Creativity in an Eggshell: The Freedom of Uncovering One’s Own World?
Probably every kind of divination requires creativity, but the Nuosu of Southwest China open up whole microcosms of it when cracking eggs into bowls of water and reading the bubbles that form. Nuosu egg divination is a spontaneous craft––one that both shapes and responds to the world––which means that diviners are free to interpret the same results differently. Many clients value this ‘natural’ approach to divination because it lets them address problems flexibly. Yet Nuosu egg divination also raises large questions about the nature of divination that I address in this talk: Is it possible to have too much creativity in divination? Or too much freedom in envisioning our own place within the cosmos?
Bio:
Katherine Swancutt is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant ‘Cosmological Visionaries: Shamans, Scientists, and Climate Change at the Ethnic Borderlands of China and Russia’ at the Department of Ecological Anthropology, Czech Academy of Sciences. She has worked with Nuosu in Southwest China since 2007 and carried out fieldwork on shamanism and animism across Inner Asia for more than 25 years.
Recent publications include Demons and Gods on Display: The Anthropology of Display and Worldmaking (special issue of Asian Ethnology, 2023) and ‘Dreams, Visions, and Worldmaking: Envisioning Anthropology Through Dreamscapes’ (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2024). Her chapters on ‘Nuosu Egg Divination’ and ‘Buryat Mongolian Card Divination’ appear in David Zeitlyn and Michelle Aroney’s Divination, Oracles & Omens (2024) published by Bodleian Library Press: https://bodleianshop.co.uk/products/divination-oracles-omens (in Europe and UK), or in USA: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo249121065.html
Image: Pointing at a bubble trapped just beneath the surface to indicate the client’s lost soul. Photograph © Katherine Swancutt
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Divining the Past, Present, and Future: Oracles, Series 1 – Four Lectures
Join us for Series 1 as we journey into the histories and mysteries of divination. Delivered by leading scholars in the field, ‘Divining the Past, Present, and Future’ includes talks on specific types of divination, from Mambila spider divination to Medieval necromancy.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.
Image: John Collier, ‘Priestess of Delphi’ (1891), Art Gallery of South Australia
