René Devisch

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

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 peoples 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 clients 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 cultures genius – the perspectivist stance and matrixial model.