Members’ Publications: Stéphanie Homola
Homola, Stéphanie. 2023. The Art of Fate Calculation. Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng. New York: Berghahn Books (Asian Anthropologies Series). ISBN 978-1-80073-812-6
This book dives into Chinese fate calculation, a practice which enthralls the Chinese despite official condemnations which have disparaged this traditional knowledge as “superstitions” since the beginning of the 20th century. From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds visit fate calculation masters to learn about and make the most of their destiny, be it to choose a career, get promoted, make an investment, or get married. How do clients experience fate calculation consultations? How do they choose a diviner and how do they assess his/her skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? What controversies structure the professional milieu? How is a person’s fate calculated? Through an investigation that takes us from Taiwan to China to meet the various actors of fate calculation, this work explores why so many people are interested in a form of knowledge which everyone admits to be highly complex and questionable.… Read more ⤻
« Dans la pensée chinoise, la musique est une partie du monde, sinon le monde lui-même en ses manifestations sonores. Œuvre humaine, elle constitue l’essence de la culture, au même titre que l’écriture ou la peinture, mais elle est avant cela l’expression de la nature, voire du 道 dao qui génère les êtres et leur confère leurs normes de fonctionnement cyclique » (préface de Rémi Mathieu). L’ouvrage est ainsi une approche par la voie musicale d’un univers qui s’avère être, à considérer les fondements esthétiques chinois, un véritable entrelacs des arts. Il est aussi fondé sur le constat que la poésie chinoise – à la fois un langage artistique et un langage sur l’art – en révèle des aspects essentiels à une compréhension fine de la pensée musicale et du geste artistique. Dès lors, un tiers de poèmes, un tiers d’illustrations et un tiers de texte théorique et technique, trame tissée d’explicitations directes et brodée d’�!… 
Volume 52, edited by Thomas Fröhlich and Brigit Knüsel Adamec, will be a special volume devoted to Chinese Reflections on the Exile Experience after 1949. China’s 20th century was a century marked by exile. The multifarious experience of exile is arguably one of the salient features of a distinction, as historical periods, between the 19th and 20th century in China.
“Passion, Love, and Qing examines the vitality of Peony Pavilion, the most famous drama in Ming China (1368-1644), through four essays (by Isabella Falaschi, Paolo Santangelo, Tian Yuan Tan, and Rossella Ferrari) and an extensive Glossary of specific terms and expressions related to the representation of emotions and states of mind. It explores the evolution and permanence of the universal message about passion or emotions contained in the language of the play. Written in the late Ming, Peony Pavilion embodies the new trends in the ‘cult of passions’ and new sensibility of the times. It is also a rich intertext of love that both inherits the legacy of earlier literary traditions and influences later amatory literature and theatrical performances.”
