Representational vs conjectural divination: innovating out of nothing in Mongolia

Abstract

Divination is often regarded as a practice undertaken to obtain a standardized, best possible result. This characterization is made at the cost of analysing how people obtain desired innovations through divinatory procedures. To show how divination actually forces people to adopt strategies that lead to innovation, this article classifies all forms of divination into ‘representational’ or ‘conjectural’ categories. Drawing on Mongolian ethnography, the article argues that in conjectural divinations repeated questioning links known impossibilities to prospective possibilities, producing the basis for innovations which initially appear to arise out of nothing. The article demonstrates how conjectural divinations initiate processes of innovation wherein repeated questioning leads to combinatory thought which imposes novel combinations on people, who perceive the need for innovation, access an innovation, and finally recursively posit that innovation’s conceptual origins.