Thumbnails of 'Wim van Binsbergen, Divination through space and time, keynote, Conference Realities re-viewed/ revealed: Divination in sub-Saharan Africa, Leiden 4-5 July 2005'

abstract: African divination, the central topic of this timely international conference, does not exist in isolation – just as little as Africa itself does. All literate civilisations of both the Old and the New World possessed elaborate, multiple divination systems – and usually these systems came under the spell of astral divination (astrology) as history proceeded. Two millennia ago, Aristotle, Cicero and Plutarch, and many of their philosophical colleagues, reflected on the rationality and credibility of divination, establishing a philosophical tradition of reflection and debate on divination that has extended to Augustine, Ibn Ezra, Aquinas, Popper, Feyerabend, etc. I am not aware of any non-literate society in historical times that lacks all forms of divination – but there are severe limitations to my cross-cultural overview, and I may be mistaken; we shall come back extensively to the point of divination as a possible cultural universal. Divination, in Africa and elsewhere, tends to pose a strange Janus face to the North Atlantic epistemologist: apparently irrational in its choice of sources of knowledge, it subsequently pursues the acquisition of knowledge in a rational fashion: systematically, intersubjectively, with insistent recourse to causal reasoning and usually with at least the appearances of logic (underneath which often communicative tautologies may be detected). Today the study of divination is the, somewhat disreputable, privilege of anthropology, African Studies, the classics, Sinology, and the history of ideas. Their contention is that divination as a form of knowledge production is nonsensical pseudo-science, but that it is interesting as a cultural phenomenon, especially as a form of local wisdom helping people to sort out their small-scale social and psychological crises. Since 1990 I have been both a practicing African diviner, and a professor of intercultural philosophy/ cultural anthropology. In that period, globalisation and long-range comparative research have been major themes in my work. All this brings me to address, in this key note, the epistemological puzzle of divination, as well as its ramifications in space and time at the descriptive and comparative level.

Click on the images (and not just in the cells!) to see the actual size; from each opened image there is a link to the previous and the next image, and to this overview. Start with the image in the GREEN upper lefthand cell

click here for an extensive list of Wim van Binsbergen's writings on divination (mostly published and in English, mostly available from the Internet)

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