Blindness and Water Divination in the Saharan West

Abstract

This dissertation examines the nexus between blindness, water divination, and perception through ethnography. It listens into the world of Dali Gimba, a hinterland village in Mauritania that is inhabited by the Awlād Ummār—a unique clan marked by a dominant inheritance of congenital blindness spanning seven generations. For the Ummār, blindness is celebrated as a sign of divine grace, a source of charisma, and an opening towards miraculous extraordinary sensory attunements. Notably, the patriarch of the clan possesses the renowned ability to sense bodies of groundwater hidden under the earth and has used this kind of divinatory touch to find and establish over 1,000 wells across the arid Saharan West region.

The story of the Ummār and the disability world of Dali Gimba are considered to probe the possibilities thinking with blindness. This work examines the material and social contexts that shape sensory and perceptual experiences and considers what difference blindness makes in mediating styles of attending, interpreting, and communicating in various sensory worlds. Blindness is regarded alongside local practices of Islamic and African divination in order to construct a more expansive and nuanced understanding of the varieties of sensory experiences, body-mind arrangements, and perceptual attunements that emerge within social, cultural, and historical contexts.