RT Article
T1 Fá Divination, Well-being, and Coolness in Bénin, West Africa
JF Journal of religion in Africa
VO 53
IS 2
SP 220
OP 247
A1 Landry, Timothy R.
LA English
PB Brill
YR 2023
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1846182808
AB For more than 40 years the relationships that exist between divination and knowledge have become central to anthropology’s understanding of African religious practice. This paper deemphasizes the commonly mobilized ‘divination as knowledge’ trope in favor of highlighting its role in achieving well-being. Indeed, I argue that by focusing on divination as a way of knowing ethnographers have inadvertently ignored what happens after said knowledge is acquired. It is these moments that I find to be at the heart of divination’s enduring value. Through an analysis of divination rituals, initiations, and material objects, alternative ways to examining divination in the West African rain forest are considered and explored. Looking to Fá divination, one of the major oracular systems employed by Fon speakers in the Republic of Bénin, I turn my attention to the ways in which divination helps individuals fulfill their destinies and achieve goodness in the world. In this way I argue that West African systems of divination are only secondarily about knowledge and first and foremost about achieving a sense of balance (coolness) and well-being.
K1 Ontology
K1 Divination
K1 Well-being
K1 Vodún
K1 West Africa
DO 10.1163/15700666-12340248