Mind, Body and Spirit in Basket Divination

An Integrative Way of Knowing

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3217690
AutoresSónia Silva (0000-0002-5266-7742, Skidmore College, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen5
Número4
Páginas1175-1187
Fecha de publicación2014-12-17
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaReligions (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
EditorialMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel5041175
OpenAlexW2010215546
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas5
Referencias citadas29

The statements of researchers on the topic of basket divination and the statements of basket diviners in northwest Zambia, Africa, do not fully agree. While researchers rightly stress the importance of observation, analysis and interpretation in basket divination, going so far as to describe diviners as scientists, they fail to recognize that divination is not an abstract, disembodied undertaking. Truthful knowledge is not flushed out of the diviner's mind as a set of theoretical propositions; it is instead delivered by an ancestral spirit that becomes objectified in three symbiotic forms: physical pain, configurations of material objects laid out inside a basket, and the diviner's translation of those meaningful configurations into words. In basket divination, human bodies, artifacts, words, and spirits work together in symbiosis. Knowing is a spiritual, intellectual, and embodied undertaking. The challenge then is to conceptualize basket divination as an integrative way of knowing in such a way that one does not fail to recognize either the neurobiological substrate that we all share as humans or those others facets-such as the numen-without which basket divination as a cultural practice would cease to exist

Art · Divination · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Mind–body problem · Sociology · African cultural and philosophical studies · African history and culture analysis · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Philosophy · Psychology