African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing

Front Cover
Philip M. Peek
Georgetown University Press, 1991 - 230 pages
The essays in this collection provide a very useful overview of both the diversity of African divination systems and of recent approaches to their study. The introduction critically reviews the preoccupations of earlier students of African divination. The essays that follow are divided into five sections that explore, in turn, the identity of the diviner; comparative and historical issues; the central role of divination in the articulation of cultural ideas, norms, and values within society; the making of knowledge through the divinatory process; and the integration of normal and nonnormal ways of knowing within the divination process. Although all of the essays provide rich ethnographic data, the essays in the fourth and fifth section are the most interesting from a theoretical perspective. They provide the clearest critique of previous positivist approaches to divination, which focus on the outcomes of the divinatory process while failing to appreciate the meanings and truths that inhere to, and are articulated by, the process itself. Of particular interest are the facinating articles by Rosalind Shaw and Philip Peek. Highly recommended for advanced undergraduates.
 

Contents

The Study of Divination Present and Past
1
Becoming a Diviner
23
The Initiation of a Zulu Diviner
27
The Search for Knowledge
37
Nilotic Cosmology and the Divination of Atuot Philosophy
41
The Antemoro Case and the Diffusion of Divination
53
Cultural Systems within Divination Systems
69
Diviners as Alienists and Annunciators among the Batammaliba of Togo
73
Divination Epistemology and Truth
133
Epistemological Aspects of Temne Divination
137
Knowledge and Power in Nyole Divination
153
Simultaneity and Sequencing in the Oracular Speech of Kenyan Diviners
173
Toward a New Approach to Divination
191
NonNormal Modes of Cognition
193
Afterword
213
Contributors
223

Divination among the Lobi of Burkina Faso
91
Divination and the Hunt in Pagibeti Ideology
101
Mediumistic Divination among the Northern Yaka of Zaire
112

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