|
|
|
|
|
|
|
congregation a "superabundance" of possibilities of interpretation as they reason together about the plausible patterns of meaning before them. This metaphoric matrix enables the diviner to avoid falling into too easy error. It enables himfrees him upto fit his pattern discovery subtly but suitably into the social and personal intricacies of the case at hand. Werbner's insights were also present in Evans-Pritchard's Azande work, as Werbner made clear. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Several papers in this collection expand on these insights, showing us how divination is, in essence, a "figuring out" of the "figurative," a "play of tropes," really (Fernandez 1986). Jackson (1978), in his discussion of Kuranko divination, also wanted us to understand the playfulness of it, the way it creatively manipulates the client's beliefs for pragmatic purposes, that is, for purposes of social order. In this volume, Parkin gives us a careful, text-anchored account of the ''metaphors of change" employed in Giriama and Swahili divination and the way these metaphors are simultaneously manipulatedlinkedso as to eventually lead to the instructive and admonitory propositions that can be sequentially applied to resolve troubled behaviors. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Synthesizing Worlds in Which to Live |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reading through this collection and thinking back on my own experience with divination, what I feel it teaches, then, is the "constitutive nature" of the diviner's art. It teaches us the way the diviner offers a more acceptable world for his client to live in, more acceptable than the troubled social world that brought the diviner and the client together in the first place. At the heart of this world creation, this therapeutic cosmogony, is, as many of these essays demonstrate, the play of metaphor. Though the reader may already have divined that I, with my long-term interest in the tropes, would have come to metaphor as the final word in my afterword, I simply reiterate Levin's argument (1977) that the putting forth of a metaphor is always the imaginative assertion of a different possible world than the one in which we literally live. There is surely that imaginative assertiveness in much divination. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In response to and as a full step beyond the outmoded debate about primitive mentality and the logic of primitive man, these papers, as the subtitle of this volume so well captures, seek to approach the various forms of divination not invidiously but openly as different "ways of knowing." As Devisch puts it, in divination the diviner's art suggests a structural causality rather than a linear one. The Yaka oracle is performative, and what that performance creates"reveals," in Devisch's preferred termis not adequately to be grasped by conventional categorical thought, so often the touchstone in the debate over primitive mentality and primitive logic. For diviners at their best structure a complex world of knowing whose veracity, as Devisch argues, should be judged in its capacity to restructure and restore a world of social reciprocity. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our master of ceremonies in this volume, Philip Peek, in his valuable essay |
|
|
|
|
|