The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

the function of divination. Special importance was attached to how divination functioned to
legitimize action and aid decision making.
The French tradition of research showed a continued interest in the meaning aspect of
divination particularly in relation to cultural classification schemes. This aspect was already
with Durkheim and Mauss tied to the social. Victor Turner inherited the tradition for
prolonged fieldwork from British anthropology but was also inspired by Durkheim. His
studies of divination focused on the meaning aspect and integrated the social with the
classificatory and an in depth knowledge of the society, not originally present in French
anthropological investigations of divination. This tying of classification and the social came
to have great significance for later American anthropology.
The problem of divination had not vanished with Evans-Pritchard's meticulous treatment of
how divination was rational to the Azande. It was taken up and discussed under influence of
pragmatic linguistic philosophy. This branch of philosophy of language was developed after
Evans-Pritchard’s work, but had many affinities to it. Like Evans-Pritchard, pragmatics used
the context in concrete situations to explain it, not systems of thought. Pragmatics contributed
with some new analytic concepts that could nuance the original analyses of Evans-Pritchard.
All treatments considered here have their strong points and weak points and they have all
followed trends in their time. I will not here go into the fruitless exercise of dwelling on the
weak points of all previous treatments and ultimately advance my own my as the solution to
all these. I will simply acknowledge that I am standing on the shoulders of giants, indeed I
will profit heavily on the insights of Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner, David Zeitlyn, Pascal
Boyer 16 and others.
There are, however, three aspects that have not been sufficiently illuminated in the previous
research in order to answer the basic question of this dissertation.
1) Apart from a few treatments the cognitive basis of divination is not very well understood.
The previous treatments, like the one mentioned by Philip Peek, all suffer from being too
superficial and not founded in experimental research.
2) As already pointed out by Boyer in 1990, anthropology in general does not have an
adequate theory of transmission of tradition. The same is the case for divination. We have a
16 I am heavily indebted to the work of Pascal Boyer whose work in general on the cognitive basis
of religion has been a major inspiration. He has treated divination in earlier works (1990, 1994),
but has not elaborated his cognitive theory of divination. Some parts of the exposition here is in
contradiction with parts of his original theory of divination, but I think it is consistent with his later
work, why I will not go in to an extended discussion of his theory in isolation.
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