Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the Eastern Cape, the paper explores the interconnections between dreams (amathongo, amaphupha) and medicines (amayeza, imithi, amachiza) as aspects of the Xhosa diviner’s culture, knowledge and experience. Background information is provided in the introduction, inter alia, on the Xhosa patrilineal clan (isiduko), divination (imvumisa, evumiso) and religious and cultural change. The ability to dream, inter alia of the ancestors and medicines, is central to the diviner’s intuition and professional stock-in-trade, which are part and parcel (...) of a religious healing tradition. Examples of dreams involving the ancestors (iminyanya), diviners, clients and medicinal plants are presented and analysed in relation to relevant case material. The ritual significance of dreams is explored in some detail. The distinctions between diviner (igqirha lokuvumisa) and herbalist (ixhwele), and between medicines and charms (amakhubalo), receive attention in the section on medicines. The underlying purpose of traditional Xhosa religious ideology is discussed in the conclusion. (shrink)

This article utilizes Derrida's explorations of the archive in Archive Fever to debate the status of Greek myth as archive. It begins with out lining a conservative notion of the archive, particularly as it has been conceived by those whose object of study is myth. It ends with an interpretation of the myth of Cassandra that seeks to augment the archive, the archive that is now refigured in terms of metaphors of time and space. An archive has traditionally been considered (...) to be something to do with the past. In the case of myth, the archive is understood as the stories told by the ancient Greeks, which are separate from the cat egorization of those stories and explicit theories or ideas about them. This separation locates myth as something prior and organic, as the archive constituted as the object of study, and the interpretation as something secondary and derivative, a commentary on the archive, which is the thing that scholars do. But at what point does the past begin to be the past? Is Ovid's Metamorphoses part of the archive of Greek myth or a commentary upon it? What of Servius? Or Frazer? Or Freud? Or Bernal? Derrida's suggestion that the archive resides in the future perfect tense leads to a reformulation of the relationship between myth and interpretation, which relies what might be described as a typological model of knowledge. His question 'Where does the outside commence?' forces an examination of who has the right of appropria tion, an issue pertinent to the study of the history of the interpretation of myth. (shrink)