Losing Deixis: Referentialist Cosmologies in Postcolonial East-Africa and Beyond

The advantage of comparing ng’hambo and nyato in terms of their deictic versus referential discourse is methodological. To substantiate our hypothesis, we examine respective instances of oracular discourse (applying among others Silverstein’s semiotic approach). The language can moreover be analyzed grammatically, among others for its distal versus proximal and medial pro-forms. But more broadly, on a level eluding discursive analysis and which this paper will exploit fully, the totality of fieldwork experiences may help to contrast the purpose of the two practices. One purpose of divination, described since Victor Turner and later René Devisch, is world-making/ordering or the cosmo-nomic (cosmos, world; nomos, order) which includes the invisible world of spirits and unknown forces. Yet, paradoxically, another purpose equally well described (cf Zeitlyn, Abbink) is its contraction, a version of the cosmo-nomic that is reduced to the visible world only, the economic (oikos, house; nomos, order), with its easily sustained illusion of measurable debt and credit, and market efficiency (although less easily sustained since the 2008 bank crisis). Unlike ng’hambo, nyato can deny the part of the invisible world that must be reached through placation, hope, trial and subjunctivity, in one word sacrifice. Nyato’s world is one of efficiency and accountability, better: one where investment (for example, of magic) will yield return, in brief: gift without sacrifice – a type of divination perfectly adapted to economic activity, namely the sort of preoccupation with ‘the household’ that does not concern itself with impact on the larger world, social or natural. While ng’hambo - ‘cosmonomic’ divination par excellence - works by managing the states of the world, always seeking to ground itself in the cosmology and thus affecting the participants’ various modes and codes of the senses, nyato can be understood as ‘economic’ divination: diviners have freed themselves from the shackles of community and cosmology, and are willing to lose deixis to make more clients and develop a referentialist discourse that is nationally and globally accessible. That is why until today nyato survives together with ng’hambo