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and research which also informs this volume. So in part an afterword framed in this way is a commentary on twenty years of anthropology. |
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The Anthropologist as Diviner |
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In the first place, I might have been made aware of the degree to which my unexamined positivist attitudes toward divination, my intellectualist impatience with it as an explanatory activity, and my suspicion of its probable fraudulence as an investigative and predictive activity were a function, as Philip Peek notes in his introduction to this volume and Rosalind Shaw so well points out in her essay, of my own "epistemological politics," a politics carrying an "emotionally charged normative weight" which protected from critical scrutiny knowledge of the role of interests and powers in producing Western scientists and African diviners. Jules-Rosette (1978) made a similar point about the "unexamined positivist ideology''our preferred Western mode of divinationwhich shields us from the "parti pris" in our work. Jules-Rosette spoke of the "veil of objectivity" maintained by both diviners and ethnographers so as to "guarantee" their method from scrutiny. Similar caution was expressed by Jackson (1978), who added the perspective of anthropologist as client in his pragmatic analysis of Kuranko divination. Jules-Rosette and, at least implicitly, several essays in this volume follow Turner (1975) in showing the similarity between divination and anthropological interpretation. |
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Had I been privy to these arguments in 1965 I would perhaps have understood that my impatience with my divinations had both an ideological basis and a basis in an implicit dispute overwould it be too much to call itprofessional privilege, a sense that both I and the inyanga yemilozi were diviners trying by our separate and, hence, competitive methods to make some sense out of the turmoiled, anomalous, ambiguous circumstances and the pain and suffering of human social life. Such an insight in 1965 might have created in me greater collegial interest in the Zulu diviner's "ways of knowing." |
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One value of this volume and of knowledge of the diverse types of divination of which it gives evidence is the comparative perspective we obtain. In 1965 I would have benefited in having a comparative perspective on the difference between the whistling diviner of the Valley of the Thousand Hills and the dream diviners at the Old Men's Cult. For while both of these diviners were inspirational and mediumistic, the latter were much more interpretive and the former more ritualistic in procedure. Of course, in respect to my case, the whistling diviner had much less to go on than the dream diviners. The whistling diviner was suddenly confronted with a member of another culture about whom neither she nor her |
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