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Based on fieldwork in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, undertaken in 1997 and 2009, as well as residence in the country in periods that spanned two decades, this study of contemporary urban divination in West Africa shows that it thrives even in the ethnically heterogeneous and religiously plural city. In stark contrast to the stereotypical view that African traditions are unable to offer a viable challenge to the influx of 'world' religions and their attendant values of modernity, divination demonstrates their vitality. The practices of divination rest on basic premises so widely shared as to constitute an overarching epistemology, at once trans-ethnic and authentically West African. By recasting contemporary problems into the familiar idioms of the 'traditional' worldview, divination enables practitioners to gain leverage over real and pressing concerns, affirming personal agency. It underscores a communal identity, not dependent on territorial or ethnic affiliation or precarious and contested definitions of citizenship.

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Ivoirian women vehemently protest the violence and calamity of civil war by deploying an embodied rhetoric of ritual, appealing to the traditional religious concept of "Female Genital Power." I propose that their imagistic resistance to the postcolonial state represents a catachresis, with a few interesting twists. Most salient is that what women reinscribe onto the political scene is not as a feature of the imperial culture but the concept-metaphors of indigenous religion, and especially the image of Woman as the source of moral and spiritual power from which proceeds all political, religious, and juridical authority. Whereas the logocentrism of the academy, and postcolonial theory in particular, leads to aporia, ritual remands scholars into the situation of the actual world, where women are actively engaged in self-representation that both defies projected depictions of them and rejects their absence from state conceptions of power.