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From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds in China and Taiwan visit fate calculation masters to learn about their destiny. How do clients assess the diviner’s skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? How is a person’s fate calculated? The Art of Fate Calculation explores how conceptions of fate circulate in Chinese and Taiwanese societies while resisting uniformization and institutionalization. This is not only due to the stigma of “superstition” but also to the internal dynamic of fate calculation practice and learning.
“Divination has been extremely common and important in Chinese culture since earliest times, but surprisingly little information appears in the Western-language literature. This excellent ethnography goes a long way toward remedying the gap… Most ethnographically exciting in this book are Homola's accounts of fortune-casting sessions in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng, especially her warm and empathetic accounts of particular practitioners, ranging from highly successful heads of large corporate operations to wandering seers who depend on small donations. The practice has been condemned as misleading for 2,000 years and as ‘superstition’ (mixin) for at least a century, yet it persists: people demand any lead, however small and tentative. - Highly Recommended.” • Choice
“Represents an extremely valuable resource, both as a one-stop account of the politics of divination in modern China (the Republic pre-1949, PRC, and Taiwan), its intellectual history, and some key methods, and as a detailed ethnographic account of how diviners and clients engage with divination as a decision-making process and set of cosmological ideas. • William Matthews, London School of Economics
“Excellent and very timely survey of the broad field of Chinese divination. And so much more than "a survey"! A comprehensive, detailed review of a complex and fascinating subject.” • David Zeitlyn, University of Oxford
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Michael Lackner
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Clients of Divinatory Services: Societal Issues and Consultation Experiences (Taipei)
Chapter 2. Divinatory Arts Specialists: Taipei’s “World of Divination”: Historical Development, Claims, and Reforms
Chapter 3. Fate Calculation Techniques: Contemporary Reformulations of a Traditional Knowledge on the Individual and Their Environment
Chapter 4. Professional Practitioners in Beijing: Institutional and Cultural Legitimacy of Professional Diviners in Mainland China (Beijing)
Chapter 5. Amateur Practitioners and Shared Knowledge: Everyday Knowledge and Modes of Transmission (Kaifeng)
Conclusion: Trust and Standardization
Appendix I: Brief History of the Ziwei Doushu Method
Appendix II: Ziwei Doushu Schools in Taiwan
Appendix III: Correspondence Tables in the Ziwei Doushu Method
Glossary of Chinese Terms
References
Index