A Tempest in a Teacup: Reading the Future in Tea Leaves.

Much of the anthropological research on divination attempts to gauge its role in society, but the question remains: why is divination persuasive? An analysis of two tea leaf readings by a single reader shows that the fortunes bear a structural resemblance to folktales, with the client as hero. Like the plot in a folktale, the readings' predictions focus on the struggle to complete the tasks of the life course, often with the help of donors. Culturally, the readings persuade by reassuring us that life imitates art, while at the psychological level, they encourage us to sift through our thoughts for people and events that fit the storyline. This is the first known study to apply a Proppian structural analysis to divination narratives. It is also a human interest story--40 years in the making--about how a grandmother who lived through hard times in the Hudson Valley of New York State taught her college-educated grandson to read tea leaves. I conclude that folktale telling and tea leaf divination may spring from the same creative source. The findings support current theories about how and why divination persists in the modern world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]