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picture only exists as a painting on canvas and remains under his technological control as creator. He can, if he wants to, alter it so as to signify new directions, as would an impressionist (Lévi-Strauss 1966:22, 25). |
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Likewise, we are told that intellectual bricolage in the form of myth making has a poetic quality and can achieve brilliant intellectual results (Lévi-Strauss 1966:17, 21). Much the same could be said of divination, which, as well as offering opportunities for dramatic and semantic creativity, solves the practical problem of mental as well as physical distress. The Digo and Giriama diviners, it will be remembered, elaborated to a greater extent than the ''Arab" and in ways much more aesthetically pleasing. As well as being bricolage, and even touching on modern medical science in its diagnostic parallels with psychotherapy, the divination is also an art form. |
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Lévi-Strauss himself notes that the difference between the myth maker and the modern scientist, or the bricoleur and the engineer, with the artist in between, is not absolute, and the distinction remains an important general approach complementary to the recent discussion of whether "primitive" thought is based on two-or three-valued logic, and whether it may be said to exist at all (Cooper 1975; Salmon 1978; Hallpike 1976, 1977; Williams 1977; Warren 1978). |
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But there is another approach which, on the basis of my data, I would state as follows: analysis of the diviner's speech reveals two parallel patterns. One concerns the language used, the other the narrative theme. To take the linguistic dimension first, the diviner starts with what I called jumbled speech, or what we may now refer to as inconsistent and mixed use of metaphor, false syllogism, some reversals, and an apparent lack of path control, i.e., straying from one concept to another and back again inconsequentially. Though intended (we assume) rather than involuntary, these are features common to some degree to the speech of all of us, but in excess may characterize so-called schizophrenic speech (Werner and Levis-Matichek 1975). These features are rectified as the divination proceeds. The speech and argument become clearer and culminate in perfectly precise instructions based on a crisp classification of causative agents and remedial plants, animals, and other substances. |
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The narrative theme starts with the idea of aimless wandering in an unspecified and we may assume empty area, which is alien and remote. Within it, paths crisscross confusedly, but eventually, through the idiom of bodily exploration, lead to a settled point and prospective cure. We can see that the shifts from jumbled to sequential speech and from aimless wandering to purposeful direction "say" the same thing. But it would be difficult to conclude that one is an epiphenomenon of the other. |
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One view might be that the logic governing both may be said to lie in the contrast between deep-structure and surface semantics. Gerald Leech offers us a linguistic example with the sentence I saw the girls crossing the street (1974: 288). At a deep semantic level the crossing and the seeing occur at the same time; they are a "junction of two interacting events" (288). But the sentence orders them sequentially; the seeing comes before the crossing. It also subordinates the |
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