Divination's Grasp

Richard Werbner is Professor Emeritus in African Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He is author of Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana (IUP).

"Werbner's Divination's Grasp documents a long and distinguished career in the service of anthropology. It will be a touchstone for anthropological studies of divination for years to come."—American Ethnologist"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."—Michael Lambek, University of Toronto Scarborough"Richard Werbner has produced a work of rare depth and profound insight that is destined to become a classic in African Studies and the anthropology of religion. In Divinations' Grasp, we come to know Werbner's divinatory mentors, men of profound intelligence who are masters of the poetically contoured 'almost said.' Readers will feel the comfort and inspiration that comes from an encounter with mastery, deep dialogue, and longstanding witness of Tswapong divining séances."—Paul Stoller, author of Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World

• Preface IntroductionPart I. Socio-linguistics and poetics1. Deep Dialogue with Evans-Pritchard2. In Praise of the Moral Imagination 3. Acrobatic Stylistics, Agonistic VisionPart II. From Tablet Archive to Wisdom Séances4. Poetics and Archives5. Family Séances: Rhetoric, Deliberations and Decisions6. Cosmic and Personal Understandings: Diviners, Headmen, StrangersPart III. From Hooved Archive to Charismatic Séances7. A Charismatic Diviner's Archive: Hooved Divination 8. The Cross-Over: Originality, Hybridity and Metamorphosis9. The Charismatic Séance: Arguments, Intimacy and IntimationsConclusion: In ComparisonNotesBibliographyIndex