How the Turtle Lost its Shell: Sino-Tibetan Divination Manuals and Cultural Translation

This article is a pan-Himalayan story about how the turtle, as a cultural symbol within Sino-Tibetan divination iconography, came to more closely resemble a frog. It attempts a comparative analysis of Sino-Tibetan divination manuals, from Tibetan Dunhuang and Sinitic turtle divination to frog divination among the Naxi people of southwest China. It is claimed that divination turtles, upon entering the Himalayan foothills, are not just turtles, but become something else: a hybrid symbol transformed via cultural diffusion, from Han China to Tibet, and on to the Naxi of Yunnan. Where borders are crossed, there is translation. If we go beyond the linguistic definition of translation towards an understanding of transfer across semiotic borders, then translation becomes the reforming of a concept from one cultural framework into another. In this way, cultural translation can explain how divination iconography can mutate and transform when it enters different contexts; or in other words, how a turtle can come to lose its shell

On the Status of Natural Divination in Stoicism

Cicero’s De divinatione portrays the Stoics as unanimous in advocating both natural and technical divination. I argue that, contrary to this, the earlier leaders of the school like Chrysippus had reasons to consider natural divination to be significantly epistemically inferior to its technical counterpart. The much more favorable treatment of natural divination in De divinatione is likely the result of changes introduced later, probably by Posidonius

Galen, divination, and the status of medicine

Galen's stories about his successes in predicting the development of an illness belong to the best-known anecdotes drawn from his writings. Brilliant pieces of self-presentation, they set Galen apart from his peers, who tried to cover up their ignorance by levelling accusations of magic and divination against their superior colleague. These accusations are usually interpreted as very real threats, as Roman law punished illicit magic and divination. Pointing out that Galen sometimes likes to present himself as a mantis and a prophet, others have suggested that the accusations against Galen and his own self-presentation indicate that the border line between medicine and religion was still fluid. Both approaches correctly draw attention to the social reality that the accusations betray: they suggest that Galen belongs to a group of healers of dubious standing that populated the empire and thus show that medicine did not have a monopoly on healing. Yet such a socio-historical approach may not be sufficient. For one thing, both explanations have their limitations. Regarding the former, it can be said that Augustus' prohibition of divination aimed at controlling prediction about the emperor and one can doubt that a widespread clampdown of all forms of divination ever was intended. A possible objection to the second view is that throughout his oeuvre Galen emphasizes his medicine as a rational undertaking, even as a science (episteme). If one takes his self-presentation as a mantis to be more than metaphorical and to indicate the not yet fully crystallized identity of medicine as a separate scientific discipline, then Galen's usual way of understanding his own craft as a science' is in need of explanation. Besides such possible objections, a different set of questions still needs to be asked: why precisely were accusations of practising magic and divination levelled against Galen and why do they recur so frequently in his writings? Why divination and not, say, poisoning

Losing Deixis: Referentialist Cosmologies in Postcolonial East-Africa and Beyond

The advantage of comparing ng’hambo and nyato in terms of their deictic versus referential discourse is methodological. To substantiate our hypothesis, we examine respective instances of oracular discourse (applying among others Silverstein’s semiotic approach). The language can moreover be analyzed grammatically, among others for its distal versus proximal and medial pro-forms. But more broadly, on a level eluding discursive analysis and which this paper will exploit fully, the totality of fieldwork experiences may help to contrast the purpose of the two practices. One purpose of divination, described since Victor Turner and later René Devisch, is world-making/ordering or the cosmo-nomic (cosmos, world; nomos, order) which includes the invisible world of spirits and unknown forces. Yet, paradoxically, another purpose equally well described (cf Zeitlyn, Abbink) is its contraction, a version of the cosmo-nomic that is reduced to the visible world only, the economic (oikos, house; nomos, order), with its easily sustained illusion of measurable debt and credit, and market efficiency (although less easily sustained since the 2008 bank crisis). Unlike ng’hambo, nyato can deny the part of the invisible world that must be reached through placation, hope, trial and subjunctivity, in one word sacrifice. Nyato’s world is one of efficiency and accountability, better: one where investment (for example, of magic) will yield return, in brief: gift without sacrifice – a type of divination perfectly adapted to economic activity, namely the sort of preoccupation with ‘the household’ that does not concern itself with impact on the larger world, social or natural. While ng’hambo - ‘cosmonomic’ divination par excellence - works by managing the states of the world, always seeking to ground itself in the cosmology and thus affecting the participants’ various modes and codes of the senses, nyato can be understood as ‘economic’ divination: diviners have freed themselves from the shackles of community and cosmology, and are willing to lose deixis to make more clients and develop a referentialist discourse that is nationally and globally accessible. That is why until today nyato survives together with ng’hambo

On Buddhism, Divination and the Worldly Arts: Textual Evidence from the Theravāda Tradition

This essay attends to the sticky web of indigenous terminology concerning divination and other so-called “mundane” or “worldly” arts, focusing primarily upon Buddhist canonical texts preserved in Pāli, augmented by references to commentarial and exegetical literature. It asks: How have some Buddhists, as evinced in this canonical and exegetical literature, understood the broader category of “worldly arts,” which includes techniques we call divinatory? Are Buddhists discouraged from engaging with such practices, as has been commonly asserted? If so, then for whom, specifically, are such words of discouragement primarily meant? And why, specifically, are such practices discouraged? Are the penalties for practicing them severe or lenient? Are there any exceptions or instances when practicing worldly arts is tolerated or encouraged? And what might we conclude, more broadly, from the textual evidence? These tricky questions bear particularly upon the complex, legalistic body of Buddhist monastic rules and their interpretation, as well as the interpretation of a few passages from Buddhist canonical literature that are arguably less straightforward than has sometimes been assumed or asserted

The Tibetan Image of Confucius

Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines Number 12, March 200

Obscure Existential Narratives: Predetermination and Freedom in Nepalese Horoscopic Knowledge.

Nepali astrological divination can be seen as a form sense-making which, in providing access to the ‘hidden motifs’ attained to determine life events, mitigates the irreducibility of being-in- the-world by providing existential narratives. Conveying hope to act upon what is initially approached as a hopeless fate, astrological knowledge forwards the perception that troubling events, apparently out of control, are also liable to be acted upon. This reveals a permanent tension between ‘fatalism’ and ‘freedom’ that challenges rendering Nepal exclusively in fatalist terms, as argued by the Nepali anthropologist Dor Bahadur Bista. Yet, accounting for these reinterpretations requires a personally-tailored inquiry, usually overlooked by sociocentric approaches that patronizingly disregard people as mere carriers of a worldview, as in the case of the ontological turn

How the Turtle Lost its Shell

This article is a pan-Himalayan story about how the turtle, as a cultural symbol within Sino-Tibetan divination iconography, came to more closely resemble a frog. It attempts a comparative analysis of Sino-Tibetan divination manuals, from Tibetan Dunhuang and Sinitic turtle divination to frog divination among the Naxi people of southwest China. It is claimed that divination turtles, upon entering the Himalayan foothills, are not just turtles, but become something else: a hybrid symbol transformed via cultural diffusion, from Han China to Tibet, and on to the Naxi of Yunnan. Where borders are crossed, there is translation. If we go beyond the linguistic definition of translation towards an understanding of transfer across semiotic borders, then translation becomes the reforming of a concept from one cultural framework into another. In this way, cultural translation can explain how divination iconography can mutate and transform when it enters different contexts; or in other words, how a turtle can come to lose its shell

Mind, Body and Spirit in Basket Divination: An Integrative Way of Knowing

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 undertaking. Truthful knowledge is not flushed out of the diviner’s mind as a set of theoretical propositions; it is instead delivered by an ancestral spirit that becomes objectified in three symbiotic forms: physical pain, configurations of material objects laid out inside a basket, and the diviner’s translation of those meaningful configurations into words. In basket divination, human bodies, artifacts, words, and spirits work together in symbiosis. Knowing is a spiritual, intellectual, and embodied undertaking. The challenge then is to conceptualize basket divination as an integrative way of knowing in such a way that one does not fail to recognize either the neurobiological substrate that we all share as humans or those others facets—such as the numen—without which basket divination as a cultural practice would cease to exist

Believed belief: science/religion versus Sukuma magic

status: publishe