From: Dr John Gillies Subject: "Water-witching" Message-ID: <9302041905.AA14399@lll-winken.llnl.gov> 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: (0)41 339 8855 ext.5351 Scotland johng@psy.glasgow.ac.uk