Chapter Seven: The Oracle and the Real

This chapter synthesizes the author’s ethnographic work on healing systems in Africa. Divination has political relevance because is the art of shifting frames. The shift occurs by letting in ‘the real’, a moment neither imaginary nor symbolical. Why should oracles need mediumship or the geomantic throw? Ethnography in eastern and central Africa indicates that an oracle’s purpose is to defuse the simplex preoccupying the consulters. The reader learns about the organs that matter in haruspication. The five chapters of the first part diagnosed society as in a state of entropy and dehumanizing. Sukuma diviners in Tanzania have the tools for such diagnosis but viscerally enact them, which our analysis is in dire need of. To dehumanize is to imagine humans that can lay a claim on you. Bewitchment is the universal experience of someone embodying the Law and living inside you, impinging on your freedom, while you mistakenly situate the help offered by people and so-called ancestral energies ‘outside’ yourself. To live together with one’s witch, an inversion is called for, whereby you accept all those energies of ‘the real’ as part of yourself and locate the Law of the witch where it belongs, quite simply outside of your self. This act is not just a micro-story. Such frameshifts, anthropologists have shown, have built and regenerated society anywhere on this planet. Not surprisingly then, it is here that we discover the tensor of collective reason.