Ingenuity in Divination: Creativity, Failure, and Hunting Signs in Southwest China

Ingenuity in Divination: Creativity, Failure, and Hunting Signs in Southwest China

‘Cosmological Visionaries’ Team, King’s College London

A Three-Talk Roundtable for the Divination, Oracles, and Omens Network at TORCH

Thursday 8 May 2025, 2pm

School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography

All welcome

The License to Improvise: Freewheeling Imagination in Nuosu Divination

Katherine Swancutt

Are divinatory answers really shaped by rules or are they made up on the go? Among the Nuosu, a Tibeto-Burman group living across the Liangshan mountains of Southwest China, the answer to this question is ‘both’. Each divination technique––from cutting notches out of sticks of wood to drawing bamboo ‘arrows’ from the bimo priest’s spirit quiver––has its own techniques that are widespread and popular but often interpreted somewhat differently from diviner to diviner. Many Nuosu say that divination is ‘natural’, by which they mean diviners have the license to tailor, and even improvise, based on the questions asked and on what their divinatory implements suggest. One of the most prosaic forms of Nuosu divination shows this clearly, and it involves cracking a raw egg into a lacquerware bowl half filled with water. Diviners read the bubbles that appear on the water’s surface or just beneath it, and factor in their proximity to the egg yolk, which is considered analogous to the client’s body. Bubbles of varying sizes and in different locations can reveal the spirits or ghosts that caused the client’s problems. Usually, diviners scoop up water from the bowl with an eggshell and pour it back onto the egg, producing fresh rounds of bubbles that may provide answers to fresh questions––or that may be used to dig deeper into questions not yet fully answered. Clients may (and often do!) suggest their thoughts on the bubbles to diviners, but diviners have the final say. A portrait of divination emerges here that allows ample space for revising answers, double-checking them, and testing whether spirits or ghosts had obstructed anyone from finding the right answers in the first place. Divinatory outcomes like this are built less on the need to follow ‘set rules’ and more on the value that Nuosu place on unleashing their freewheeling imaginations in the process of divination.

Divination and Performative Failure: When Nuosu-Yi Rituals Go Wrong

Jan Karlach

An overwhelming amount of anthropological research focuses on the observation of somewhat successful outcomes in rituals and their associated practices, such as divination. However, what happens if a divination or ritual fails? "Performative failure" can occur during the divinatory or ritual process—often due to human error or unforeseen circumstances—and it can also manifest as an unsatisfactory result days, months, or even longer after the process has been completed. What typically happens in such awkward situations, often filled with confusion and nervous laughter? Might diviners have a particular means at their disposal to manage these failures? If so, how might these failures be interpreted, justified, and perhaps even corrected? Drawing on several ethnographic examples, this talk will explore instances of divinatory and ritual failure among the Nuosu-Yi of Liangshan in Southwest China, whose everyday life is filled with divinations and ceremonies. It will examine the consequences of such failures, how they are usually addressed by Nuosu ritual specialists and their clients, and whether there is a uniquely imaginative space for reconciling the tight bonds between ritualists, laypeople, and the realm of ghosts and spirits.

The Hunter’s Path:
Divining Debts and Fortuitous Tracks in Southwest China

Zuoxi Yueqi

Divination has traditionally been used to calculate hunting debts and indicate hunting success among the Nuosu of Southwest China. However, some Nuosu are creatively repurposing divination to manage new cases of ‘hunting withdrawal’. Since the late 1980s, the Law of the People’s Republic of China on the Protection of Wildlife (Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Yesheng Dongwu Baohu Fa 中华人民共和国野生动物保护法) has stipulated that hunters can no longer hunt in forests. Many former hunters have died of old age, but some of their descendants are experiencing illnesses attributed to their Kesi (ꈌꌋ) hunting spirits and/or their Musi (ꃅꌋ) mountain spirits, which used to regularly receive their sacrifices. The most common afflictions are physical pain and madness. Yet while the afflicted families use divination to confirm which spirits caused their illness, the majority of hunting families remain free from afflictions. In this talk, I ask: Why do only a few descendants of hunting families experience hunting withdrawal? How are hunting debts being calculated now, in this age of wildlife protection? And can hunters use divination to overcome the dilemmas posed by hunting regulations? Following the descendants of hunters along their paths, I show how Nuosu hunting traditions are changing and the solutions that some hunters are uncovering for sustaining––through divination––what in many other respects might be considered a dying craft. Through these hunters’ tales, I throw new light on the role that divination is playing in both the Nuosu hunting process and in the healing practices of their bimo priests.

Divination, Oracles, and Omens Network