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of providing counsel to the client upon which he can act. The diviner makes sense out of the afflicted world brought to his attention by rescuing sequence out of the muddle of simultaneity and synchronicity. For, in the end, if the client is to be brought to act, if not efficaciously, at least with some confidence, a sequence of activity must be proposed to him. The "cryptic potency" of the diviner's session, therefore, lies in its production of domesticated sequences of action out of the wild, existential simultaneity of experience. It is this simultaneity that is simulated if not constituted originally in the diviner's initial, muddled, wilderness speech. In a like manner Devisch shows us how the Yaka diviner works from his own production of ambiguous dreamlike images, as cryptic and potent in themselves as my dream upon the ladder, which the diviner then, in the act of interpretation, transposes to the client's problem situation. This transfer leads to the therapeutic restoration of social reciprocity. |
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Figuring Out the Inchoate Human Condition |
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Insofar as divination is not strictly bound to mechanical proceduresand many mechanical procedures themselves manipulate multivocal symbolic elements subject to variable interpretationthere is a figurative process going on in divination that is well captured in a number of these essays. This is a process by which the diviner and the client often enough together "figure out" (with figures of speech in mind) a pattern of knowing that will meet the existential anomalies and ambiguities, the aleatory and inchoate qualities, of the social situation that has brought them together. This "figuring out" in my view is largely accomplished in primary process language rich in dreamlike images, metaphors, metonyms, synechdoches, and other figurative devices which are put forth as relevant to the divinatory problem but whose relevance has to be subsequently "figured out" in a more straightforward cognitive fashion. |
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I recall the way my ladder dream was "figured out" by MaMfene, the Zulu dream diviner. I was told, it will be remembered, to contribute to the chapel building fund and to call home. Had this collection of essays been in my hand at the time I would have paid much closer attention to the initial discussion of the dream diviner of the ladder image, the steel window, the brilliant white chapel walls. I was, as I say, too focused on the practical instructions that were subsequently "figured out" from this initial "play of tropes." |
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In some respects I could have been informed, to be sure, more than a decade and a half ago. Richard Werbner (1973) alerted us to the figurative, if enigmatic and innuendo laden, richness of Kalanga domestic divination, the "superabundance of understandings" it offered through its language of metaphors about the "common occult." Indeed, as Werbner showed, the divinatory apparatus of the Kalanga, the four two-sided pieces of ivory, could be regarded as a matrix of metaphors, a comprehensive concordance of divination that conditioned the play of verbal art at seances (1419). These ivory metaphors, as cast, offer to the diviner and |
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