Of divinatory connaissance in South-Saharan Africa: the bodiliness of perception, inter-subjectivity and inter-world resonance

Abstract

Branching out from recent perspectives on divination in Africa, this study explores a fresh approach that engages in a constructive dialogue between local knowledge practices and Western-derived human sciences. A first section positions this essay within an emerging debate over the perspectival ontological turn in anthropology – in line with Viveiros de Castro (2004) – which holds that people's culture-specific ontology – such as, envisaging some propensity in the fabric between the human, things, fauna, flora and inter-worldly force-fields – is most explicitly voiced in the divinatory oracle and expressed in the ensuing healing and societal redress. The study then outlines the post-Lacanian matrixial model, defined by Ettinger (2006), that re-examines the originary processes unlocking, and inter-connecting in, the matrixial borderzone between body and psyche of mother and foetus or infans. A second section then focuses on the oracular scrutiny typically employed by the mediumistic Yaka diviner in southwestern DR Congo. Such practice, it is contended, induces the diviner to sense out in the consulting kin group the bewitching force-effects and the unspeakable in the inter-generational realm. The oracle unconceals some unguessed fate in the client's inter-generational line, in particular the inter-corporeal embeddedness of latent memory traces and forces of ill-bearing. Third, the study will conclude by evaluating – along the terms of the local culture's genius – the perspectivist stance and matrixial model.

Keywords:

• divination
• local knowledge practices
• perspectivist approach
• matrixial model
• South-Saharan Africa
• the Yaka

Acknowledgements

The research was financially supported by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, the Research Fund – Flanders and the European Commission Directorate-General XII. The author has followed the ethical guidelines for ethnography of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Peter Crossman provided invaluable editorial assistance.

Conflict of interest: none.

The paper was presented at the conference ‘Medical Anthropology in Europe’ funded by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Anthropological Institute.

Notes

1. The Kwaango region's rural-based society numbers some 350,000 speakers of yiYaka in the vast expanse of the southern savannah on the Angolan border. The domestic and public day-to-day life-scene of great scarcity is one of hunter-gathering and small-scale subsistence farming. It is a society historically devoid of any autochthonous statist edifice, monotheist religion or overall master discourse. The Yaka are widely reputed for their divinatory art and healing cults. They combine a social identity derived from patrilineal descent with the notion of uterine filiation of the ‘innate nature’ originating with the very source of physical life, traced back to the maternal great-grandmother. While over the last decades half of the Yaka population have taken advantage of elementary school education, we should acknowledge that, in DR Congo, rural areas are increasingly bereft of good educational opportunities which only a few privileged city schools offer. It is reasonably likely that an equal number of people today define themselves as Christian, having been baptised at the school-going age or having at a later age joined a neo-pentecostal church. The state logic from the administrative centres creeps in very slowly in the Kwaango region, mainly through the educational and religious persuasions, the back and forth movements of persons, and the mercantile rationale and influx of basic consumer goods.

2. Ngombu initiation, for example, effects a transworld passage, evoking the behaviour of the otter-shrew which goes underground before re-emerging, thereby evoking rebirth in the manner of brooding (see Devisch, 2012, 89–95). The otter-shrew is an amphibious animal that is a notorious chicken-killer; and a chicken may eventually function as a sacrificial equivalent to the human being. The diviner's initiation thus produces an ontological change in both the diviner-novice and her slit-gong, which is her very double.