My name is Ken Takashima.

I'm now retired from the University of British Columbia where I taught nearly 30 years.

While I was there, I took a leave about seven years.

I was at Tokyo University Institute of Oriental Culture where I was engaged in research on

oracle bone inscription.

That is actually, I met you when you were studying with Hayashi Minow at Kyoto University.

Anyway, here I am, invited by the consortium to do specifically research on the language

of Shan divination.

It's scapulomancy is what they did.

Because I really do not know anything about anthropological or other philosophical matter,

I deal basically with linguistic and philological issue.

Here I am doing the language of divination in Shan oracle bone inscriptions.

Michael, would you like to be next?

Thank you so much.

My name is Michael Puyet and I teach at Harvard and work mainly on early Chinese history and

anthropology.

Here at the consortium, I've mainly been working with Christoph Harbsmeier on doing a conceptual

history of the classical period dealing with, in terms of the Western concepts, fate, freedom

and prognostication.

How do these concepts play out in classical China?

What were the concepts at play?

None of these three terms translate properly or directly into classical Chinese.

What were the tensions involved in classical China?

How were what we call the tensions between them playing out in that period?

Historically, what are the implications of the way those tensions were playing out?

Thank you.

I am Lothar von Falkenhausen.

I teach at UCLA in beautiful Southern California.

My field is Chinese archaeology.

I also am very interested in the Shang and Zhou period, which are at the center of the

concerns of these two very distinguished colleagues.

But I approach them from the perspective of material culture.

So I have a lot to learn from anybody who can tell me what the texts mean from those

periods.

I've been at UCLA for 20 years now and it is great pleasure to come back to Germany

and to participate, albeit very briefly, in the intellectual goings on at the Consortium.

I think our topic today will be to explore a little bit

where our research sort of intersects

and where the work that'd you are doing about the language

and you are doing about the concept

and the work that I'm trying to do about material culture

can jointly contribute to a better understanding

of, well, what exactly, what are we trying to do?

Would you like to articulate that, perhaps,

everybody for a little moment?

What I'm interested is

through studying the language,

basically it's the work of decipherment

of the Shan Oroko bone inscriptions

dating to the 13th century BC to 11th century BC