'Oracles' and 'divination' as subjects of study were constructed fuzzily
by Classical Scholarship and Anthropology. This was because they sought to
create a universal category in which religious and healing practices from
diverse cultural contexts could be incorporated. The limits of this blurred
definition became marked by the Christian tradition and European modernity that
first understood the diverse practices as demonic idolatry, and then as a
product of irrational-primitive thought, directly in opposition to monotheistic
faith and institutionalized rational-scientific
knowledge. With the 'discovery' of the 'New' World,
'divination'-along with 'magic'-became projected in overseas colonial contexts
as conceptual (and even inquisitorial) tools to identify demonic belief and
'primitive-savage' mentalities or, diplomatically, 'exotic' forms of believing
and thinking. Although the definition of 'divination' began with being
constructed epistemologically on the basis of Ancient sources, it was
appropriated as an alterity of scientific rationality and,
furthermore, used to catalogue practices of 'other' cultures. In this paper, I propose a symmetricizing reversion
to diffract the epistemological interpretation
of mantic practices. To do so, I analyse Greek
divin ation through an Amerindian perspective, focusing on the Andean
notions of cam ac and wak'a documented in different colonial sources, and establish translations
that call into question some epistemological principles
of the subject of 'divination', as it was
understood based on the Greek tradition.
Several meanings of
Andean divination can similarly be traced back to Greek sources. But their meanings were either marginalized
by ClassicalStudies, or a partial and biased selection of certain Creek
sources was made, leading to some canonical epistemological
path. This symmetricizing reversion between Andean and Greek divination makes it possible to reconsider mantike as a cosmopraxis of eure between beings of a different nature.
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