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helps us to see this structurally creative, "synthesizing" role of divination, the way it first shakes up a society, as the divinatory apparatus is shaken up in the diviner's basket, then recreates and reorders that society. Peek speaks, summarizing some of the material in this collection, of the diviner as translator between modes of thought and as mediator between worlds, for example, between left hemisphere and right hemisphere of the brain, between deep structure and surface structure, between inspiration and wisdom, between the supernatural and the natural. |
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This argument in favor of the "cryptic synthesizing power" of the diviner is all to the good. But since the editor has given me the last word here, let me suggest simply that the best diviners are ones who are exceptionally well tuned in to the primary processes where so many of our problems lie. They are exceptionally attuned to those primary ways of knowing in which the tropes have their primacy in our understanding. But at the same time diviners must also bring this way of knowing revealingly to bear upon troubled social situations. They must provide, in the usual cases, understandable counsel to their clients. They must, thus, synthesize primary process knowing with secondary process knowing, that knowing where the logics of category, concept formation, and cognition hold sway. They must cognize the world as well as perform and express it. |
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In short, diviners, in my view, are ones who exceptionally sensitively mediate between these two essential ways of human knowing: primary process and secondary process. I personally would not wish to overemphasize the mysterious elements in the "cryptic potency" of diviners. They simply give more credence to primary process thinking than is normal in our world, where secondary process thinking holds sway for a variety of good and bad reasons. Butto be cryptic myself in conclusionwho is to say that we Westerners have not overdone secondary process thinking in human affairs in a non-normal way, if we are allowed to measure normality from the perspective of anthropological knowledge of the human spectrum. To rephrase Marcel Mauss (1967), are the social reciprocities of the modern world what a sensitive and sensible diviner would have them be? As both my Zulu diviners told me after, to be sure, some very recondite discourse: "Spend some money on your fellowman and don't forget to call home." |
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Abimbola, 'Wande. 1976. Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus. Ibadan: Oxford University Press. |
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Fernandez, J. W. 1966. "Revitalized Words from 'The Parrot's Egg' and 'The Bull Who Crashes in the Kraal': African Cult Sermons." In Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. J. Helm, 53-64. Proceedings of the 1966 Meeting of the American Ethnological Society. |
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Fernandez, J. W. 1967. "Divinations, Confessons, TestimoniesConfrontations with the Social Superstructure among Durban Africans." Occasional Papers of the Institute for Social Research, University of Natal, Winter-Spring. |
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