Week 3: Comparative Warding
Why this course treats nine independently-arrived-at warding traditions, named explicitly as themselves, as countermeasure data rather than folklore to be explained away.
Protective practices across cultures.
8 March 2027
Outline#
- why “it’s just superstition” is not an argument this course accepts, and what would count as one
- why this course names each of this week’s nine traditions explicitly — fú talisman, mezuzah, witch bottle, nazar — rather than filing them under a dry, generic label: the point is that you could recognize these from your own life, and renaming would only hide that
- reading a ritual practice as a countermeasure claim: what it predicts, and how that prediction could fail
- the transition-and-precision convergence introduced in this week’s practical, and why convergence across nine traditions with no documented contact between them counts as evidence
- what carries forward: the same read-a-practice-as-a-claim method returns in the literature-synthesis phase (weeks 10–11), applied to theories about cause rather than practices for containment
After this lecture#
Having read this week’s traditions as testable claims about mechanism, the next step is testing or applying them without compromising the observation itself — which is exactly what week 4’s safety protocol supplies. Fieldwork starts next week: consent, the buddy system, and the disengagement rule, before either on-campus case gets its first observation logged.
Teaching team
- Teaching Fellow Jonah Whitcombe — Teaching Fellow, Field Safety Officer