Thank you very much Sven for this presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honor and

pleasure to present my research at the EKGF lecture series. It's been years after the first

lecture I gave here and also many fruitful collaboration with the EKGF family and they

are still going on. So as you have probably already heard here in one or another lectures

or conferences here at EKGF, the Chinese notion of fate is a very technical one. It's so technical

that it requires highly trained specialists to be able to analyze it and these specialists are

called Shushu masters, that is, Mantic Arts masters, diviners. And their knowledge has

developed along centuries into what is often called a Chinese science and common people consult

this specialist to understand what fate has in store for them. But today I will not deal with

this technical aspect of fate in Chinese societies. Rather I want to focus on people's everyday life.

I want to understand the multiple and sometimes paradoxical ways in which people in China

encounter the powers of fate, how they come to understand and accept it and eventually actively

engage with it in their own lives. Historians consider that notions of fate are an essential

part of Chinese cosmology, Chinese culture and religions because documents a test of hundreds

and even thousands of years of scholarly reflection on fate and also a very long historical development

of fate calculation techniques. And today I want to consider how fate is part of Chinese culture,

not because of this very long history but because common people in today's society have somehow

some knowledge and some conception of fate. My question is how do people come to know about

fate? How do they come to believe or rather to engage with it? This comes down to very basic

questions in anthropology that relate to the process of socialization in a given society,

that is how worldviews, beliefs and ways of life that constitute a specific culture, how they are

transmitted from one generation to another and how some beliefs or practices originate, how they

propagate and how they last in time and eventually become what we call a tradition. By doing so I

also would like to consider fate under a new light. What I mean here is that we learn a lot

about what fate is for Chinese people when we study how it emerges in their life and how it

propagates in their life. And my point here is that fate mainly emerges and propagates through

language. A few words about fieldwork. Here I rely on data that I collected during fieldwork among

diviners and their clients in mainland China and in Taiwan and mostly the Taipei region since 2007

and today I will concentrate on the Taiwanese case. So ever since I started working on Chinese

divination and actually one reason why I become interested in this topic in the first place is

that in Taiwan there is a lot of talking around fate and divination. And well before I started

studying the techniques and started working with diviners, what attracted me is that the language

of fate permeates people's everyday life in Taiwan. And fate and divination are ever-present,

whether in informal conversations, in rumors about others misfortune, in gossip about neighbors and

relatives or in intimate exchanges when discussing personal crisis. My argument is that it is through

what I call a language of fate with multiple genres and multiple registers that the concept

of fate emerges as a force in people's life. A force that affects choices and life trajectories.

And I will focus on three distinct genres through which this language operates in social and intimate

life. The language of rumors, the language of personal crisis and the language of misfortune.

And I want to show how the language of fate acquires power by effectively catching those

involved in its logic. And now I would like to say a word about the title I chose for this lecture

that is called in destiny. So being caught is an expression that has been coined by anthropologists

working on witchcraft. And here I refer in particular to the work of Jean-Fabrice Sada,

deadly words, witchcraft in the Bokaj. So being caught is the common way to say being bewitched.

And people are being bewitched by words that can be deadly. For those who were here last semester,

you might have attended a lecture that was given in this room by anthropologist Robert Laffler.

And he started his lecture with a reference to the anthropologist Evans Pritchard and his work,

his very famous work, witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Zenday. In this work,

he explains how witchcraft is used to explain unfortunate events. And he gives an example that

became very famous later of a grain hut, a granary. And this granary collapsed and killed someone who