The Chicken and the Egg

Which comes first, divine agency or the calculations of diviners? Both are integral to divination, other predictive methods, and ‘hatching out’ new creation stories among Nuosu Southwest China. In this article, I present ethnography on divination in which eggs evoke person’s position world while bodies bones chickens indices health prosperity. When cracking open raw eggs, peeling slaughtered chickens, reading chicken bones, diviners creatively draw upon assistance spirits their own calculatory reflections ways that encourage internal variation within craft. Through case studies illnesses a family tradition, show inhabit hybrid features cosmological proliferation, creativity responds.