Divination and Ontologies

Abstract

The way types of divination move round the planet means it is not helpful to simply attribute one unitary ontology to specific techniques or to groups of practitioners. Explaining divination in terms of ‘ontology’ homogenizes cognitive and conceptual multiplicity, and pre-empts the possible outcomes of divination. Moreover, this contradicts the fundamentally open nature of divination, and the fact that in many forms of divination the reformulation of questions helps keep futures open. With examples drawn from Mambila spider divination, I suggest what an epidemiology of beliefs and ontologies that gather around divination could look like. On this account, divination acts as a ‘boundary object’, mediating both the cognitive differences among clients and the conceptual differences between clients and diviners.