis similar to that of artistic thought (Wilson 1978:97); does this further mean that bricolage and schizophrenic and artistic thought are equivalent? This seems absurd and perhaps, in reaching this equation, I have merely allowed myself to be captured by the terms and have merged their respective referents. |
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On the other hand, absurd though the equation might seem, the fact that it can be reached at all suggests some further consideration of Lévi-Strauss's three-fold distinction between bricolage, art, and modern science as modes of thought. Art, it will be remembered, is placed halfway between bricolage and modern science. The artist is said to partake of both. He is a bricoleur in creating a model or structure, a recognizable painting for example, out of preexisting images. So does the myth maker. But he also works by design, like the modern scientist or engineer in producing, as well as reproducing, structures. That is to say, the |
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