Researchers engaged in cross-cultural comparison inevitably face the problem of how to analyse cultural differences in thought, rooted in a tension between the relative and the universal. This talk will focus on how to reconcile this tension by looking at the relationship between culture and cognition in divination. Frequently, and not least in the study of divination as a culturally variable way of knowing, cross-cultural comparison leads to an emphasis on deeply-ingrained differences in understandings of the basic things that exist in the world and how they can be known. These cosmological and epistemological conceptions are often understood as a basis for thought and action. For example, forms of divination that developed in the early Chinese empires were based on a naturalistic conception of the universe, governed by constant laws of transformation. In contrast, forms of divination which arose in comparable societies and occupied similar social roles elsewhere, as in the Roman Republic and empire, relied on conceptions of gods communicating divine truth. At first glance this comparison suggests a fundamental divergence in how basic aspects of the world are understood, which is often causally attributed to ‘culture’.
But what can we actually conclude about cultural differences from such comparisons? The danger of emphasising ‘culture’ as a causal factor in such comparative analysis is reliance on an intuitive, but inaccurate, account of how humans behave. If we consider central features of human cognition, in particular a distinction between rapid intuitive judgements and slower, deliberate reflection, we find that apparently coherent ‘cultural’ worldviews don’t in fact underlie behaviour, but are reflectively constructed in specific circumstances. Examples from divination practices illustrate that the relationship between cognition and cosmology in practice is more complex than it first appears, and that to understand it, we need to take account of various scales of causation, from individual cognition to wider socio-political context. Using divination as an inspiration, this talk presents an approach to cross-cultural comparison which accommodates cultural similarities and differences coherently as functions of different scales of human behaviour.