Abstract

Divination as Hermeneutic Encounter: Understanding, Dialogue and the Intersubjective Constitution of Knowledge in Senegambian Divinatory Praxis

Knut Graw
(Africa Research Centre, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

In Senegal and Gambia diviners apply a wide range of different divinatory techniques. While the diviner draws and calculates geomantic patterns, studies the positions of cowrie shells or contemplates upon the meaning of cast roots, the client waits for and listens to the diviner’s findings. As the diviner succeeds in gradually addressing the issues and questions most significant for his client, different paths of thought and reflection appear and start to shape and renew the subject’s understanding of his or her own personal situation. In this regard, from the start of the first divinatory pronouncements and through the gradual unfolding of the divinatory inquiry, the divinatory encounter acquires an increasingly hermeneutic quality. Drawing on a detailed description of several cases of cowrie divination, it will be demonstrated how divinatory enunciations regularly evolve not in a strictly monologic way but in a relatively open, dialogic fashion. It will be argued that the meaning of dialogue in the divinatory encounter is not only practical and heuristic but relates to the significance of divination as a consultational encounter. Furthermore, it will be asked how exactly the hermeneutic and dialogic dimensions of the divinatory encounter relate to each other and why this relation should be considered crucial for the understanding of the significance of divination as a hermeneutic cultural space of recognition and trust and, perhaps, for the understanding of the possibility and growth of existential insight and knowledge in general. Highlighting the dialogic and intersubjective dimensions of divinatory knowledge praxis, the paper locates the meaningfulness of ritual and religious knowledge practices in the lived reality of the social encounter and resists the reification of knowledge practices and networks in terms of functionality, tradition or content.