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Divination's grasp: African encounters with the almost said (2015) is an ethnogra-phy of extraordinary richness, an outcome of Richard Werbner's close involvement with Tswapong diviners in northeast Botswana in the early 1970s and subsequently since 1999. The book makes a forceful case for looking to vernacular expert discourses for evidence of how the moral imagination, when confronted with misfortune , operates beyond ordinary language and consciousness. Werbner shows how the tactile and visible qualities of small objects (in this case, the diviners' lots) can foster reflection and arouse emotions about a wide set of past and present life circumstances. Over the course of séances, diviners juxtapose the microcosms displayed in their tablets and dice with musical praise poetry derived from an oral archive that expresses ancient wisdom about self and other. Diviners are archons, keepers and directors of a corpus of oral poetry that has been handed down over generations; Werbner documents close parallels between the praise poetry recited by the diviner Moatlhodi in the 1970s and that of Natale, a diviner who worked with Isaac Schapera in southeastern Botswana during the 1930s. The poetry is esoteric and eludes transparency. It brings to mind disorienting imageries of metamorphosis , of sets of circumstances in the process of shifting from one configuration into another. Hence Werbner's emphasis on the " almost said " : divination involves sifting through the ambiguous evidence of the lots to find " truth-on-balance, " aspects of a hidden reality that only the ancestors can truly see. In fact, as Werbner makes
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2016
Comment on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination’s grasp: African encounters with the almost said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
South African Historical Journal, 2017
To further enhance the vitality of an ethnographic text, Ghodsee recommends including maps and other images that complement or illustrate ethnographic data and support the analytic argument. Ghodsee's strategies for writing compelling ethnographies are as useful as her conceptual guidelines are valuable. She tells us that authors should opt for endnotes instead of placing author-date citations in the text, that prose must be invigorating but lean, that simple words may communicate complex emotions and ideas, and that subjects and verbs must be kept together. Through illuminating examples and her own terse prose, she instructs us to master good grammar and syntax, privilege the active voice, avoid filler phrases, choose strong verbs, and limit adverbs and adjectives. Ghodsee's practical tips on stages of revision and line editing remind us that writing is a craft to be relished. In her discussion of writing rituals, she reiterates that ethnographic writing is and ought to be a personal enterprise. Her simple but ingenious 10-step process for writing a book-from beginning with an imaginary table of contents to collating draft chapters into a manuscript to submitting it for review-is likely to inspire even the most ambivalent or insecure of us to overcome writer's block. The value of From Notes to Narrative is as aesthetic as it is instrumental. Each chapter stirs in the reader the aspiration to write and to write well. Ghodsee's artful integration of excerpts from and examples of model ethnographies reinforces the power and beauty of her own message. Her plea for social scientists to write clearly and accessibly is prudent and timely. Graduate and undergraduate students, novice ethnographers, and even senior scholars in the social and behavioral sciences ought to read this book before they begin writing their next essay or their next book. Priceless!
Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 1991
2023
This work is a philosophical exploration of divination as a theory in African epistemology. The motivation behind this is that apart from the derogatory remarks about divination as a theory of knowledge and justification, African epistemology seems to be an underexplored aspect of African philosophy. Again, until the dynamics in accessing knowledge within the African space is explored and connected, we may be jeopardizing objectivity and certainty in our knowledge claims and indeed the scope and the richness of what we can know. To this end, the work argues that African epistemology is a holistic approach to the issue of knowledge and for this to be achieved, both the physical and quasi-physical realities that make up African ontology must coalesce, be properly understood, and connected. Thus, the paper argues that divination as an African theory of knowledge is an attempt to give a comprehensive and holistic insight into what it means to know and how knowledge is achieved in the African space. To go about this, the work subscribes to the analytic and critical methods of philosophical analysis as useful tools.
2013
Even after conversion to Christianity two pre-Christian practices that hold attraction to some African converts are sorcery and divination. These practices, which served a function in the lives of the people, met needs and dealt with fears in their previous lives, pose present missiological challenges to the church. This paper aims at understanding what these needs and fears are in the African experience, and to find scriptural responses that are contextually relevant while avoiding the pitfall of syncretism.
2006
This article argues that anthropological approaches to African divination are characterized by a certain epistemology, which creates specific problems with regard to vernacular truth-claims. Using ethnographic material from the Chagga-speaking people of Kilimanjaro, the article traces the multiple overlapping ramifications that interrelate vernacular concepts, physical objects, and local subjectivities. By thus avoiding reductionist arguments, the article endeavours to demonstrate that careful attention to these complex lateral relationships reveals how local diviners are able ‘to see’, or ‘be shown’, the ‘truth’ pertaining to their clients.
Based on fieldwork in Abidjan, Côte d' Ivoire, undertaken in 1997 and 2009, as well as residence in the country in periods that spanned two decades, this study of contemporary urban divination in West Africa shows that it thrives even in the ethnically heterogeneous and religiously plural city. In stark contrast to the stereotypical view that African traditions are unable to offer a viable challenge to the influx of 'world' religions and their attendant values of modernity, divination demonstrates their vitality. The practices of divination rest on basic premises so widely shared as to constitute an overarching epistemology, at once trans-ethnic and authentically West African. By recasting contemporary problems into the familiar idioms of the 'traditional' worldview, divination enables practitioners to gain leverage over real and pressing concerns, affirming personal agency. It underscores a communal identity, not dependent on territorial or ethnic affiliation or precarious and contested definitions of citizenship. professional consulting rooms in the style of a clinic, with waiting rooms filled with urban clients even in the earliest morning hours; most are less visible, practicing in their private rooms in recessed courtyards filled with hanging laundry, cooking pots, young children at play and other signs of bustling life. Clients come with all manner of problems, from unrelenting and unexplained medical problems to unemployment or unhappy love affairs, confident that divination can identify the hidden source of their troubles and prescribe the means to alleviate their suffering. Moreover, in the city multiple forms of divination compete for attention. Hand-painted road-signs advertise clairvoyants and 'consultants' who use palmistry, numerology, astrology, and tarot along with 'traditional medicine,' a reference to the herbal remedies that diviners often prescribe.
Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Religions, 2024
Divination is a ritual mode for communicating with the divine. But divination is not just one among many rituals practiced in the religions of Africa and the diaspora. Divination is the very pivot on which all other practices-initiation, healing and the protective arts, libation, sacrifice, and even possession trance-hinge. It is an essential warrant that commissions or sanctions these other rites. It establishes their orienting spiritual vision. It links the individual to the human and spiritual community and reveals the inextricable place of the person in a dynamic and spirit-filled cosmos. It is through divination that we can best understand how these various other practices operate as a complex and coherent religious system, as philosophically sophisticated as it is pragmatic. There are multiple forms of divination and a variety of systems for accessing oracular knowledge among the diverse traditions in the Caribbean. This is no less true of divination in the source traditions of Africa. Divinatory techniques vary tremendously, from the interpretation of omens to water gazing or geomancy, but a common form relies on reading the configurations that result from the random cast of a set of objects, such as shells or bones. The diviner is a ritual specialist who has mastered the technique to obtain and decipher the messages transmitted from the spiritual realm through these phenomena in the physical world. But divination is far more than "fortune telling. " Its primary object is to enable the client to navigate life's problems by offering concrete
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