linuxmafia.com 2016/linuxmafia.com.tar/linuxmafia.com/pub/skeptic/files-to-classify/uk-dowser.txt

Internet Message Format | 1996-02-19 | 2KB

From: Dr John Gillies <[e-mail]>
Subject:      "Water-witching"
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date:         Thu, 4 Feb 1993 17:10:16 GMT,BST

BBC Television has just run a series of programmes featuring "Donovan
the Dowser" (Britain's "most successful water-diviner") - which
followed him around as he sought to divine the existence of
underground water (and other minerals, etc) in a variety of settings.
What was interesting about these programmes for me was (a) the wholly
uncritical tone - the reality of Donovan's powers was taken for
granted throughout - and (b) the extent to which it was possible to
see the same kind of confabulatory processes at work between Donovan
and his clients/audiences which one sees in demonstrations of
mediumship, hypnotism and a wide variety of other phenomena. The
interactions between performer and co-operative audience are the real
fascination of such events - failures re-interpreted as partial (or
even complete!) successes, sensitivity to minute verbal and non-
verbal cues to the "appropriate" response to setbacks, and so on.
There was nothing in these programmes which could be characterised as
objective evidence of successful dowsing (IMO) - yet the final
impression which the programmes contrived to give was that we had
witnessed deeply mysterious and inexplicable events.


John Gillies
Department of Psychology
Adam Smith Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow  G12 8RT                      Tel: [phone] ext.5351
Scotland
                         [e-mail]