ABSTRACT
Faced with illness, suffering, death, famine, or disaster, in most of the world through most of history, people have consulted spirit mediums, oracles, and diviners who reveal who is morally responsible and what can be done to rectify the wrong: appease the offended spirits, ancestors, or deities – and/or identify the witch. Contrary to modern Western explanations of these practices, what is revealed has nothing to do with the material ‘cause’ of the misfortune. What people seek to know, and what is revealed, is who transgressed what social relationship with whom. In these practices, the biological or physical causation is typically not at issue in any respect, and is quite often not even considered relevant to moral responsibility. A person can be found to be at fault without anyone making the attribution that they had anything at all to do with the material facts of the case, such as the disease or accident. The suffering person or community may be found to be at fault, or they may be entirely innocent victims of wrongdoing. If the sufferer(s) are at fault, they need not have intended the transgression or even been aware that they committed any transgression; their suffering or death is regarded as just, regardless. In these crucial respects and others, the explanations that people seek and find can be said to be ‘moral,’ in that they concern transgressions of social relationships. But the morality in which people find meaning does not correspond to the modern Western academic concept of morality. It is notable that finding these ‘moral’ meanings does not make people feel secure, nor does it make them feel that the world is comprehensible, far less controllable. I illustrate these points from my two years of fieldwork among the Moosé of Burkina Faso, including my own consultations with diviners, my three experiences of becoming a diviner myself, and my participation in several funerals where the dead testified who was to blame for their deaths.
