The role of the Ifá in the construction of the person in relation to death: Psychology’s interface with ideas from the Adjatado of Dogbo, in Benin

Abstract

According to the Adjatado systems of knowledge, the Ifá is a mediator between the world of the living and of the dead and this mediation depends on the funerary rites. Ifá is a word used to refer to the science of divination, the son of God, among other names. It is present from a person’s birth to death. The paper discusses the Ifá’s relation with the cultural processes of the construction of the Adjatado person, assuming its significant role in the lives of the Adjatado people in sustaining personal experience. After discussing selected cultural perspectives, about the meaning of Ifá for the Adjatado people, we propose a dialogue on the construction of the person in relation to death in the framework of Semiotic-Cultural Constructivism in psychology, in which death can be discussed from a philosophical perspective, articulated to the phenomenology of temporality, tradition, and alterity (cf. Simão, 2005; 2010; Simão, Guimarães & Valsiner, 2015), nevertheless, the subject of death has not yet been much explored. We argue that the dialogue here proposed enables an understanding of how the meanings that the Adjatado confer to the experience of death is related to processes that involve the cultivation of the person in the culture, addressing further developments concerning dialogues between diverse cultural understandings on psychological processes.