Preface Introduction Part I. Socio-linguistics and poetics 1. Deep Dialogue with Evans-Pritchard 2. In Praise of the Moral Imagination 3. Acrobatic Stylistics, Agonistic Vision Part II. From Tablet Archive to Wisdom Séances 4. Poetics and Archives 5. Family Séances: Rhetoric, Deliberations and Decisions 6. Cosmic and Personal Understandings: Diviners, Headmen, Strangers Part III. From Hooved Archive to Charismatic Séances 7. A Charismatic Diviner's Archive: Hooved Divination 8. The Cross-Over: Originality, Hybridity and Metamorphosis 9. The Charismatic Séance: Arguments, Intimacy and Intimations Conclusion: In Comparison Notes Bibliography Index
Honorable Mention, 2016 Elliott P. Skinner Award
Richard Werbner takes readers on a journey though contemporary charismatic wisdom divination in southern Africa. Beginning with the silent language of the divinatory lots, Werbner deciphers the everyday, metaphorical, and poetic language that is used to reveal their meaning. Through Werbner's skillful interpretations of the language of divination, a picture of Tswapong moral imagination is revealed. Concerns about dignity and personal illumination, witchcraft, pollution, the anger of dead ancestors, as well as the nature of life, truth, cosmic harmony, being, and becoming emerge in this charged African setting.
Richard Werbner is Professor Emeritus in African Anthropology at the University of Manchester. He is author of Reasonable Radicals and Citizenship in Botswana (IUP).
