Paper short abstract:

This paper brings an ethnographic analysis of how Kasena migrants of Northern Ghana use the divinatory oracle to understand and cope with the new challenges of daily and family life in a migration situation.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I examine how Kasena migrants of Northern Ghana use the divinatory oracle to understand and cope with the new challenges of daily and family life in a migration situation. Men and women of all ages return to the rural home areas to consult diviners and flesh out intergenerational issues and tensions hoping to realize aspirations and to settle disruptions often caused by migration.

A diviner is able to see into other realms, he can reveal the world order to those who consult him. Through the divinatory oracle, the 'blind' client is made to see again. Usually the diviner's capacity to 'see' is situated in the divination bag: it is the diviner's bag that sees and shows the order of things during a divinatory session. The order of things is revealed through the articles that the bag contains and the configurations within which they are drawn. These are read and written by the diviner.

In this paper various ethnographic accounts of consultations, but more importantly of the contents of the bag, are discussed. The transformations in the world order, and the opening up of (migrating) clients to different worlds are reflected by the inclusion of new articles in the diviner's bag such as pieces of mobile phones, car parts or transport icons referring to (possible future) journeys and mobility. Other items evoke new social orders, including the various layers of newly constituted kin-groups and the transformed inter-generational and gender relations, and the redefined contacts with the ancestral world.