Divination perspectives for a new millennium (Ashgate, 2010)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Theorizing divinatory acts: the integrative discourse of dream oracles / Barbara Tedlock -- "Twinning" and "perfect knowledge" in African systems of divination / Philip Peek -- Memoir as method or "what the devil was I up to anyway?" / Laura Grillo -- Central Asian and northern European Shamanism / Juha Pentikainen -- The carbon footprint of oracles: how green is divination? / Stuart Harrop -- Embodiment, alterity, and agency in divination: resolving antinomies / Patrick Curry -- Chicane: double-thinking and divination amongst the witch-doctors / Geoffrey Cornelius -- Darwin's fortune, Jonah's shipmates, and the persistence of chance / Evan Heimlich -- Arrows, aiming, and divination: astrology as a stochastic art / Dorian Greenbaum -- The descent of Orpheus and life between lives dialogue: divination, initiation or therapy? / Angela Voss -- Talking and walking with spirits: fresh perspectives on a medieval necromantic system / Paul Devereux -- Clarifying divinatory dialogue: a proposal for a distinction between practitioner divination and essential divination / Anthony Thorley, Chantal Allison, Petra Stapp and John Wadsworth -- Afterword / Martin Holbraad
This interdisciplinary collection by leading scholars in the field is dedicated to fascinating new insights into divination and oracles arising from recent work in anthropology, religious studies, history and classical studies. Central importance is given to the practical and theoretical perspectives of diviners as well as scholars of divination; several contributors are both. This book explores philosophical issues such as the nature of divinatory intelligence, the relationship between divinatory and metaphorical truth, the primacy of ontology over epistemology, the importance of reflexivity in scholarly studies of divination, and astrology as the principal Western form of divination. The ethnographic and historical examples range from contemporary Nigeria, urban Cuba, Mayan Guatemala and the shamanic cultures of the circumpolar Arctic to classical Greece and ancient Judea