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method could presume very much and who otherwise offered little information to go on in the framing of questions. The dream diviners had the advantage of my many months working in their kraal, which gave them much contextual knowledge of me and my situation. Moreover they were presented with the relatively rich materials of my dream of initiation. |
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What this volume achieves, then, is a sensitizing of the student to the diverse forms of divination, the diverse ways that diviners and clients have of coming to know each other and their situation. In Madagascar Vérin and Rajaonarimanana show us both astrologically oriented diviners (mpandro) and geomantics (mpisikidy) relatively tightly bound into a system of divinatory interpretation. Among the Batammaliba, on the other hand, Blier describes an unusually open interaction between the consultant, the diviner proper, and the adviser to the client. Both work together, mutually suggestive, to resolve the problem of the client's health. Both keep in mind community health as a goal. Callaway, for the Zulu, gives us the contrast between the relatively mechanical "thumb diviner," the "stick diviner" more open in interpretation, and the inspired spirit mediums who depend little on mechanical interpretative devices. Almquist gives us insight into the variety of oracles and oracular practices among the Pagibeti. The object of his essay is to show us the substantial variation within cultures as regards divinatory practices. Among the Lobi, Meyer describes a very rapid question and answer session between diviner and clients, directed at circumambient spirits, that is unusual among either the more reflective and interpretive divinations or the more deliberative mechanical, geomantic procedures described. |
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In general this volume enables us to understand the number of continua along which systems of divination vary: as, for example, between inspired divination and learned divination; as between open and closed systems of divination; as between collaborative and consensual divination (in respect to the relation between diviner and client) and unilateral and authoritarian procedures. While respecting this variety as a source of insight, I direct myself here primarily to divination of the inspired, open, collaborative and consensual kind. |
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The Logic of Divination as a Logic of World Building |
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This open and collaborative variety of divinatory practice should make us wary of being able to identify a logic of divination. But since the question of the logic of divination has been a perennial one, as the introduction and various essays make clear, we may look back at it again in the light of this collection. In 1965 I certainly took divination to be an illogical procedure for human problem solving, a position all the more strange since I was studying African religions as imaginative cosmological constructions both redemptive and therapeutic in effect. But I was not prepared to understand divination as having the world-building import many of these chapters so clearly show it to have. |
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One conclusion we arrive at through our reading here is that the old debate over Western and primitive logics as it is focused on divination is a comparison |
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