- Home
- African Divination Systems
Preparing your PDF for download...
There was a problem with your download, please contact the server administrator.
African Divination Systems
Ways of Knowing
Edited by Philip M. Peek
Published by: Indiana University Press
240 Pages, 10 b&w photos
- eBook
- 9780253113801
- Published: May 1991
$9.99
Other Retailers:
"This volume of finely crafted case studies is also the vehicle for an important general theory of divination. . . . this is a book overflowing with ideas that will powerfully stimulate further research." —Journal of Ritual Studies
"The essays in this collection provide a very useful overview of both the diversity of African divination systems and of recent approaches to their study." —Choice
This unique collection of essays by an exceptional international group of Africanists demonstrates the central role that divination continues to play throughout Africa in maintaining cultural systems and in guiding human action. African Divination Systems offers insights for current discussions in comparative epistemology, cross-cultural psychology, cognition studies, semiotics, ethnoscience, religious studies, and anthropology.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The Study of Divination, Present and Past
Philip M. Peek
Part One. Becoming a Diviner
The Initiation of a Zulu Diviner
Henry Callaway
Part Two. The Search for Knowledge
Nilotic Cosmology and the Divination of Atuot Philosophy
John W. Burton
Divination in Madagascar: The Antemoro Case and the
Diffusion of Divination
Pierre Verin and Narivelo Rajaonarimanana
Part Three. Cultural Systems within Divination Systems
Diviners as Alienists and Annunciators among the Batammaliba
of Togo
Rudolph Blier
Divination Among the Lobi of Burkina Faso
Piet Meyer
Divination and the Hunt in Pagibeti Ideology
Alden Almquist
Mediumistic Divination among the Northern Yaka of Zaire:
Etiology and Ways of Knowing
Rene Devisch
Part Four. Divination, Epistemology, and Truth
Splitting Truths from Darkness: Epistemological Aspects of
Temne Divination
Rosalind Shaw
Knowledge and Power in Nyole Divination
Susan Reynolds Whyte
Simultaneity and Sequencing in the Oracular Speech of
Kenyan Diviners
David Parkin
Part Five. Toward a New Approach to Divination
African Divination Systems: Non-Normal Modes of Cognition
Philip M. Peek
Afterword
James W. Fernandez
Contributors
Index
"The essays in this collection provide a very useful overview of both the diversity of African divination systems and of recent approaches to their study. The introduction critically reviews the preoccupations of earlier students of African divination. The essays that follow are divided into five sections that explore, in turn, the identity of the diviner; comparative and historical issues; the central role of divination in the articulation of cultural ideas, norms, and values within society; the making of knowledge through the divinatory process; and the integration of normal and nonnormal ways of knowing within the divination process. Although all of the essays provide rich ethnographic data, the essays in the fourth and fifth section are the most interesting from a theoretical perspective. They provide the clearest critique of previous positivist approaches to divination, which focus on the outcomes of the divinatory process while failing to appreciate the meanings and truths that inhere to, and are articulated by, the process itself. Of particular interest are the facinating articles by Rosalind Shaw and Philip Peek. Highly recommended for advanced undergraduates.December 1991"
~R. M. Packard, Tufts University