Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: David Zeitlyn, "Mambila Divination: Framing Questions, Constructing Answers" (Routledge, 2021)
Description: Professor David Zeitlyn’s book offers a major contribution to the study and analysis of divination, based on continuing fieldwork with the Mambila in Cameroon. It seeks to return attention to the details of divinatory practice, using the questions asked and life histories to help understand the perspective of the clients rather than that of the diviners.Drawing on a corpus of more than 600 cases, David Zeitlyn reconsiders theories of divination and compares Mambila spider divination with similar systems in the area. A detailed case study is examined and analysed using conversational analytic principles. The regional comparison co...