How do diviners divine? How do they achieve such dependable results? Barbara Tedlock, distinguished professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, analysed the mystery. Her crystallised thoughts appear in a new study in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness.
Tedlock explains why other anthropologists were unwilling or unable to build what she has built – a “theory of practice for divination”….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.