About
"Divining Uncertain Futures: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Tarot Practice in Los Angeles and Mumbai"
Responding to conditions of uncertainty and precarity, tarot reading has emerged as a practice outside of religious institutions that is able to offer situated moral guidance through interpretations of cards grounded in readers’ local ethical sensibilities. Tarot acts as a lively tool of enchantment that provides a vital form of ascribing significance to life events that helps people connect with a variety of spiritual beings, process and heal from their pasts, and create desired futures amidst the destabilizing forces of late capitalist modernity. Clients routinely seek guidance around some of life’s biggest questions: how to find love, how to find purpose and succeed in their career, how to connect with a sense of the divine, and overall how to live a good life. Tarot reading practices thus lie at the intersection of ethical counsel, religion, and science. In order to understand this nexus I take a comparative approach and examine tarot reading practices in both Los Angeles, California and Mumbai, India. In the US context, tarot has been drawn into “post-New Age” spiritual-therapeutic registers of self-cultivation. Whereas in India, tarot now joins the ranks of India’s other “predictive sciences” and longstanding traditions of divination and counsel. This approach allows me to explore the question of how the material practices of tarot readings have been made to speak to different epistemologies and ontologies. Furthermore, as I take the global rise of tarot reading practices as an index of the disjunctures and anxieties produced by modernity, my approach allows me to examine how people grapple with these ruptures in their everyday lives.
Janaki Phillips is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology.
