Divination

Patrick Curry holds an honorary research fellowship in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Wales at Lampeter. He taught an MA in Cultural Cosmology and Divination at the University of Kent, and is co-author , with Roy Willis, of Astrology, Science and Culture: Pulling Down the Moon (Oxford: Berg, 2004).

• Chapter 1 Introduction, PatrickCurry; Chapter 2 Theorizing Divinatory Acts, BarbaraTedlock; Chapter 3 ‘Twinning’ and ‘Perfect Knowledge’ in African Systems of Divination, Philip M.Peek; Chapter 4 Memoir as Method, or ‘What the Devil Was I up to Anyway?’, Laura S.Grillo; Chapter 5 Central Asian and Northern European Shamanism, JuhaPentikäinen; Chapter 6 The Carbon Footprint of Oracles, Stuart R.Harrop; Chapter 7 Embodiment, Alterity and Agency, PatrickCurry; Chapter 8 Chicane, GeoffreyCornelius; Chapter 9 Darwin’s Fortune, Jonah’s Shipmates and the Persistence of Chance, EvanHeimlich; Chapter 10 Arrows, Aiming and Divination, Dorian GieselerGreenbaum; Chapter 11 Life between Lives Therapy, AngelaVoss; Chapter 12 Talking and Walking with Spirits, PaulDevereux; Chapter 13 Clarifying Divinatory Dialogue, AnthonyThorley, ChantalAllison, PetraStapp, JohnWadsworth; Chapter 101 Afterword Of Ises and Oughts, MartinHolbraad;

'The book is unique in academia in that, next to putting forward a strong and currently revitalising case of cultural diversity, it provocatively presages for the new millennium a trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary mode of cross-fertilising local knowledge systems and Western-born globalising sciences. Alongside the border-linking beacons set out by Curry’s explorative and post-secularist contribution, the fourteen refreshing scholarly essays authoritatively examine many of the epistemological, ontological and ethical questions that the various millennia-old and vital geomantic, necromantic, shamanic or mediumnic divination practices from across the world put to the human sciences and their modernist world view.' René Devisch, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium 'This book adds several more ethnographic accounts of divination that add to our knowledge of such practices outside the Western worldview.' Time and Mind