Abstract
Although a substantial literature in anthropology and comparative religion explores divination across diverse societies and back into history, little research has integrated the older ethnographic and historical work with recent insights on human learning, cultural transmission, and cognitive science. Here we present evidence showing that divination practices are often best viewed as an epistemic technology, and we formally model the scenarios under which individuals may overestimate the efficacy of divination that contribute to its cultural omnipresence and historical persistence. We found that strong prior belief, underreporting of negative evidence, and misinferring belief from behavior can all contribute to biased and inaccurate beliefs about the effectiveness of epistemic technologies. We finally suggest how scientific epistemology, as it emerged in Western societies over the past few centuries, has influenced the importance and cultural centrality of divination practices.
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Code Availability
Code used for simulation is publicly available at https://github.com/kevintoy/diviniation_as_technology
Notes
The idea here is that geomancy can be used to identify “earth veins” (龙脉), and that the construction of railways would “disrupt” these earth veins. Disrupting an earth vein was illegal.
See chapter 5, < Wángzhì > , in Book of Rites: “凡执技以是上者: 祝史射御医卜及百工... 不贰事, 不移官.” (“All who professed particular arts for the service of their superiors, such as prayer makers, writers, archers, carriage-drivers, doctors, diviners, and other artisans... are not allowed to practice any other thing.”).
Sometimes the client could ask the second diviner on the spot for suggestions for other candidate animals to sacrifice and perform the sheep shoulder blade divination immediately.
Both the Yi and the Wa are politically integrated into the People’s Republic of China and have access to hospitals. The quality of the doctors and equipment in these hospitals, however, is generally inferior to that in large hospitals in urban areas. Depending on the seriousness of the illness, going to hospitals in the city can be rather costly (payment to the hospital and travel expenses).
Most people did not struggle with being asked for a percentage. It seems that a significant proportion of the Wa and Yi population have some understanding of percentages, possibly because most fertilizers have nutrient percentage information on their packing bags.
“Modern” is used here in the sense of epistemically modern, post-Enlightenment, or “Western.”
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We thank Robert Maier for checking the simulation code.
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The fieldwork component of this project was supported by the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative at Harvard University.
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Hong, Z., Henrich, J. The Cultural Evolution of Epistemic Practices. Hum Nat 32, 622–651 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09408-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09408-6