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Divination, media and the networked body of modernity
DOI link for Divination, media and the networked body of modernity
Divination, media and the networked body of modernity book
Divination, media and the networked body of modernity
DOI link for Divination, media and the networked body of modernity
Divination, media and the networked body of modernity book
ABSTRACT
Practices of divination, such as evil-eye exorcism and coffee-cup reading, have been habitual in Greek everyday culture. Divination in Greece is strongly associated with moira; moira is the individual’s share or allotment of positive and negative events and the expenditure of these qualitative units in the course of a life. Divination takes the form of perceptions of the somatization of social conflict, of illicit bodily penetration and manipulation at a distance, which requires divinatory diagnosis and even purification or exorcism. The chapter discusses that the practices point to the incomplete articulation of current Greek everyday life with neoliberal globalizing processes, media, and structures of communication. Healing practices that redress the violence of the transcendental nervous system are, for Taussig, practices that counter distracted visuality with media of tactility that create touchability in a social web structured by visual distantiation and virtualization.