Divination}}}s Grasp African Encounters with the Almost Said [Hardcover]

Richard Werbner takes readers on a journey though contemporary charismatic wisdom divination in southern Africa. Beginning with the silent language of the divinatory lots, Werbner deciphers the everyday, metaphorical, and poetic language that is used to reveal their meaning. Through Werbner's skillful interpretations of the language of divination, a picture of Tswapong moral imagination is revealed. Concerns about dignity and personal illumination, witchcraft, pollution, the anger of dead ancestors, as well as the nature of life, truth, cosmic harmony, being, and becoming emerge in this charged African setting.

Werbner'sDivination's Graspdocuments a long and distinguished career in the service of anthropology. It will be a touchstone for anthropological studies of divination for years to come.

Richard Werbner's superb account of moral imagination and the poetics of divination grasps the density of its subject, matching the insights of the diviner with those of the ethnographer. The book takes its place among the very best works of Africanist anthropology as a new classic in the tradition of ethnographic divination and a necessary reminder of live and deep traditions of African wisdom.Honorable Mention, 2016 Elliott P. Skinner Award

Preface
Introduction
Part I. Socio-linguistics and poetics
1. Deep Dialogue with Evans-Pritchard
2. In Praise of the Moral Imagination
3. Acrobatic Stylistics, Agonistic Vision
Part II. From Tablet Archive to Wisdom S?ances
4. Poetics and Archives
5. Family S?ances: Rhetoric, Deliberations and Decisions
6. Cosmic and Personal Understandings: Diviners, Headmen, Strangers
Part III. From Hooved Archive to Charismatic S?ances
7. A Charismatic Diviners Archive: Hooved Divination
8. The Cross-Over: Originality, Hybridity and Metamorphosis
9. The Charismatic S?ance: Arguments, Intimacy and Intimations
Conclusion: In Comparison
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Richard Werbner hl›