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'Divination and Oracles', In DIVINATION AND ORACLES Heald, Suzette. "The Absence of Anthropology: Critical The divinatory consultation or oracle works Reflections on Anthropology and AIDS Practice in toward identifying remedial or preventive measures Africa." Learning from HIV and AIDS, ed. George to be taken and thereby provides stepping stones Ellison, Melissa Parker, and Catherine Campbell. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003. for empowerment and a temporality of prospect and peace of mind. Sometimes, however, the Heywood, Mark. "Shaping, Making and Breaking the Law diviner's involvement may actually exacerbate the in the Campaign for a National HIV/AIDS Treatment Plan." In Democratizing Development: The Politics of conflict or indeterminate situation. Indeed, a Socio-Economic Rights in South Africa, ed. Peris Jones diviner's role may be that of the trickster, namely, and Kristian Stokke. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff one of ambivalent speech or apparent deception, in Publishers, 2005. order better to reveal and address the problem. Strand, Per; Khabelc Matlosa; Ann Strode; and Kondwani Public scepticism toward the diviner or power Chirambo. HIV/AIDS and Democratic Governance in struggles among elders and family factions may South Africa: Illustrating the Impact on Electoral detract from the authority or acceptability of an Processes. Cape Town: IDASA, 2005. oracle's findings. While diviners reject suggestions ALEX DE WAAL that they themselves are sorcerers*, they tend not to discourage their client's depressive belief in sor• cery. That diviners have only occasionally aspired to positions of public leadership also shows the extent to which divination remains beyond political DIVINATION AND ORACLES. There power. is practically no community in black Africa that does not know divination, an institution attuned to people's basic assumption that the fundamental KINDS OF DIVINATION AND ORACLES order of things lies in the invisible, the other• In black Africa the continuum of geomantic and worldly. Divination and its clients see the other• shamanistic divination implies cross-world commu• worldly realm as underpinning the this-worldly nication and knowledge not otherwise attainable. social-symbolic order and holding the key to the Diviners are perceived as mechanisms of spiritual individual's fate, good or bad, here and now. forces that have been selected for this role at birth Despite the availability of cosmopolitan technology or identified through name-giving, through recov• and biomedicine (which assume that reality is sheer ery from a particular illness, or by descent relations; matter, i.e., something constructed and/or inde• many are endowed with a charismatic personality. terminate) to which the well-to-do have ready Through elaborate professional training and initia• access, the historical African religions, for their tion, diviners-to-be become members of trans-local part, as well as widespread Christianity and Islam, cults, sodalities, or lodges. Divination basically underscore most African people's sense of the concerns a rather stable and culturally relevant world as fundamentally reaching out human body of expert production of etiological herme- knowledge and mastery. In the case of a lasting neutics. Divinatory perception—and here a punc• disempowerment or affliction (insoluble conflict, tual observation from a psychoanalytic perspec• disaster, exceptional loss, lack of income, chronic tive—traces a kernel of forces or fate at the heart illness, misfortune, threat of death, or difficult deci• of human experience that escapes conventional sions concerning the foundation of a house, mar• understanding and other mainstream human con• riage, or divorce or migration opportunities), peo• trol yet is perceptible through its effects. ple in uncertainty may call upon a diviner's keen Divination in Africa is always to some degree sense of offering new insights into the enmeshed mediumnic in that the oracle and the divinatory ancestral, societal, ethical determinants of their tools, if not the entranced shamanic diviner him lives, so as to stir up their existence. Recourse to or herself, establish heightened sensorial awareness divination may even be linked to critical political or of, and communication with, what is defined as an communitarian decisions, the struggle over scarce otherworldly realm of unforeseeable and invisible economic resources, warfare, and similar conflicts. forces diagnosed as being coactivated by spirits, 128 NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICA DIVINATION AND ORACLES Most widespread geomantic techniques attested unprecedented "seeing through" at the heart of in various parts of the African continent since the neighborhood relationality. sixteenth century are the cowrie-shell and dream div• Scholars have distinguished three types of sha- ination (in Islamic West Africa), the Bilumbu, Fa, manic divination depending on whether it is pro• Hakata, Hamba, Ifa, Sikidy and so many akin forms duced by possession trance, by strict-shamanic of divination (respectively along Luba, Fon, Shona, Chokwe, Yoruba, or Malagasy cultural traditions), trance, or by a trance-like or heightened state of or the sangoma tablet divination in southern Africa, consciousness. The first category is widespread and as well as the mankala board games. In cowrie-shell involves spirit appropriation of the diviner, who and tablet divination, the seemingly at random, divi• relays or even acts out the message sent by the natory-borne manipulation of divinatory tools or possessing spirit or deity. Spirit mediums may be tokens over a geometric layout of lines or holes may associated with a shrine of an interregional cult, act as an oracular grid inducing the divinatory anal• such as Ngombo (spread across the Congo-Lunda ysis. In many mankala board games, the mechan• belt in the southwest of the Democratic Republic ical, chess-like, gaming rules may do without refer• of Congo, southeast Angola, and northwest ence to otherworldly realm. Tablet divination turns Zambia) or Mwali in southeast Africa. In the second distant time and space (or the elsewhere and other• category, the shamanic diviner is believed to initiate wise) into a geometry of here and now co-occurring visionary contact with the spirit. He or she either or intersecting paths of causes or antecedents and recounts this visionary journey or transduces the effects. actions of the spirit in his or her body through a particular alteration in his or her sensor)' capacities. While the natural sciences and usual mathe• matics would conclude that the results of cowry- It could be argued that this type of divination is shell, tablet, and Mankala geomantic techniques being reappropriated in multiethnic (peri-) urban are determined by chance, local actors consider cultures throughout Africa by many of the Christian them to be activated and guided by invisible forces. healing churches and new Christian-borne move• The diviner establishes the divinatory theme ments of the Holy Spirit. While speaking in the according to information a client reveals concern• name of the Holy Spirit, Christian diviner-prophets ing his or her needs or motivation for the consul• surreptitiously coalesce this Christian entity with the tation. The diviner then decodes the position or ancestral spirits (though often overtly diabolized) movement of an array of divinatory vehicles, and summoned to participate in the healing process of further interprets the social relevance in dialogue the most afflicted church members. The shifting with the client. These divinatory vehicles are power of the Holy Spirit-Ancestor is all the more manipulated in front of the client while standar• effective by virtue of its encompassing capacity to dized verses or questions about causes, relation• animate, re-energize and recapture life forces. That ships, and events are uttered, depending on the the divining art of these prophets tends to slide into configuration of objects. The ostensibly neutral moral prophecy focussing on individual strivings quality of the divinatory vehicles permits the demonstrates the extent to which the perception diviner to deny personal involvement in the social and explanation of misfortune and divinatory practice and otherworldly forces at stake. Elsewhere, the increasingly reflect a spirit of entrepreneurship that is client may be the interpreter, as in Ifa divination spurred by the multiethnic and commoditized urban among the Yoruba of Nigeria, whereas the Sissala context. The third type of divination is distinct in that client in northern Ghana is expected to examine diviners or seers here develop heightened sensorial or personally the divinatory apparatus while being dreamlike visionary capacities. asked a series of yes/no questions. Among the Chagga-speaking people of Kilimanjaro, the perspi• There are yet other self-arbitrating forms of cacious tuning in of the divinatory objects and the guilt divination or ordeal. The ordeal extends the everyday activity of dwelling around production shamanic divination into a self-arbitrating proof of and reproduction, with the client's subjectivity guilt. One subcategory involves the diviner's coer• and affliction, both allows for and results from an cion of an invisible force to configure items in 130 NEW ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICA DIVINATION AND ORACLES tablet or basket divination or provoke friction or SOCLAL CONTEXT other movement among the divinatory apparatus A critical distinction must be made between the (rubbing horn, cowry shells, board, or stick; divin• oracle proper and the social use
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