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that, at best, is all too likely to embody an "epistemological ideology" and at worst to be plainly invidious. The task is not, as this volume shows, to disqualify divination as lacking in the power of Western logic to identify causes and reflect upon premises but rather to try to see the powers of synthesis in divination, the ways that it enables its clients to see and know a better world in which to live. A number of these essays do enable us to see divination as such a cosmological activity. Indeed it is not too much to argue that systems of divination such as Yoruba Ifa are complex enough in their ontological implications to constitute an academic discipline (see Abimbola 1976). |
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So various essays here move us satisfyingly beyond "epistemological ideology" and invidious comparisons to a pragmatic understanding of what divination achieves in ministering to affliction and by its powers of synthesis in discovering alternative worlds to the afflicted one. Burton, for example, shows us how Atuot divination provokes a reexamination of world view. That is, it provokes philosophic reflection on social order in its participants and leads them to a deeper understanding of the verities of human social life lived out amid suprahumans. He finds in the "dialectic of divination" between diviner and client, which is to say the dialectic between a ''social definition of experience" as provided by the diviner and the individual's sense of suffering but uncertain identity as provided by the client, the basis for philosophic reflection. But, of course, this dialectic works best, as Whyte points out, where the "model of misfortune" is "contextual" or "sociocentric." That is, it works best where the person is defined in terms of relations to external agents rather than in terms of relations to autochthonous selves and autochthonous bodies. |
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I like to call this process whereby a religious world view is constructed in the process of religious communication "edification by puzzlement." It certainly occurs in divination, which is often characterized by puzzling discourse that gives to it a "cryptic potency," as Shaw calls it. |
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The "Cryptic Potency" of Divination |
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If I had only paid closer attention to the "performative utterances" that accompanied my experience with divination, I might have better grasped this "cryptic potency." For, as Shaw goes on to say, it is not the logical truth properties, the intellectual aspects, but the performative powers, the "efficacy" that lies in divination to transform social realities, that is most interesting. This is the fundamental "truth" of divination, a truth more fundamental than any positive truth. This point is made effectively in this collection by a number of writers. |
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The extensive Nyole divination text recorded by Whyte well demonstrates the abundance of meaning brought forth by the diviner which is then clarified through resistance and response by diviner and client. Parkin, in his essay, also provides us with the actual discourse of the Giriama and Swahili divining sessions. He shows us how the initial ambiguous, muddled, "wilderness" speech of diviners obtains its "cryptic potency" by being subsequently straightened out for purposes |
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