African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing

Philip M. Peek edited this Indiana University Press volume, an academic collection of fieldwork based scholarship arguing that African divination sessions function as structured processes of deliberation and knowledge production, not simply fortune-telling in the popular Western sense. Its strength is genuine comparative fieldwork drawn from contributors with direct ethnographic experience of specific African divination systems, letting the volume make its central argument from real documented practice rather than generalization. Its limit, as with any edited volume, is that coverage and depth vary by chapter depending on which specific divination tradition a given contributor studied, so a claim about one particular system is best checked against the chapter addressing it directly rather than the volume's general thesis.