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diviner then synthesizes with secondary process knowing to determine the client's plan of action. Fernandez's personal reflection on the nature and value of divination among African peoples provides an apt conclusion to the volume. |
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Background to the Study of Divination |
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Because European and American scholarship has granted divination only marginal status in human affairs and presumed it to be magical in nature, one must glean those factors which have affected divination research from broader discussions of religion. In the later nineteenth century, several prominent themes, including evolutionism and secularism, shaped anthropology's approach to non-European belief systems; but most influential was positivism, which accepted only verifiable observations as "truths" and automatically denied any ideas of religious or esthetic causality.
2 These ideologies, coupled with the "moral crisis" of the times (Evans-Pritchard 1965:100101; Langness 1987:1112) and the urgency to be more "scientific" in all endeavors, hardly promoted the sensitive study of non-European religions. |
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In Primitive Cultures, Tylor simply enumerates myriad divinatory methods which "survive" only as games of chance (1958, vol. 1:7883, 11933). Clearly "Mr. Tylor's Science" had little tolerance for the arts of divination anywhere; he completely ignores contemporary European use of divination. Other early anthropologists, including Frazer, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown, offer nothing on divination. Although Fortune records much on Dobu divination (1963), he defines divination as "a method of arriving at a judgment of the unknown through a consideration of incomplete evidence" (1921:174). I will discuss the persistence of this attitude in England in my review of Evans-Pritchard and the British social anthropologists. |
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Outside strictly academic circles at the turn of the century, other scholars reflected ambivalence about divination. Henri Junod, a missionary whose research on the Thonga appeared in 1989, allows that "the Bantu mind" has invented an extremely comprehensive and responsive divination system: ". . . the art of bone-throwing is by no means child's play, nor mere quackery by which astute soothsayers deceive their credulous followers" (1927:568). Nevertheless, he concludes: "I am convinced that, however high the degree of astuteness engendered by the divinatory bones may be, they have been extremely detrimental to the intellectual and moral welfare of the Natives" (572). A fellow missionary in southern Africa, Henry Callaway, while agreeing about divination's effectiveness, did not accept Junod's final evaluation (see section I). |
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The status of divination study in France was not as dire as in England, but one might have expected more attention to be paid to the topic.3 The philosopher Lévy-Bruhl concluded that divination works for its practitioners but on the basis of a type of logic different from that of educated Europeans (1966); he thereby erroneously excluded "the mystical in our own culture as rigorously as he excluded the empirical in savage cultures," according to Evans-Pritchard (1965:91). Durk- |
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