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

Adjatado views on the IFÁ

Iroko (2000) and Kossi (1993) claim that the Adja are the original people of Tado, a village on the border between Benin (formerly Dahomey) and Togo. The Adja people gave birth to many ethnic groups, among which, Fon, Ewé, Xla, Ayizo, Saxwé and Gun people etc. These peoples are spread out between Benin, Togo and Ghana and their main activities are agriculture, trade, fishing and the sea salt factory.

To illustrate the Adjatado views on the Ifá, we present two types of funerary rites that require a consultation to the Ifá. The first is when an Adja dies in an accident or fire and the second is when the person suffered from severe mental disorder (which the Adja see as madness) or epilepsy. The choice of these types of rites is because their conduction depends on a considerable use of the Ifá. The funerary rites start from the moment of the death of the Agbetor. In the burial stage, there are specific choices of rites according to the type of death.

Funerary rites of an Adja who dies in an accident or fire:

In the Adja view, accidents and fires are the works of the ‘égou’, the God of iron and war. When someone dies in these situations, the body is immediately buried, but the ceremonies only happen after the place where the accident or fire happened is purified. The funerary rites themselves require a previous consultation to the Ifá. The initial purification ceremony is conducted by a Vodun master who has to be Dogbo-Ahomè, which is the region where the Adja of Dogbo settled after having left Tado. The bereaved contact this master, taking with them a liter of alcoholic beverage traditionally known as sodabi. The Vodun master then tells them the necessary items for the ceremony: palm tree branches, 20 L of palm oil (dendê), 10 L of sodabi, 4 m of white cloth, a bottle of gin, two bottles of beer, two bottles of soda, a male or female goat, a chick, and 12000 CFA francs. In the beginning of the process, the devotees of the divinity who will perform the cleansing eat and drink. Then, they go to the place of the occurrence. As they chant the songs of the divinity, they clean the floor with a branch of palm tree, on which the chick tied. The same is done in the burial place. Once the cleansing is over, they place the items used in the divinity’s house, which is called ‘Tolégba’ (To – community; Légba – Vodun). The divinity’s sculpture and offerings house is usually at the center of the community. After this ceremony, the date of the following funerary rites is determined by the deceased through a consultation to the Ifá. They are usually carried out three, six or nine months after the person’s death (Séminaire Exposé académique, 2015).

Funerary rites of an Adja who suffered from severe mental disorder (‘madness’) or epilepsy:

Formerly, when a mad person or epileptic died, he or she would be immediately buried in the woods. To carry out the funerary rites, the soul had to be brought back home, since it was wondering in the woods. These funerary rites allow the deceased to enter then clan of the ancestors. Today, however, the bodies are no longer buried in the woods, but behind the family’s housings. The Ifá is consulted to establish the place where the soul of the deceased is to be found. This place is usually a crossroads not far from the woods or in the middle of the woods. The bereaved go to the indicated spot with a large piece of wood called ‘Kpatchiadéhoui’ in Adja, intended for capturing the wandering soul. Once there, three people who were dear to the deceased must each cry out this person’s name three times. After the first one has done this, if the soul does not answer, it is the second one’s turn. They will do this until they hear an answer. After they hear a voice, a strong wind starts. Then, they will start chanting and make their way back home, because the soul has already been captured by the piece of wood. Once in the house, the piece of wood will be wrapped in cloth and later go through all the normal funerary rites (Exposé académique, 2015).

The two types of rites described show the Ifá as a tool that people recur to in important moments, such as a relative’s burial. This tool is heterogeneous. It is the culture’s science of divination and the means for consulting the deceased, mediating the communication between the living and the dead. Through this process, the necessary ceremonies before, during and after the burial are established, according to the type of death.

Meanings and origins of the IFÁ

The Ifá has a central role in sustaining cultural life, especially in events such as births, baptisms, marriages and death, all highly meaningful in the Adjatado culture. It is relevant to understand how it entered the community’s life and came to occupy such an important position.

During an administrative trip to Benin between January 1934 and January 1936, Maupoil (1981) conducted a field research in which he talked to different people about the Ifá. The results were published in the book ‘La Géomancie à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves’, which introduced in the scientific field questions related to the Beninese views on the Ifá. Maupoil (1981) shows that, in his informants’ views, the Ifá is not originally from the Dahomey (current Benin), but from the Yoruba city of Ifé, in Nigeria. The word Ifá is employed by the Yoruba from Ifé. The Fom and Adja (Benin) word is Fã.

According to the Ifá masters Maupoil (1981) spoke to – who are called Bokonon in Fom and Babalaô in Yoruba, the later meaning ‘fathers of the secret’ – the first Babalaô to consult the Ifá in Ifé was known as Alaba or Araba. He received the knowledge of the Ifá from Mawu (God). Mawu placed him in Ifé, as the first inhabitant. In the fertile lands of the region, he grew an oil palm with 16 branches. Surrounding the trunk were 16 holes, where the palm nuts fell, 16 per hole. In this way, the nuts amounted to two hundred and fifty six (16 squared), corresponding to the signs of the Ifá: each of its 16 signs generates 15 secondary ones. Mawu taught the Alaba how to manipulate the signs and Alaba passed this knowledge on to the entire world. Maupoil (1981) situates the entry of the Ifá in Ifé around the 17^th century.

Maupoil (1981) mentions other narratives as well, in which the Ifá was sent to Earth by Mawu, who placed signs on a stone or over stones in Ifé and disappeared. The stones remained under Alaba’s protection and are said to still exist. With time, Alaba became the name of the best Bokonon in Dahomey, Togo and Nigeria. In another version, found in Abomey (a city in Benin), from the coastal Gunu, Dahomey hunters encountered fantastic animals that taught them things about the Ifá known nowhere else. The source of the Ifá’s influence is the special palm nut it uses. The multiple stories of the origin of the Ifá show the heterogeneity of this tool. Its nature is also heterogeneous.

There are many understandings among the cultures of Dahomey and Nigeria about the nature of the Ifá. Generally, people see the Ifá as Mawu, the god of divination, the intermediary between N’sou, Nhonu and the gods. The Ifá is the personal Vodun each person carries since birth, and which disappears with them (Maupoil, 1981). To Farrow (1926), the Ifá is the supreme divinity of the Yoruba country, and its oracle the most important one. It is an oracle, the messenger of the gods, and protector of individuals.

The majority of Bokonon from Dahomey consider the Ifá as Vodun. However, this is not a consensus. According to the Bokonon that Maupoil (1981) spoke to, the Ifá is Vodun to the extent that it cannot be known, but it lacks some properties of Vodun, such as leading devotees into a trance or having a house of worship of its own. The Vodun is both a divinity with devotees and something mysterious that cannot be fully known. Since it does not fully fit the Vodun category, the Ifá is also placed among the organizers of the world, the messenger of Mawu, the chief of all Vodun, that which utters all secrets, explains everything and reveals everything. Regarding these views, Maupoil (1981) reports a speech from the retired interpreter Léandre Martin de Savalou:

The Ifá is not Vodun, but a natural science that allows seeing into the future, which men included in their cults. With Vodun, you can harm people. With the Ifá, it is not like that. It does not take sides, it is impartial. (Maupoil, 1981, p. 13)

To Babalaô Zumô (Maupoil, 1981), the Vodun is an object of public worship, while the Ifá is individualized. To Zumô, the Ifá does not belong to the Vodun category. Every hardship is diminished when it comes in contact with the Ifá. The Ifá’s scrutiny is unlimited; it is the revealer of hidden things. To Bokonon Gèdègbé ¹ of Abomey:

All Bokonon make efforts to define the Ifá. Each one searches for an interesting, intriguing definition. But I, though I am a Bokonon, do not risk a definition. Only the miraculous nature that created the Ifá could in fact say what it is. (Maupoil, 1981, p.13)

These speeches show that sometimes people and especially priests are worried about defining the Ifá based on understandings that do not always correspond to its mysterious nature. To the Bokonon, the Ifá is not an offensive magic weapon; it is impartial. The impartiality we point to concerns the fact that Ifá is an entity available for consultation by anyone, it enters the consultation process more than the achievement of personal goals. When a master consults the Ifá, he manipulates divining objects: the palm nuts or cowry shells. But these objects are not the Ifá; it speaks through them. It is not the messenger of any Vodun. It transmits the messages of Mawu (Maupoil, 1981).

In the Bokonon’s speeches about the Ifá’s progenitors, we observe other contradictions. The Ifá is seen as the son of Mawu, the son of two women or even as Mawu himself.

The Ifá’s honorific titles demonstrate the extent to which it is respected and honoured. According to Bokonon Gèdègbé of Abomey, the names Orunmila ² and Oromila mean, in Yoruba, ‘Mawu will save us’ and ‘only Mawu knows our future’, respectively (Maupoil, 1981). The Yoruba name Akonilogbõ − ‘you gave us knowledge’ is also frequently used by the Fom and the Yoruba.

Martins (2012) describes three divination methods. The first is the ikins (palm nut) divination or grand divination, which represents the Orunmila itself. The ikins are extracted from a specific type of oil palm that produces nuts with three or more indentations, or eyes, different from the most common type, which has two eyes. Only the nuts with three or more eyes can be used for consultations, and the extraction process requires a specific rite (Martin, 2012). The second method is the divining chain or rosary, called opelé. Through it, the Ifá can say more than through the ikins (Martins, 2012). The third method, the simplest and most popular of all, is using cowry shells. To Martins (2012), the ikins system is superior to the others. Regardless of the method, divination is performed exclusively by the Bokonon and Babalaô, who are initiated into the Ifá.

Lacking a fixed and definable nature, the Ifá presents once more its heterogeneity. It relates to something that is not fully definable or understandable. The Agbetor keeps something that will always escape his or her understanding. The Agbetor person is thus constructed in the relation with the indefinable, present in the Ifá’s characteristics and attributions.

The IFÁ and death

In the Adjatado culture, consulting the Ifá is the first action when someone dies. To Bokonon Sehounou Bienvenu, ³ who we talked to by telephone (January, 2018), the Ifá represents the path of happiness to the Adja. This is why it sees the arrival of death because death is understood as the return to where we came from. To this Bokonon, the Ifá knows death and its ways. To Adja Bokonon Degbé Bruno, ⁴ who we also talked to by telephone in January 2018, the Ifá can travel between the worlds of the living and of the dead and it carries messages in both directions. It is omnipotent and omniscient.

The Ifá’s relation to death brings us to three different topics: the Ifá’s relation with the Nhonu in the funerary rites; the subject of the death of an Ifá Bokonon (Favi); and the participation of the deceased in the Ifá’s cult.

N’sou (men) and Nhonu (women) have different roles in funerary rites. In this context, cowry shells divination is an exclusively male activity. However, according to Maupoil (1981), some Nhonu take part in the Ifá’s cult, both as assistants and with their own Ifá. Nhonu Bokonon are infrequent, though.

Although hypothetically reserved to men, the Bokonon function may be performed by a woman whose intelligence and manly character match the study and practice of the Fá (Ifá). A nagô diviner from Porto-Novo mentioned some names of women Bokonon in Nigeria, in the Ayó province. In the region of Akpoun, Odu Elévé (‘Odu does the good’); in Ado, Fagoibo (‘Fá, to me, is like a white person’); in Abéokuta, Malufé (‘originally from Ifé’); in Ibadan, Osãnhi Tola (‘effective amulet’). The informant knew these women, with the exception of Fagoibo. (Maupoil, 1981, p. 167)

The Nhonu also relate with the Ifá in another manner: by receiving the Ifá and following its prescriptions for a better life, since it is considered by the people as an entity of personalized cult (cf. Kiki and Guimarães, 2019). From this relationship between Ifá and the Nhonu, we understand that the gender issue is not fundamental to becoming a bokonon, what matters is the essence and disposition of the person. So both men and women can become bokonon.

The second topic is the Ifá’s participation when a Bokonon dies. It is important to first make a distinction between the Ifá as an entity, manifested during divination, and the tools used in this process, such as the palm nuts and cowry shells. These tools are also called Ifá. When a person is initiated and receives an Ifá, he or she establishes a unique relation with it. When they die, their Ifá is buried with them, or passed on to a family member, as long as the Ifá accepts this. In the case of a Bokonon’s sudden death, the sacred nature of their Ifá is removed in ceremony. This is done through the Ifá’s prohibitions: pepper and afintin (traditional mustard) are used to show it has ceased to perform its informative functions, which could remain connected to its owner in the afterlife (Maupoil, 1981). Before the ceremony, however, the Ifá is consulted to know whether it wishes to stay in the household or leave with its deceased owner.

The third and last topic regards the participation of the deceased in the Ifá’s cult. This is essential for understanding the relation between the Ifá and death. As a mediator between worlds, the Ifá is connected to both. The dead participate in ceremonies with their requests, which are transmitted by the Ifá to the living. The living, in turn, carry out the ceremonies as prescribed by the dead.

The construction of the person in the Adjatado culture also involves a naming process related to death. Next, we will present some of the Adjatado considerations that may help understand how these names constitute a cultural identity mark.

A person’s naming process in relation to death in the adjatado culture

In the Adjatado culture, as to other indigenous peoples and cultures (cf. Hugh-Jones, 2002; Watzlawik et al., 2016) the name is a cultural mark. The ways of naming children and the reflection about naming shows, to some extent, how a person belongs to the culture. The Adjatado have two words for name: Nkor and Gni.

The first form, Nkor, means ‘in front’. It is also the diminutive of , ‘the first’. The name is understood as the first element of a person that we have access to. Thus, the name is seen as the door that opens to the person.

The second form is Gni, ‘being’. It conveys the idea that you are through your name. The name is thus the starting point for the condition of being.

The two forms of name in the Adjatado culture transmit cultural belonging, expressed in the condition of being in the world. Since the name is our opening to the other, in the Adjatado culture this opening may come in death also. This is the case when people receive names related to death. A family that faces the sudden death of more than one child before their teenage years, for example, might give their next child a name related to death. Since birth, a person’s life is marked by their imagined death. Therefore, death is a part of the cycle of life in the Adjatado culture. In this culture, death is seen as a natural phenomenon only when it happens in old age (Botchi, 2007). Except for this case, death is always caused by a third party (Botchi, 1982).

Initially, the Adjatado thought the Agbetor had power over death and could even avoid it. Certain names indicate this view: Kudjega means ‘death is captured’; Aloléku means ‘death captured death’; and Kulegumé means ‘death is under the earth’ (Botchi, 2007). With time, and the persistence of death, the later was thought to be stronger than the Agbetor. This idea can be found in names such as Kutowu (death’s strength is greater than men’s), Kutoglo (death is stronger than us) and Kudufio (death is queen). Death’s endurance led to the notion that death was an unavoidable event. This is seen in names such as: Kuto (Agbetor lost to death), Kutujo (death is right) and Jononku (born for death). Since death is inevitable, the Adjatado culture offers relief to those who mourn: death is only natural in old age. In all other cases, death is caused by a third party, which is always unknown. Certain names show this: Mèlo Mè, ‘in someone’s hands’, is the short form of Amèlo me Yi na zonyi’aku, ‘in the hands of a third party or of someone who will lead me to death’. The name ‘Mèshimè’ conveys the same idea. These names are given at birth to show that when this person dies, it will be because someone sent him or her to death (Botchi, 2007). These names make it explicit that Adjatado culture reflects on the fact that people can take the lives of others through mysterious practices. These personal names are special and point to a precise action: the action of death. So they are not names that all ordinary people have or can have.

Having presented the Ifá and its relation with death, as well as the naming process related to death, we proceed to a dialogue with considerations about the death in the field of psychology, from a SCC psychological perspective, aiming at contributing to understand cultural dimensions of human behaviour and sense making in general.

The subject of death: Semiotic-cultural constructivism and phenomenology

The subject of death has not been much explored in the SCC psychological framework. We will approach some aspects from the phenomenology of Heidegger and Lévinas, that dialogues with SCC (cf. Simão, 2010, 2016, 2017). Both philosophers discussed death in their works. SCC focuses on the meanings a person creates around disquieting experiences. This type of experience causes rupture in relation to expectations and leads the person to confront the unknown. The disquieting experience introduces the person in the cultural reality, in which he or she will create a unique meaning linked to his or her subjectivity in the I-other-world relations (Simao, 2005). In this process, the person occupies an alterity position in dialogue, which also produces cultural transformation. Alterity refers to something that exceeds the self and its comprehensive categories:

[…] the dialogue between two places: the knowledgeable (as supposed by the subject who is constantly reconstructing [the] relationship with the other) and the unknowledgeable (the impossibility of full knowledge as lived and experienced by the subject in [the] relationship with the other). (Simão, 2007, p. 20)

People relate to others through the meanings they attribute to disquieting experiences in their culturally constructed worlds. Research in the SCC emphasizes the symbolic development of the person. Human activity creates the cultural sphere that cultivates individuals in the relations with others and the world. The notion of person and the issue of death are therefore important. The process of becoming a person results from how each culture symbolically guides psychological development (cf. Boesch, 1991; Valsiner, 2012).

SCC dialogues with the phenomenology of E. Lévinas and M. Heidegger, addressing their conception of death as a form of alterity (cf. Lévinas, 2004) that confers meaning to our existence. These philosophers understand death as finitude and alterity. Death also relates to the mysterious and to passing. It makes people reflect about the meaning of their own lives. In the SCC, death is related to existential questions, psychological processes and the elaboration of the experience of finitude and alterity.

Death is a central issue to both Heiddeger and Lévinas, although each philosopher develops their philosophical projects in distinct directions. Their ideas help us broaden our views on death and contribute to new developments in the field of psychology. The notions of ontology in Heidegger and ethics in Lévinas can be useful to reflect on the construction of the Agbetor in relation to death.

Heidegger’s formulations on death involve the concepts of Dasein, the ‘being-there’, ‘being-with’ and ‘being-toward-death’, and the role of anxiety (Angst), especially connected to being-with and being-toward-death. These interdependent concepts present an understanding of the human being’s relation to death, in the process of assuming its authenticity (Werle, 2003).

The being in the world that daily exists with others is Heidegger’s being-there, or Dasein. Dasein does not live alone but in a world with other entities. Its social aspect is expressed in the concepts of being-with and being-there-with. The Dasein is always trying to anticipate the other’s existence (Werle, 2003). This posture may produce anxiety, whose existential character is essentially human (Werle, 2003) and indicates human finitude. Being in the world is a source of anxiety, a structural condition of the Dasein (Duarte and Naves, 2012). The finitude revealed by anxiety makes the being a being-toward-death, making death the most characteristic trait of the being (Heidegger, 1989).

To Heidegger, the end of the being-in-the-world is death (Werle, 2003). Death indicates that human transcendence, the possibility of being, contains a possibility of not being (Werle, 2003).

Death as finality and the physical ending of life carries a negative sense. To Heidegger, positivity may be found in death if the being assumes being-toward-death. By assuming its own finitude and anticipating death, rather than trying to dominate it, the being may accept it as one of the many possibilities of existence in the direction of a total being. It is the last of all possibilities (Mendes, 2015), a possibility manifested within existence itself (Werle, 2003).

Lévinas has another perspective. In his book, ‘Totality and Infinity”, he proposes death is an unknown destination that appears as alterity.

In his early works, Lévinas presents a critique of Heidegger’s ontological project. To Lévinas, every ontological thought starts from a unity and returns to a unity (Coelho Junior, 2008). This leads him to the issue of alterity, which in turn places ethics in a central position (Coelho Junior, 2008). Ethics is Lévinas’ first philosophy. Ethics opens the way for thinking the subject beyond rational Western thought and recognizing the existence of different forms of subjectivation (Ribeiro Junior, 2005). Ontology, to Lévinas, is the assimilation of the other and return to oneself, in which the subject consolidates and accommodates itself in being (someone-identity). Ethics, diversely, is a process of subjectivation. Even if the I is in a passive condition, subjectivity emerges as the loss and dissolution of the I’s figures of identity (Coelho Junior, 2008).

Ethics in social relations involves the dimension of time, since the I has a time of its own, as do the others (Mendes, 2015). This indicates the responsibility of the I in relation to others. Alterity implies a displacement of oneself, a fissure or transformation of the subject (Coelho Junior, 2008). In the alterity relation, something in the other always escapes the I and this may produce a traumatic experience, requiring work from the subject that wishes to know the other. The traumatic experience may also happen in relation to death, due to the ruptures it produces and to its unfathomable dimension.

Interface between psychology and adjatado views on death and the construction of the person

The final remarks of this essay can be frustrating for those who expected a clear and fixed definition of the role of the Ifá in the construction of the person in relation to death, from the perspective of the Adjatado tradition. Nevertheless, we argue that Ifá, precisely, is related to the experience of the undefinable and not fully understandable in this culture. For this reason, we articulated the Ifá with the reflections in the field of SCC, about disquieting experiences and alterity (cf. Guimarães, 2015, 2016, 2017; Simão, 2010). From this framework we become available to face the unknown as part of the cultural experience, and to observe how a culture guide people to face it through ritualized practices that accompany the person throughout life, with greater or lesser intensity, depending on the events experienced.

Therefore, th construction of the Agbetor is rooted in culture and conducted through cultural elements and tools, such as the Ifá. As a mediator between the worlds of life and death, known and unknown, the Ifá creates a communication with death and sends its messages to the living. As a divining entity, it stands at the frontier between alterity and identity, translating the mystery of death into culturally shared meaning constructions. The Ifá thus mediates alterity.

From a general perspective in cultural psychology, we put it, side by side, two trajectories of semiotic elaboration about the death that trigger different knowledge systems. The Adjatado system of knowledge understands that the death of the Agbetor (owner of life) is mediated by mysterious forces that acquire meaning through querying the Ifá. Therefore, the Ifá organizes disquieting experience of personal relations with something mysterious and uncontrollable, the death as alterity. In this sense, Ifá is central to the processes of constructing the person, given that, for this culture, the persons’ life and death are bonded. Finally, we found specificities and resonances between the Adjatado organization of the experience of death and the phenomenological reflection on human finitude and alterity. (Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Cultural conceptions about the death in dialogue.

Death for Adjatado people	Death for SCC (based on phenomenology)
Death as the return to where we came from	Death as a traumatic event
Born to death	Be for death
Death as something that transcends human reality	Death as assuming our finitude
Death as always from someone	Death as finality and the physical ending of life

Although it is evident that the phenomenological philosophical reflection and the Adjatado system of knowledge belong to distinct cultural traditions, this research showed that is relevant, for psychological studies in cultural psychology, to take into account how rites and myths from specific societies, in its whole and supra-personal dimension, reveal sophisticated source of knowledge about human universal existential issues.

Besides death, life is also mysterious, since it is marked by unpredictability. The Ifá is consulted in the attempt to handle unpredictable events. One may learn about oneself in the relation with this type of experience. Knowing oneself and others pervades all human action. Simão (1984) presents the ideas of Bastide et al. (1968), to whom knowledge about an event, about what happens, can be explained by two social spheres of knowledge: the archaic and the modern. Divination is within the first sphere. In this scope, knowledge concerns everyday events and people’s destinies. It is an attempt to formulate knowledge and thus gain control over what seems to the individual as random events (Bastide et al., 1968). In the second sphere, collective aspects are more important than individual ones in knowledge creation. The public fact prevails over the private one. The Ifá pertains to the first sphere of knowledge. In Ifá divination, certain non-observable elements intervene, granting it a scientific appearance, as astrology has (Simão, 1984). In both the Ifá and astrology, planets and elements of nature – water, fire, air and earth – intervene (Maupoil, 1981). The non-observable elements behave as a set of data whose meaning must be apprehended in order to act over the future (Simão, 1984). To read these elements, the Bokonon must be previously initiated.

How distinct cultural practices and conceptions can dialogue with Western psychology? This paper proposed a possible strategy, observing that philosophical views on death approaches, in some aspects, the Adjatado views, creating a border where dialogue between them starts to be mapped. Certain elements compose this dialogue: death as part of the cycle of life; our relation with the death of the other; and death as something not necessarily negative, but rather something positive that places us before our finitude. Death is an inevitable reality, stronger than humans; a view also present among the Adjatado. Death questions the Being-there and its place in the world in relation to other entities. It makes the possibility of human transcendence difficult. Since facing finitude is a source of anxiety, the culture offers its members funerary rites to support the passage of the deceased and help the Being-there assume its condition of Being-toward-death.

Heidegger and Lévinas have different ontological and ethical views on death. To Lévinas, death is not a moment, but a manner of being that the Dasein is conscious of from the beginning of its existence (Lévinas, 1998). Living is postponing death and enables perceiving that time exists. Not the time of the clock, but the historical time, later considered the time of subjectivity characterized by the succession of events in history that memory may reconstruct and preserve (Mendes, 2015). Time and death are thus connected between themselves and to temporality. Death is a good example of the discontinuity of time, since it breaks with the idea of a chronological time. Death opens the being to infinity, to the unknown, to the continuity of the time of subjectivity (Mendes, 2015). Death can therefore be understood as a passive continuity because of its irreversible nature (Lévinas, 1998). Heidegger’s and Lévinas’ different ideas show they have different views on the same phenomenon, which can be observed in their different formulations on ontology (Werle, 2003) and ethics (Coelho Junior, 2008). These are different from the Adja’s views on death that lead to the intervention of the Ifá in the funerary rites. This entity is in a position of alterity in relation to death.

Finally, an essential question can be made in relation to the Adjatado name-giving, and which relates to traditional cultures in general. This regards the relation between the person’s name and their identity, from a cultural perspective. The personal identity here is cultural before it is personal. The naming process has an important role in the person’s individuation (Watzlawik et al., 2016). Because identity construction is processual and the culture is dynamic and constantly changing, the people of a given culture can be considered as actively involved in culture (Andacht and Michel, 2005). They create unique meanings in culture. From a person’s own name, he or she occupies an alterity position in relation to the other, and vice versa.

From the discussion developed throughout this article, we understand that identifying and reflecting about cultural elements organizes the construction of meanings in unique life trajectories. These processes pertain to more general processes of cultural semiogenesis. In this way, the construction of the Agbetor takes place through a cultural action field (Boesch, 1995). It is both structure and process. Structure because it has a cultural basis: the references the Agbetor uses to constitute itself in a unique manner in the culture (Valsiner, 2012). Certain elements we identified in the study of the Adja culture provide interesting material for psychological reflection. We highlight some central topics: the relation that may be established between the naming process and identity, the alterity of death as a path for the construction of the Agbetor and the centrality of the Ifá in this process. The Ifá participates in different ontological and ethical levels of the construction of the Adjatado person, as in the funerary rites, the naming process and the mediation between the worlds of the living and of the dead. This participation brings some issues to psychology: the unknown, with its mysterious nature, is indispensable in the process of construction of the Agbetor. These ontological and ethical issues need to be considered in the scientific attempt to explain all phenomena of traditional cultures.