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Buxton's comments highlight two important facts about possession and divination in the Nilotic Sudan. First, death and the experience of dying are associated with the destruction or collapse of a moral community. In other words, possession threatens both the individual and the larger group. Throughout the region jao are associated with immoral and amoral phenomena which affront community standards. Second, the recurrent notion that one or another jok originates from beyond the boundary of a specific linguistic community underscores the vital significance of the concept of community in the definition of local social experience. At a further remove, possession and its associated interpretations may be cited as one factor in local perceptions of ethnic difference. |
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Unfortunately, Evans-Pritchard, writing on the Nuer, had relatively little to say in this regard. Lienhardt and Deng, on the other hand, observed and recognized the central role that possession and divination assume in the Dinka's definition of social and individual experience, so that rather than being epiphenomena of spiritual existence, possession and divination were seen as central to an understanding of Nilotic religions in general. In Lienhardt's words, |
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When faced with the failure of sacrifice to produce the required result which is the proximate occasion of sacrifice, [Dinka suggest] that "Divinity has refused" or, more likely, that the power which was really the grounds of the man's sickness was not correctly identified. So, what is required is another sacrifice, and not alternative action. (1961:291) |
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And when experience contradicts expectation, the limits of human agency are explicitly recognized. As Deng writes: |
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Diseases or other evils are not always corrected successfully. In each case, the Dinka find an easy answer in the refusal of divinities to be appeased, or perhaps in the failure of the diviner to have discovered the cause. It would seem that where the organic disease is one that psychological cure cannot effect, or where the patient's condition is too serious, the diviner's psychological cure is likely to be ineffective. In these cases, some diviners are honest enough to tell the relatives that they can do nothingand that the man must die. (1971:131) |
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From a different perspective one can argue that the divination experience is ultimately a dialectic between an individual's sense of identity and a social definition of experience, dividing the social personality and in consequence redefining the moral community. Both socially and individually, Nilotic divination draws attention to change and adaptation in social relationships. It does not recreate a community but rather redefines the context of social life. |
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To the individual who becomes the focus of this attention the diviner is a medium through which a process of psychological projection is made public. Among the Atuot, as among the Nuer, Dinka, Shilluk, and Anuak, the diviner is an individual within whom a power or a number of powers is always latent. The diviner has the ability to dissociate this power at will, thus inviting other powers to possess |
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