Divination's Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said presents Richard Werbner's professional and personal archive on divination in Botswana, using extended case studies of a small group of rural, older Tswapong men, some of whom have worked with the author and his wife Pnina since the early 1970s. Divination's Grasp covers divination in wisdom and charismatic forms using sociolinguistic and interpretive-symbolic analyses. It is a long form treatment of ethnographic material in the tradition of James Fernandez's Bwiti, or, importantly for Werbner's analysis, E. E. Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. The second chapter interestingly resurrects Evans-Pritchard's theoretical approach as one grounded in researchers’ empathy for informants’ ‘idioms of belief’ to show how divination in Tswapong and elsewhere is ultimately a moral project.

The text opens by introducing a Tswapong moral philosophy of self, one that centers on a person's dignity, seriti, which is a penumbral formation symbolic of the ability to see oneself reflected in the eyes of another. This philosophy emerges in the local social world for seekers, practitioners, and witnesses of divination, as well as in diviners’ verbal art of séance and their perceptual engagement with thrown (‘fallen’) divinatory objects of dice, hooves, bones, and shells, ‘lots’ or ditaolo. These are very nicely illustrated in several photographic and drawn figures. The expressive, mimetic, and highly ambiguous poetic language used by diviners is, by its semiotic and linguistic properties, self-referential. It uses ‘agitated’ or repeated verbs, reversals of noun pairs (chiasmus), as well as imagery of mythic, animal, plant, human, and non-human beings. Diviners draw on this relatively standardized ‘verbal archive’ to interpret configurations of fallen lots which, as objects, operate as representative miniatures of persons and elements surrounding clients. Interpreting the lots is an exercise in reading the ‘microdramatics’ of client's social lives and the relations between lots as mythic agents. Clients face what Werbner calls moral perils of interpersonal wrath and nefarious forces like pollution and witchcraft. Yet diviners’ work is to a degree ‘anti-political’ in tempering actual social accusations and indirectly compelling clients toward taking some degree of personal responsibility in remedying their situation.

The book's first part includes a helpful introductory synopsis of the intellectual project and fieldwork, a reconsideration of Evans-Pritchard's approach, and an overview of divining techniques. Throughout, Werbner also incorporates material from Isaac Schapera's original 1930s fieldnotes with Kgatla diviners. The book's second part focuses on the wisdom diviner Moatlhodi and his séances in the 1970s with his own and others’ families local to his village and a few strangers from outside of it. It includes a formal semantic analysis of divinatory poetry. This poetry is made up largely of patriarchal metaphors that manifest in the mythic figures associated with the lots, the diviner's authority over his clients, and the clients’ socio-moral networks. Disintegration in clients’ networks often turns out to be a source of their afflictions. Cases that stand out as well described and arresting were ‘the case of the guilty businessman and his amplifier [sound system]’ (189–93) and ‘the case of the granddaughter without wrath’ (137–49). Chapter Five, ‘Family Séances: Rhetoric, Deliberation, and Decisions’, was the strongest in this section, and is a good example of the Manchester School's approach of finely describing social dramas and their corresponding rituals of mediation.

Morebodi, a charismatic diviner who uses an eccentric repertoire of techniques, is the focus of Chapters Seven and Eight. Werbner's description of Morebodi's divination in the late 1990s and 2000s here supplements several films produced by Werbner that feature this man and his practices. The combination of visual and textual ethnography used to document encounters between researchers, research assistants, and the diviner offers a useful case of how dialogical methods can produce knowledge about religious subjects in Africa. The concluding chapter considers cases of divination from across sub-Saharan Africa in comparative perspective, putting forth a typology inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce and arguing that divinatory systems trend toward semiotic principles of analogy, sympathy, and textuality.

Contemporary educated and urban Tswana may not find much of their older, rural counterparts’ perspectives on seriti and its cultural symbolism to be empowering, as Werbner suggests that they might. Still, the philosophy presented in the book arguably informs part of the contemporary public sphere and moral imagination in Botswana. For some citizens, transcendent phenomena glossed as occult are only partially and unnervingly perceptible. By employing diviners’ grasp of esoteric religious knowledge, they might better understand that which upends their social world.