Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers

(Routledge Studies in Anthropology) 2020
London: Routledge. ISBN 9780367199500

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Summary

This book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners.

Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. A detailed case study is examined and analysed using conversational analytic principles. The regional comparison considers different kinds of explanation for different features of social organization, leading to a discussion of the continuing utility of moderated functionalism.

The book will be of interest to area specialists and scholars concerned with religion, rationality, and decision-making from disciplines including anthropology, African studies, and philosophy.

Contents

• Foreword xii DAVID PARKIN
• Acknowledgements xvi 1 Introduction: divination studies in the 21st century: setting the research agenda 1
• PART ONE Studying 21
• 2 Techniques of divination: studies in interpretation 23
• 3 Finding meaning in the text: the process of interpretation in text-based divination: Leavis in the bush 43
• 4 Spiders in and out of court: styles of spider divination in their sociological contexts 59
• 5 Divinatory logics: how diagnoses and predictions mediate outcomes 81
• PART TWO Doing 107
• 6 Mambila divination 109
• 7 Case studies: logic in action 133
• PART THREE Using 159
• 8 Framing questions: does divination pay attention to pragmatics? 161
• 9 A sociology of problems 174
• 10 Divination in life histories 192
• Appendices 207
• Appendix 1. The literature on spider divination 209
• Appendix 2. Extract from J.H. Pollock’s 1926 Mbembe assessment report 215
• Appendix 3. Wajiri Bi’s version of the divination myth. Recorded 21/4/1990 216
• Appendix 4. Sample (anonymized) divination log entries 220
• Index 222

The book was discussed on the CAMP linguistic anthropology blog with Stephan Feuchtwang on APRIL 27, 2020: See https://campanthropology.org/2020/04/27/david-zeitlyn/

The book was reviewed by Erwan Dianteill in 2023 in the International Journal of Divination and Prognostication. Vol. 4, pp 167-70. Available here. The review concludes: "The book, with its exceptional ambition and thorough ethnography, is essential for all social scientists studying divination."