ABSTRACT
It was about one o'clock in the morning and Mseka had unexpectedly become possessed by nkharamu, the lion. Usually, when the lion comes, Mseka divines the cause of illness and misfortune in those who seek his help. But what had started as a divination session--why the mothers were there in the first place--quickly turned into the possibility of a situation spinning out of control. Trance-dancing is not something at hand, present to an observing subject. Rather, dancing a disease is a way of being-in-the-world, and ways of being can never be reduced to things embedded in chains of causality. What is needed is an approach that does not seek to overcome ambiguity, but rather embraces it. This chapter brings out this ambiguity in all its specificity, not to reduce it to a semblance of itself, a synthetic analysis of presence. The dancing prophets are the diagnosticians nonpareil in Tumbuka healing.
