Divination is more dialogical than some diviners or anthropologists have made it appear. I analyze the transcript of one Bangladeshi divination event, comparing it with a dozen others performed by one diviner, Delwar, revealing how tenuously he manages to assign a single meaning to troubles, especially when clients openly compare his declarations with their intimate knowledge of those troubles....

The statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia, Africa, do not fully agree. While researchers rightly stress the importance of observation, analysis and interpretation in basket divination, going so far as to describe diviners as scientists, they fail to recognize that divination is not an abstract, disembodied undertaki...

This study is intended to facilitate the basic understanding of Orality and Visuality as media of communication in African divination systems and to underscore their relationships with related ritualistic and oracular activities and/or actions, and to emphasize their importance within the context of an Oracle that makes statements about future events or about the truth. It is discovered that th...

Plato uses the idea of divinatory knowledge as a metaphorical descriptor for a variety of kinds of daytime, waking knowing. What unites these examples is that they all include discussion of a kind of knowing that cannot account for itself, and that is tentative, imagistic and non-discursive. These metaphorical uses can further be illuminated by his more detailed discussion of divinatory knowled...

Ancient Greeks drew advice from oracles, dreams, entrails, the movements of birds, sneezes, and myriad other sources for divination. Classicists typically study such phenomena as examples of occult religion, or for their use as a social mechanism for managing dissent and forging consensus. Ancient philosophical accounts by contrast go a longer way toward considering them seriously, on their own...

"Supersti+Tech" is a compound word of "Superstition" and "Technology". The purpose of this project is to reinterpret superstition with new media devices through which juxtaposes and combines various paradoxical concepts such as irrational versus rational, fiction versus fact, and virtual versus real. The outcome of this project displays three interactive installations which use computer process...

Numerous indigenous healing traditions around the world employ plants with psychoactive effects to facilitate divination and other spiritual healing rituals. Southern Africa has often been considered to have relatively few psychoactive plant species of cultural importance, and little has been published on the subject. This paper reports on 85 species of plants that are used for divination by so...