Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Cognition

Literacy

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 03:45:18 +0000

University of British Columbia

Initially published 2 Dec 2021

Abstract:

Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated. Understood to be both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been the subject of anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century, with protracted debates about its effects on human consciousness and social life. This entry tracks the development of literacy as a concept.

Initially dominated by technologically deterministic assertions that literacy was a tool for sociocultural and cognitive development, anthropology would later embrace the more culturally relativistic perspective advanced by the New Literacy Studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This movement sought to understand how cultural logics and norms informed the development of localised literacy practices, thus creating variations of ‘literacies’ which were themselves embedded within ideologies and structures of power relations. Coming to recognise the marginalising power of standardised literacy, anthropology turned its attention to education.

Anthropologists and educators have become partners in research dedicated to developing pedagogical practices that draw upon the unique linguistic resources and practices that students bring with them into the classroom to cultivate inclusivity and empowerment. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life have challenged earlier notions of literacy, inspiring anthropologists to investigate how people draw upon multiple modalities to encode and decode meaning, thereby fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it means to ‘read and write’.

Introduction

Literacy is such a central part of most people’s everyday lives that its ubiquity can be taken for granted. Scholars have highlighted how, for many of us, literacy represents an essential pathway to development and personal liberation that has the power to cure almost any social ill (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Street 1997: 49; Ong 2012). Literacy is often presented as an ability with such transformative potential that becoming literate leads to a fundamental redefinition of an individual’s identity (Riemer 2008; Ahearn 2004). However, there are communities for whom literacy can be a less integral, sometimes even inappropriate, means for documenting and communicating language (Debenport 2015). In circumventing the constraints of the written word, such communities seek alternative ways of transmitting ideas, both orally and through other technologies (Finnegan 2012; Turin et al. 2013). Considering the perceived centrality of literacy to most contemporary human societies, and its continued absence from others, how has anthropology contributed to a cross-cultural understanding of literacy?

Broadly defined as both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been characterised as communication through an invented system of visually decoded signs, rather than by oral or gestural modes (Besnier 1999: 141). As an area of interest, literacy has figured prominently in anthropological inquiry since the discipline’s inception, as scholars sought to make sense of what the ability to read and write means for us. While studies have included exploring the origins, use, and transmission of different writing systems, the central question remains: does giving a tangible form to the most fundamental aspect of humanity, namely our capacity for language, transform how we think about, perceive, and process the world around us? In essence, does literacy change who we are as humans? Understanding this has become all the more relevant as the rapid transition from analogue to digital technologies further complicates how people engage with the written word, and thus reshapes our sense of what it means to be literate (Jewitt 2006; Wolf 2017).

In this entry, we track the progression of literacy through different eras of anthropological theory. Early interpretations treated literacy as a lens for analyses at the societal level, a framework that saw writing systems as a means for differentiating between cultures and their imagined evolutionary, cognitive, and socioeconomic development, which thus helped to frame literacy as an autonomous technology independent of its social contexts (Morgan 1878: 3, 11). While this position has softened over the years, the crucial link between literacy and consciousness was maintained as scholars emphasised the intrinsic benefits that a literate mind offered individuals and the societies in which they lived (Goody & Watt 1963; Ong 2012).

Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to reflect on the sociocultural underpinnings of literacy practices, with the scale of analysis narrowing to focus on local specificity and variation (Scribner & Cole 1981). Strict definitions of ‘literacy’ and what it meant to be ‘literate’ were shown to be implicated in the hegemonic ideologies that structure our societies and determine our values, and have given way to more nuanced understandings (Bialostok & Whitman 2006; Street 1997; Blommaert 2008). This newer movement in literacy studies situated literacy’s power to marginalise and sought to re-evaluate the diversity of written language in ways that challenged normative assumptions prevalent in earlier models. Insights generated by a sociocultural approach to literacy have motivated anthropologists to work with educators to make pedagogical literacy practices more inclusive and empowering for students (Street 1997; Hornberger 2003). The increasing centrality of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life (Horst & Miller 2012) has led to a re-scoping of what it means to read and write, with traditional definitions of literacy becoming less relevant to understanding the emergent meaning-making processes of digital texts.

Literacy and pre-literature

In the discipline’s early years, anthropologists took so-called ‘primitive’ peoples as their subjects of inquiry to expand their understandings of humanity (Mandelbaum 1955: 213; Hsu 1964: 169). Broadly applied to peoples living beyond the cultural and political ‘West’, the term ‘primitive’ invoked a Hobbesian image of primordial humanity that contrasted with the presumed cultural, historical, and linguistic sophistication of the societies from which anthropologists hailed (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 169). While the term ‘primitive’ was used extensively by prominent anthropological theorists at the time, objections quickly arose due to its analytical ambiguity and racist implications of superiority and inferiority (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 173). In response, and on account of their apparent objectivity and perceived greater scientific precision, the terms ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ arose as alternatives to the ‘primitive’/ ‘civilised’ opposition.

Unlike primitivity, ‘literacy’ was considered to carry less awkward baggage, being an attainable state of socioeconomic and cognitive development rather than an essential and inherent condition. Those who had not yet learned to read could be identified as ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’, only because written literature had not been introduced or developed in their societies (Faris 1925: 711-2; Hsu 1964: 169). However, the use of ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ also assumed that literacy and orality were mutually exclusive (Dickinson 1994: 320) and presented literacy as the first step towards greater civilisation and sophistication (Faris 1925: 712). The essence of the connection between literacy and civilisation derived from a belief that written language had an inevitable impact on how people understood, interpreted, and made sense of the world around them.

As twentieth century scholars became increasingly interested in understanding how language might shape thought and culture (Whorf 1952; Lévi-Strauss 1966), the physical form of written language came to be seen as more than a simple representation of speech, and rather a unique form of language in its own right (Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 5, 8). While earlier assumptions ascribed a ‘prelogical’ cognitive state to ‘primitive’ peoples, a notion assuming that such communities were completely uninterested in abstract thinking and focused solely on ensuring their basic needs of survival (Lévy-Bruhl 2018; Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 10), Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how both literate and oral peoples engage in the rational ordering of the world, albeit from quite different perspectives (1966: 269). Oral peoples were presented as reasoning with a ‘mythical thought’ pattern that was ‘entangled in imagery’, while literate peoples could reason at a ‘concrete’ level that was detached from perception and imagination (Lévi-Strauss 2001: 11-2; Lévi-Strauss 1966: 15, 20, 22).

Drawing from linguistic theory, Lévi-Strauss posited that the key difference between literate and oral thought processes was the capacity of the literate mind to distinguish between signs and the signified, thus being able to explore the relationship between images and the concepts they represent (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 18, 21). This perspective continues into the present with cognitive scientists like David Olson asserting that literacy leads to a meta-awareness of language that allows for an objectified and decontextualised understanding of concepts (2017: 239). Writing, having the capacity to lift words (signs and concepts) out of context, transforms them into objects that can be scrutinised and categorised on their own without attachment to a particular image or signification (Olson 2017: 241). In this way, the rationality of the literate mind has been compared to that of an engineer looking for ways to think beyond cultural and categorical constraints by critically focusing on its constituent elements, whereas the oral mind was theorised as only capable of rearranging, and never thinking beyond, the categories it was given (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 19).

While ‘literature’ is generally used to refer only to cultural expressions with written form, there is no compelling reason to treat the verbal art of oral societies as fundamentally different to written traditions: oral literatures simply exist at one end of the spectrum of literary types (Finnegan 2012: 20, 27; Turin et al. 2013). A bias towards the written word combined with the tendency of anthropologists to record and transcode oral traditions into textual form (Turin 2014) has resulted in the misrepresentation of oral literatures as simply verbatim transmissions of narratives across generations, and further contributes to the belief that such traditions are cruder than written literature (Finnegan 2012: 15-6). In reality, the difference between written and oral literature is the mode of transmission: oral literatures are more dependent on live (and increasingly online) performances and are therefore characterised by greater variability as performers improvise and innovate, often in active dialogue with their audience (Finnegan 2012: 10-2). In contrast to the unchanging physical form of written texts which can be transmitted unaltered across time and space (albeit subject to much reinterpretation), the composition and dissemination of oral literature—much like music and dance—is dependent upon and inextricably linked to the performative context (Finnegan 2012: 4-5, 14). While this difference in tangibility has led to academic and popular assumptions regarding the supposed objectivity and verifiability of written historical narratives, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2015) critiques such perspectives as holding a positivist bias that fails to account for how power enters into the process of constructing historical narratives. This results in conceptions of history that present a ‘fixed past’, whereas the ‘truth’ of history is actually intimately tied to the present even in the case of written records.

Working through the dichotomies: primitive/civilised and oral/literate

Early anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1878) suggested that writing gave a permanence to language that was fundamental for understanding a particular society’s thought processes and its capacity for development. For late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century anthropologists, literacy represented a necessary precondition for a culture to be considered a ‘Civilization’ within the monodirectional and evolutionary logic that served to organise all societies (Morgan 1878: 3, 11; Hsu 1964: 169; Akinnaso 1981: 180). While scholars would later criticise their predecessors for assuming radical cognitive differences between literate and oral peoples, many anthropologists nevertheless felt comfortable asserting that written language had a deterministic influence on an individual’s analytical processes and capacities (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Ong 2012: 8-9).

This position is known as the ‘universalist’ or ‘autonomous’ model of literacy. It understands writing to be a technology reliant on generalised skills and language practices that in turn impact an individual’s linguistic, cultural, and cognitive potential (Collins 1995: 75; Akinnaso 1981: 187; Ong 2012: 77-8, 81). Some observers, like Walter Ong, travelled far with this perspective, asserting that writing is an inevitable, even ‘absolutely necessary’, technology for the development of science, history, and philosophy; a precondition for nuanced understandings of art and language without which humans will not achieve their full cognitive potential (2012: 14-5).

According to this logic, and given their lack of written records, oral societies were presumed to be homeostatic, that is, internally and perpetually stable, operating with a model of cultural transmission incapable of distinguishing between history and myth, past and present. Literate societies, on the other hand, could draw on written records and were thus positioned to make objective distinctions between ‘what was and what is’ (Goody & Watt 1963: 308, 310-1; Ong 2012: 8; Faris 1925: 712). In this conceptualisation, literacy was a means for expanding a society’s capacity for rational and abstract thought (Langlois 2006: 18; Akinnaso 1981: 164; Ong 2012: 102) and if properly harnessed, could catalyse socioeconomic and cognitive development (Collin 2013: 29; Akinnaso 1981: 164, 169).

Research on oral literature has challenged the prevailing and myopic assumptions in the autonomous model of literacy. Comparative research shows that technologies like writing are better conceptualised as shaping, rather than determining, our collective and individual recollections (Martindale et al. 2018: 198; Scribner & Cole 1981). Archaeological evidence, for example, corroborates thousands of years of layered histories as recorded in the oral narratives of Tsimshian people in British Columbia, Canada, while members of the Thangmi community in Nepal disrupt the presumed path of orality to literacy by incorporating digital technologies as part of their techniques of recording oral history (Martindale et al. 2018: 199-200, 202). The centrality of oral performances to the recitation of origin myths by ritual practitioners is internalised by members of the Thangmi community who view orality as a source of strength and as essential to their ethnic identity (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 82-3). As a consequence, writing down the oral performances of Thangmi ritual practitioners can be seen as undermining the very feature that makes these narratives identifiably Thangmi (Shneiderman 2015: 83, 87). Alternative technologies, such as audio and video, present a more desirable means of documenting and transmitting oral narratives for practitioners who thereby retain control over the message, with multimedia helping to emphasise distinctiveness and variation, avoiding the pitfalls of standardisation through the mediation of the written word (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 87, 96).

Christine Helliwell’s work in a Borneo Dayak community further demonstrates the diverse understandings encoded in oral literature by contrasting two distinct narrative genres, the sensangan and the cerito Nosi (2012: 52). Both of these genres are considered high prestige art forms of storytelling and recount epic poems of great heroes, often taking many hours to complete. Despite this general similarity, they differ in a number of significant ways: the sensangan are a corpus of tales about the culture-hero and trickster Koling that are each narrated as a slow song with a drum accompaniment, whereas cerito Nosi are standalone stories chanted quickly without any accompanying instruments (Helliwell 2012: 54, 57). The different pacing and styles by which these two distinct genres are performed affect how the audience experiences and interprets their content. The slow pace of the sensangan allows for the content to be discussed by the audience as it is performed, while the rapid chanting of the cerito Nosi necessitates focussed attention. In contrast to theories that present oral societies as incapable of distinguishing between myth and history, the unique performative styles of these genres illustrate important differences in how their content is interpreted, impacting the level of truth attributed to the stories by the audiences (Helliwell 2012: 53, 60).

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) challenges the assumed necessity of written language for scientific knowledge with a description of the Onondaga Nation’s Thanksgiving Address. This ancient practice of expressing gratitude to the environment speaks to the relationship that the Onondaga Nation has to the natural world (Kimmerer 2013: 107-8, 111). As speakers name and thank each species in turn for their roles in sustaining the environment, the structure of the Thanksgiving Address serves as a scientific inventory of ecological information, ‘a lesson in Native science’ that unifies the speaker and audience in a collective reflection on the ethic of responsibility towards the land (Kimmerer 2013: 108, 110, 115). Crucially, much of the power of the Thanksgiving Address comes from its oral performance which, in contrast to a written document that may be skimmed, requires the audience to actively participate for the duration of its lengthy recitation and creates the space to contemplate one’s relationship to the environment (Kimmerer 2013: 110). Kimmerer asserts that Indigenous knowledge practices like the Thanksgiving Address can complement Western science’s focus on matter by interweaving Indigenous understandings of respect and gratitude, and by positioning ecological restoration as a return to reciprocal relations between humans and the environment (2013: 257, 263).

In short, while some communities may not have a long history of written texts, this does not imply that their histories and perspectives are solely confined to the present (Martindale et al. 2018: 205). Moreover, the assertion of the autonomous model that literacy results in improved rationality remains questionable when considering how real-time, in vivo oral performances allow for audience members to challenge and seek clarification from performers (Finnegan 2012: 14). This is no new realisation: Socrates himself identified that an inherent flaw of written language was its inflexibility. Seen in this light, the written word can hinder deeper understanding because a reader cannot challenge or seek clarification from a text. By definition, written words just keep repeating themselves (Wolf 2017: 76; Plato 2002).

Even though evolutionary theories of literacy fell out of fashion and remain unsupported by ethnographic evidence, literacy has continued to be used to distinguish between human cultures (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Akinnaso 1981: 164). In particular, the imagined capacity for social organisation, socioeconomic growth, and cognitive development that some acquaint with literacy continue to situate the terms ‘non-literate’, ‘pre-literate’, or ‘oral’ alongside a reduced level of technological development in ways that are unfortunate (Berndt 1960: 64; Akinnaso 1981: 164). While not connected to the earlier evolutionary theories, the technological determinism implicit in the autonomous model of literacy assumes negative consequences for both cognition and society in the absence of literacy. Furthermore, the standards by which certain language practices are recognised as constituting ‘literacy’ must be considered in light of the colonial histories that have informed those very standards.

As part of the colonial project, languages were historically equated with race, with non-European languages and their speakers categorised as inferior to Europeans and their language practices (Rosa & Flores 2017: 623-4). These racio-linguistic ideologies continue today in forms such as ‘standardised languages’ which can legitimate the language practices of White speakers by positioning their language practices as the ‘norm’ or ‘ideal’ to be used in written texts (Rosa 2016: 163, 165; Baker-Bell 2020), thus devaluing and discounting the diversity of reading and writing practices that exist outside of this narrow standard (Rosa 2019: 187-8). For this, the autonomous model of literacy has been critiqued as merely replacing one racist and evolutionary dichotomy (primitive/civilised) with another: preliterate/literate or oral/literate (Akinnaso 1981: 164; Langlois 2006: 16-7; Collin 2013: 29-30).

Literacy as a sociocultural practice

From the 1980s, anthropologists grew dissatisfied with the essentialising dichotomies that had characterised mid-twentieth century theories and that posited a ‘great divide’ between societies. Such simplistic binaries failed to explain the complexity and rationality present in oral societies (Collin 2013: 30; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382), not to mention the many varied ways in which oral and written language are used (Stephens 2000: 11; Dickinson 1994). In response, scholars shifted their inquiries from broad societal-level analyses to the local and granular, proposing a sociocultural model in which literacy was better understood as a collective activity with varied potentials dependent upon how a particular community incorporated writing into their processes (Collin 2013: 30; Street 2013: 54). Referred to as ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS), this movement made use of more ethnographic approaches and embraced a cultural understanding of literacy as a practice embedded within, and defined by, institutional settings and everyday life (Collins 1995: 80-1; Stephens 2000: 10).

In addition, NLS rejected the idea that writing was no more than a general skillset easily transposable onto different contexts. For example, the ubiquity of keyboard writing in certain societies has meant that ‘computer literacy’ has supplanted analogue forms of literacy practices to such an extent that being ‘computer illiterate’ is seen as equivalent to being illiterate (Blommaert 2008: 5). NLS proposes a relativistic, dynamic, and situated model that recognises diverse forms of ‘literacies’ embedded within particular cultural contexts, norms, and discourses. These vary across time and space and are tied to how individuals construct their identities (Collins 1995: 75-6; Street 1997: 48; Riemer 2008: 444).

NLS is therefore understood to advocate a culturally relativistic approach (Collin 2013: 32), with aligned research demonstrating how textual practices are influenced by cultural logics and beliefs (Riemer 2008), such as the use of magical writing in Ecuador as means of critiquing state power (Wogan 2004), or the strict norms regulating the creation and dissemination of textual documents to preserve community secrecy in a New Mexico Pueblo community (Debenport 2015). The NLS approach has encouraged anthropologists to reflect on how their own level of literacy in the ‘texts’ of the communities with whom they work may affect their interpretations. Researchers often ‘normatively reorganize’ texts, silencing the original author’s voice (Blommaert 2008: 10-1), while in other cases have little or no reading ability in the predominant written language of the communities with whom they work, calling into question the kinds of knowledge represented in anthropologist’s publications (Allen 1992; Ortner 1992).

A key element of NLS is the realisation that literacy functions as an ideology, and that the uses, meanings, definitions of, and efforts to control literacy policies are embedded within wider relations of power (Street 1997: 48; Wogan 2003: 66; Blommaert 2008: 6). Determinist assumptions inherent in the autonomous model of literacy cultivated a conviction within development organisations that literacy was a panacea for all social ills, leading to the entanglement of literacy programs with free-market neoliberal capitalism (Street 1997: 49; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 384). Targeting Indigenous peoples and other marginalised populations, development-minded literacy programs remain tethered to earlier missionary activities which sought to ‘civilise’ non-Western peoples through education and religious conversion (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Wogan 2004: 62-4; Besnier 1995).

Literacy interventions across the Global South during the mid-twentieth century, while distinct from the ethnocentric drive of missionary literacy programs, nevertheless upheld colonial ideologies through a ‘liberal paternalism’ that identified literacy as the path to progress and modernity (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 383). In such thinking, literacy was a mechanism for moral transformation, constituting new subjectivities in the context of modern capitalist states, with schools serving as key institutional sites for integrating individuals into the nation (Collins 1995: 82; Riemer 2008: 450). ‘Schooled literacy’, that is, standardised writing practices as transmitted in educational settings, replaced diverse literacies that were present in other social spheres (Collins 1995: 82). These diverse literacies might have included the reading of religious texts for ritual purposes, the use of books in children’s play (such as word games and puzzles), or reading stories aloud in the home (De la Piedra 2009: 116, 121; O’Neil 2007: 172). María Teresa De la Piedra’s research on the multiple forms of ‘hybrid literacy practices’ that coexist within the rural Urpipata community in Peru demonstrates that the replacement of alternative literacies with schooled literacy is not necessarily total; individuals continue to mix and appropriate Quechua and Spanish literacy for use in different contexts and to fulfil their own purposes (2009: 110, 112–3).

Jan Blommaert (2008) classifies alternative literacies under the umbrella term ‘grassroots literacy’, which he applies to a broad range of ‘non-elite’ literacy practices. These forms of writing deviate from standardised norms of spelling and speech and can usually only be interpreted within a local context (Blommaert 2008: 7, 193). Graffiti is an example of a grassroots literacy in which reading and decoding a script is only accessible to other graffiti writers (Blommaert 2008: 193). Some scholars consider schooled literacy to be part of an elite-led movement against grassroots literacies, seeking to establish a particular literacy standard as foundational for citizenship and the moral order, contributing to the problematic use of the term ‘officially literate’ as a necessary requirement to access social standing (Collins 1995: 82-3; Erickson 1984: 525; Rosa 2019; Baker-Bell 2020).

Laura Ahearn (2004) and Frances Riemer (2008) examine the effects of development-minded literacy programs in Nepal and Botswana. In Junigau, Nepal, Ahearn studied women’s newly acquired literacy skills in the 1990s in the context of the writing of love-letters and suggested that a growth in romantic elopements indicated that learning to write love-letters impacted how villagers conceptualised their agency (2004: 306). In Ahearn’s analysis, the dominant discourses of Nepali society encouraged a moral connection between the acquisition of literacy skills and increased development, capitalism, independence, and agency (2004: 309, 311). However, in connecting literacy to a belief that romantic love was integral to modern life (Ahearn 2004: 308, 312), development-minded literacy education in Junigau may have inadvertently resulted in women’s disempowerment, as those who chose to elope often lost the support of their natal families. Demonstrating how women who later faced difficulties in their marriage had few options, Ahearn challenges an instrumental view that positions literacy as a necessarily positive capacity that inevitably leads to greater empowerment (2004: 313).

Riemer’s research into the meanings ascribed to literacy in Botswana demonstrates that while adult learners may frame their path to literacy as coming to see ‘the light’, the greater sense of personal empowerment they experience as a result also leads to their increased participation in the modern global capitalist system (2008: 449-50, 458). Riemer describes a cultural model in which strong associations exist between literacy, education, and moral transformation, and the acquisition of literacy skills through schooling involves reconstructing one’s identity to be a full member of a modern community (2008: 451-2). Aside from the technical skills associated with literacy, the transformed sense of self produced through school-based literacy programs further situated these new readers in a nexus of discursive power relations constructed by ideologies of race, Christian morality, and political economy (Riemer 2008: 456-8). In this analysis, the desire for literacy—and the sense of personal empowerment that students feel—can be read as a ‘discipline’ in the Foucauldian sense in which literacy generates compliance and functions as a tool for assimilation (Riemer 2008: 458).

An anthropology of literacy education

The aversion to generalisation that informs NLS’s descriptivist approach to literacy limits its effectiveness as a scalable educational model, running the risk of generating little more than collected anecdotes about diverse forms of literacies (Besnier 1999: 141; Stephens 2000: 19). While acknowledging the importance of contextuality to literacy, Kate Stephens argues that some aspects of literacy skills development are not context-specific and can indeed be generalised, and that there is educational value in understanding how writing can be recontextualised and interpreted across time and space (2000: 12-3). Furthermore, while superior cognitive processing is not necessarily a consequence of being literate, there is increasing evidence indicating that literacy does support cognitive potentialities that cultivate skills like metalinguistic knowledge: that is, knowledge about language that may be impossible to harness without the linguistic objectification associated with literacy (Stephens 2000: 14, 16-7; Wolf 2017; Olson 1977; Olson 1994). A ‘literacy for education’ approach can balance the action-oriented concerns of educators with a greater anthropological recognition of context by offering language instruction for specific contexts and purposes (Stephens 2000: 20-1). So managed, the problem of shoehorning strict definitions of literacy into a narrow standard can be offset by expanding the range of practices that qualify as ‘literate’, thus diversifying the writing contexts for which students are prepared (Akinnaso 1981: 167; Street 2013: 60).

H. Samy Alim et al.’s (2011) examination of Hip Hop literacies offers an example of how the cultural relativism of NLS can mesh with the development of effective pedagogical models. While the Black English language used in Hip Hop has been criticised as ‘illiterate’, scholars point out that the grammatical prescriptivism of ‘standard English’ is itself artistically limiting and an example of linguistic racism that devalues the language and literacy practices of marginalised communities (Alim et al. 2011: 121; Baker-Bell 2020: 15-6). Recognising the normalising power of ‘schooled literacy’ in defining standards of educability (Collins 1995: 83; Erickson 1984: 531; Rosa & Flores 2017: 626-7), Alim et al. advocate for literacy education that locates its goals within the lived realities of its students by making it ‘ILL’, namely: Intimate, Lived, and Liberatory (2011: 134). Through Hip Hop, young people introduce their own cultural standards and prioritise ‘ill-legitimate’ artistic creativity, challenging dominant ideals of correctness by defining their textual practices as ill, or skilled (Alim et al. 2011: 122).

‘Ill-literacy studies’ helps to frame American educational institutions as illiterate on account of their inability to decode the culturally rich and linguistically complicated experiences of their students. This institutional illiteracy results in schools failing to take advantage of the range of opportunities for true learning (Alim et al. 2011: 122, 132). Drawing on NLS, which situates literacies within the politics of unequal power relations, identity formation, and state authority in modern capitalist nation-states (Alim et al. 2011: 133; Collins 1995: 81-2), ill-literacy studies redefines ‘being literate’ as a capacity to critique dominant ideologies and reclaim one’s own voice from the constraints of institutional structures and practices (Alim et al. 2011: 133).

Pedagogical strategies such as Alim et al.’s (2011) ill-literacy studies align with what April Baker-Bell calls ‘Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy’, which provide students with the opportunity to learn about and through Black English, thereby educating them into a ‘Black Linguistic Consciousness’ that can heal the traumas of ‘Anti-Black Linguistic Racism’ while simultaneously nurturing their language abilities (2020: 8, 34). Critical pedagogies of this type are crucial as they enable students and educators to see past the narrow-minded binary of the ‘street’ versus the ‘school’ that forces students’ identities, communicative repertoires, and literacy skills into contradictory categories that reproduce problematic hierarchies (Rosa 2019: 207-8). In this re-framing, students are not marginalised minorities but rather complicated individuals capable of giving voice to their lived realities through the use of ill-literate texts, without necessarily shunning the acquisition of traditional literacy skills (Alim et al. 2011: 134, 136, 140). So viewed, ill-literate pedagogies help to nurture metaliteracy and greater awareness in learners, uplifting their social consciousness beyond dominant ideologies of language and identity (Alim et al. 2011: 140).

Multilingualism and literacy education

As processes associated with globalisation bring ever-greater numbers of multilingual students into schools, literacy researchers face the difficult task of making sense of the specific challenges and opportunities that multilingualism introduces into the classroom environment (Hornberger 2003: 4). Beginning in the late 1980s, researchers identified a glaring gap between the extensive literature on multilingualism and writings on literacy. In response, a theoretical approach was developed for understanding how these two aligned phenomena interact with and shape one another (Hornberger 2003: 4). The concept of ‘biliteracy’ is the result of these inquiries and offers an analytical framework applicable to any occurrence of reading or writing in which more than one language features (Hornberger 2003: 5).

The biliteracy model does not characterise multilingualism and literacy through a binary perspective that (re)produces oppositions like first language (L1) vs. second language (L2), monolingual vs. bilingual, or literate vs. oral. Instead, it understands any single biliterate practice to be entangled within each of these states simultaneously. In this way, the biliteracy model conceptualises states of language as multiple, intersecting, and nested continua that together constitute a complex whole (Hornberger 2003: 4-5; Hornberger & Link 2012: 264). Briefly, these continua describe the media through which different languages are used; the contexts in which language and literacy practices are enacted and evaluated; and the content expressed by language and literacy practices; that is, their styles, genres, and the perspectives they communicate. In contrast to the compartmentalising and decontextualising perspectives that typically inform educational policies and practices, the biliteracy model enables researchers and educators to delve into multilingual settings and unpack how the development of biliterate skills occurs so that novel solutions in support of literacy education for multilingual learners may be imagined (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265; Hornberger 2003: 25).

Nancy Hornberger and Holly Link describe a scenario in which bilingual first grade students read an English language text while discussing it with one another in Spanish, and then respond to their teacher’s inquiries in English (2012: 269). The biliteracy model makes clear that, while the teacher’s acceptance of Spanish dialogue offsets obvious power dynamics and helps to validate students’ voices, the use of English as the sole language of instruction limits the possibilities for biliteracy development as Spanish is only permitted for oral communication (Hornberger & Link 2012: 270). Similarly, Melisa Cahnmann’s study of a grade nine Spanish-English classroom examines how correction and assessment strategies influence student resistance or acceptance of biliterate practices (2003: 191). During the research, Cahnmann learned that students would often draw upon their Spanish linguistic resources to aid them in the creation of English-language texts. For example, to assist herself in spelling the English word ‘people’, one student verbalised the Spanish phonemes of ‘PE-O-PE-LE’ [pronounced as ‘pay-oh-pay-lay’ in English] (Cahnmann 2003: 193). While some experts in second language acquisition believe that such inter-lingual transcoding should be discouraged, the biliteracy model considers any kind of transfer along the L1-L2 continuum to be an opportunity, because it reveals students’ strengths and identifies areas where teachers can focus their energy to support positive and impactful learning (Cahnmann 2003: 192-3).

The key insight of biliteracy is that interrelatedness between continua ensures that literacy and language skills can develop across and between different languages and literacies, with contextual factors determining and shaping specific manifestations (Hornberger 2003: 25). Stronger biliteracy skills will therefore emerge in environments that encourage students to draw on all points of the continua (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265). Crucially, this analytical framework is capable of recognising and incorporating students’ multilingual practices as part of a classroom’s learning resources, critiquing standard literacy norms while also producing alternative outcomes (Hornberger & Link 2012: 274; Cahnmann 2003: 189).

Re-imagining literacy in a digital world

The circulation of fast-changing information technologies and media in the twenty-first century introduces new aspects to established questions about what it means to be ‘literate’ in an overwhelmingly digital era (Wolf 2017: 219-20). Does the immediate access to vast amounts of information through Internet technologies change how people critically engage with texts (Wolf 2017: 222-3)? There is growing concern among researchers and educators that the shift from physical to digital texts may result in a reduction in the ability of young readers to analyse and think beyond the words they read, thus failing to perceive deeper meanings. In response, literacy research is moving towards understanding how students can become ‘multitextual’, that is, proficient in reading and analysing different kinds of texts in adaptable ways to harness the benefits of both print and digital media (Wolf 2017: 223, 226-7).

Multimodality is a theoretical approach to meaning-making that stems from social semiotics: the study of the social life of signs and symbols (Jewitt 2006: 3). In this framework, ‘signs’ refer to the association of meaning to a form; ‘modes’ describe the different forms in which signs are constructed (for example, an image versus a written word); and ‘media’ applies to the ways in which modes disseminate their signs (for example, ink on paper, computer screens, etc.) (Heydon 2007: 39). A social semiotic approach to the sociality of language recognises that linguistic meanings are constantly reproduced through people’s sociocultural work and are not simply a pre-existing code waiting to be activated (Jewitt 2006: 3). Multimodality extends this theory to suggest that the production of meaning is further influenced by any modes through which signs are communicated (Jewitt 2006: 3). In reconceptualising literacy as ‘multimodal design’, the analytical lens offered by multimodal literacy takes the focus away from the written word and broadens the frame to examine how people make meaning through the many modes and media to which they have access (Heydon 2007: 38; Jewitt 2006: 8).

Applying the multimodal literacy framework to new digital technologies can illustrate how digital media are reconfiguring our understanding of writing in generative ways (Jewitt 2006: 107). In particular, the dominance of writing is being decentred through digital technologies that harness images, speech, music, and moving elements to communicate (Jewitt 2006: 108; Heydon 2007: 39). In the classroom, there is increasing reliance on forms of ‘edutainment’; that is, games, computer applications, and videos used for educational purposes, in place of strictly textual resources (Jewitt 2006: 6-7, 108). The influence of the digital screen on the meaning of texts is so great that, even when it is used to render the written word, as in an e-book, it mediates how we encounter and interpret the text we read. For example, book layout is often restructured to fit a screen, altering how a textual narrative is represented on a page (Jewitt 2006: 108-9). Carey Jewitt asserts that new digital media are changing what literacy means so profoundly that it may soon no longer be possible to define reading solely as the act of interpreting the written word (2006: 123). Instead, readers will have to make sense of all the features that have been enabled by the capabilities of the digital screen as they navigate the meanings communicated by a screen’s multimodal design (Jewitt 2006: 123). Effectively ‘reading’ a digital text, then, also requires understanding how the design of images and writing contribute to the realisation of the text’s own meaning (Jewitt 2006: 136).

Conclusion

This entry offers a review of how literacy has been theorised in anthropology since the first days of the discipline. While perspectives have changed over the years, with definitions of literacy fluctuating between opposing frameworks of technological determinism and cultural relativism, the underlying theme remains unaltered: the development of literacy represents one of the most significant innovations of human history.

Despite more than a century’s worth of research on literacy, questions about how humans shape literacy and how literacy shapes humans continue to be actively discussed. The rapid development of new information and media technologies has only accentuated the conversation. As new media invite novel possibilities for encoding and decoding meaning, which in turn result in changes in language practices, communication, and society, literacy will continue to be a prominent subject of anthropological research. If the history of anthropological theory is any indication of its future, the role of literacy in shaping the human condition will be ardently debated as its function is productively reinterpreted.

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Note on contributors

Mark Turin is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, cross-appointed between the departments of Anthropology and the Institute of Critical Indigenous Studies. His research is situated in the fields of language documentation, reclamation, and revitalisation with regional focuses on the Himalaya and the Pacific Northwest of Canada. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2262-0986

Prof. Mark Turin, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. mark.turin@ubc.ca

Robert Hanks is a graduate student in the department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research examines language and literacy education in multilingual contexts and the decolonisation of pedagogy. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3788-321X

Robert Hanks, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. rhanks@alumni.ubc.ca

Mind

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 17:37:15 +0000

Tanya Marie Luhrmann

Stanford University

Initially published 2 Oct 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21mind

Abstract:

There is something phenomenologically basic about the human experience of awareness, or consciousness. All ethnographies describe people who think, feel, imagine, hope, and are aware. Yet anthropologists have shown that different social worlds understand mental life (we will call this ‘mind’) in different ways. Different cultures imagine mental life differently, both in what thought can do, and how one might draw the boundary between mind and world. These culturally different understandings have real social consequences. They affect the way that people imagine what it is to be a self, the way they understand time and history, the way they understand spirits and rituals, the way they experience illness and health. More recently, anthropologists have begun to use the phrase ‘anthropology of mind’ to describe the comparative exploration of specific dimensions in the way the mind-world boundary is imagined. For example, they have observed that in some social worlds, one finds mental ‘opacity’. In those social worlds, people understand that one cannot know—or, should not presume to know—what someone else is thinking or intending. Another dimension is ‘porosity’. In some social worlds, the mind-world boundary is imagined to be permeable, so that thoughts pass into the world directly, and are potent. Someone can feel vulnerable because a witch, for example, thinks envious thoughts—and those thoughts are understood to be powerful enough to enter someone else’s body and harm it. They have different views about who or what has a mind. It turns out that the way we think about the mind in the West is culturally peculiar.

Introduction

The basic question of an anthropological approach to mind is whether there are culturally different representations of mental life, broadly construed, and if so, whether and how they matter. (There is another, related question, which is whether people in different social worlds have different cognitive orientations; that is a more psychological question and will not be discussed in detail here.) The question starts with the presumption that the experience of conscious awareness—thinking, feeling, reflecting, knowing, hoping, desiring and so forth—is phenomenologically basic for humans, but that different social worlds often represent this domain of experience differently. Some social worlds sharply distinguish mind from body; others do not. Some treat thoughts as potent, so that one person’s angry private thought can hurt another person’s body directly; others do not. Some treat the mind as the source of identity, so that what someone thinks defines who they are; others do not. Some believe that personal feelings should be shared widely and easily; others do not. For some, the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain, and it is the brain that is more real; for others, the mind is part of a spiritual reality more real than the everyday world. The anthropological approach to mind sets out to understand what we can know about these cultural differences in the representation of mind, and how those differences affect those who hold them.

Conceptions of the mind in early ethnographies

The observation that different social worlds imagine mental life differently was one of the great achievements of early anthropology and the source of some of its most interesting debates, although these observations were not always made systematically or explicitly. The first point to be made was that different representations of mental life did exist. One of the most important essays here was by a Frenchman, Marcel Mauss. His 1938 essay, ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self’ argued that across time and space, everywhere, something like a self is present, but it is not always expressed by the concepts ‘me’ or ‘I’, (‘moi’ or ‘je’). Everywhere, that is, humans are aware of themselves as individual beings: as Mauss writes, ‘There has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical’ (1985 [1938]: 3). At the same time, they were not always aware of being aware. All humans, Mauss argued, had a sense of the moi, a sense of ‘me-ness’, but in different societies, with different systems of law, religion, customs, social structure, and mentality, they conceive of this moi in different ways. Among the Zuni, the Pueblo Indians in North America studied by Frank Cushing and Matilda Coxe Stevenson at the end of the nineteenth century, a person is first and foremost someone who occupies a role within the clan (Cushing 1896). A Zuni person’s sense of individual uniqueness receded against their sense of prescribed status, the way an athlete in a team sport can find that their sense of self feels so much less important than who they are on their team. One is first and foremost a ‘personage’, as Mauss put it: a name, a title, a placeholder for those who will come later. Among the Kwakiutl, another indigenous group in North America, studied in the early twentieth century by Franz Boas among others, every stage of life was named and designated, with many represented by masks used in sacred rituals (Boas 1921). Among communities like the Zuni and the Kwakiutl, people are imagined primarily through their definite location in the social whole—mother, child, ancestor, and so forth, cycling through their roles like leaves on a forest floor. Mauss argued that the idea that a person’s private, personal thoughts and feelings make them who they are is really quite recent. In fact, he claimed that even in the West, the psychological self—the person defined by personal thoughts and feelings—did not become of paramount importance until the nineteenth century.

Another French anthropologist, Maurice Leenhardt, provided an extended ethnographic example of a non-Western representation of inner mental life. Leenhardt had spent two decades among the Houailou speakers (he calls them the Canaque) who lived in the western Pacific archipelago known in English as New Caledonia, first as a missionary and then as an anthropologist, at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his classic ethnography, Do Kamo, Leenhard argued that the Canaque avoid the kind of analytic categories that came easily to his French readership. For them, ‘thought springs from viscera’ (1979 [1947]: 7). What he seemed to mean by this was that they did not have many abstract words. Before the missionaries came, he wrote, the Canaque did not use words to refer to thought or to thinking. They didn’t really have a term for the body either, nor did they talk as if anything happened ‘inside’ the body. ‘Man and world, the living and the dead, gods and totems, each plays its own role, but each lacks distinct boundaries’, Leenhard explained (1979 [1947]: 74). People have some sense of these distinctions, but their distinctness is not culturally meaningful. The Canaque did not have a sense that, for example, that time passes in a way that is the same for all. Nor did they clearly seem to separate myth from the empirical everyday. Leenhardt wrote that instead, the Canaque lived in ‘a reality where the mythic forms of life are visible to the eye, and where [Canaque] verbal expressions have a mythic tone in which myth can be perceived as an experienced reality’ (1979 [1947]: 19). Leenhardt told a now-famous story: that after decades of talking to the Canaque about Christianity, he asked them if he and his wife had brought the spirit to their way of thinking. No, they replied, we have always had the spirit: ‘What you have brought us is the body’ (1979: 164).

Yet another extended ethnographic example came from Godfrey Lienhardt’s Divinity and experience (1961). That book set out to understand the religion of the Dinka of Southern Sudan, with whom Lienhardt had lived for around three years in the late 1940s. The Dinka are a pastoralist people who move between permanent and wet-season settlements as the Nile river valley swells with rain. Lienhardt was fascinated by what he calls ‘symbolic action’: that, for example, a man hurrying home later than he wished might tie a tuft of grass to delay the meal at the journey’s end. Lienhardt’s ethnographic goal was to explain that this is not a magical act: ‘No Dinka thinks that by performing such an action he has actually assured the result he hopes for’ (1961: 283). The symbolic action, he wrote, is not a substitute for practical action, but a preparation for it. The person tying the knot makes an external representation of a mental intention: a model, as the author put it, of their hopes and desires. Symbolic actions do not change historical events. They change the way we prepare for and react to them.

All well and good: this sounds like something secular Western readers might say. But Lienhardt also laid out a local understanding of mind that, he argued, would have made symbolic action feel more real. He held that the Dinka had no conception of a domain of thought and feeling inside of them which symbolic action might effect: ‘The Dinka have no conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular modern conception of the “mind” as mediating and, as it were, storing up experiences of the self’ (1961: 149). Dinka culture did not model the mind as separate from the world. Lienhardt writes:

So it seems that what we should call in some cases the ‘memories’ of experiences, and regard therefore as in some way intrinsic and interior to the remembering person and modified in their effect upon him by that interiority, appear to the Dinka as exteriorly acting upon him (1961: 149).

You could not say to a Dinka person that a dream was ‘only’ a dream, or that an experience was ‘only’ psychological. ‘They do not make the kind of distinction between the psyche and the world which would make such interpretations significant for them’ (1961: 149). For those who hold such representations, symbolic action is more powerful. The doer of the action has fewer resources with which he can dismiss its efficacy as only a thought in the mind or only a dream.

Early anthropologists did not just show that representations of mental life were more or less abstract. They also argued that people in different social worlds thought differently about mental causation. One of the more forceful arguments was made by another French philosopher-anthropologist, Lucian Lévy-Bruhl. In How natives think (1979 [1926]), he argued that people who were not literate, and who lived in small scale, traditional societies (he called them ‘primitive’) imagined thought as potent in its own right. Such people imagined themselves as participating in the external world, and the external world as participating in their minds and bodies. A man might believe, for example, that his enemies would have power over him if they simply knew his name; he might believe that his dream was a visitation by a real and external spirit. Lévy-Bruhl called such an orientation ‘mystical’ and he described it as governed by ‘the law of participation’ in which objects are ‘both themselves and other than themselves’ (1979 [1926]: 76). He also called it ‘prelogical’. In the modern West, he thought, people define reality as independent of what they think and feel: ‘Our perception is directed toward the apprehension of an objective reality, and this reality alone’ (1979 [1926]: 59). Non-modern people, he argued, imagined their thinking as more entangled in the world. At this point, Lévy-Bruhl was more focused on what he took to be the mistaken thinking of the pre-modern world, and confused ideas about what was real, than on a different representation of the mind. These days, readers might find his evolutionist language to be dated and inappropriate. The question he raised—whether non-literate people in small societies might think about thought differently—is still important.

At the end of his life, in the posthumous Notebooks, Lévy-Bruhl abandoned the claim that so-called primitive people thought differently than modern Westerners do. (He did so in part because he had struck up a close relationship with Maurice Leenhardt.) Instead, he began to write of ‘a mystical mentality which is more marked and more easily observable among “primitive peoples” than in our own societies, but it is present in every human mind” (1975 [1949]: 100-1). The mystical mode of thought was both affective and conceptual, and had those features which he had attributed to ‘the law of participation’ all along: independence from ordinary space and time, logical contradictions (an object is both here and there), identity between objects and their arbitrary features (between hair cuttings and the person from whom they came, for example), and ‘the feeling of a contact, most often unforeseen, with a reality other than the reality given in the surrounding milieu’ (1975 [1949]: 108, 102). He thought that the mystical mode intermixed with everyday thought continually in our minds. He thought that the Kwakiutl switched back and forth between modes of thought as did the Catholic French. For him, the puzzle became, ‘How does it happen that these “mental habits” make themselves felt in certain circumstances and not in others?’ (1975 [1949]: 100).

This was in fact the puzzle that the English anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard focused on in Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (1937) based on fieldwork in southern Sudan in the late 1920s. Evans-Pritchard was quite struck by the social importance of ideas about witchcraft in the community in which he lived. The Azande spoke and acted as if some people had special abilities. The angry and envious thoughts of those people could make other people sick, hurt their crops, delay their travel, and in general cause bad things to happen in their lives. Ordinary people also used a variety of techniques to divine who was bewitching them and how to protect themselves magically against them. In his ethnography, Evans-Pritchard set out the conditions which he thought could help to explain why the Azande did not notice why witchcraft, as he put it, did not really exist—that envious and angry thoughts did not in fact have this supernatural power. He suggested many reasons for Azande failure to notice the futility of their magic, among them the failure to generalise across situations, the disinterest in experimental technique, and so forth. His work gave rise to extremely active debates about modes of thought, the difference between science and religion, the nature of rationality, and so forth. It also gave rise to active discussions about why witchcraft beliefs emerged in some social worlds rather than others. Mary Douglas’s important edited volume, Witchcraft: confessions and accusations (1970) concluded that witchcraft beliefs were more often found in agricultural societies where social conflict cannot be easily resolved by moving, as it can be in hunter-gathering groups. The authors also found them to be more frequent in communities where the transition to power—such as being headman of the village—is unstructured, rather than being determined straightforwardly by being the headman’s first born son, for example.

These and other classic texts share the basic intuition that human awareness is imagined differently in different settings—and thus, that there is something particular about the representation of mind in the modern West. This sense of mind as a thing, as the seat of the self, as the driver of action, as something inner which is separate from an outer world; these are Western preoccupations, not Kwatkiutl, Canaque, or Dinka preoccupations. And although the authors quoted above made their claims broad and thinly sketched, the basic point seems right. A remarkable collection published in 1981 by Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock, entitled Indigenous psychology, laid out clear comparative evidence of different representations of mental experience. One essay, by Signe Howell, demonstrated that the Malaysian Chewong had very few vocabulary words for inner states. The Chewong certainly experienced emotion—but their social concerns circled around suppressing those emotions, and around their fear that the person who did not suppress was vulnerable to ghosts, spirits, and malevolent forces. In 1998, a dense article by Angeline Lillard in Psychological Bulletin summarised decades of ethnographic work to argue that the model of mind most psychologists took for granted was in fact quite culturally peculiar. The time seemed ripe for a structured comparative exploration of representations of mind and their consequences.

And then the work stalled. Little was written about the anthropology of mind for some three decades. Work in the area likely stalled for two reasons. The first is the shift in the temper of the times. Post-1960s anthropology ushered in an intense guilt about replicating colonial power dynamics in scholarly practice, and psychologically-informed inquiry, focused as it was on the intimate and the private, seemed the most egregious of unmerited intrusions. Michel Foucault began to dominate anthropology and anthropologists began to diagnose power asymmetries and to doubt their own capacity to observe. The second was the publication of a book that seemed to be undergirded with the new theoretical sophistication of cognitive science. C.R. Hallpike’s Foundations of primitive thought (1979) reported an observation made repeatedly about adults not schooled with Western education: they fail the standard tasks that indicate advancement along the cognitive path to adulthood in the West. They systematically fail tasks devised by Western researchers (like Jean Piaget and Alexander Luria) to test whether a child has cognitively advanced from early childhood to middle childhood. For example, in one task, the person taking the test is shown a tall thin glass from which water is poured into a short, fat glass and then asked whether the second glass contains the same amount of water. Younger children say no; older ones say yes. Hallpike carried out his work in a Melanesian village. With apparent regret, he reported that his adult villagers failed most of these tasks. When water was poured from a tall thin glass into a short fat glass, they said that the amount of water had changed. Hallpike was careful, thorough, and, seemingly, knowledgeable. He concluded that his adult villagers had the cognitive abilities of a preschool Western child. Most anthropologists were horrified. Although his conclusions were roundly criticised (Shweder 1982, Hamill 1985, Cole 2013), many younger anthropologists backed away from the comparative study of mind altogether.

To be clear, this apparent failure is deeply interesting. It suggests that the tasks embed assumptions about how children should respond to adults, what it means when adults question children, and so forth (see Greenfield 1997). It also suggests that there may be ways in which people in non-Western settings organise information differently than those in Western settings. In fact, this was the deep question raised by Claude Lévi-Strauss across his work (see especially Tristes tropiques [1955] and Wild thought [1962]). He argued that people without writing thought about history quite differently, and that they imagined that the world was limited to what they knew, rather than assuming that the world had many things which they did not yet know (imagining a ‘closed’ rather than an ‘open’ society). He compared the way Westerners thought to an engineer constructing large new buildings, and he compared ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ thought to the work of a bricoleur, a do-it-yourself handyman who solves problems with materials at hand. Lévi-Strauss was very clear that the cognitive capabilities of people living in small-scale and non-literate societies were as sharp as those of people in the West. In recent years, as cognitive science has emerged within the academy, some anthropologists (and psychologists) have begun to explore the question of how culture affects cognitive analysis (see overviews by D’Andrade 1995, Strauss & Quinn 1997, Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan 2010). They find that people in non-literate, small scale societie are equally cognitively capable as those in the modern West, but that their analytic styles can be quite different.

The anthropology of mind

In recent years, interest in culturally different models of mind has re-emerged as psychologically-inclined anthropologists have encountered a mature cognitive science which is increasingly concerned with cultural diversity. These days the ‘anthropology of mind’ is an emerging field which studies the way different representations of thought, awareness, and the mental shape the way people move in their world. Rather than only looking at performances and tests and asking how culture shapes cognitive process, the anthropology of mind asks what leads to different conceptions about thought and thinking, and how those differences matter. Psychologists have used the phrase ‘theory of mind’ to refer to the ways that children learn to draw inferences about other people’s minds (Gopnik & Meltzoff 1996). The anthropology of mind tends to use the term ‘local theory of mind’ to describe the cultural ideas about the mind that shape the ways that they draw those inferences.

Current discussions tend to assume the following points. They assume that all humans make some kind of mind-body distinction, but map it differently in different social worlds. Anthropologists are sometimes tempted to use the work of Lienhardt, Leenhardt, Howell, and so forth as evidence that mind-body dualism is an aberration of Western society, and that in many other social worlds people simply do not make the distinction. Indeed, one anthropologist, Rita Astuti, has described the idea that non-Western people are free of dualistic thinking as ‘one of anthropology’s favorite claims about cognition’ (2001: 429). Here is an example: ‘Gahuku notions do not parallel, but collapse, Western mind/body categories. For them … the body swallows and contains the mind’ (Strathern 1994: 45). And another: ‘Many (if not most) non-Western peoples … simply do not recognize anything comparable to the social/biological distinction as articulated by Western discourse’ (Ingold 1991: 362).

In fact, they do. The Malagasy Vezo studied by Rita Astuti speak as if they do not distinguish between nature and nurture, what is inherited by the body and what is learned through the mind. They insist that birth parents do not have exclusive rights to, or authority over, a child, and that resemblance between parents and children arises out of rich social involvement. The adult who cares makes the child. And yet when adult Vezo were asked to reason about the characteristics of an adopted child—with a story about parents attacked by bandits, a child left alone in the bush, found by another couple and loved—they clearly distinguished between bodily characteristics and mental ones. Astuti showed that they thought that the body of the adopted child would surely resemble her birth parents, but her thought and opinions were more like to resemble those who had adopted her. In another study, the Vezo systematically attribute more thinking and feeling capacities to a dead man (does he miss his wife?) than bodily capacities (does he get hungry?), the more so if they were invited to think about religion (Astuti & Harris 2008). These observations are supported by systematic work in other groups (e.g. Bering 2004, Cohen et al. 2011; see Weisman et al. forthcoming). The evidence strongly suggests that most humans recognise the difference between mind (broadly conceived) and body (again, broadly conceived).

At the same time, the evidence suggests that in different social worlds people draw the distinction between mind and body in different ways. We now see efforts to understand systematically how this human terrain is mapped differently by different cultures. Phillipe Descola’s grand comparative study, Beyond nature and culture (2013), for example, seeks to show that the culturally different representations of the human-nature relationship shape basic mental schemas through which humans apprehend the world. Descola asks:

But what is the form of this structural subconscious? Is it present in each mind in the form of cognitive imperatives that remain tacit despite being culturally determined, or is it distributed among the properties of the institutions that reveal it to the observer? How is it internalized by each individual and by what means does it act in such a way that it may determine recurrent behavior patterns that can be translated into vernacular models? (2013: 96)

He answers, in effect, that we know that there are cognitive schemas common to all humans yet internalised differently through experience in a specific social and environmental setting (2013: 103). Some of these culturally shaped schemas, or models, are consciously available to those in the group, but some are not. ‘Many cultural models are not transmitted as bodies of precepts but are internalized little by little, without any particular teaching, although this does not prevent them from being objectified quite schematically when circumstances demand it’ (2013: 103). The models become ‘the tacit frameworks and procedures of objectivization by means of which actors in the system themselves organize their relations to the world and to Others’ (2013: 110). The rest of his book is an ethnographic argument that there are deep differences in representation that follow the logic he lays out. Descola describes his comparative account as explaining the way the nature-human relationship shifts around the world. One might as easily describe it as a comparison of who is held to have minds: no one but humans (the West); everything, including rocks (Amazonia and other animist societies); some plants and animals which represent humans, but not all (Australian indigenous peoples and other totemic groups); a more contingent, shifting relationship (in other settings).

The Mind and Spirit project, a Stanford-based comparative and interdisciplinary project under my direction, also set out to understand differences in models of mind across settings (Luhrmann 2020a). This project drew on the expertise of anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers to ask whether different understandings of ‘mind’, broadly construed, might shape or be related to the ways that people attend to and interpret experiences they deem spiritual or supernatural. We took a mixed-method, multiphase approach, combining participant observation, long-form semi-structured interviews, quantitative surveys among the general population and local undergraduates, and psychological experiments with children and adults. We worked in five different countries: China, Ghana, Thailand, Vanuatu and the US, with some work in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In each country, we included a focus on members of urban charismatic evangelical churches, with additional work in rural areas and in indigenous religious settings of local importance.

The Mind and Spirit Project showed systematically that there are local theories of mind by interviewing and surveying people with similar probes about thinking and feeling. In Thailand, we found that many people held what could be described as a ‘kaleidoscopic’ mind. Felicity Aulino (2020) argued that her participants generally understood phenomenal experience as contingent on a host of factors, from personal habits to the influence of others. Here, sensory perceptions themselves were understood as in part a consequence of prior action (karma) and were shaped by their moral import. In Ghana, Vivian Dzokoto (2020; see also Dulin 2020a) identified four dimensions of an Akan theory of mind: that the central function of the mind is planning, not identity; that one of the most salient qualities of the mind is its moral valence (the ‘bad minds’ of others are an ever-present potential threat to social harmony and personal wellbeing); that the mind is porous in nature and vulnerable to supernatural influences; and in many ways, what English speakers would describe as mind are instead depicted as bodily. In China, Emily Ng (2020) found an urban Shanghai world in which many had adopted a Western-style bounded mind, which was seen as an obstacle in knowing God, while in rural settings the mind was represented as porous and God’s word carried immediate authority. Here, people deeply feared supernatural evil. In Vanuatu, Rachel Smith (2020) found what she called an ‘empowered imagination’. She thought that inferences about others’ intentions were not accorded a privileged role in social interaction. People thought about knowledge, creativity, meaning and intention not as confined to an inner mental domain, but as discoverable within the body, and in the world. Sensations on the left side of the body were taken as bad omens; sensations on the right side as good opens. The sight of a native kingfisher was a portent of death. There was little sense of a boundary between mind and world. In this context, the US model of mind (see Brahinsky 2020, Luhrmann 2012, Taylor 2007), did stand out: highly bounded in the sense that thought is supernaturally inert, and non-opaque (Robbins even calls it ‘transparent’) with a sense that the mind is a thing, the seat of the self, the driver of action, something inner which is separate from an outer world.

Dimensions of mind: porosity and opacity

Two dimensions along which different representations of the mind have emerged in the literature are opacity and porosity. Opacity (Rumsey & Robbins 2008, Robbins 2021) is the idea that one cannot know what someone else is thinking, feeling, or intending. Opacity statements are known to be common in many South Pacific societies—among them, the Yap (Throop 2010), the Korowai (Stasch 2008), the Urapmin (Robbins 2004), the Samoa (Duranti 1988), and others. In such places, anthropologists have been startled when they asked what seemed to be a routine question about someone not present, or drew a banal inference about such a person—was she walking to the store, or to visit her parents—and had been told that no one knew but her. These assertions are startling because in the anthropologist’s home setting, people often talk freely about other people’s intentions and motivations. Statements that one cannot know are at the least statements that one should not attempt to know, but an active debate centres on the question of whether these opacity doctrines can actually inhibit the human capacity to infer what others are thinking (Keane 2018).

Porosity is the idea that thought can seep from the mind and act with supernatural power in its own right, and that minds are vulnerable to the powerful thoughts of others, sometimes with the power to affect the entered mind. Many of us have some porosity intuitions. These include the idea that a dream carries information about the world that the dreamer could not have known, or that something of a dead person—particularly a murdered one—lives on in the house when they are gone. Porosity was introduced by Charles Taylor (2007) but has been developed and taken up by others (Luhrmann 2020b, Dulin 2020b) to capture the observation that in many social worlds, gods speak into the mind, and someone’s anger and envy can be harmful to others. Porosity is about mental causation. One of the central questions here is about how deeply supernatural and religious claims are held in awareness: whether claims about the Holy Spirit entering the mind, or witchcraft envy affecting other bodies, are held with the same cognitive attitude as facts in the everyday world. At the moment, the answer seems to be that while these supernatural claims might be fervently believed, they are likely believed in differently (van Leeuwen 2014, Luhrmann 2020). Another question is whether anger and envy are generally treated as more potent than love. At the moment, the answer appears to be yes (Legare & Gelman 2008).

Both opacity and porosity have real-world consequences. The degree of the social commitment to opacity shapes whether and how much one person shares with another. Middle-class Americans, for example, often believe that they should share everything with others—that nothing, not even anger or envy, should be held secret. That tends to be a central commitment of psychotherapeutic thinking, which is not oriented to opacity. Emotions not expressed will fester and cause harm. Opacity also appears to affect the way children respond to classic theory of mind tasks which ask them to draw inferences about what another person will think. In these tasks, the child is shown something that a third person does not know—that a toy, which is hidden, has been moved, or that a crayon box contains candy. Then the child is asked whether that third person knows where the toy is, or what is in the box. The child ‘passes’ when the child say no. Most children do pass theory of mind questions, everywhere, at some point. But in the South Pacific, children tend to pass later than children in the US, and some adults never pass at all (Wassman, Träuble & Funke 2013). More subtle analyses lay out the way children draw inferences about other people—learning that other people can have different desires, different beliefs, different knowledge access, false belief, and hidden emotion. In different social worlds, children grasp these possibilities in different orders. In worlds which value opacity, children are slower in passing standard theory of mind tasks, but far quicker than US children in learning that people can feel things they do not show on their faces (Wellman 2013, Dixson et al. 2017).

Porosity, meanwhile, undergirds religion and magic, but is not the same as either. One can be religious without believing in prophecy, the healing power of prayer, and so forth. Both magical and religious systems have a host of specific limitations: the magician or priest must use particular words, be trained in particular ways, and so forth. But the core idea of magic is that the magician’s intention acts in the world. That is why Stanley Tambiah (1973) could call magic ‘performative’: the act entails its consequence. Porosity, too, has more specific real-world consequences. The Mind and Spirit Project (Luhrmann 2020, Luhrmann et al. 2021, Dulin 2020) found that the more people endorse porosity ideas, the more vivid their spiritual experiences will be. The more they endorse porosity ideas, the more they report voices, visions, unusual presences—a range of sensorially vivid events. It is as if the commitment to the supernatural power of thought allows immaterial events to be felt as more substantial. A specific model of the mind seems to alter our visceral sense of what is real.

Recent anthropological work also offers evidence that local thinking about thinking has an impact on human experience that seems fundamental, although for the most part, anthropologists have not yet systematically organised these and other efforts around the question of how models of the mind might be related to human experience. Let us consider two.

First, medical anthropologists have shown that different models of mental action alter the symptoms of disease. Those who struggle with despair but do not imagine sadness as a legitimate cause of illness (as, for example, in China) are more likely to focus on joint pains and to experience them more intensely than those who take the mind’s action to be central (Kleinman 1986; Kirmayer 2001; Kitanaka 2011). Those with psychosis may not experience the symptom of thought insertion—the sense that a thought has been placed in one’s mind by another being—if, like the Iban people of Borneo, they do not imagine the mind as a container but as an action of the body (Barrett 2004). If the mind is a place where feelings can be held down like a monster under a trap door, then you should help someone who is unhappy by talking with them: you need to help them see that they are the keeper of the keys. If the mind is the emergent epiphenomenon of a pulsating brain, unhappiness is best treated by a chemical that alter those neural connections (Luhrmann 2000; Lakoff 2005; Makari 2015).

Second, anthropologists and historians have shown that Christianity’s doctrine of ‘inner assent’, or the emphasis on the importance of belief, contributed to a new individualism, although they argue about when the new individualism became apparent. The famous sociologist Max Weber (1930) located one shift at the birth of Protestantism, with what he called its unprecedented inner loneliness. Anthropologist Webb Keane (2007) follows his lead in focusing on Reformation efforts to purify the relationship between human and God so that it was not tainted by people, practices, and even words. Louis Dumont (1980) saw individualism in early Christianity but then emphasised the Enlightenment and its aftermath as the point at which individualism became socially salient. Medieval historians identify a shift from more collective notions of personhood to modern individualism in the tenth and twelfth centuries, with the new emphasis on the inner propelled both by theology and by the emergence of guilds and other groups (Morris 1972, Bynum 1982). But the source of the idea of moral person as an individual lies in the Christian text itself: Romans 10:10 states, ‘For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified’. The main point is that the idea that inner thought is more important than outward behaviour—in conjunction with some other changes—may have changed the way people thought about who they were. Notions of the mind may thus be of great importance for understandings of personhood.

Conclusion: the understanding of mind in the West is peculiar

One important point that emerges from anthropological studies of the mind is that Western, post-Enlightenment ideas about the mind are unusual in the context of world cultures. By this I mean the idea that the mind is bounded (thoughts do not have supernatural power, and they do not leak of their own accord into the world and into someone else’s body) and that the mind is non-opaque (people think it is appropriate, even healthy, to ask about and seek to know what other people are thinking) are unusual when considered against ideas about the mind in other social worlds. I also mean that the idea that mind is sharply distinguished from the body and greatly important as a source of personal identity—that what you think and feel makes you ‘you’—is unusual. In psychology and medicine, these expectations about mental life are often taken to be straightforwardly natural, as the way mental life is experienced by all (see D’Andrade 1987). To be sure, some scholars have noted its historical specificity. They have explained the peculiarity of this Western model of the mind in different ways: as the effect of capitalism (Dumont 1992, Macfarlane 1993), Protestantism (Weber 1905, Keane 2008), secularism (Taylor 2007), and the idiosyncratic individualistic family structure of the West (Goody 1983, Henrich 2020). It is also clear that these ideas have political consequences. To count as fully human, a person has had to demonstrate full rationality—a goal thought for many years to be unachievable by persons with a different skin colour, and by women, among others. These matters deserve our attention. They are of profound social relevance.

Christina Toren (1993) was one of the first to call for a comparative anthropology of mind. Only once we grasp the degree to which our fundamental concepts of the mental shape our understanding can we appreciate that all humans are not only creatures with bodies but also with history, and that this history shapes us so deeply that, like a fish surrounded by water, we forget that it is there.

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Note on contributor

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor at Stanford University, in the Stanford Anthropology Department (and Psychology, by courtesy). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. She is the author of When God talks back (2012, Knopf) and How God becomes real (2020, Princeton University Press) and is currently at work on a book entitled Voices.

Divination

Felix Stein — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 12:54:34 +0000

Diana Espírito Santo

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Initially published 4 Apr 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19divination

Abstract:

Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The classic distinction is that of Cicero’s inspirational divination versus that which requires some form of trained skill. Oracles, seers, and prophets in Ancient Greece would be part of the first category, while African basket diviners, Yoruba priests of divination, and Mongolian shamans would be part of the latter category. Arguably most forms of divination require both inspiration and skill. Divination practices are often based in nature, taking form through its elements. It can be done with things, such as tea leaves, bones, nuts, and water, as well as cards, and other non-nature-based components. It can also be done in and as the body, such as with spirit possession, mediation, and dreams. Furthermore, there are spontaneous forms of divination, such as reading the movement of birds, and more formal ones requiring meticulous human input. But links to the divine can vary, with Western forms of divination often devoid of a tradition or theology behind the use of oracles. As a concept, divination has constituted one of anthropology’s primary tropes for representing its exotic ‘other’. While cognitive and symbolic-intellectualist approaches understand divination as a mostly explanatory device, critics signal to divination’s embodied, worldmaking, and also ontological character.

Introduction

A good first way of approaching divination is to consider it as a means of arriving at answers to a personal or social quandary. As such, divination may be diagnostic, in that it offers advice, guidance, rules, and taboos to be followed. It can also be forecasting, by predicting future events, and it may even be interventionist, by intervening in the receptor’s spiritual and physical health or indeed in their destiny.

That said, divination is also a ritual and a tradition, ‘constituted by, and constituting, an ongoing dialogue with more-than-human agents’ (Curry 2010: 114-115). Nature is traditionally fundamental to divination, whose indigenous metaphorical roots remit to natural phenomena such as stones, water, and animal behaviour (Curry 2010: 115). In some African and Afro-American religious communities, animal blood and other sacrifices are necessary to obtain enough vitality for the gods to manifest in an oracle, as a prelude to interpretation (exegesis) on the part of the diviner. Different concepts of temporality seem to apply in divination. To engage in ‘evil eye’ exorcisms and coffee-cup readings, or tasseography, in Greece, for instance, one has to be able to comprehend multiple temporalities. C. Nadia Seremetakis explains, ‘[l]inear, compartmentalized time advanced by modernity precludes any interpenetration of the present and the future’ (2009: 339), characteristic of divination. For instance, modernity’s temporality has little to say about dream signs from the future and how these penetrate the present, for dreamers. In modern times, the present is something impermeable (Seremetakis 2009), unaffected by the future-telling of oracles such as coffee-cup readings, which interpret the patterns on remaining coffee sediments.

Divination has been documented ethnographically as a phenomenon with an astounding variety of methods and techniques across cultures. In De Divinatione (2007), written in 44 BC, the Roman philosopher Cicero distinguishes between inspirational kinds of divination, such as visions or dreams, and those requiring some form of trained skill, such as astrology. Oracles, seers, or prophets in Ancient Greece would be considered part of the first lot. Indeed, healing sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world promoted forms of dream incubation for the premonition and recognition of ailments (Tedlock 2010). Techniques for skill-based divination tend to involve interpreting diviners, who can be socially recognised and highly respected as experts, or indeed shamans,[1] in their respective societies.

Divination can be done with things, such as consecrated or significant objects, bones, shells, stones, tea leaves, or cards. But it can also be carried out via bodies, cultivated through spirit mediumship and shamanism, in which there is a communicative prerogative to the possessed: messages come from the mouths of mediums but do not originate with them. A medium’s sensory and subjective information can remain relevant, such as with North American ‘channelers’ (Brown 1999) or with Latvian ‘sensitives’^[2](Skultans 2007). Alternatively, full possession can annihilate the medium’s consciousness altogether and they become pure vehicles for the divine (Wafer 1991). In some cases, trance by a witchcraft spirit can constitute evidence of foul play by others, whereby it qualifies as divination of sorts (see Fontein 2014, for a discussion of this in UK courts).

Links to the divine in divination vary. It can be buttressed by a cosmology of invisible entities, which an oracle mediates, such as with the orisha gods in the Yoruba cowry-shell divination (Bascom 1969). Yet it may also be experienced as a direct configuration of the cosmos as it is, such as with the Tarot, astrology, or numerology, which animate the cosmos with extra-human causal forces, but do not necessarily rely on the existence of a single god or deity. This second category includes conceptualizations by Jungian scholars such as Marie-Louise von Franz, for whom the unconscious is a repository of collective archetypal knowledge, that is catalysed perfectly through divination (1980).

Importantly, divination does not just belong to ‘traditional’ societies. In Western societies for example, experts often use divination without a cultural sanction of any kind, and indeed magical traditions are often associated with the upper classes (Greenwood 2009). Electronic and digital technology can also become important, such as when paranormal investigators contact the dead using white-noise generating machines known as Ghost or Divination Boxes, resulting in so-called Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) (Noory & Guiley 2011). Further, divination has something to say about representational concepts of mediation and transcendence in modern technology. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús has used the ethnography of transnational divinatory practices between Cuba and the United States (2015) to argue that electronic media, such as the Internet, or DVDs, enable the expansion not just of Afro-Cuban religion, but also of the movement and transit of its deities through electric currents. Modern media and spirit here cannot easily be analytically separated.

Some scholars have proposed divination is part of ‘magical thinking’, which we are all capable of, either because it is biologically, evolutionarily innate (Barrett 2004; Boyer 1994; Nemeroff & Rozin 2000), or because we are all in possession of an ultimately ‘irrational’ intuition. Thorley et al. (2010) have even proposed the term ‘essential divination’ to describe the quotidian symbolic thinking, some of which is unconscious, which characterises all human beings. In any case, divination is not an arbitrary cultural practice; it is, in the words of Philip M. Peek, ‘often the primary institutional means of articulating the epistemology of a people’ (1991: 2): both a way of knowing, and a trusted means of decision-making. It is also a source of social and political power.

But as a concept, it has also constituted one of anthropology’s primary tropes for representing its exotic ‘other’. In this entry, I follow the main functionalist and intellectualist-symbolic perspectives that have dominated the anthropology of divination. In broad stokes, structural-functionalism sees cultural elements as fitting together organically and maintaining social cohesion, whereas intellectualist-symbolic approaches see divination as commenting on or explaining the social and natural world. These perspectives are underwritten by the notion that practitioners represent reality in myriad and expert ways with available but limited knowledge, and that divination implies a complex knowledge of social relationships in a given society articulated in symbolic ways. At the end of this entry, I will explore recent approaches to divination that understand it thoroughly in its worldmaking and ontological capacities.

Randomness, interpretation, and language

One of the guiding questions of the anthropology of religion has been, in the words of Dan Sperber, why some people entertain and reproduce ‘apparently irrational beliefs’ (1985). This puzzlement has haunted much of the anthropology of divination.^[3] For Sperber, this assumed ‘irrationality’ can be explained if we take into consideration that evolved minds are capable of having meta-representations, i.e. representations of representations. The paradigmatic example of these are spirits and other beings that perform extraordinary feats with disregard for the laws of physics and biology. Thus, it is because a person can have reflective beliefs (2001) based on a meta-presentational capacity inherent to the human brain that we can believe in, say, dragons (an example in Sperber’s 1982 text), or guiding spirits in the absence of ever having seen them.

Another way in which the anthropology of divination has partially redeemed its denizens of the charge of ‘irrationality’ (see Argyrou 2002) is by working from what is taken as the basic condition of divination – randomness. The assumption of some anthropologists is that oracular systems don’t really work, and that what matters about them is interpretation, not divine or mystical intervention of any kind. Randomness, and chaos, have thus been largely understood as a necessity of divination; namely, as a prelude to an expert’s exegesis in the language of cultural symbols. The key is that randomness provides a blank canvas of sorts for the oracular enterprise, something to be worked over cognitively and socially, which may sometimes be necessary for the survival of a community. In his study of scapulmancy, or shoulder-blade divination,^[4]among the Naskapi Indians of the Labradorian peninsula in Canada, Omar Khayyam Moore argued that divination is instrumental in the tribe’s life-supporting hunting endeavours because it randomises human behaviour in a context where avoiding fixed hunting patterns can be an advantage (1957: 73). Habitual success in certain hunting areas can lead to the depletion of game; randomness, presupposed for divination, is here constitutive of Naskapi livelihood itself.

Indeed, randomness is so taken for granted by some divination scholars that it is widely assumed that the difference between a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ divination is the diviner’s capacity to theoretically leap between complete arbitrariness and representational form. This is done through competences and knowledge of social and personal circumstances. Tedlock, for instance, observes that diviners are

[s]pecialists who use the idea of moving from a boundless to a bounded realm of existence in their practice. Compared with their peers, diviners excel in insight, imagination, fluency in language, and knowledge of cultural traditions (2001: 191).

Moving from an unbounded to bounded plane is thus informed by theory, cosmology, and knowledge of one’s social cohort and its myriad relations. The anthropology of African divinatory systems has been particularly elucidative of this. The utterances of African diviners often imply linguistic and poetic dexterity, as well as the ability to artfully select or omit certain passages or oracular observations, banish socially problematic implications, as well as infer collectively what the best possible result might be.

The prime example of these social and rhetorical strategies is Richard Werbner’s work on the Kalanga of Botswana (1973; 2017), where he posits a ‘superabundance of understanding’ on the part of diviners, which must be whittled down and tuned to suit a particular situation or client. As in many African societies, Kalanga diviners are persuasive, and have ‘highly stylized language’ – both immediate events and matters of personal history must be part of their divinatory speech (1973: 1414). ‘Transparent talk without counterpoint of hidden and manifest meanings is inadequate for divination’ for the Kalanga, Werbner argues (1415). Divination consists of throwing four separate pieces of ivory, each of which has two surfaces, one marked, the other unmarked. The pieces have characteristics of age and sex at first glance. The ‘senior’ of these pieces is Old Male, while the others include Young Male, Old Female, Young Female (Werbner 1973: 1416-17). Sixteen possible configurations can result from a throw, taking into account that all four pieces are thrown at once, and that some may land with no markings. Most people are familiar with the overt meaning of these configurations. However, Werbner’s argument is that there is a matrix of metaphors to the configurations known expertly only by the diviner:

[a] diviner strings together riddles, paradoxes, and equivocal figures of speech, with barbed emphasis in rhetorical questions, each associated with a cast of the diviner’s four two-faced lots (1421).

He speaks in praises, imagery and evocations, some cryptic. The point is not just one of aesthetics, he says. It is, in essence, the

‘sociologically significant aspects of the ordered relations’ – based on, say prior knowledge of personal circumstances – ‘which free divination […] from the risk of being such a gamble. There is a cognitive control such that contextually relevant meanings within a matrix shape divination, rather than randomness’ (Werbner 1973: 1419).

David Zeitlyn also stresses the interpretive and collaborative dialogues needed to achieve successful divinatory outcomes (2001). The series of operations that manipulating an oracle implies may themselves be random, but the interaction between clients and diviner is indispensable to the processes of interpretation itself, especially when texts are particularly opaque, such as the I Ching,[5] and the diviner must take on the qualities of a ‘literary critic’ (2001: 228). Elsewhere, Zeitlyn writes on spider divination among the Mambila in Cameroon (1993), whose results are presented as evidence in court among, say, chiefs of lineages. Again, oracular meanings are not simple. They involve a host of factors, including a complex negotiation of political, familiar, and personal concerns.

Symbolic and intellectualist approaches

Symbols are of primary importance in Victor Turner’s analysis of divination. We will focus on his ethnography Revelation and divination in Ndembu ritual (1975) and on Ndembu basket divination, nğombu yakusekula within that. It involves shaking up or tossing a series of objects in a round, flat, open basket, a type of action associated with women’s winnowing of millet, and standing for the ‘sifting of truth from falsehood’ (Turner 1975: 213, 215). The objects – figurines – are selected by the diviner from a large group of objects of assorted shapes, colours, and sizes, kept separately. Each one represents the human being in various postures. Before throwing, the diviner asks a question; after the toss (he does three) he examines which figurines were left above the others. More questions can follow. Turner argues that his skill ‘consists in the way in which he adapts his general exegesis of the objects to the given circumstances’ (1975: 214).

Turner’s ethnography is considered to be exhaustive and theoretically innovative (De Boeck & Devisch 1994). For Turner, divination can be thought of as

a form of social analysis, in the course of which hidden conflicts between persons and factions are brought to light, so that they may be dealt with by traditional and institutionalized procedures (1975: 235).

It is, under this light, a ‘form of social redress’, whereby the diviner exonerates or accuses individuals, uncovering ‘unconscious impulsions behind antisocial behavior’ (Turner 1975: 233).

The diviner is all too aware of the precarious nature of his own position. Approached by a family for revealing causes of sickness or misfortune in a family member, his work includes identifying the witch who may be responsible for it. The diviner knows that the witch-culprit may be a family member who stands to gain politically by the death of the victim. His appraisal of the balance of power between competing factions is therefore critical. Turner argues that divinatory symbols open an understanding of the ‘social drama’ at hand, and redirect social action appropriately:

[t]he diviner […] is trying to grasp consciously and bring into the open the secret, and even unconscious, motives and aims of human actors in some situation of social disturbance (1975: 232).

De Boeck and Devish argue that Turner’s symbolic analysis fails to account for the multidirectionality and polyvocality of symbolic and metaphorical processes (1991: 103). While he acknowledges the emotive character of divination, the latter is taken unproblematically as part of a ‘script’ or ‘text’ that somehow represents or condenses social life. Ultimately, for Turner, divination

is a device to help a conscious individual to arrive at decisions about rightdoing and wrongdoing, to establish innocence or allocate blame in situations of misfortune, and to prescribe well-known remedies’ (1975: 233).

The ultimate aim of divination is then to heal social schisms and lead to a consensus. But this view may be too simple: De Boeck and Devish recommend that Turner’s emphasis on structure and social engineering be balanced with one that sensitises agency, praxis, performativity (1991: 103). In the Luunda and Yaka basket divinations studied by these authors, meanings are open-ended and social redress is not necessarily their aim: instead, social dramas multiply into more social dramas. Furthermore, ‘in the act of performing and doing’ divination, the transformation implicit in the oracular process ‘is being embodied by the consultants in the ritual praxis’ (De Boeck & Devish 1991: 111). De Boeck and Devich stress that the performance of the oracle invites the consultants to redefine their relations (of reciprocity, commensality, solidarity) and their involvement with their ‘life-world’ (1991: 112). In this sense the diagnosis that is forthcoming by the diviner already carries within itself ‘the meaningful (re)generation of a new integrative social and world-order’ (De Boeck & Devish 1991: 112).

Sonia Silva, on the other hand, calls the knowledge produced as part of basket divination in Zambia ‘integrative’, in the sense that knowledge is lived as pain in the body, as the configurations of material objects in the basket, and as their interpretation (2014). According to Silva, human bodies, materials and spirits work in tandem (that is, integratively) in the divination process. She says that ‘truthful knowledge in basket divination is not delivered as a set of abstract propositions flushed out of the diviner’s mind’; rather, it is imputed to an ancestral spirit:

[t]his spirit, however, manifests itself through a human body that feels pain and operates the oracle by shaking it. The contrast between the statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia is revealing of a broader, telling story that has defined the scholarship on divination systems in particular, and the study of knowledge in general (2014: 1176).

Silva points to the fact that many of the foundational divination scholars saw diviners as ‘scientists’, whose ultimate aim was to explain, albeit bad scientists at that. Indeed, like some of his predecessors, Turner too says that the diviner ‘does not try to “go behind” his beliefs in supernatural beings and forces’ (1975: 231). He holds that the premises by which the Ndembu diviner deduces his conclusions are non-rational.

While Turner turns to symbols to explain divinatory practice, E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s 1937 explanation of the benge poison oracle among the Azande in Sudan is decidedly intellectualist in scope. Here, poison is given to domestic fowl with the result of its life or death impinging upon the question asked. The poison is a liquid mixture from a forest creeper and is inserted in the fowl’s beak. Sometimes the doses prove immediately fatal; often the fowl recovers; other times it remains unaffected. Reasons why people consult this oracle can vary. Mostly, they aim to discover the agent of some misfortune (namely, a witch). In order to answer a question, there are usually two tests involving two fowl, each of which will be administered the poison in sequence. A verdict (say, if X has committed adultery) must be confirmed through the second test. If the results are contradictory, the verdict is considered invalid (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 139). The poison oracle is by far the most important one among the Azande: it has a force of law. For instance, a man wishing to avenge a homicide cannot act without authorization from the poison oracle (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 121).

‘Witches’, Evans-Prichard says famously, ‘as the Azande conceive them, clearly cannot exist. None the less, the concept of witchcraft provides them with a natural philosophy by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained, and a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events’ (1976 [1936]: 18). Evans-Pritchard was well aware that the Azande had other concepts of causation that were not mystical. The classic example is that of a granary collapse at a time when people were sitting under it (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1936]: 23). The Azande know that termites undermined the support of the granary ceiling. What is missing is an ‘explanation of why the two chains of causation intersected at a certain time and in a certain place, for there is no interdependence between them’, Evans-Pritchard says (1976 [1937]: 23). The missing link is provided by Azande philosophy of witchcraft. Both natural and mystical causation co-exist, supplementing each other:

[h]ence we see that witchcraft has its own logic, its own rules of thought, and that these do not exclude natural causation. Belief in witchcraft is quite consistent with human responsibility and a rational appreciation of nature (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1936]: 30).

According to Evans-Prichard, the Azande as studied during the period of 1926-30, when he did his fieldwork, did not rely on belief, but on action, conceptually informed as it was. Thus, when the poison oracle did not work, or contradicted itself, the Zande came up with all kinds of ‘secondary elaborations’ to support the thesis that it failed for some reason, whether because of a breach of taboo, anger of ghosts, or wrong variety of poison administered (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 155). In sum, while the Zande were described as fully rational people, Evans-Prichard held that they ‘cannot go beyond the limits set by their culture and invent notions’ (1976 [1937]: 163). Their ‘web of belief’ was not an external structure in which the Zande were enclosed. It was the texture of their thought and they could think that it was wrong (Evans-Pritchard 1976 [1937]: 194; Horton 1967: 155).

Robin Horton has advanced this intellectualist approach (1967a, 1967b). He proposes dealing with the ‘puzzling features of traditional religious thinking’ through an analogy between theoretical Western science and religious African thought. Horton uses Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Azande extensively, as well as his own work among the Kalabari in contemporary Nigeria, to argue that ‘traditional thought’ cannot operate outside itself. According to Horton, while there is valid theoretical thought in ‘traditional cultures’, it is ultimately ‘closed’ because it is based on magic, witches, oracles, and other mystical phenomena inconsistent with ‘reality’. Propositions here are not open to disconfirmation and there is a reluctance to take failure of, say, an oracle as evidence against the existence of spirits or deities. Herein lies, according to Horton, the difference with Western scientists, who operate an ‘open’ thought system, marked by an experimental method that tests hypotheses and advances theoretical claims. The point for Horton is that both African traditional thought and Western science are theoretical and explanatory, in the sense that they explicate particular circumstances through a particular causal context. Horton’s comparison has come under critique for implying in myriad ways that African thought is inferior to Western science (Tambiah 1990: 91). Stanley Tambiah also questions whether the African ‘theorizing’ observed by Horton would not be in actual fact the pursuance of other values and interests (1990: 91). In the next section, I explore a body of literature that has taken this postcolonial critique to heart and tries to break with functionalist, symbolic, and intellectualist approaches to divination.

Counterpoint: ontological approaches to divinatory truths

In an article from 2012 on religious conversion among followers of a Japanese new religion, Philip Swift makes an argument that is indicative of a new direction in the study of religion. He says that conversion is not conceived of as a ‘reordering of one’s world-picture, in which novel representations (or beliefs or propositions) are imported into the mind’ (Swift 2012: 272-3). Rather, it is essentially a bodily process. Thus the need to shift gears, drop the epistemological focus and foreground difference right from the start, by adopting an ontological analysis. Swift says this is a well-trodden path in anthropology; indeed, he cites Victor Turner who argued that rites of passage involve ‘not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but a change in being’ (Turner 1967: 102; Swift 2012: 273). In other words, Turner made a case that rites actuate, not represent, changed states in people. This praxiological understanding of rituals on the part of Turner contrasts significantly with that of divination, which we have seen above.

A paradigmatic case for the ontological approach to divinatory practice is Martin Holbraad’s work on Afro-Cuban Ifá divination. Ifá is an all-male-dominated religious cult in Cuba, in which the diviner, the babalawo, chosen for his role by the gods, undergoes years of rigorous training and extensive study of oracular divinations signs (oddu), of which there are 256. Babalawos divine with a consecrated board, a white-powder called aché, and sixteen palm nuts. Orula, the god of the Ifá oracle, is called, and as different throws are effected, the number of palm nuts remaining in both hands dictates the marks the diviner will draw on the powdered board.

Both Ifá and Santería (Ifá’s more popular religious sibling in the Afro-Cuban field) present a relatively fixed cosmology, and a corresponding world of causality (Holbraad 2010: 76). The latter is articulated extensively in myths (patakies), as well as in divination, through oracular signs with which they associate. Everything that has existed, presently exists, and will exist is regarded as encompassed under the auspices of the oricha-gods and their respective domains and life stories. While the notion that human beings can disrupt a divine social and cosmic equilibrium is rife, and explains misfortune and illness, this is underpinned by an even stronger concept of predestination. Most importantly here is that Orula, the god who has witnessed the destiny of every man and woman, never lies (Holbraad 2007, 2012a, 2012b). Thus, according to Holbraad, oracular pronouncements should not be subject to the truth verification of anthropologists. Holbraad’s interpretation is therefore pitted exactly against the intellectualist (and also cognitivist) analyses described above.

Holbraad proposes a new answer to an intractable problem anthropologists have faced with divination (and religion more broadly): the problem that, when in the face of alterity, they often decide to negate the assumptions of the people they study. According to him, ‘the job of anthropological analysis […] is not to account for why ethnographic data are as they are, but rather to understand what they are’ (Holbraad 2009: 96). The idea is to review and revise anthropological assumptions analytically, so that they become congruent with the said data. Radical alterity demands a fresh conceptual field. Holbraad explains, ‘[r]ather than enunciating the conditions of native error (be they epistemic, cognitive, sociological, political, or whatever), the analytical task now becomes one of elucidating new concepts’ (Holbraad 2012b: 84). In broad strokes, he argues that the job of anthropologists would not be to explain but to conceptualise. He proposes the concept of ‘infinition’ (in other words,‘inventive definition’) as the answer to this conundrum.[6] Just like Cuban diviners infine their clients, gauged through the notion that the oracle is infallible and indubitable, anthropologists too must invent new terms and new concepts to deal with alterity, say, of a divination system in which truth is not subject to verification or doubt.

There have been other scholars of Afro-Cuban religion inspired by this line of argument in their respective fields, myself included (see, e.g., Espírito Santo 2013). Taking Holbraad’s notion of motility as central to the oracular enterprise in Cuban creole espiritismo – in which deities are not seen as individual entities but as motions, such as the markings on the divining board – I have argued that randomness is essential to the divinatory act and its results, and is tied to the movement inherent in the ‘things’ used for such purposes, like water or flames or cards flicked in quick succession. The oracle itself can be secondary to its movement. Movement is what allows spirits to intervene in their messages – it excites a metaphysical domain of beings, and moves potential cosmology into action, bringing it into the concrete world. Relatedly, chaos may not just be a backdrop for meanings but a substance that brings cosmology into concrete existence (Espírito Santo 2013: 33).

Anastasios Panagiotopoulos has also worked with a perspective on ontology, focusing on both diviners and clients. Articulacy, defined as the capacity of a given entity to ‘speak’ through the oracle, cannot be taken for granted. It requires sacrifice, both literal (animal blood, for instance) and metaphorical (taboos, restrictions, good conduct). In a recent paper, he argues that sacrifice should not be seen through the opposition of sacred/profane, but – in the context of Afro-Cuban religion – as the fuel with which oracular perspectives, and thus articulacy, are ignited (2018: 483). This fuel yields words, which in turn yields perspectives and paths (caminos) for the people who seek diviners. As these paths solidify in a given individual, they create centers of oracular production, which are in turn generative of articulacy itself (Panagiotopoulos 2018: 475).

In another article, Panagiotopoulos speaks of spirit ‘affinity’ as the glue through which these paths are revealed (2017). Affinity here, spirit-person kinship if you will, is materialised through spirit representations (dolls), for example, which acknowledge and reify the dead’s voices and perspectives. Importantly, this relies on being seen and manipulated by a medium. Panagiotopoulos thus takes inspiration from Viveiros de Castro in that he argues that points of view matter in the creation of personhood (2018: 479). But they are not simply momentary points of view. Offerings and sacrifices are catalysts for the solidification of divinatory perspectives (‘paths’) that create the conditions for a certain kind of person to exist and modulate her life.

Another anthropologist with similar references is Katherine Swancutt (2006, 2012). In her monograph Fortune and the cursed, she argues that Mongolian Buryat shamans adopt spirit perspectives in their oracular dealings, but that these are characterised by a combination of intersubjective and perspectival encounters (Swancutt 2012: 156). In some cases, the divinatory implements, such as cards, can be ‘hijacked’ by rival shamans resulting in a revelation of only the rival’s perspectives, imbued as they can be with witchcraft. Shamans can thus inadvertently adopt their nemesis’s agency and pronouncements (Swancutt 2012). ‘Buryats, then, try to control the divinatory implements so that they only represent dangerous people, rather than becoming agents-cum-representations of them’: they try to avoid that divinations take on an intensive dimension and turn into outright cursing wars (Swancutt 2012: 162). Instead, they work towards more desirable outcomes such as those of ‘revising’ the clients’ views of the past (Swancutt 2012: 175). Throughout this case there is a tug of war, on the part of the officiating shaman, between representational and ontological dimensions of the divination. It also alerts us to the notion that in divination ‘things’ are not passive, but can take on life, and uncontrollably, for that matter. As Swancutt puts it, objects can ‘carry their subjects within themselves’ (2012: 161). Her work thus alerts scholars of divination to attend to the multiple potential properties of the ‘things’ used for such purposes. In the final section, I turn towards the ‘body’ as the main instrument of divination – often, in the absence of such objects.

Possession, dreams, and divining spirits

Apart from all its cultural concepts and theorisations, divination is also a decidedly bodily thing. As Patrick Curry says, ‘the diviner’s body and everything he or she ‘physically’ performs and experiences is essential to it’ (2010: 115). This is even more so in the absence of divinatory implements or objects. Then the source of knowledge is the diviner’s own bodily manifestations, born as they are from enskilment, expertise, and experience. The prime example of this is spirit possession or shamanism, where oracular pronouncements by the person are perceived to come from a source outside the possessed’s body.

Eliade explains shamanism well among a Siberian community, noting that

[t]he shaman begins by circling the yurt [tent], beating his drum; then he enters the tent and, going to the fire, invokes the deceased. Suddenly the shaman's voice changes; he begins to speak in a high pitch, in falsetto, for it is really the dead woman who is speaking (1972: 209-10).

The shaman is ‘replaced’, somehow, by the divinatory voice. The idea that the dead ‘speak’ through their medium, and that this communication should be taken seriously, is arguably cross-cultural (Bubandt 2009; Lambek 1981; Placido 2001; Rasmussen 1995; Vitebsky 1993). However, these extraordinary individuals do not always lose their consciousness, as Todd Ochoa shows for Cuban Palo Monte (2007, 2013), a spirit possession practice associated with Bantu-speaking slaves. During such possession, there is sometimes no clear boundary between ‘voices’. Even outside of ritual circumstances, Kalunga, a Ba-Kongo derived term referring to the ‘sea of the dead’, may coexist with the medium’s body in varying intensities (2007: 488). According to Ochoa, Palo invites us to linger on the power of sensation and its capacity to dissolve the body’s boundaries. The sea of the dead is not constant, but something that takes one over in waves of saturation, only to recede again. Most interesting is Ochoa’s observation that the dead themselves constitute a play of forces that ‘suffuses and makes the person who lives Palo’ (2007: 488), as people also come into being by sharing the moods, pains, and sensations, as well as thoughts, of the dead. In this dynamism, one cannot wholly distinguish object from subject, matter from spirit. Neither can the bodies and biographies of mediums be separated from the oracular act itself.

Dreams are a field that is understood to be little mediated by the conscious cognition of the diviner him or herself, and thus are seen as spaces where knowledge is freely revealed, including about oneself (Hollan 2004). They are also open to anyone, including entire communities. In an article called ‘Dreams of treasure’, Charles Stewart argues that ‘dreams may be treated as exemplary moments of vision in which imaginative temporal flights fuse and create a present imbued with meaning’ (2003: 483). Stewart describes how in Naxos, Greece, people have been dreaming with the Virgin Mary who tells them about the location of lost religious idols buried in the hillside for more than a century (2003: 490-3). Dreaming revelations are not considered extraordinary in many parts of the world. Indeed, Rane Willerslev describes how, for Siberian Yukaghir elk hunters, ‘the world of dreams and that of waking life are two sides of the same reality, which together constitute one world’ (2004: 410). Hunters penetrate the ‘shadow world’ to lure prey into theirs. Thus, the dream has ontological as well as premonitory effects. In African inspired cosmologies in the Caribbean, dreams may be considered places of encounter ipso facto. Karen McCarthy Brown reports on the dream of a Haitian vodou priestess in New York – Mama Lola – in which a guiding spirit of the pantheon (Papa Gede) appears to answer a specific question (1993); and Diana Maitland Dean analyses the social impact of dreaming in the wider Afro-Cuban religious community (1993). These two ethnographies point to critical culturally-sanctioned concepts of the self in the emergence of dream divination.

Conclusion

Divination, as discussed in this entry, is widespread and varied. It can entail objects, consecrated or not, but it can also be bodily processes, for instance, in dreaming, or in spirit possession. Oracular cosmologies often imply a world of metaphysical processes, causality and beings, and different temporal logics, where the future is at the reach of the present. Divination also implies linguistic and discursive dexterity on the part of diviners. The anthropology of African divination systems has demonstrated that diviners are often individuals who are politically, socially, as well as cosmologically knowledgeable, and can draw on this awareness during séances. While some scholars have understood divination in terms of ‘magical thinking’, it is not generally associated with magic per se. It is a craft – a skill – that must alternatively be learned and sanctioned, and/or embodied in some way, such as with sensitives or mediums. The anthropology of divination has taken a variety of analytical routes, among which is regarding divination as an explanatory drive, on the part of certain cultures. With the ‘ontological turn’, scholars have paid more attention to local, native concepts that promise to challenge and renew conceptions of truth, personhood, and reality as such.

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Note on contributor

Diana Espírito Santo is a social anthropologist teaching at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She obtained her PhD at University College London in 2008, working with Cuban spirit mediums on concepts of self and knowledge. For her postdoctoral fellowship in Lisbon, she worked on cosmological plasticity and religious change in Brazilian Umbanda, and is currently developing a project on ontologies of evidence in Chilean parapsychology.

Dr. Diana Espírito Santo, Programa de Antropología, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Vicuña MacKenna 4860, 782-0436, Santiago, Chile. gimmefish@yahoo.com.

[1] Diviners are people who practiced divination and have the capacity to interpret the results; they do not necessarily have special powers. Shamans, while they can also practice divination, are considered intermediaries of sorts between worlds, and in most cases can fall into trance states.

[2] Channelers are people who speak for non-physical beings or spirits, whereas ‘sensitives’, sometimes also called ‘intuitives’, are those who have increased susceptibilities for stimulation of the sensorial kind, often feeling things in their bodies – pains, emotions, spirits in the environment.

[3] Not all anthropologists regard divination as something irrational. Indeed, David Zeitlyn speaks of ‘divinatory logics’ with diagnostic and prognostic implications (2012).

[4] Scapulmancy is divination by means of the observation of the cracks in an animal cadaver’s shoulder-blade, when heated by fire or another instrument.

[5] I Ching is also known as ‘Book of changes’, and is a classic Chinese divination text dating from around 1000 BC. The I Ching uses cleromancy, which relies on the generation of random numbers. Consultants will throw coins or another object, and generate a hexagram with six numbers between 6 and 9, and then look up its meaning in the book.

[6] Holbraad is here inspired by both Roy Wagner’s The invention of culture (1981), and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s take on Amazonian perspectivism – the idea that the point of view makes the subject (Viveiros de Castro 1998, 2012; see also Lima 2005).