African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing (African Systems of Thought)
Philip M. Peek
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0253206537
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Filenote: PDF retail from ebsco. Publisher/Ebsco have used the reflow common in old ebsco titles. Has pagination but most definitely not the typical beautiful PDF imprint.
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This unique collection of essays by an exceptional international group of Africanists demonstrates the central role that divination continues to play throughout Africa in maintaining cultural systems and in guiding human action. African Divination Systems offers insights for current discussions in comparative epistemology, cross-cultural psychology, cognition studies, semiotics, ethnoscience, religious studies, and anthropology.
"This volume of finely crafted case studies is also the vehicle for an important general theory of divination.... this is a book overflowing with ideas that will powerfully stimulate further research." ― Journal of Ritual Studies
"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." ― Choice
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commonly attributed. (In illustration, one Nyole diviner remarked that even Jesus died by the malicious act of Judas, another human being.) Nyole suspected personal enemies of sorcery—not people who were irredeemably and totally evil and harmful toward everyone but persons who had specific motives for striking at the victim. Here too social relationships (albeit negative ones) were the mode of interpreting misfortune.
person; he also talks with the dead. That's who he talks with, it is not to say that he talks alone [implying that a living person invokes the ancestors in a curse]. So there are many types of living people. There is . . . the father of this person, the mothers of this person—perhaps the father's sister—perhaps the grandmother—perhaps the sister of the
Page 193 African Divination Systems: NonNormal Modes of Cognition Philip M. Peek The art of divination presents us with puzzling problems which I make no pretence to solve. A certain amount of communication goes on between diviners and nonhuman powers (whether living or otherwise or both). It is difficult to know exactly what this is: it might involve the diviner's extrasensory ability, it may involve spiritual agents, it might be
of extra vision for consultants that it is actively encouraged in children who will be consultants through the use of special medicated waters for bathing and drinking. The development of this deep vision is seen to be important not only for consultants but also for family advisers, certain health care practitioners, great hunters, and extraordinary singers.
is in divination that the Yaka seek the answers to crucial existential questions. Indeed, so critical is this system that we might ask if Yaka society shorn of divination would still remain Yaka society. Notes The research for this study was conducted from 1972 to 1974 in the Taanda territory, about 450 kilometers southeast of Kinshasa, encompassing thirteen Yaka