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which validate and channel them. Further data on the selection and training of African diviners are found throughout the volume. |
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The two essays constituting the second section provide comparative regional studies of divination as a search for knowledge. First is John W. Burton's analysis of divination among the Nilotic peoples of the Sudan, especially the Atuot, for whom divination provides the primary interpretation of their experience and the source of their philosophy. Pierre Vérin and Narivelo Rajaonarimanana, using archival and field material, then discuss the development and diffusion of the Antemoro divination system in Madagascar and the influence of Arabic divination on African systems. |
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The third section focuses on divination as the majoroften the soleexpression of a social system and the means of maintaining its governing norms; in other words, the social system exists through divination. Rudolph Blier describes the central role of the diviner-consultant in the health care system of the Batammaliba of northern Togo, from selection and training to diagnostic practice. Piet Meyer presents the divination system of the Lobi from Burkina Faso, who are totally dependent on the suprahuman powers revealed only through divination. The next two essays, although both deal with Zairean peoples, reveal very different divination systems. Alden Almquist, in the context of the Pagibeti culture and hunting ethos, analyzes the criteria employed to choose among divinatory mechanisms. René Devisch demonstrates how the divination system of the Yaka, while determining the causes of their misfortunes, also maintains their social structure, especially aspects of matrilineal inheritance and ascent. |
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The fourth group of essays is primarily concerned with how knowledge and truth are generated by the special sensibilities of divination and then subjected to the cooperative, transformational interaction of diviner and client(s) through the full divinatory process. Rosalind Shaw critiques the imposition of European rationality on other cultures' systems of knowledge and analyzes the construction of truth through the "authorizing process" of divination among the Temne of Sierra Leone. Susan Reynolds Whyte discusses the ways in which divination, through control of oracular knowledge by the consulter/adviser, defines social relationships between Nyole men and women of Uganda. David Parkin's study of the oracular speech of the Giriama and Swahili diviners of Kenya demonstrates how these bricoleurs transform the confusion of simultaneous events into a comprehensible sequencing of significant factors. |
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My own contribution in the fifth section proposes a way to understand the diverse symbolic elements and the unique cognitive process of these systems of knowledge. This analysis suggests that the divinatory enterprise establishes a non-normal mode of cognition through the manipulation of cultural symbols of anomalousness, liminality, and inversion in order to receive non-normal communication, which is then mediated by diviner and client(s) to permit effective practical response. |
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James W. Fernandez provides a final overview in which he analyzes the evocative and efficacious ways in which "figuring out" takes place in divination through the critical roles of metaphoric speech and primary process knowing, which the |
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