Cosmic Coherence : A Cognitive Anthropology Through Chinese Divination

Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world – theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison and cultural difference. "Humans are unique in their ability to create systematic accounts of the world - theories based on guiding cosmological principles. This book is about the role of cognition in creating cosmologies, and explores this through the ethnography and history of Yijing divination in China. Diviners explain the cosmos in terms of a single substance, qi, unfolding across scales of increasing complexity to create natural phenomena and human experience. Combined with an understanding of human cognition, it shows how this conception of scale offers a new way for anthropologists and other social scientists to think about cosmology, comparison, and cultural difference"-- Provided by publisher CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS NOTES ON TEXT INTRODUCTION Getting Our Ontological Assumptions Right 1 DEEP ONTOLOGY A Fishy Business 2 DIVINING IN A HOMOLOGICAL COSMOS 3 FIGURATIVE THOUGHT FOR A COHERENT COSMOLOGY 4 COSMOLOGICAL CHANGE Historical Homologism and ‘Chinese Thought’ 5 SCALE, COGNITION AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCE CONCLUSION Cosmic Coherence and Correlative Comparison APPENDIX The Content of the Yijing REFERENCES INDEX