Verità oltre il dubbio. Gli oracoli di Ifá all’Avana.

The article analyzes the concept of truth on which the practice of Ifá divination in Cuba turns. Motivated ethnographically by Ifá practitioners' claims that the truths their oracles issue are indubitable, the author argues that from the viewpoint of commonplace conceptions of truth such an assumption can only be interpreted as absurd. To avoid such an imputation, the article is devoted to reconceptualizing what might count as truth in such an ethnographic instance. In particular, it is argued that in order to credit the assumption of divinatory indubitability, representational notions of truth must be discarded in favor of what the author calls a "motile" conceptualization, which posits truth as an event in which trajectories of divinatory meanings (called "paths" by diviners) collide. In advancing such an analysis, the article exemplifies what the author call an "ontographic" approach, dedicated to mapping the ontological premises of native discourse through the production of concepts which, while not the native concepts themselves, comprise their close equivalents.