In: Stökl , J 2014 , Divination as Warfare : The Use of Divination Across Borders . in A Lenzi & J Stökl (eds) , Divination, Politics and Ancient Near Eastern Empires . Ancient Near East Monographs , vol. 7 , Atlanta , pp. 46-63 .
This paper studies the impact of prophets' communications in international politics, i.e. where the message is addressed not to the prophet's people, but to people living in another country / state.
Economic theory and technocratic policy have long understood economic action to be a communicative activity. From Pierre-Simon Laplace and Adam Smith to current liberalization fiscal policy in India designed to produce price signals and entrepreneurial behavior this conceptualization has been dominant. Instead this article draws on the anthropology of divination to argue that capitalist action is provoked by technologies of the imagination that generate speculation. These issues are explored in the context of changing forms of governance of the Hooghly riverine economy by bureaucrats in the Kolkata Port Trust. Through ethnography we track how public-private partnerships are forged by exemplary men, or seers, deploying divinatory action. The fortunes of business, trade, and the livelihoods of informalized workers rest on these practices, which generate short-term unstable forms of capital accumulation. Drawing on this case, we can potentially develop comparative critical approaches to the recent emergence of popularist speculators in India and elsewhere.
The introduction to this volume describes the contribution that it makes to scholarship on ancient divinatory practices. It analyses previous and current research, arguing that while this predominantly functionalist work reveals important socio-political dimensions of divination, it also runs the risk of obscuring from view the very people, ideologies, and experiences that scholars seek to understand. It explains that the essays in this volume focus on re-examining what ancient people—primarily those in ancient Greek and Roman communities, but also Mesopotamian and Chinese cultures—thought they were doing through divination. The Introduction provides an overview of the content of each chapter and identifies key themes and questions shared across chapters. The volume explores the types of relationships that divination created between mortals and gods, and what this can tell us about the religions and cultures in which divination was practised.
"Divination was an important and distinctive aspect of religion in both ancient China and ancient Greece, and this book will provide the first systematic account and analysis of the two side by side. Who practised divination in these cultures and who consulted it? What kind of questions did they ask, and what methods were used to answer those questions? As well as these practical aspects, Lisa Raphals also examines divination as a subject of rhetorical and political narratives, and its role in the development of systematic philosophical and scientific inquiry. She explores too the important similarities, differences and synergies between Greek and Chinese divinatory systems, providing important comparative evidence to reassess Greek oracular divination"--
In: Lenzi , A & Stökl , J (eds) 2014 , Divination, Politics and Ancient Near Eastern Empires . Ancient Near East Monographs , vol. 7 , Atlanta .
This collection examines the ways that divinatory texts in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East undermined and upheld the empires in which the texts were composed, edited, and read. Nine essays and an introduction engage biblical scholarship on the Prophets, Assyriology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the critical study of Ancient Empires.
Schon Simmel bemerkte, dass die "Grenze nicht eine räumliche Tatsache mit soziologischen Wirkungen ist, sondern eine soziologische Tatsache, die sich räumlich formt". Deshalb muss man auf die Vorstellung verzichten, dass für soziale (oder psychische) Systeme die Unterscheidung intern/extern wie für die durch Haut abgegrenzten Organismen räumlich sei. Die Gesellschaft endet nicht hinter den Bergen oder jenseits des Flusses, obwohl sie diese Bezüge für ihre Selbstbeschreibung benutzt. Die Autorin versucht, aus einer systemtheoretischen Perspektive folgenden Fragen zu beantworten: Wann wird der Bezug auf den Raum benutzt und warum? Von welchen Eigenschaften hängen seine kommunikative Relevanz und die Art ihrer Veränderung im Laufe der gesellschaftlichen Evolution ab? Anders gesagt: Wie und wie weit ist der räumliche Bezug mit Komplexität kompatibel? Mit der Zunahme der sozialen Komplexität wird die Kongruenz mit dem Raum und der Zeit in der Umwelt allmählich verlassen, und eine eigene Systemzeit und ein eigener Systemraum werden gebaut: man kann z. B. mit längst gestorbenen oder weit entfernten Personen kommunizieren. Wenn die Gesellschaft mit der Theorie sozialer Systeme auf Kommunikation zurückgeführt wird, dann hängt die semantische Relevanz des Raumes eigentlich nur noch von seiner Verbindung mit Interaktion - also mit der besonderen (aber keineswegs ausschließlichen) Form der Face-to-face-Kommunikation - ab. (ICA2)