Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Cosmology

Dance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:06:39 +0000

Girls dancing at the Celebrating Sanctuary Festival on London's South Bank in 2008. The festival celebrates the cultural diversty that migrants bring to the UK. Picture by Gary Knight.

Panas Karampampas

Durham University

Initially published 2 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25dance

Abstract:

Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are enacted and negotiated. This entry explores dance as both a localised embodied practice and as a globally circulating phenomenon. It begins by questioning universal definitions of dance before outlining key contributions from dance anthropology and ethno-choreology, specifically their focus on embodiment, research methods, and the limits of representation. Subsequent sections consider dance in relation to politics, and the impact of digital media in fostering global hybrid forms of dance. The final section examines staged performances and the role of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has further institutionalised dance by recognising it as a ‘living heritage’. Together, these sections illustrate that dance operates simultaneously as practice, symbol, and political artefact—what might be called its ‘multiple existences’—and explores why understanding these layers is essential across disciplines. As a dynamic and fluid practice, dance remains a vital subject of anthropological inquiry, revealing complex interactions between tradition, innovation, and socio-political power.

Introduction

Defining dance in anthropology is a challenge, since it does not always exist as a clear-cut category as such for the people we study. Speaking of ‘dance’ therefore risks profoundly misinterpreting the activities we try to analyse and the social contexts where they occur. For example, for the sixteenth century Mixtec people of Jamiltepec, in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico, no single term for ‘dance’ existed. Instead, the word yaa simultaneously referred to dance, games, and music, which were always performed together and not experienced as distinct or separate (Stanford 1966, 103). Likewise, in classical Greece, the term ‘ὄρχησις’ referred to the inseparable triad of music, song, and bodily movement—much as in many contemporary Greek folk dance practices. Again, ‘dance’ did not exist here as a meaningful stand-alone concept (Zografou 2003). The same point applies for the all-night yamɨn siria ceremony of Papua New Guinea’s Ambonwari people. Held in people’s private houses on celebratory occasions, it combines song and dance with storytelling and bodily decoration, elements that are closely connected to the natural environment and the spirit world. Yamɨn siria is not just a dance, but a holistic ritual that reflects an entire cosmology, reproduces the cultural memory of participants and their ancestors, provides young people with a chance to flirt, and can serve as an opportunity to settle old disputes (Telban 2017). In Arabic, several terms that describe movement and rhythmic expression also do not correspond precisely to the English notion of ‘dance’. Raqs (رَقص) broadly denotes Arabic dancing—often referred to colloquially as ‘belly dance’; dabke (دبكة) designates collective line dancing that embodies social cohesion; and samāʿ (سماع) refers to musical listening and rhythmic bodily movement within Sufi ritual (Rowe 2010, 11–3).

All that said, conceptual clarity can be useful so long as it speaks to the perspectives of the people we study. A fairly encompassing definition of dance considers it to be a practice composed of purposeful, often intentionally rhythmical, and socially patterned sequences of nonverbal body movement (Hanna 1979, 316). This movement is generally considered distinct from ordinary motor activities. It involves time, space, and effort, relies on both individual choice and social learning, and possesses inherent and aesthetic value. Specific criteria tend to determine what is appropriate in each context and what may distinguish the competency of dance practitioners as perceived by their society. Finally, such movement should be recognised as dance by its practitioners and—if an audience is present—by the audience members of the practitioner’s social group.

Understood in these terms, dance can be a powerful social instrument. Often much more than mere entertainment or artistic expression, it physically manifests identity, tradition, and a sense of belonging, while also reflecting and contesting social norms (Desmond 1997a; Kealiinohomoku 1970). Various academic disciplines, from psychology to performance studies, have explored dance from multiple angles, analysing its aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. They have shown that politicians and media often harness dance as a symbol of national identity, and sometimes as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Anthropology brings a unique focus to the study of dance’s social implications and cultural contexts (Buckland 1999), in part because it tends to delve deeper into the meanings and power relations embedded in dance practices (Spencer 1985).

From the early twentieth century onward, dance has attracted the interest of influential anthropologists, including Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1928), Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Franz Boas (1927), Margaret Mead (1928) and Gregory Bateson (Mead and Bateson 1952). For these early writers, the documentation and analysis of Indigenous people’s dance was integral to understanding their social structures. As part of ritual, dance was primarily seen as contributing to social cohesion, essential for maintaining social bonds. Evans-Pritchard, for example, argued that that the gbere buda or ‘beer dance’ of the twentieth century Azande people, in what are now the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan, allowed for moderate, discreet, and therefore harmless kinds of flirting and sexual play. Thereby, Evans-Pritchard argued, the dance protected the institutions of Azande marriage and the family (1928, 458). Early anthropological studies also emphasised the importance of dance for transmitting cultural knowledge. For example, according to Mead, dance interrupted the otherwise rigorous subordination of Samoan children during the early twentieth century to the social hierarchy they grew up in. Dance allowed them greater degrees of attention and freedom than they were habitually used to. It equally permitted the expression and cultivation of children’s individuality in ‘a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic exhibitionism’ as Mead put it (1928, 118).

Early anthropological studies were equally fascinated by the ways in which ritual dance reflects and shapes people’s spiritual lives, serving as a powerful medium through which people express their cosmologies and influence spirits. During the late nineteenth century, for example, the Kwakiutl of North America used dance to attract life-giving spirits, to tame them, and to receive gifts of supernatural powers from them. As part of the ritual known as the ‘winter ceremonial’, Kwakiutl families came together and danced wearing masks that emulated and personated different spirits, tracing their family histories back to mythical times and supernatural events (Boas and Hunt 1897).

For many Indigenous peoples, ritual dance has remained central until today, as it remains part of ceremonies marking life events, seasonal transitions, and collective identity. The nomadic Wodaabe of West Africa, for example, engage in a series of dance and performance rituals throughout the year, one of which, called the yaake, comprises a beauty contest in which women chose the most beautiful male performer. The young men stand in a long line, facing the sunset, and dance by moving especially their feet and spinal column. Accentuated movements of the face highlight the whiteness of their eyes and teeth, all while being overlooked by Wodaabe women. It has been argued that in this case this dance not only expresses male pride or allows the men and women to flirt, but that it also distinguishes the Wodaabe from the more sedentary Fulani people who live in the same region. It renders the Wodaabe recognisably ‘exotic’ to the people of Niger, and to Westerners who are only superficially aware of their life circumstances. By internalising and cultivating their reputation of being ‘exotic’, Wodaabe dancing contributes to a sense of ‘cultural archaism’, which is but one of several elements of their collective survival strategies (Bovin in Hughes-Freeland & Crain 1998).

Anthropology’s early focus on the ritual contexts of dance laid the groundwork for more systematic engagements with dance, especially from the mid-twentieth century onwards. During this time, the subfield of dance anthropology (or the ‘anthropology of dance’ as it was called in the US) emerged, establishing a dialogue between dance studies and anthropology (Kurath 1960; Kealiinohomoku 1970). As part of a new comprehensive approach to dance, anthropologists and dance scholars synthesised methodologies and theoretical approaches, and began to study dance as a social phenomenon everywhere. They drew on examples from large and small-scale populations, as well as ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ groups.

In this way, they challenged prevailing Eurocentric views, which had, for example, considered ballet as the pinnacle of dance forms and as distinct from folk or ethnic dances. A ground-breaking study viewed ballet through the same anthropological lens as any other dance tradition (Kealiinohomoku 1970). It questioned the perception of ballet as a universal standard against which other dance forms were to be measured. The study recognised that ballet was conventionally celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and technical precision, having evolved from court entertainment to a professionalised art form: an ethnic dance of the West, rooted in the court cultures of Renaissance Italy and France. Political power, social hierarchies, and the spread of European colonialism had all shaped what ballet was and needed to be accounted for as ballet continues to express and reinforce the values and aesthetics of its cultural origins.

Examining ballet as an ethnic dance opened the door to a more egalitarian approach to dance studies overall, which values all dance traditions equally and appreciates their cultural significance (Kealiinohomoku 1970). Such studies and approaches suggested a more inclusive understanding of dance that recognises it in all its forms as ultimately culturally and ethnically rooted, whilst also arguing for the value of often-marginalised non-European dance traditions. Importantly, these authors called for more first-hand observation and participation in dance as part of fieldwork (Kurath 1960). Furthermore, discussions emerged that focused on how dance traditions change over time through incorporating elements from different trends that migrants carried into diverse new contexts. In line with the cultural relativism that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropologists began to show that dance is often hybridised, constantly changing and blurring boundaries of traditions that had previously been considered fixed. For example, Latin American tango emerged from the fusion of African rhythms, European couple dances, and local criollo musical forms, later becoming reinterpreted through global circulation (Savigliano 1995, 10–5).

Anthropology of dance and ethno-choreology

The anthropology of dance has a close relative, called ‘ethno-choreology’ (sometimes called ‘dance ethnology’). While these fields of study often overlap, they have different starting points, methods, and theories (Kaeppler 1991, 13). Dance anthropology has a tendency to be more ‘interested in socially constructed movement systems, the activities that generate them, how and by whom they are judged, and how they can assist in understanding society’ (Kaeppler 2000, 120). A prime example is the ethnography on lakalaka performances, which are danced and sung throughout the islands of the Tonga archipelago in the South Pacific. Performed at royal weddings, royal birthday celebrations, and coronation ceremonies since the late nineteenth century, the lakalaka is not merely a form of aesthetic expression but also serves to enact and legitimise social hierarchy and political authority. It involves singing poetry which, together with choreographed movements, elevates the monarch and chiefs, linking royal and chiefly power within the broader Tongan cosmology (Kaeppler 2006, 40–1). These performances illustrate the social origins of movement systems, and their role for the broader organisation of society, as they help negotiate rank, genealogy, and political power. Rather than analysing the choreography in isolation, dance anthropology situates it within the Tongan system of social stratification, showing how dance both reflects and reinforces societal structures (Kaeppler 1993). In contrast, ethno-choreologists often focus more closely on dance content, while the cultural context serves primarily to illuminate the dance itself (Grau 1993, 21). For example, Andriy Nahachewsky (2011) examines the movement vocabulary, structural patterns, and stylistic variants of Ukrainian folk dances, drawing on ethnographic context chiefly to clarify regional distinctions and historical layering.

Dance anthropology and ethno-choreology also sometimes differ in how they think about the dancers’ bodies. Dance anthropology has come to question the idea of a natural or archetypal dancer’s body, foregrounding instead the body’s culturally and socially constructed aspects (Grau 1993, 21). Ethno-choreologists, on the other hand, tend to consider the dancer’s body more as a given; an instrument moving in time and space that is largely separate from the dancer’s mind or sociocultural ideas about it. This makes ethno-choreology particularly interesting for dancers and choreographers who are constantly attempting to improve upon existing forms of dance, as well as for folklorists, interested in the preservation of existing cultural practices.

In short, dance anthropologists are ‘not simply to understand dance in its cultural context, but rather to understand society through analysing movement systems’ (Grau 1993, 21), while ethno-choreologists study the dance itself and its changes over time with its cultural context more in the background (Kaeppler 1991, 16–7). Despite these differences, the fields have increasingly converged over time, particularly since the 1990s when both embraced a more holistic view of dance. Both disciplines now recognise that dance is not just interesting as a physical movement but also that it matters as a cultural text that can convey complex meanings and serve various social functions (Rakočević 2020). This shared perspective has led to greater interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling folklorists and cultural critics to employ similar methodologies and theories with the goal of exploring the multifaceted nature of dance.

A relatively recent study of folk dance in Romania, for example, demonstrates the value of combining dance anthropological and ethno-choreological approaches (Giurchescu 2001). Anca Giurchescu examines 45 years of cultural policy in socialist Romania to show how traditional dance, such as in the century-old Romanian Căluș ritual, has changed in connection to its socio-political context. Over time, Romanian traditional dance has turned from a ritual that shapes the daily lives of participants to a more restricted and staged form of folklore, mostly organised and watched rather than practiced. While it continues to be danced on important social events, such as weddings or family gatherings, it is now mostly passively consumed. As a form of folklore, traditional dance always runs the risk of being used for political ends, as in late-stage Romanian Communism, when song and dance were employed to conceal the country’s socio-political contradictions, obscuring diversity while highlighting a singular national narrative. According to the author, studying dance requires examining the philosophical, ideological, socio-political, economic, and cultural systems of a given society, as well as the internal structure of the dance itself. Only through this holistic approach can dance, its social context, and its practice be illuminated simultaneously (Giurchescu 2001, 109).

Dance as elusive and embodied practice

The ephemeral and elusive nature of dance renders participant observation particularly difficult. Dance only fully exists in the moment of performance, making it hard to capture and document. Its transience arises from several factors. Movement notation systems, while developed in order to record dance, are complex and require demanding training. Moreover, describing sound and movement (as well as speech and song in some cases) all at once can often be challenging. Simply filming dance and focusing on its visual aspects does not capture the whole experience as it ignores too many other sensorial dimensions of dance. Dancer’s experiences are deeply kinaesthetic (i.e. relating to their bodily awareness), combining the visual, tactile, and auditory (Bull 1997, 269). Such embodied experience is hard to put into words, so dancers’ verbal accounts of their practices often differ from their actual behaviour. All these issues raise the problem that dance experiences may be sensible to the performers without also being intelligible for others (Bull 1997, 269).

These methodological difficulties raise an ever-prevalent question for ethnographic researchers of dance: Should the ethnographer have practiced or be trained in dance, or is this not a requirement for a deep understanding of it? The people we study may think that dancing is essential if one wants to truly understand it. Members of professional dance companies, for example, have been shown to hold that experience in ballet is an asset to make sense of it (Wulff 1998). In fact, classical dancers are frequently of the opinion that ‘you have to do it in order to understand what it’s like’ (Wulff 1998, 8). Given that dance is a mostly non-verbal activity that requires a high degree of precision and proficiency, having some embodied experience of it allows for insights which are challenging to acquire by other means (Wulff 1998, 10-1). Thus, dance ethnographies often achieve a remarkable level of understanding by relying on the fieldworker's body as a means to attain cultural knowledge. The researcher's immersion in sonic events and movement—their awareness of and participation in sound and dance—induces bodily responses that render fieldwork as a profoundly visceral experience. Thereby, important questions can be raised and put into perspective, such as what the role of tacit knowledge in dance may be, how feelings of unity and community are created and altered by dance, or how dancers conceive of pain and endurance (c.f. Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017, 3, 10-2).

Physical participation in dance also shows how ‘movement combines felt bodily experience and the culturally based organisation of that experience into cognitive patterns’ (Sklar 2001, 4). It teaches us that ‘ways of moving are ways of thinking’ (Sklar 2001, 4). For example, for young members of the Greek goth scene in Athens in 2010, dance was an important part of their lives. Goth clubs and goth nights allowed them to link their daily style and ways of living, which often emphasised the fleeting nature of life and the futility of human striving, to dance. Several of them thus danced in ways that involved irony, self-irony, and sarcasm. On the dance floor they recited the lyrics of songs that expressed their disappointment with humanity, expressed anger at their own illness and mortality through stomping movements, or mocked traditional Greek dances in a refutation of Greek national values (Karampampas 2017).

Even when the researcher does not have prior dance experience, it is possible to learn dance in the field, as has been done for other somatic ethnographies that focused on boxing (Wacquant 2004) or Aikido (Kohn 2001). Particularly interesting are the times that the researcher will have to dance with their interlocutors. These moments allow the researcher to demonstrate whether and how they have embodied local dances and how precisely they understand the local movement idioms (Pateraki and Karampampas 2014, 156).

The deeply embodied nature of dance also highlights its role in shaping and experiencing gender, sexuality, and identity (Cowan 1990, Foster 1996). Dance practices often reflect and reinforce gender roles and expectations, but they can also provide spaces for exploring and contesting these norms (Allen 2022, 3–7 and 140–50). For example, Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (2004) has studied a group of middle-class women who form an all-female ‘company of friends’ (parea) near a Greek provincial town that the author calls ‘Kallipolis’. Once initiated to their ‘company’, the women spend time with and support one another, and they engage in same-sex relationships. One way in which they perform gender is through dance, notably the belly-dance tsifteteli, associated with femininity and desire, and the powerful, masculine dance called zeimbekiko. Dance and flirtation enable the women to create intimate relationships, which may be interpreted by people outside of their group as merely playful heterosexual friendships (Kirtsoglou 2004). Dancing thus allows them to negotiate, reveal, and conceal their identities, challenging and reconfiguring the meanings attached to their bodies within their specific cultural context.

The embodied nature of dance also lends itself to exploring how cultural and political meanings are represented, felt, and lived through the body. White competitive Latin dancers may use a fake tan to represent Latinness in the context of the predominantly white dancing culture and sport. In another context, practitioners of Javanese court dances are held to embody an element of national identity that is actively passed on to younger generations and made visible in performances for tourists (Kringelbach & Skinner 2012, 11). Thus, dance frequently turns out to be a site of negotiation where dancers can both conform to and resist social norms (Cowan 1990; Fraleigh 2004). It has, for example, been argued that the bodies of classical ballet dancers can be read as affirming a Western marginalisation of women’s bodies in general. According to sociologist Janet Wolff, ballet dancers preserve a ‘classical body’, emphasising boyish petiteness, clear lines, weightlessness and ethereal presence, ideals that stand in clear tension with most real feminine corporeality (Wolff 1997, 95). This tension is also revealed in roles for women, who in classical dance often depict ‘a strangely disembodied female’ (Wolff 1997, 95).

Deeply embodied activity, such as dance, also lends itself to the expression and transmission of embodied collective memory. Thus, dance is frequently part of spirit possessions among the Songhay people of Nigeria and Mali. The Songhay pantheon is divided into six spirit families, each of which represents a specific historical period. Some stand in for Muslim clerics, commemorating the fifteenth century institutionalisation of Islam in the area, while others are Hausa spirits that entered the Songhay pantheon in the early twentieth century as part of a large migration of Hausa-speaking people to Songhay territory. Spirit possession, which involves dance, thus partially enacts Songhay history, including the ravages of nature, such as when the choreography involved in a possession recounts the movement of spirits ‘from water to heaven and back to Earth’ (Stoller 1994, 642).

In sum, dance is not simply a sequence of movements but is also an embodied system of cultural meanings and knowledge. The meanings of dance are not always explicit, and may be tacit, intuitive, and difficult to articulate verbally. Researchers need to be aware that their own cultural background and experiences may shape their interpretations of dance. It is important for them to be reflexive, considering their own positionality and biases, and it is frequently an asset if, as part of dance research, they dance themselves.

Politics, resistance, and dancing beyond borders

Beyond its artistic or cultural expression, dance is a potent form of political discourse and resistance. The intricate relationship between dance and politics has been extensively analysed, revealing how dance movements and performances can reflect, contest, and sometimes transform political realities (Shay 2002).

Dance frequently intersects with political power in the realm of national identity and statecraft. Dances are often promoted and institutionalised through state-sponsored performances, festivals, and education programs. They may serve to foster national unity, constitute emblematic representations of a nation’s cultural heritage that justifies national sovereignty, or simply project power both internally and on the international stage (Reed 1998). For example, in constructing and legitimising national identity in the modern Greek state, officially established in 1832, ancient Greek statues and monuments were used to associate the state with ancient Greek glory. In this process, folk traditions such as dances and songs were used to bridge the substantive gap between ancient and modern Greek identity, including serving as official ‘proofs’ of the ‘cultural continuity’ between the two (Karampampas 2021, 655). Until today, the so-called ‘Greek traditional dances’ are part of the country’s primary and secondary education curriculum, aiming to demonstrate the coherence of Greek populations by teaching a selection of dances that is meant to represent all the country’s regions (Karampampas 2021, 655). Importantly, this curriculum has excluded dances from the unrecognised Slavic-speaking Greek minority, marginalising some kinds of dance as it foregrounds others (Pateraki 2024; see also Manos 2003 on the minority politics of dance). In addition, some previously Greek dances are today danced beyond national borders and may be called ‘Albanian’ or ‘Turkish’, due to the shared past of these countries during the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, ‘Greek dances’ to music that shares melodies with that of the Cappadocia region of what is now Turkey are performed as far as in the city of Xi’an (西安), the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi where the Muslim minority of Hui people (回族) dances them (personal observation).

In addition to creating national identity, Jane Cowan (1990) provides us with an example of how dance can stand in for European modernity. As part of studying dance in the Northern Greek town of Sohos in the early 1980s, Cowan noticed that formal ‘evening-dances’ (horoesperidha) were regularly organised on the weekends by local civic associations such as political parties or business associations. Rather than celebrating kinship, belonging, or church affiliation, these dance events were meant to promote civic solidarity and the common good, while also fostering the wealth, reputation, and political standing of the associations that sponsored them (Cowan 1990, 134–70). To achieve these goals, the usual opportunities for competitive male dance and folklore were foreclosed, and European symbols and practices were adopted instead, including dancing ‘European dances’ like the waltz, the foxtrot, and the tango, and wearing modern apparel rather than traditional clothing. These evening-dances linked the civic associations to the West, which had long politically and culturally dominated Greece, and stood in for modernity.

National and international understandings of dance can often greatly influence one another. As mentioned above, tango, for example, originally developed in the late nineteenth century around the Río de la Plata that separates Argentina and Uruguay. It fused African rhythms, recreated by former slaves, with music of Spanish descendants born in the Americas (criollos), and with European influences brought by mostly Spanish and Italian migrants. As such, it can be seen as a dance of exiles (Savigliano 1995, xiv). However, tango soon developed into a system of seemingly ‘exotic’ Argentinian identity, considered wild, untamed, and passionate by the colonial and imperial powers of Argentina and Uruguay. As part of a global ‘political economy of passion’ that included tango records, handbooks, films, and fashion, foreigners appropriated the dance throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, London, and New York, and all the way to Japan. Tango underwent an even more widespread revival in the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that it also became Argentina’s national dance can only be made sense of when considering the interplay between Europe’s former Latin American colonies and ongoing Western imperialism. Western countries were eager to consume exoticised forms of dance that ultimately legitimated their own perceived superiority. Once consumed abroad, the exoticised dance could be re-appropriated by national elites as an appropriate marker of national identity (Savigliano 1995, 138).

However, dance can also serve as a site of resistance against colonial or oppressive regimes, providing a means through which marginalised communities assert their own identity and sovereignty. The Irish dance revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, was closely tied to broader nationalist movements seeking to affirm Irish identity in the face of British rule (O’Connor 2013; Wulff 2007). The Gaelic League and other cultural organisations promoted step dancing and céilí dancing as emblematic expressions of an authentically Irish way of life, in contrast to what they saw as British cultural dominance. Standardised competitions, codified techniques, and public performances all became tools for mobilising dance as a marker of national unity and cultural distinctiveness.

Similarly, dance has played a key role in the expression of Palestinian national identity, serving as a form of cultural resistance against European colonial imperialism as well as Israeli occupation and Islamic reform movements (Rowe 2010). Nicholas Rowe, who lived in Ramallah between 2000 and 2008 and worked with local dance groups in refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, raises the question of whether dance can be represented without highlighting the extreme political circumstances in which it takes place. He shows that Palestinian dance productions become impossible as choreographers and their family members are killed, curfews and roadblocks make movement impossible, and dance venues are vandalised and destroyed (Rowe 2010, 189). Yet even under these difficult circumstances, dance may continue, not least to express individual and collective trauma (Rowe 2010). In a similar vein, the resurgence of Indigenous dances in the Americas is not only a revival of cultural practices but also a statement of resistance against colonial erasure and a declaration of sovereignty (Prichard 2022).

Of course, the political affordances of dance go beyond traditional party or state politics. An example of this is the critical role that dance plays in creating a queer Latino/a public in the United States. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the US Latino/a population quickly gained public visibility, dance (along with other forms of performance) was crucial to enable queer Latinos/as to equally claim spaces that allowed them to live publicly. Their increase in social rights was partially enabled by queer Latino/a cultural production, which had in the 1990s permeated the mainstream American queer culture in the form of Latin rhythms and choreographies (Rivera-Servera 2012, 15). Queer Latino/as’ ability to dance eloquently to Latin rhythms helped shift the power dynamics of the dance floor of the clubs they frequented. Their dance skills can thus be understood as ‘choreographies of resistance’—as embodied practices through which minoritarian subjects claim space in social and cultural realms, such as the dance floor (Rivera-Servera 2012, 43). Studying queer Latino/a identity through dance raises the question of whether Latinidad should be thought of as a programmatic political identity in the first place, or rather ‘as a performative modality’ that establishes Latino/a cultural practice (Rivera-Servera 2012, 20).

Importantly, the role of dance in enabling oppressions or resistence is not always clear cut. Thus, dance has been a form of resistance for the Italian mafia, in mafia-patronised religious celebrations of southern Italy. These celebrations include dances on the towns’ main squares, in which prominent members of the mafia dance with local politicians and both parties engage in a symbolic fight with imaginary knives and sticks (Pipyrou 2016, 175–8). These dances imply mutual political recognition, but they also enable members of the mafia to challenge regional state hegemony. They come with ambiguous real-life consequences, as local politicians may participate as they are trying to gain local votes, while members of the mafia do the same to gain recognition and status.

The fact that dance constitutes a form of ‘embodied resistance’ distinguishes it from other forms of political activism. Dance allows individuals and communities to express dissent and critique socio-political conditions in a way that words alone cannot (Fraleigh 2004). For instance, during the apartheid era in South Africa, the gumboot dance, which includes groups of performers stomping and tapping on their rubber boots, evolved as a form of resistance among mine workers. It was a covert way to communicate and to express grievances under the guise of entertainment (Welsh-Asante 1993). Similar roots entangled with a complex and contested history can also be found in capoeira, a hybrid between a dance, a martial art, and a game. It was likely developed in Africa by enslaved people who sought to practise self-defence under the guise of dance before being transported to Brazil. Evidence shows that it has been practised in Brazil since at least 1900 by the male African-Brazilian urban underclass. For some time, the government criminalised capoeira, and practitioners were persecuted until it was legalised in 1937. After 1975, it spread to the US and Europe, and soon after to the rest of the world (Delamont and Stephens 2008, 58). Thus, what began as a form of ‘embodied resistance’ became a global practice that celebrates the hybridisation of Portuguese and African-Brazilian music, dance, and bravery. On 26 November 2014, UNESCO recognised capoeira as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The global spread of dance forms via media and migration has further complicated the dance-politics nexus, introducing issues of cultural appropriation, global inequality, and transnational identities. Street dance styles like breakdancing have been adopted by young persons across the world. This may come as a way of expressing resistance against societal norms and injustices (Koutsougera 2023; Marsh and Campbell 2020). At the same time, the global popularity of dances raises questions about cultural ownership, authenticity, and the commercialisation of cultural expressions (Ana 2017). Cuban rumba, for example, has been strategically packaged for international tourism, where performers are expected to embody ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban identity in ways that cater to visitor expectations; yet rumberos themselves often receive minimal benefits from this commodification, and many view the state-driven ‘heritagization’ of rumba with ambivalence (Ana 2017, 163–7, 173–6, 181–3).

The global spread of dance forms also raises questions regarding their hybridisation, which is often presented as a result of globalisation (Duffy 2005). Hybrid dances emerge when elements from different dance traditions combine to create new forms, reflecting the complex interactions and exchanges facilitated by global flows of people and media. One example is the Tribal Fusion dance, in which North African and Arabic dance (colloquially known as ‘belly dance’) practitioners blend modern electronica and other various styles in creative and largely unbound ways. Dancers in this style thereby mostly do not reference the modern Middle East. As a result, their dance style may be derided by purists as derivative and degenerate compared to seemingly more ‘authentic’ forms of belly dance. At the same time, the freedom of Tribal Fusion enables the dancers to eschew accusations of cultural appropriation and to bring their very own styles to the transnational dance scene, drawing on movements from tango, flamenco, jazz, and modern dance, among others (Scheelar 2013; Sellers-Young 2016).

The digital age has further accelerated the global spread and transformation of dance practices. Social media platforms and video-sharing sites enable the rapid dissemination of dance videos, influencing global dance trends and fostering a sense of global community among dancers and enthusiasts. This has also allowed new dance styles to be created, such as industrial dance, a highly stylised goth-style dance with a well-defined repertoire of movements that is practised in similar ways in different goth scenes around the world. Its creation and development, however, took place almost entirely online. Goth YouTubers from different parts of the world began uploading videos of themselves dancing to industrial music, often inspired by cyber and rave aesthetics. These videos sparked discussion in the comment sections and across online forums, where users debated what counted as industrial dance. Through these public exchanges—offering feedback, critique, and praise—a shared set of movements and aesthetics gradually emerged. Over time, these digital interactions informally established and defined industrial dance, both morphologically and conceptually, without the need for a central authority or institutional framing (Karampampas 2016, 139–46).

A compelling example of rapid global circulation in digital times is Japanese Butoh, developed in the second half of the twentieth century and marked by grotesque imagery, playful experimentation, and slow, hyper-controlled motion. Since the 1980s, Butoh groups have emerged around the world, with many non-Japanese practitioners becoming recognised artists and teachers who establish their own schools and often develop approaches that diverge from the original lineages (Calamoneri 2008, 36–7; Candelario 2019, 245–52; van Hensbergen 2019, 276–84). The global and increasingly digital dissemination of Butoh enables unprecedented participation and innovation, while also raising questions about authorship, ownership, and the ethics of cross-cultural transmission (Garnica 2019, 325–36).

Dance as intangible cultural heritage

Dancing, particularly when it is staged, can often be read as a performance of folklore, i.e. of a traditional custom that links to the beliefs or values of a specific group. It can thus stand in tight connection with broader cultural narratives, identities, and histories. This ‘second existence’ of dance, beyond its initial performance context, matters when dance is reinterpreted, adapted, or incorporated into new spatial, temporal, or cultural settings. Keeping the folkloristic aspects of dance in mind allows anthropologists to explore the dynamic processes through which traditions are transmitted, transformed, and reimagined in response to changing cultural landscapes (Nahachewsky 2001). The second existence of dance may have a parallel life with the ‘first’, i.e. with the folk-dance performances which continue to take place in their initial social context. At other times, the initial social context may have changed, or there may be discontinuity in the transmission of knowledge, and in some cases, the second existence of dance replaces the first. The second existence of dance also encompasses how dance traditions are taught, learned, and practised beyond their original contexts. Dance workshops, festivals, and educational programs serve as important spaces for the transmission and adaptation of dance traditions, contributing to the ongoing evolution of dance forms and the formation of transnational dance communities (Karampampas 2021, 660–1; Sklar 2001).

The staging of dance can thus be seen as a site of cultural production where meanings are negotiated between performers and audiences. When dances are staged, they are often adapted or recontextualised to fit new settings, engaging with audiences unfamiliar with the original cultural context. Staging can thus be seen as a form of cultural translation, where the inherent meanings and aesthetics of a dance are interpreted and potentially transformed (Shay 2016). Moreover, the folkloristic aspects of dance on stage raise questions about its authenticity and about the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Debates about authenticity highlight the tension between the desire to preserve cultural heritage and the need for artistic innovation and cultural exchange (Bendix 1997; Theodossopoulos 2013).

For example, in 2003 the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) aimed, among other things, to rethink what folklore, now referred to as ‘intangible heritage’, may be. It inaugurated the important shift from trying to record and preserve disappearing traditions to promoting their ongoing transmission. This was to be achieved by supporting both practitioners and the conditions necessary for their practices to continue (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2014, 53). While this marks a shift from older folkloristic approaches, the Convention still relies on established methods like listing, mapping, and recording (Kuutma 2012; Tauschek 2011). Notions of authenticity thus persist—albeit in redefined terms—and continue to shape public perceptions of cultural value (Bendix 2018, 6; Bortolotto 2020).

Transforming a tradition into ICH involves a process of ‘heritagisation’. This process can be deeply self-referential, as constructing heritage can itself be part of the cultural and social processes that end up constituting heritage (Smith 2006, 13). For example, when a community prepares a dance for inclusion in an ICH inventory—by defining what counts as ‘authentic’, formalising choreography, or crafting heritage narratives—these acts of preparation reshape the tradition and feed back into how it is understood. At the same time, the dance itself becomes a policy object, especially when viewed through the lens of Intangible Cultural Heritage, where safeguarding frameworks transform lived practices into administratively managed ‘heritage’ (Smith 2006, 13; Tauschek 2011). ICH may therefore be seen not merely as preserved tradition, but as a metacultural production (Tauschek 2011), a policy-oriented reimagining of tradition focused on safeguarding, transmission, and empowerment. Following this logic, ICH could be seen as a third existence (Karampampas forthcoming) of dance: no longer just a performance or culturally relevant social activity, but a policy artefact focused on cultural continuity. Through this lens, dance is framed not as a static, authentic relic, but as a living tradition that carries community values, identities, and histories. This third existence resists overly static and folkloristic views of dance and opens new directions for anthropological inquiry.

Conclusion

The study of dance offers profound insights into the human condition. It allows us to understand and rethink social dynamics and structures, as well as individual and collective identities. Dance is not merely an art form but is also a rich cultural practice that informs and is informed by the contexts in which it occurs. Its analysis reveals the many, often highly nuanced ways in which communities express themselves, negotiate social norms, and maintain traditions, making it an endlessly fascinating subject for future study. As societies continue to change, the relevance of studying dance remains undiminished. It offers a unique vantage point from which to observe the ongoing interplay between tradition and innovation, providing a mirror in which we can view the continuous reshaping of identities in response to global influences and local practices.

The ephemeral nature of dance, with its ability to adapt and morph into new forms while retaining links to the past, makes it an ideal subject for exploring broader questions of continuity and change in contemporary societies. At the same time, the rise of the internet and the turbocharged hybridisation of dance make it more exciting than ever. As a form of embodied, non-verbal communication that transcends social and linguistic barriers, dance is likely to remain crucial to understand the human condition in an increasingly interconnected world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. I am especially grateful to the editors, Hanna Nieber and Felix Stein, whose exceptional patience and valuable suggestions have shaped this entry and supported its successful completion.

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Note on contributor

Panas Karampampas, PhD (St Andrews) is a Social Anthropologist at Durham University. He currently works on Intangible Cultural Heritage policies, bureaucracy, and global governance. His doctoral research focussed on the goth scene, digital anthropology, dance, cosmopolitanism, peripherality, and globalisation. He serves as an elected member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2025–2027).

panas.karampampas@easaonline.org / ORCID: 0000-0001-8712-9445

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Outer space

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:54:32 +0000

Rocket launch at Playalinda Beach, Florida, 2017. Picture by Jill Bazeley

Anna Szolucha

Jagiellonian University

Initially published 26 Nov 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25outerspace

Abstract:

People’s daily lives have always relied heavily on their link with outer space. From using the constellations for navigation millennia ago to connecting with thousands of satellites that provide geopositioning, communication, and weather monitoring services, outer space has been a constant companion. But it doesn’t always appear as such in today’s world. Today, space exploration might seem distant and reserved for a select few—astronauts, billionaire tourists, astronomers, or the military. However, ethnographic work shows how deeply outer space is intertwined with people’s lives on Earth, from the daily work of space scientists to the impacts of space infrastructure on local communities around the world.

Since outer space cannot often be known directly, what humans know about it and how they relate to it tends to be shaped by what they know about and how they relate to Earth. Consequently, earthly relations and political dynamics inevitably influence human activities in space. At the same time, an anthropological perspective on outer space can help defamiliarise the taken-for-granted contexts and factors specific to the earthly realm, revealing how deeply they shape human lives and people’s understanding of Earth within the cosmos. Thus, examining outer space can help us recontextualise fundamental questions about society and culture, compelling us to expand our analytical framework to encompass the cosmic realm but also encouraging us to explore alternative models for social life on Earth and beyond. This entry showcases anthropological research that has attempted to answer three fundamental questions at the human-cosmos interface: How do people interact with outer space? How does outer space impact human lives? How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Introduction

Outer space exerts a constant, albeit sometimes imperceptible or remote, influence on the daily lives of people worldwide. From treating the sky as the domain of ancestors and a guide for social and environmental understanding, to utilising space-based infrastructures and technologies for essential needs like communication and travel, outer space profoundly impacts human existence. Yet, what constitutes ‘outer space’? How have people interacted with this realm? And given its intimate connection to human life, is the term ‘outer’ space even appropriate?

The boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space remains ambiguous, conventionally placed between 80 and 100 kilometres above sea level. Anthropological studies generally avoid rigid definitions of outer space as a purely physical entity, recognising it instead as a domain of human sociality beyond Earth’s atmosphere where diverse political, social, economic, and cultural relations are being played out.

At the same time, media and political discourses often frame outer space within an expansionist, competitive, and developmental narrative, employing terms like ‘space colonisation’, ‘frontier’, ‘race’, and ‘settlement’. Some of these are also used in academic literature. International and national legislation governing space activities, such as the UN Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, frequently reinforce the perception of space as an empty territory, available on a first-come, first-served basis. Some argue that the very descriptors ‘outer’ and ‘extraterrestrial’ perpetuate this sense of detachment, overlooking the long-standing Indigenous connections to the sky and the myriad ways in which it has shaped the lives of various communities and individuals throughout history, both before and after rockets soared through the atmosphere (see, for example, Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Certain critical scholars refer to outer space with the term ‘cosmos’, which usually carries a more philosophical or spiritual connotation than ‘outer space’. Within this entry, these terms are treated as synonymous. Doing so deliberately avoids reinforcing some of the dualisms—such as technology/culture or sacred/profane—that anthropological inquiry strives to critically examine and challenge.

Space anthropology is still an emerging field, despite its roots in early works by Ben Finney and Eric Jones (1986), among others. While it is already grappling with intricate terminological challenges and shifting research foci, its inquiries are fundamentally driven by a desire to ask better questions about humans and understand their place within the cosmos. Thus, ethnographic studies have investigated communities deeply immersed in outer space, such as space scientists discovering new planets by comparing their features to Earth and engineers working with Martian rovers that navigate an extraterrestrial terrain, for whom the cosmos is not merely an imagined realm but also a remote yet tangible and real place. These studies demonstrate that our understanding of the cosmos is not solely derived from an unmediated scientific perception, but rather shaped by a confluence of individual imaginations, organisational structures, and national cultural influences (Messeri 2016; Vertesi 2015).

As people’s familiarity with the vast cosmos deepens, it forces them to re-evaluate Earth’s position within it, broadening understandings of human environments and challenging anthropocentric and geocentric perspectives. At the same time, anthropological and historical research consistently underscores the persistent terrestrial impacts of space exploration, the ecological and social footprint of which extends beyond the celestial sphere. Launch sites, research facilities, and other infrastructure are firmly rooted on Earth. These structures are not merely stepping stones to the cosmos; anthropological research argues that they are also intricately intertwined with earthly realities of colonialism, environmental impacts, and social displacement (e.g. Redfield 2000, 212–44). Outer space thus emerges as an arena of political power struggles, military competition, and capitalist expansion, where approaches deemed historically problematic on Earth are apparently readily adopted for exploring the unknown. Despite the powerful forces that frame the cosmos as a domain for profit-making and geopolitical expansion, anthropological perspectives both provide nuance for and problematise these narratives.

As space exploration continues, anthropological analysis has also addressed the more speculative possibilities of encountering extraterrestrial cultures or establishing human habitats beyond Earth. Ethnographic knowledge of intercultural dialogue, encounters, and migrations once served as anthropologists’ claim to a rightful role in space exploration endeavours (Finney and Jones 1986). Today, some continue to envisage outer space as a potential new home for humanity where the limitations and shortcomings of current societies could be transcended (Valentine 2012). This opens up discussions about human futures, both on Earth and potentially beyond. Consequently, outer space emerges as a space for not only critiquing existing politico-economic relations but also for projecting and contemplating alternative social formations.

From an anthropological perspective, outer space can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of terrestrial realities. According to this approach, earthly relationships and dynamics play out and expand within a cosmic context, intricately connected to events on Earth. On the other hand, outer space can also be seen as an overarching realm that encompasses our planet. This perspective recontextualises Earth’s position and significance within the cosmos. It offers potential avenues for imagining alternative social and economic relations both on Earth and beyond. This entry delves into anthropological investigations exploring the profound relationship between humans and outer space. It examines three core questions that have shaped space anthropology so far. These are: How do humans engage with the cosmos? What is the impact of outer space on our lives? And what is its influence on people’s understanding of social reality?

How do people interact with outer space?

Ethnographic research has demonstrated a diverse range of ways in which people around the world engage with the cosmos. Their interactions shape their understanding of its significance within their communities and for humanity as a whole. While these understandings may sometimes differ, their analytical value lies in their capacity to offer alternative perspectives that can enrich, nuance, problematise, or challenge established narratives of space and space exploration. For example, Indigenous connections with the sky often problematise the assumption that outer space is empty and inanimate and no people or beings other than a limited number of astronauts have travelled or lived in space. Reportedly, Inuit peoples in Alaska laughed when an anthropologist informed them about the first Moon landing, as they claimed to have been travelling there for years (Young 1987).

In fact, several Indigenous knowledges express a profound interconnectedness between the earthly and cosmic realms, recognising their mutual dependence. The sky is often considered to be inhabited by ancestors and other beings. Indigenous cosmologies such as those of the Yolŋu in northern Australia are deeply embedded within the stories told about outer space and the sky (Bawaka Country et al. 2020). Moreover, oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge of the skies not only aid in understanding natural patterns related to weather, seasons, animal behaviour, and plant life but also sometimes pre-date Western scientific knowledge of historical celestial phenomena (Hamacher 2023). Given their close and kin relationships with the cosmos, Indigenous communities worldwide such as the Diné (the Navajo nation in the southwestern United States) often caution against exploitative approaches to space exploration, which they believe disrupt the cosmic order (Bartels 2024).

Non-Indigenous interactions with the cosmos can appear to lack the Indigenous sense of kinship with the sky. Space scientists and engineers within major Western space agencies and laboratories, recently the focus of ethnographic attention, often rely on technological devices and terrestrial landscapes to mediate their interactions with and conceptions of the cosmos. However, even they strive to reaffirm the reality of the cosmic objects they study and operate upon, seeking to establish more intimate and multi-layered relationships with outer space.

For instance, scientists who study planets that circle stars outside our solar system (exoplanets) strive to measure the dimming of a star while the exoplanet transits across its face—a technique known as ‘the transit method’. Subsequently, they visualise and interpret data obtained through such methods to turn the measurements into something that would seem more tangible and relatable. As part of this process, the scientists imagine exoplanets as potential places that they might inhabit, as worlds (Messeri 2016). They draw, for example, upon the more familiar language of the Earth’s solar system to describe the properties of newly discovered planets. Even though their precise parameters remain uncertain, astronomers employ familiar comparisons, calling the exoplanets ‘super-Earths’ or ‘hot Neptunes’, etc. They also utilise a variety of visualisation techniques, from producing curves and graphs to generating statistics, to represent these places that elude visual observation. Similarly, scientists can now translate cosmic phenomena, such as gravitational waves, into audible sounds. While this process relies on established scientific theories, models, and instrumental captures, the resulting sounds are also shaped by a multitude of social and cultural metaphors. For example, an astronomical observatory is compared to ‘a hearing aid’ and sounds of cosmic phenomena to ‘chirps’ or ‘whines’. These visual and acoustic ‘informalisms’ (Helmreich 2016) not only reflect upon the original theories and instrumental data but also foster a more intimate connection between the astronomer and the celestial objects they study.

This connection mirrors the direct experience of observing the night sky at an optical observatory. Although astronomical work increasingly relies on digital data, some astronomers still deeply value the opportunity to conduct research at an observatory, where the distant universe becomes more tangible (Hoeppe 2012). Ethnographic work within science and engineering teams responsible for operating Mars rovers has also underscored the importance of such embodied practices (Vertesi 2015). Various team members identified with the bodies of the rovers, incorporating their physical gestures and movements into their understanding of the rovers and their objects of analysis. This shows how important representational techniques are in establishing and cultivating relationships with the extraterrestrial. Simultaneously, team members aligned their work structures with local and workplace-based norms, meetings, and forms of talk, thereby forging a specific community. Put differently, the intimate engagements with the Mars rovers represented the extraterrestrial as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of a particular social order. People’s representations of and engagements with outer space not only facilitate the scientific exploration of the cosmos and render extraterrestrial scientific objects more legible, but also generate new social relations on Earth, aligning individuals’ aims and values in their collective endeavour to familiarise the unknown.

Many of the techniques that bring the cosmos closer and render it more familiar are inherently social and cultural. Consequently, our representations of outer space are profoundly shaped by cultural tropes and socio-political narratives. The spectacular images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, are not merely unfiltered photographs of the universe; they are products of scientific and aesthetic negotiation. Astronomers had to make deliberate choices about how to translate raw data into meaningful colours and contrasts. In the process, they drew upon familiar geological and meteorological formations, as well as the iconography of nineteenth century American Western landscapes (Kessler 2012). These images were carefully composed for both American domestic and international audiences, serving as a form of scientific outreach and public service. However, by drawing parallels to earthly landscapes and aligning with narratives of outer space as a frontier, these images also encouraged a specific perception of the cosmos: a place simultaneously distant yet inviting exploration. Similar dynamics are evident in other public-facing initiatives, even those designed to be more ‘democratic’, i.e. open to independent public interpretation. For instance, a group of computer scientists at NASA aimed to create an interactive map of Mars that the public could explore independently. Yet, even this initiative promoted a specific way of seeing Mars: as a dynamic, vital place that merits continued research and financial commitment from NASA's exploration project—ultimately reflecting NASA’s overarching mission of extraterrestrial conquest (Messeri 2017). Our highly mediated engagements with outer space offer valuable insights into the socio-cultural nature of how humans represent the cosmos. They also demonstrate how we connect to the cosmic realm while simultaneously shaping our realities on Earth.

Analogue sites (and various forms of simulation training, more generally) offer another example of an important medium for human interaction with outer space, particularly for experimenting with aspects of human spaceflight missions. These sites allow space scientists and future astronauts to familiarise themselves with the unfamiliar environment of outer space while remaining on Earth. Analogue research typically involves travelling to locations with environmental, geological, or other conditions resembling those found on Mars or other celestial bodies, enabling the testing of equipment and mission designs. For example, ethnographic work with scientists at NASA demonstrates how Mars was brought into being as a group of scientists descended upon an analogue site in the Utah desert (Messeri 2016). These ‘mission’ members treated earthly geological formations as if they were Martian, weaving planet-specific narratives about their past and present. This experience provided the closest possible approximation of being on Mars, and it helped maintain the possibility of future human habitation on the planet. The physical and imaginary elements of the analogue mission, including the strict protocols governing ventures outside the ‘space habitat’, induced a cognitive shift among its participants, redefining the experience of living on Earth. However, these missions also possessed more practical elements. At the time of this research, NASA had stalled plans for human missions to Mars. Consequently, the activities observed by the anthropologist present also represented an attempt by NASA employees to cultivate a utopian narrative within the agency, one that preserved the possibility of Martian missions in the future (Messeri 2016).

In another ethnographic study of analogue sites, anthropologist Valentina Marcheselli worked with astrobiologists in Italian caves and mines, simulating potential microbial habitats or shelters on Mars (2022). Their embodied experiences of the caves and mines were crucial not only for transforming these earthly settings into otherworldly analogues but also for establishing astrobiology as a novel scientific discipline. The analogue astrobiological work challenged traditional scientific practices, as its observations and results were no longer solely derived from hypothesis testing but emerged through a more open-ended approach. Such embodied and open-ended research was deemed particularly suitable for a discipline dedicated to encountering and explaining the extraterrestrial unknown. Studying analogue sites, then, reveals something about the inherently dual nature of analogue space missions. In trying to keep Martian exploration viable in times of institutional contraction, or reinforcing the case for a new scientific research method, they aim to make mission participants more intimately familiar with another world, while also utilising this work to influence human engagement with this one.

In a similar vein, astronautics, or the science of space travel, is thought of by US scientists, physicians, and engineers involved in human spaceflight as relying on various ‘systems’ in order to work (Olson 2018). Such systems are defined as technologies that relate diverse concepts and materialities to one another. Thinking of human-technology constellations as systems serves a technocratic function. It contributes to perceiving outer space as governable, thereby perpetuating expansionist narratives of space exploration. The work conducted in extreme terrestrial environments, such as analogue lunar bases on the seafloor, and the allure of radically different extraterrestrial conditions, resonates with a culture in which the extreme has positive connotations as a catalyst for improvement and progress. Consequently, analogue missions participate in a cultural dynamic that frames the extreme as an imperative for overcoming challenges, fostering social innovation, and achieving distinctiveness (Olson 2018).

Earlier research on the European Space Agency (ESA) examined the entanglement of space with a different cultural dynamic, specifically the metaphor of European cooperation (Zabusky 1995). Studied during the 1990s, European cooperation in space science turned out to, paradoxically, rely on both conflict and diversity. The inherent internal diversity of European institutions, in which staff comes from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds, helps ESA employees avoid feelings of alienation and stagnation. Through regular, contested interactions and performances of difference, cooperation emerges through space technology as a form of rational solidarity. However, this process is not merely instrumental; it also constitutes a journey through which individuals experience a sacred and intense sense of community (i.e. communitas).

Even though science often claims to be largely impartial and independent of cultural influences, the social nature of the human-space interface is evident not only within the structures and practices of scientific communities, but also in the scientific outcomes of major research organisations such as NASA. Their varied internal hierarchies and interactional norms produce different kinds of scientific knowledge. Sometimes NASA's collective work modes relied on collectivist decision-making structures such as consensus, and emphasised the importance of arriving at a common ground. On other occasions, integrative work modes were favoured, stemming from a position that respected the autonomy of separate units and tried to unite the particular interests of different units in some form of a workable whole. These differing organisational structures were reflected, for example, in the authorship structure of scientific articles and in the influence that different scientific disciplines had in NASA's research (Vertesi 2020).

While the socio-cultural connections between Earth and outer space turn out to be robust, as is evident in human representations and engagements with the cosmos, it is also crucial to avoid an overly deterministic view of this relationship. While human perceptions and interactions with the universe are undoubtedly shaped by cultural narratives and social structures, these influences are multifaceted and nuanced rather than one-dimensional or all-powerful. For example, NASA employees working with Mars rovers encountered significant challenges in aligning their work schedules with the Martian day-night cycle, which is around 40 minutes longer than that of Earth. Despite the use of visual displays and other representational techniques to track Martian time, the inherent mismatch between Earth and Mars time led to confusion and—with ever-changing work schedules meant to allow staff to keep up with Mars—bodily fatigue (Mirmalek 2020). This highlights the limitations of simply imposing external (and extraterrestrial) frameworks on human experience.

Just as the human body cannot simply adapt to Martian time while remaining firmly rooted on Earth, human imaginations are not solely shaped by dominant narratives of space exploration. Ethnographic work with 'New Space' advocates, who invest in commercial space ventures (Valentine 2012), as well as space creators and enthusiasts, who popularise space exploration (Szolucha 2024), reveals a more nuanced picture. While these individuals may operate within the constraints of capitalist relations or navigate the uncertainties of a social spectacle, they also challenge conventional investment strategies, foster community, and actively produce shared visions of the future, thereby creating new social relations. The work of space creators, for example, not only popularises space exploration and makes it comprehensible to a global audience of enthusiasts, but also has the power to mould the public’s collective space myths. The collective imagination of outer space may, therefore, contain possibilities for new narratives of space exploration.

How does outer space impact human lives?

Space exploration leaves a visible mark on Earth, requiring diverse infrastructure for the manufacture and operation of space technologies. These facilities are often situated in locations perceived as remote or uninhabited. However, anthropological research foregrounds the stories of communities impacted by these developments, emphasising their needs, perspectives, and the structural biases that limit their agency. For example, several engaged anthropologists worked during the 1970s with the Yanadi, an Indigenous tribe in India with a nomadic lifestyle historically centred around hunting and gathering (Agrawal, Rao and Reddy 1985). This engagement occurred shortly after the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had acquired the Yanadi’s traditional lands to establish a new space centre on an island off India’s eastern coast. The anthropologists documented the profound changes ISRO brought to the region, displacing the Yanadi from their traditional hunting grounds, offering employment opportunities, and creating new community facilities. By collaborating with the Yanadi and ISRO, the anthropologists helped negotiate extended land access rights for the tribe members and educated the ISRO about the social impacts of its activities on the Yanadi community.

The Yanadi case is not an isolated historical incident. Displacement or various degrees of neglect of Indigenous or disadvantaged populations during state or commercial encroachment on their territories has been a recurring theme in the construction and siting of space-related infrastructure, persisting to the present. In the 1980s, the space base in northeastern Brazil displaced Afro-Brazilian villagers, reflecting a history of class and racial inequality within the country (Mitchell 2017). In French Guiana, the construction and operation of ESA’s spaceport in Kourou continues to be entangled with the colonial history of the region (Redfield 2000) and its peculiar status as a European periphery (Korpershoek 2024). Currently, the Native American Esto’k Gna oppose the operations of a private space company for restricting the access to their traditional lands on the southern tip of Texas in the United States (Szolucha 2023). The proposed construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the sacred mountain of Maunakea in Hawai'i, despite sustained local protest and predicted environmental impacts, is another example (Hobart 2019; Maile 2019). Anthropologists have helped to amplify the experiences and perspectives of Indigenous and disadvantaged groups, documenting the historical legacies of inequality and injustice, while exploring potential avenues for change.

Such examples have led some social scientists to formulate more sweeping critiques of space exploration efforts, characterising them as inherently colonial and exploitative (for example, Rubenstein 2022; Treviño 2023). Against such views, critical scholars propose alternative approaches to engaging with the cosmos, such as celestial wayfinding. Aiming to mirror the way Polynesians navigated the ocean and to avoid the perpetuation of colonial dynamics in space exploration, celestial wayfinding is meant to be guided by principles of sustainable settlement, informed by an animate view of the cosmos and based on a belief in the inherent value and necessary co-existence of all beings (Lempert 2021). The !Kung San people of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa have been suggested as a positive and egalitarian model for social organisation of space communities (Lee 1985). Their adaptations were based on the practice of sharing, living in a small group, and being self-sufficient for a very long time. Anthropologists have also considered the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, with their emphasis on mutual learning and reciprocal interaction, as a potential model for interstellar migration (Tanner 1985). Furthermore, alternative modes of travelling and living together that have been explored in science fiction movies also hold the potential to inspire and improve space exploration (Lempert 2014; Salazar 2023).

Queer and feminist perspectives on space exploration equally offer frameworks for reimagining it. ‘Queering the cosmos’ would involve liberating it from the constraints of established, often limited, visions of the future and opening it up to multiple possibilities (Oman-Reagan 2015). Similarly, feminist approaches to space travel challenge the presumption of heterosexuality—pervasive within the imaginaries and designs of human spaceflight—and critically examine the ideological and structural biases that lead to exclusionary and oppressive practices and imaginaries (Gál and Armstrong 2023).

While various critical approaches are being proposed to ‘reclaim outer space’ (Schwartz, Billings and Nesvold 2023) a growing body of anthropological work is emerging in parallel that challenges the seemingly monolithic character of modern space projects. On the one hand, space infrastructure developments are typically justified in the name of scientific and economic advancement for a specific community, region, or even nation. While the examples above illustrate some significant challenges and pitfalls of these justifications, space projects may mobilise a sense of hope, agency, and visions of alternative futures that extend beyond serving as an escape plan for a select few (Denning 2023). They can provide alternative visions of international cooperation and even increased ecological care.

At the same time, outer space has always held the potential for increased militarisation, neocolonialism, and extractivism. Anthropologists demonstrate that these two facets, of care and extractivism, are inextricably linked and that space exploration, while perpetuating harmful legacies, also automatically elicits alternative practices and visions of the future (see, for example, Ojani 2024). Many Mexicans, for example, reveal complex imaginaries surrounding space. They see space exploration as a pathway to economic development through technological innovation while simultaneously emphasising the need to critically reflect on the conditions that shape its achievement (Johnson 2020). Similarly, astronomers in Madagascar demonstrate that a problematic and culturally specific notion of the ‘universality of science’ can nevertheless serve as a tool for navigating inequalities on Earth (Nieber 2024). Assuming that science is to some extent universal is not just an epistemic requirement for gaining entry into an international scientific network. It is also a horizon of possibility, one that offers both hope and direction.

How does outer space influence our understanding of social reality?

Outer space not only affects people’s lives but also recalibrates their structures of understanding. Being outside Earth and thinking about the cosmos involves encountering extraterrestrial materialities and contexts that are unfamiliar or behave in unexpected ways. Living in microgravity on the International Space Station (ISS), for example, removes the people involved from the familiar bounds of Earth and from usual ways of being and feeling human. The physical experience of weightlessness affects emotions and their social expression, demonstrating how gravity—a condition we typically take for granted—influences not only the human body but also emotions and social relations. This is because the effective communication of emotions and human relations depends on certain material conditions. When those are dramatically altered in such environments as outer space, a simple hug, for example, becomes a challenge because bodies behave and react differently than they would on Earth. The hug becomes a somewhat awkward experience, because bodies of astronauts struggle to align and exchange the same sense of touch they would under the conditions of gravity (Parkhurst and Jeevendrampillai 2020). Similarly, venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere allows us to reconsider its role as a primary context, one that provides the reference points for our fundamental understandings and distinctions, such as the one between nature and culture, for example (Battaglia 2012; Valentine 2016). An anthropological engagement with outer space turns out to broaden the notions of what constitutes an ‘environment’ and to decentre our geocentric and anthropocentric perspectives (Battaglia, Valentine and Olson 2015; Helmreich 2012; Olson and Messeri 2015).

This recalibrating nature of outer space has also prompted a rethinking of anthropological methodologies (see, for example, Gorbanenko, Jeevendrampillai and Kozel 2025). Specifically, it has been suggested that anthropological research be recontextualised in ‘more-than-terran’ spaces (Olson 2023), to think about fieldwork as having significance and being localised beyond Earth, and as being entangled with entities, dynamics, and phenomena beyond Earth-based contexts. While humans’ earthly embeddedness is undeniable, an expanded methodological toolkit would acknowledge that societies already exist on a boundary between terrestrial and extraterrestrial realms. However, how radically methodologies need to be adjusted is currently somewhat under dispute. Given that people constantly negotiate their social existence through a dialogue with their social and material worlds, life on Earth may be quite mediated already and therefore not that different to study than life in space (Jeevendrampillai et al. 2023).

Ethnographic research in locations like the ISS is unlikely to occur anytime soon, given how expensive and hard it is to access. Studying Earth-based space infrastructures related to it, such as its Mission Controls, is much more feasible and can still be highly elucidating. Ethnographers can more easily enter a meeting in ground-based buildings by government agencies and companies designing space experiments or observe livestreamed conversations with ISS crews. Seemingly remote locations can thus be studied via the multiple, interconnected sites, media, and groups of people that constitute a field both up in space and here on Earth (Buchli 2020). These include the constant online presence of the ISS, multimedia archives, and communities tracking the ISS from Earth.

Space activities, both on Earth and in outer space, are dispersed across vast distances and dynamically evolving networks. Therefore, field sites are never stable entities but are better understood as sometimes-atomised and relational spaces connected through shared meanings and materialities (Timko 2024). The distributed nature of space-related sites and globally dispersed communities has led to the idea of a ‘planetary ethnography’ (Szolucha et al. 2022; 2023). This approach to research seeks to push the boundaries of representation to uncover new perspectives both by engaging with diverse social groups across different cultures and by bringing them into a comparative analysis that can reveal unexpected alliances or effect a change in perspective. These under- or unrepresented experiences and viewpoints, much like the extraterrestrial itself, should have the potential to revisit and reorient entire fields of understanding, rather than simply adding another perspective, one that remains on the periphery.

Conclusion

Although outer space remains a physically distant horizon, unreachable for most, it is closer than one may think. It plays a significant role in the everyday lives of diverse groups, from Indigenous communities to the global network of space professionals. Through their engagement with outer space and its many representations, they make communal histories, social norms, as well as distant celestial objects and phenomena more readily comprehensible. In doing so, they reshape social relations and realities here on Earth. Regardless of how they connect with the sky, people worldwide seem to actively strive to forge more intimate relationships with the cosmos, underscoring its inextricable link to human life.

But why is this connection with the universe so important? Perhaps the answer lies in viewing outer space as a social and cultural canvas, one on which individuals and communities can project their understanding of the present social order and their aspirations for the future. For example, Russian cosmonautic amateurs who build and test satellites and other space technologies hold the idea that anyone can participate in space exploration, even without government backing (Sivkov 2019). Their activities highlight the importance of merit and technological know-how in driving space exploration. Therefore, engaging with the cosmos allows them to critique the social and political realities of their country. Outer space can thus be understood as a field for critiquing current social conditions and experimenting with potential alternatives.

Popular representations of extraterrestrial life and unidentified flying objects (‘UFOs’) have also been interpreted as expressions of broader socio-political concerns. These include feelings of alienation and mistrust towards political representatives. Alien abduction narratives equally reflect anxieties, including concerns about racial and ethnic difference. In other depictions, extraterrestrial beings are viewed as divine, expanding the scope of human understanding beyond purely scientific explanations. Historically, ‘ufology’—the study of UFOs—emerged from anxieties surrounding military tensions and technological advancements (Battaglia 2006), a dynamic that continues to resonate today.

Public interest in the cosmos waxes and wanes, driven by the vagaries of politics and cultural trends while popular sentiment toward even the most successful space programmes is often ambiguous (Launius 2003). However, anthropological research has definitively demonstrated that people worldwide actively seek deeper and more complex connections with the cosmos. It is an inextricable part of daily life, shaping their past, co-creating their present, and prefiguring their future.

This understanding challenges the detached view of the cosmos as an outside domain, a perspective some argue was reinforced by the first images of Earth taken by astronauts of Apollo missions from the void of space (Arendt 1968; Cosgrove 1994). This seemingly detached ‘view from nowhere’ may perpetuate the notion that the cosmos is simply there for the taking, whether by technologically advanced nations or an oligarchy-controlled private sector. If technological engagement with outer space expands in the coming decades, largely fuelled by commercial and military-led space ventures, what convergences and tensions will emerge with the fundamental human drive for cosmic intimacy? One thing is certain: humanity will discover ever-new ways to imbue outer space with meaning, both on Earth and beyond.

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Note on contributor

Anna Szolucha is an Associate Professor and Principal Investigator of the ARIES (Anthropological Research into the Imaginaries and Exploration of Space) project at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. Her research interests lie at the intersection of new technologies, natural resources, and society.

Research for this article received funding from the National Science Centre, Poland, project number 2020/38/E/HS3/00241.

Anna Szolucha, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Jagiellonian University, ul. Golebia 9, 31-007 Krakow, Poland. ORCID: 0000-0001-8938-6066

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Dreams

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:17:37 +0000

Scene from a 2018 mural depicting dream creatures and the women who paint them, by Guatemalen artist María Elena Curruchiche. Picture by UN Women/Ryan Brown

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney

Initially published 8 Aug 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24dreams

Abstract:

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached—if not always formally recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, social relationships, psychological landscapes, and cultural worlds of those who experience them. This entry examines three prominent themes in the anthropological study of dreams as experience and dreaming as process. The first section considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of selfhood and identity. The second section considers dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section considers dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining in particular dreams’ morality and function as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion considers the methodological opportunities and challenges that arise in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis in light of the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological approach of ‘participant-observation’.

Introduction

There is perhaps no activity more private, individual, or interior than dreaming. Dreams tend to occur as involuntary, sporadic events during slumber, encompassing visual images, cognitive activity, and a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. They are often remembered and recounted in scattered fragments or fleeting impressions rather than coherent or structured events. Their significance can seem glaringly evident, or thoroughly opaque. Some we deem meaningful, others trivial. Some dreams we are happy to share, others we would rather not reveal. Dreams, as such, sit somewhere at the interstices of the experienced and narrated, real and imagined, meaningful and meaningless, conscious and subconscious, and disclosed and concealed. Yet despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their nebulous nature, dreams have often been approached—if not always recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, relationships, affects, and environments of those who experience them.^[1]

Dreams were long considered the primary terrain of psychoanalytic theory, which centres the role of unconscious mental processes in shaping human behavioural and mental states. Anthropological approaches have shed vital light on the socially and historically shaped ways that different communities understand the origins, causes, contents, contexts, and meanings of dreams, both as individual psychic experiences and as culturally situated practices, and in ways that do not necessarily correspond to scientific definitions (Lohmann 2007). The earliest reference to dreams within anthropology can be traced to the late nineteenth century scholar Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who argued that dreaming, as a universally experienced state of reality-transcending and altered consciousness, enabled the emergence of human mythologies, cosmological frameworks, and religious beliefs worldwide. For Tylor, dreams in many non-modern societies were held to put people in touch with objectively existing souls or ghosts, while modern societies understood souls and ghosts to be the result of psychology and biology ([1871] 1920). His theories reflected a broader understanding among Victorian anthropologists that belief in the reality of dreams characterised earlier stages in the development of human society, within a three-part evolution of culture from ‘savage’ to ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’.

Early twentieth century dreaming studies, conducted primarily in non-Western settings and often tied to psychiatric interventions, tended to focus on the collection, classification, and comparison of similarities and differences in dream contents, or what was known as ‘dream data reports’ (e.g. Lincoln 1935).^[2]However, post-war scholars in psychological anthropology, and particularly those affiliated with the US-borne ‘Culture and Personality School’—an influential current concerned with how psychological and cultural forces shape human experience—were critical of the abstraction of dreams from their specific lived and interpretive contexts. They posited that dreams should instead be approached as expressions of collectively shaped personality traits and emotive dispositions shared by particular social groups (e.g. Eggan 1952).

It was primarily in the late 1980s and early 1990s that dreams came to figure more prominently as objects of ethnographic inquiry and cross-cultural comparison in their own right within the work of social anthropologists, some of whom bring their social scientific analyses into conversation with neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (e.g. Nordin 2011; Laughlin 2011). Sometimes referred to as the ‘new anthropology of dreaming’ (Tedlock 1991), albeit not thoroughly systematised or integrated, this current recognises dreams as communicative events and legitimate modes of interpreting, inhabiting, and effecting change in the world. It draws attention to dreams as both interiorly experienced and culturally contextual social facts, often requiring multi-disciplinary analysis and attention to local psychodynamics. It also considers dreaming as a fruitful way to conduct research. Dreams can help build relations between field interlocutors and fieldworkers as dreamers themselves, allowing them to connect across different sociocultural worlds.^[3]

Drawing on ethnographic examples from diverse regions, this entry considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of self, personhood, and identity. It then approaches dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section examines dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining dreams’ functions as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion assesses the opportunities and challenges entailed in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis, particularly given their often-opaque nature and the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological method of ‘participant-observation’.

Self, identity, and psyche

Dreams play a central role within anthropological investigations into constructions of the self, identity, and psyche across individuals, collectives, and cultures, or what is referred to alternately as the field of ‘ethnopsychology’ (White 2012) or ‘cultural psychodynamics’ (Mageo 2015). Freudian psychoanalysis was instrumental in rehabilitating dreams as objects of legitimate scholarly inquiry and therapeutic intervention in the West and had a profound influence on early anthropologies of dreaming. Its influence manifests, for instance, in analyses of dreams as the disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes and as expressions of trauma, anxiety, and guilt. It also surfaces in the distinction identified by researchers between dreams’ manifest or conscious content and their latent or subconscious content, and an attention to the multiple symbolic valences of recurring dream motifs or patterns.

Exemplary of this approach is an ethnographic study conducted in the 1980s that centred on the dreams of Jovenil, a recently bereaved father among the Kagwahiv people of the Brazilian Amazon (Kracke 1981). In these dreams, Jovenil witnesses the engorged penis of a man that is snapped off as punishment for the man having slept with his own sister. Jovenil also dreams of suffering the wrath of his wife for inadvertently hunting and killing a monkey and of overturning a canoe that drowns his son, Alonzo. These events, according to anthropologist Waud Kracke, manifest Jovenil’s curiosity in the large penis of a fellow villager he beheld as a child and for which he was later castigated by his mother, resulting in sexual trauma. They also show his repressed guilt for engaging in taboo incestuous relations with a parallel cousin earlier in life, and the blame he places upon himself for the consequent death of his children as a form of punishment. In a society that prescribes that the dead must be forgotten and all memories of them eradicated, it was through the subconscious experience of dreams that Jovenil was able to work through the emotional process of mourning the loss of his children, facing his guilty conscience, and acknowledge his complicity in the tragedy.

If the example above centres on a single individuals’ multiple dreams, other early studies of an ethnopsychological bent took as their primary data a wider array of subjects and dreams to identify basic personality traits and worldviews that are shared by particular social groups, or what was then called ‘culture patterns’ (Eggan 1952, 478). For instance, ‘dream charts’ were deployed to analyse the manifest content of 334 dreams collected from men and women aged 6 to 75 years in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico (Foster 1973). Recurring symbols within these dreams, and particularly among men, include a threatening environment, impotence and loneliness, fear of embarrassment, and unpredictable futures. These repeated motifs point to anxiety over what people will say, or of being found out, as central dimensions of Tzintzuntzan cultural and gendered norms. They suggest that Tzintzuntzan people’s adherence to principles of good behaviour in waking life is driven less by their sense of guilt than by their conformity to what anthropologist George Foster calls a ‘shame culture’. Importantly, dreams’ manifest content directs attention not only to the basic tenets of ‘shame culture’ as a shared disposition among Tzintzuntzan people, but also to the disharmony or tensions that exist between this cultural ideal on the one hand, and the repression of desires that sustaining this ideal demands (Eggan 1952, 478).

More recent ethnopsychological scholarship has distanced itself from Freudian and Culture and Personality approaches to studying dreams. It recognised that such approaches risked being ethnocentric, i.e. that they often misinterpreted dreams because they stuck too closely to the cultural understandings of the analysts. Previous approaches had also assumed that cultures were largely static and that insights from one culture were widely generalisable. Working against these assumptions, contemporary ethnopsychological studies consider how cultural transformation, including processes of globalisation, colonisation, and modernisation, reconfigures the ability of individuals and collectives to reorganise their sense of self. They study, for example, how dreams that reflect back to the dreamer how their organisation of self relates to them, their body, and other beings and entities in the world (so-called ‘selfscape dreams’) relate to people’s interpretive frameworks (Hollan 2004). While such dreams may be universal in their basic orienting functions, their content varies within and across both cultures and individuals, conjuring cultural contexts that are more-than-local in their scope, sites, and subjects (e.g. Lattas 1993; Hollan 2005).

In American Samoa, for example, the dreams of young students, and their own reflections on these dreams’ significance, express their efforts to situate their selves in the context of imposed cultural shifts over a century of Christian conversion and Americanisation (Mageo 2004). In one such dream, a female Samoan’s muteness, compounded with her inability or refusal to speak either English or Samoan and her appearance as a White, blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old, point to communication problems, existential confusions, and forms of cultural resistance linked to Samoan girls’ shifting sexuality and gender roles. They reflect enduring traditional hierarchies on the one hand and notions of social equality and racial categories introduced by colonialism on the other. In another dream, the violent silencing and injury suffered by a male dreamer’s girlfriend embodies the challenge of reconciling the customary authority of higher-status Samoan males with the values of romantic engagement, care, and sincerity introduced by Christian missionaries, and American soldiers in WWI. In both instances, dreams and their interpretation by dreamers themselves come to constitute experiences that are creative rather than purely passive, conscious rather than purely unconscious, and generative rather than purely reflective. It is through these experiences that Samoans engage emotionally and discursively in the effects and affects of socio-cultural change and attendant forms of meaning-making.

Cultural artefacts, ritual acts, and interpretive practices

The sociocultural dimensions of dreams accrue particular prominence when dream ritualisation, communication, and interpretation form part of an established local knowledge system. Such insider or local knowledge systems offer valuable insights into how dream experiences are defined, classified, and valued across different communities as significant or mundane, empowering or perilous, or pragmatic or supernatural. They showcase how and when dreams should be communicated to others, or not, and who has the authority to elucidate their meanings. They also shed light on the diverse functions and causes of dreams, including as momentary and revelatory journeys deep into parts of the self or beyond (Mittermaier 2015; Groark 2009); as products of the intentions of the dreamer or unsolicited visitations by outside entities (George 1995; Heneise 2017); as pathways to or predicaments of past and future events (Stewart 2017; Basso 1987); as deliberately induced expressions of creative imagination or unwilled forms of external control (Herdt and Stephen 1989; Chao 2022); as guides to behaviour or reflections thereof (Ingold 2013; Pandya 2004); as experiences of diagnostic, therapeutic, anxiogenic, or punitive valences (Devereux 2023; Traphagan 2003); as expressions of resilience or rupture in the face of change (Graham 1995; Glaskin 2005); and as continuous extensions of, or radical breaks from, waking thoughts (Kracke 1981; Rubenstein 2012).

Ethnographic studies of dreams among the Yolmo of north-central Nepal illustrate the value of attending to local understandings of dreams’ sociocultural significance as categories of experience and modes of practice (Desjarlais 1991). According to one study, conducted in the late 1980s, dreams do not exist for Yolmo as a unitary entity, but rather in three distinctive forms—auspicious, inauspicious, and seemingly insignificant—that manifest in particular dream events. While villagers can articulate these basic distinctions, it is primarily Buddhist spiritual leaders and priests, such as lamas and shamans, who have the authority and expertise to determine what particular dreams signify and to heal those who experience them. They do so by drawing on a ‘dictionary of dream symbols’ (Desjarlais 1991, 215) that identifies and indexes a wide, complex, yet finite range of dream images and meanings that are collectively recognised but also vary in significance depending on the dreamer in question.

In contrast to the notion of dreams as reflective of the individual’s self, psyche, and past, many Yolmo believe that dreams predict events that will impact those around the dreamer in the course of their future waking life. For instance, a tree falling in one person’s dream indicates that one of their close relatives will imminently die (Desjarlais 1991, 216). Another key facet of Yolmo dream knowledge systems pertains to the sustained enculturation in editing, remembering, communicating, and thus in some ways creating dream stories that begin in the early stages of life. Throughout this process, Yolmo not only come to terms with the distresses expressed in their dreams, but also actively ‘make their dreams mean what they want them to mean’ (Desjarlais 1991, 221). What this study offers is an approach to dreams anchored first and foremost in the knowledge systems of dreamers themselves—one that uncovers dreams’ divinatory functions as well as their positioning with local structures of expertise, processes of skill acquisition, and understandings of meaning-making as a concomitantly symbolic and strategic endeavour.

Other ethnographic accounts attend the embodied and ritualised dimensions and protocols of dreams and dream-sharing as collective—rather than individuated—practices that serve to guide everyday social activities. One such case centres on dreaming among the Ongee people of Little Andaman Island and its role in determining communal hunting and gathering practices in daily life (Pandya 2004). Within these dreams, shared sensations of smells help to inform conscious and practical decisions by Ongee groups around what plants or animals should be sought out in the forest, where, and when.^[4]This olfactory dimension stems from the Ongee perception of dreams as moments where individuals’ internal bodies (enteeah) collect the smells left behind or imprinted upon their external bodies (mateeah) in waking life, in a process known as dane korale, which translates literally as ‘a spider making its web’ and is also the Ongee term for ‘dreaming’ (Pandya 2004, 143).

Ongee practice a ritualised form of dream-sharing by participating in lengthy and highly stylised discussions and singing before falling asleep on concentric and mutually facing platforms, in which they describe what they did in the day and what they dreamt of the previous night. Olfactory references identified across different individuals’ dreams, such as the smell of ripe jackfruit, bring these individuals to form groups and look for jackfruit in the forest together. The discovery of ripe jackfruit validates the dreams shared, producing what Ongee call ‘dream success’ (eneyemaga-tegebe) (Pandya 2004, 140). The collective, rather than individuated, nature of dream images and smells thus works hand in hand with Ongee’s collective interpretation of these dreams’ meanings and their implications for shared daily activities. While Ongee have since experienced a transition from circular open campgrounds to private enclosed quarters, and from forest-based subsistence to plantation labour, this ritualised, sensory, and collective ethos persists. People no longer dream or discuss the familiar scents of plants and animals. Instead, their collective dream-sharing rituals speak to experiences of, and guidance found in, the novel smells of plantation foremen and buzzing helicopters.

If symbolism and sensoriality play an important role within some cultural understandings of dreaming, other anthropological approaches invite a more radical appraisal of the primacy of acts and processes of interpretation. They focus less on the instances and categories of imagery and meaning and more on the activities involved in determining and consolidating dreams’ social significance. One example of this are the new dreams of ‘being eaten by oil palm’ (dimakan sawit) experienced by the Marind people of West Papua, Indonesia (Chao 2022, 183–200), wherein sleeping individuals become violently possessed by an introduced cash crop that is rapidly taking over their lands and forests in waking life. These dreams act as cultural critiques of the plantation as a newly established mode of economic production in the region, and they resonate with the new sensory experiences of Ongee community members.

Rather than focusing their discourses on the contents or events of these dreams, or attributing a therapeutic or cathartic value to dream experiences, Marind affirm it is primarily through the oral transmission of dream narratives to and with others that collective healing takes place. For instance, knowledge of kith and kin who have recently been ‘eaten by oil palm’ brings people to travel the landscape to their encounter. Shared dream experiences prompt villagers who are in conflictual relations over land rights to reconcile with one another, or enable starcrossed lovers whose marriage is proscribed by customary law to sustain a different kind of intimate relationship through dream story-telling. In contrast to traditional dreams, whose significance was arbitrated by medicine-men (messav) (Chao 2022, 188–9), new dreams of being eaten by oil palm are open to each and everyone’s interpretation, creating an egalitarian ethos that in turn allows for the participation of women, children, youth, and elders across rural and urban divides. What dream experiences mean, in other words, matters less than what dream sharing does as an exercise in mutual trust-building and as an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability to the attritive forces of plantation capitalism across waking and sleeping worlds.

Another example of how dream interpretation processes come to produce meaning, identity, and consciousness derives from studies of ‘dreamwork groups’ in the United Kingdom (Edgar 1999). These are groups in which six to twelve people share and interpret their dreams in a structured manner. Studying these groups showed that the ways in which dreams are discussed, embellished, and censored depend heavily on social and interactional group dynamics, such as their members’ degree of mutual familiarity, friendship, and shared values.

These dynamics produce dream interpretations that, over the course of conversations initiated by the dreamer but primarily shaped by the group’s questions, suggestions, reservations, and encouragements, become vastly different from the originally recounted experience of the dream and also mutate when dreamwork groups’ composition changes over time. It is through this situated and collective ‘cultural reworking’ of dreams (Edgar 1999, 39), involving the consciousness of both the dreamer and group, that new kinds of mental and affective connectedness are generated and the grounds for individual self-realisation actualised.

Transcendent encounters, spiritual power, and beyond-human knowledge

A third prevalent motif in the anthropology of dreaming pertains to its relationship to religiosity and the transcendent, notably as a source of cosmological knowledge, divination, and power across time. In some contexts, dream experiences and their revelations are intrinsically connected to spiritual understandings of consciousness, cognition, and salvation (e.g. Young 1999). In other contexts, dreams are seen as tied to prophetic figures and events in the past that in turn motivate religious and political movements in the present (e.g. Edgar 2011; Mittermaier 2011). Religious authority can be premised on the ability of select individuals to travel in time in the pursuit of sacred knowledge or to access extra-human powers and entities including spirits, gods, ancestors, and the deceased (e.g. Alatas 2019). Dreams may act as informal yet powerful ‘technologies of governmentality’ that self-regulate individuals’ conscience and conduct in everyday life (Eves 2011). They may also constitute sources of ‘liturgical novelty’ when creatively and contextually interpreted and acted upon by recognised experts (McGee 2012). While revelatory dreams may come to chosen humans through the agency of more-than-human beings, they can also be intentionally sought out and cultivated by human dreamers, including in the form of volitional or lucid dreaming, and through rituals, prayer, and trance- or vision-inducing substances, notably hallucinogenic plants (e.g. Hurd and Bulkeley 2014; Brown 1985).

One example of the cosmological and temporal dimensions of dreams is found among the Bardi Aboriginal people of the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia (Glaskin 2005). As with many Indigenous Australian Peoples, the Bardi identify the creative period in the past during which ancestral beings gave shape to the world (or ‘Country’), as ‘the Dreaming’. Local terms for this period include buwarra, which translates as ‘dream’. While ‘ordinary’ dreams are experienced by ‘ordinary people’, particular individuals in the community, known as jarlngungurr (Glaskin 2005, 303), can communicate with ancestral figures, as well as the spirit beings and the deceased from the Dreaming. They do so through dreams that are initiated by these other-than-human beings and through which knowledges are revealed to the human dreamer. While these knowledges have existed since time immemorial, they inform contemporary ritual and ceremonial life in novel ways, including in the form of new songs, dances, designs, and more, pointing to the integration of tradition and innovation, and past and present, in both the dream form and its real-world ramifications. It is also through the knowledges acquired through dreams from spirits, ancestors, and the deceased that jarlngungurr are able to perform healing, divination, shape-shifting, and time-travel. Dreams thereby help the Bardi anticipate future calamities, notably where respect for Country has been violated and must be remedied or redressed.

As the example above demonstrates, dreams and their authority in producing truths play an important role in enabling the transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge across times and generations. In other contexts, dreams have played a seminal part in encouraging societal transformation, notably in the form of religious enculturation and spiritual self-reinvention. This is the case among the Asabano of highland Papua New Guinea, for whom dreams (aluma) have always acted as portals to the dead, forest beings, or place spirits, and as experiential evidence through which people describe, explain, and rationalise their religious beliefs (Lohmann 2000). When Baptist missionaries sought to convert them in the late 1970s, many Asabano continued to practice their customary religion. It was only following a series of prophetic dreams experienced by villagers, in which they encountered God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, angels, apocalyptic deluges, and the fires of Hell, that Christian beliefs were truly absorbed and internalised. Christian figures that appear in villagers’ dreams to this day testify to these beings’ reality and power and remind people of the behaviours they must sustain in order to secure an afterlife in paradise, whereas traditional and familiar dream-entities like evil nature spirits and cannibal witches are now interpreted as minions of Satan. As such, while the ability of dreams to convey information has not changed for Asabano, the kinds of information being received, and associated dictates of moral conduct, have significantly transformed, with dreams playing an important—potentially even determinant—role in enhancing villagers’ receptivity to the precepts of introduced Christianity.

Dreams, as such, can be instrumental in validating, inspiring, and sustaining belief among members of religious communities. Their evocative valences can also be harnessed beyond the scope of those individuals who adhere to particular religious groups, as illustrated by Amira Mittermaier’s (2015) reflective account of dream-stories among Egyptian adherents to the mystic body of Islamic religious practice known as Sufism. During her fieldwork, Mittermaier was granted permission by her interlocutor, ‘Umar, to consult and select accounts from the Book of Visions, containing the records of dreams and waking visions of followers of Shaykh Qusi, a renowned inheritor and transmitter of the prophet Muhammad’s teachings. This permission, she later found out, itself stemmed from an order that had come to ‘Umar by way of a dream. However, while Mittermaier originally chose dream-visions for her research with the aim of achieving a representative sample from diverse sources and encompassing diverse themes, ‘Umar replaced these selections with a collection of accounts that, to Mittermaier’s initial disappointment, were all relatively similar in content. What drove ‘Umar’s choices was not the pursuit of neutrality or representationality, but rather the effectiveness of these particular dreams in achieving the key aims of Sufi dream-visions—namely, to communicate the shaykh’s aura, to create a sense of awe, and to buttress the shaykh’s spiritual authority. Just as anthropologists selectively deploy ethnographic examples to convince and draw in their readers, so too Sufis approach dream-stories as invitations to their audiences that enable them to communicate and connect with the Prophet, his descendants, and the dead. Dreams allow us to catch a glimpse of the inaccessible, invisible, and unknown, and to be moved both spiritually and imaginatively. And just as prophetic dreams in Sufi communities are at once highly valued and contested, so too decisions around which dreams to include and exclude in Mittermaier’s ethnographic account were never neutral, but shaped as much by anthropological considerations as by the evocative use of dreams as examples by Sufis themselves.

Conclusions

Dreams are universal as experiences yet specific in their contents, interpretations, and performances. As such, they constitute powerful resources for engaging with long-standing questions around the construction of, and relationship between, self and society, mind and body, and continuity and change, and the meaningful slippages that arise across the realms of the known and speculated, lived and narrated, practical and spiritual, and agentive and reflective. Dreams express cultural creativity, social conflict, potentialities for self-exploratory, self-transcendence or hazardous vulnerabilities. They alternately reflect, resolve, or reinforce individual and collective anxieties and desires, as people move in and across different worlds, knowledges, and relations.

Importantly, attending to dreams anthropologically challenges the notion of a single ‘reality’ and its correlative relationship to the ‘imagination’ as the ‘broader range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception and conceptualizations of the real’ (Mittermaier 2011, 3). Instead, it invites us to think of dreams as a form of ‘emergent reality’ (Tedlock 1987b, 4)—or as ‘real in a different way’, as Vincent Crapanzano’s Moroccan informant, Tuhami, says when speaking about his nightly visitations by a she-demon (1980, 15). Dreams are multiply meaningful precisely in light of their inherent ambiguity and in-betweenness, or what Jeannette Mageo calls their ‘mimetic incompleteness’ (2004, 151). They also draw attention to the political, affective, and social force of the imagination as a culturally molded yet never entirely graspable or intelligible dimension of human existence (Stephen 1995; Stevenson 2014). And just as not all dreams bear the same hermeneutic weight or consensual meaning for those who experience them, so too it is critical to consider whose dream interpretations are foregrounded within anthropological accounts across insider-outsider and subjective-objective divides.

Since its inception, the anthropology of dreaming has continued to develop in new and exciting directions. It is no longer confined to particular ‘culture complexes’ or world-regions. Instead, comparative studies of dreams across Global North and South divides push against the romanticisation or essentialisation of non-Western dream cultures (Domhoff 1990). These studies identify recurring motifs in the dreams of American and Japanese citizens (Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago 1958), the role of conflict in the dreams of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children (Levine 1991), and the manifest content of dreams experienced by US-based college women of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American heritage (Kane 1994).^[5]

Alongside a burgeoning of multi-disciplinary approaches that combine anthropological methods and theories with cutting-edge findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, some scholars are practicing ‘studying up’ by examining how Western-trained psychotherapists understand their own dream experiences alongside their relationship to both their patients and their profession (Dombeck 1991). Other researchers practice ‘studying in’ by harnessing auto-ethnographic methods to consider how dream-related knowledge systems learned in the field come to bear new meanings in light of their own personal, physical, and psychological traumas back home (Richman 2000). The role of animals as participants in and producers of dreams (Hallowell 1960) has seen renewed attention in emerging multispecies approaches that consider, for instance, dogs’ dreams as expressions of more-than-human perspectival agency (Kohn 2007) or the haunting apparition in dreams of wrongfully killed cows as expressions of more-than-human retributive justice (Govindrajan 2022).

At the same time, dreams continue to pose certain challenges to the classical methods of anthropology. ‘Dream-narratives’ are always fragmentary and often socially or individually motivated accounts of ‘dream-experiences’ (Kirtsoglou 2010) that themselves cannot be empirically verified and lie beyond the reach of participant-observation. The personal nature of dreams, as well as their at-times spiritual, sacred, or supernatural dimensions, can make them a sensitive topic of discussion, often requiring a strong level of rapport between the researcher and her interlocutors. Taking dreams seriously as objects of analysis is also not devoid of risk for anthropologists themselves, whose professionalism and objectivity may consequently come under question—notably when it comes to writing and imparting their own dream experiences (George 1995, 17–8).

And yet, attending to dreams can also open meaningful spaces for conversations around the different yet interconnected worlds of researchers and their informants. Participating in dream-experiences and sharing dream-narratives can drive intersubjective dynamics of fieldwork, and create mutual trust, critical self-reflection, and openness to ambiguity.^[6]As a form of affective and discursive ‘involvement in the cosmology of the Other’ (Sprenger 2010, 61), delving into dreams—both one’s own and others’—can push back on the ‘anthropological taboo against going native’ (Ewing 1994, 574) and attendant assumptions around the nature of cultural belief versus empirical reality (Luhrmann 1989; Favret-Saada 1980). Rather than dismissing dreams as fictive constructs or ethnographic objects alone, it is perhaps in anthropologists’ willingness to become vulnerable to dreams’ intersubjective thrust that dreams’ agentive force as ‘wild possibilities’ (George 1995, 17) might relationally and imaginatively gain ground and grow.

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Note on contributor

Sophie Chao is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua (2022, Duke University Press) and co-editor of The promise of multispecies justice (2022, Duke University Press).

[1] On the significance of dreams and dreaming in Western history from Ancient Greece to modern times, see Pick and Roper (2004); Parman (1991). On the role of dreams in medieval world religions, including in Europe, early Asia, and Latin America, see Shulman and Stroumsa (1999); Bulkeley (2008).

[2] These studies found echo in later approaches that were concerned with identifying constant and recurring motifs underlying diverse myths across different cultural settings (e.g. Kuper 1979).

[3] For state-of-the-field syntheses of the anthropology of dreaming, see Laughlin (2011); Lohmann (2019); the edited volumes by Tedlock (1987a); Bulkeley (2001); Mageo (2003); Mageo and Sheriff (2021); and the special issues edited by Stewart (2004) and Heijnen and Edgar (2010). For region-specific anthologies of dreaming, see Lohmann (2003) on the West Pacific; Jȩdrej and Shaw (1992) on Africa; Bulkeley (1994) on the West; Price-Williams and Degarrod (1989) on South America.

[4] On the function of dreams as techniques for solving everyday practical matters, including in the contexts of hunting, curing, craftsmanship, and artistic production, see Brightman 2002; Rushforth 1992.

[5] On anthropologies of dreaming in the Global North, see Hollan 2005; Newsom 2021; Heijnen 2010; Sheriff 2017.

[6] On dreams as an intersubjective research method in the field, see Chao 2023; Lambek 2018.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

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).