Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History (HESCAH) Symposium: "Divination and Diviners in Chinese Religions"

“Divination and Diviners in Chinese Religions,” an online symposium on February 17th and 18th organized by Guolong Lai, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Florida.

Divination has played an irreplicable role in the diffused religious life of the Chinese people. Although it faced periodical suppressions, especially in the modern era, divination and diviners have not only survived but also flourished in digital media in recent decades. Built on decades of innovation scholarship conducted through the International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (IKGF) at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg, this international symposium brings together a group of eminent scholars from various disciplines of Chinese studies to focus on Chinese diviners, examining how they adopted new technology and adapted their practices to changing social, political, and cultural contexts throughout Chinese history.

The International Consortium for Research in the Humanities (better known under the German abbreviation IKGF) “Fate, Freedom, and Prognostication” was established in 2009 and can therefore look back to more than 12 years of an international transdisciplinary community of scholars. This talk will deal with two important aspects of the research conducted at the IKGF, where the often unjustly criticized comparative perspective proved extremely fruitful. We compared attitudes, views, and theories of premodern literati regarding prediction and divination in East and West and identified a broad spectrum ranging from skepticism to credulosity, with numerous differentiations “in between”. We further compared divinatory practices from the angle of their techniques (often based on calculation) and their respective religious affinity (sometimes empowered by prophecy).

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