The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

Another reinterpretation of Evans-Pritchard's Zande study focusing on the rationality of
divination comes from Emily Ahern. By applying speech act theory, specifically John
Searle’s distinction between constitutive and regulative rules, she seeks to account for why
Zande divination appeared illogical to Evans-Pritchard and other western commentators
(Ahern 1982). Constitutive rules are rules that constitute an activity, such as the rules of
chess. They are rules that define a kind of activity and are expressed as definitions.
Regulative rules regulate a pre-existing activity and are logically independent of the rules of
that activity. They are framed in the form of imperatives. Consequently you can break
regulative rules without interfering with the kind of activity, but not the constitutive rules.
According to Ahern the misinterpretation of Zande divination comes from mistaking
regulative rules for constitutive ones. This is why contradictions between rules and
performance are not perceived to be irrational.
David Zeitlyn is also concerned with the old problem of what happens when contradiction
arises in the course of consultation and he also tackles it in the light of pragmatic linguistics
(Zeitlyn 1990). He studied Mambila spider divination and found that contradictions
frequently arose from consultation. Zeitlyn suggest that the key to understanding why this
was not damaging to the practice might lie in conversational analysis. But Zeitlyn makes a
new move in that he does not focus on the dialogue between diviner and client, but instead he
argues: “We must take seriously the diviners’ assumption that the sequence of questions is a
dialogue between divination and diviner” (Zeitlyn 1990: 662). In order to throw light on how
people deal with contradiction in conversation, he uses a study by Harold Garfinkel. Here a
group of college students are told that they can consult a student counselor over an intercom,
but that the counselor can only answer with a yes or no. What they did not know was that the
answers were given from a predetermined list and hence random (Garfinkel 1967). In this
study it was possible in detail to study what happened when two answers flatly contradicted
each other. Subjects seemed to treat contradiction, not as logical problems, but as question
rejecting moves (Zeitlyn 1990: 657). Meaning is constructed according to a relevance
principle – that the communicator gives the most relevant answer. In order to find this the
context of the question becomes central. This is exactly the same as what happens in the
divinatory dialogue.
Contradiction led Evans-Pritchard, and those after him, to assume secondary elaborations
were protecting the closed thought system/collective representations by immunizing them to
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