École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient EFEO
Scuola Italiana di Studi sull'Asia Orientale ISEAS
(European Consortium for Asian Field Study, ECAF)
KYOTO LECTURES 2016
Wednesday, December 14th, 18:00h
co-hosted by Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University
This lecture will be held at the Institute for Research in Humanities (IRH), Kyoto University (seminar room 1, 1st floor)
Arts of Numbers: Fortune-telling Methods in Early Modern Japan
Speaker: Matthias Hayek
Anyone
who has walked through a shopping avenue in Japan knows that
fortune-telling parlors are a staple part of the landscape. Divination
in Japan is still well alive, and continues to meet a demand from the
public. This was, however, even truer during the Edo period (1600-1868),
when fortune telling was an essential component of daily life in many
more respects. Prolonging a trend already visible during the late Middle
Ages, popular diviners and soothsayers appear to have grown
exponentially in number alongside the development of cities and the
stabilizing of rural areas. Yamabushi and village physicians–quite often
the same individual–as well as urban fortune-tellers were expected to
help people get rid of their ailments, find lost properties or
relatives, or chose an auspicious name and/or life partner. To do so,
they had a vast array of techniques at their disposal, in part due to
the expansion of commercial printing, which allowed for a large
diffusion of introductory books. Following the evolution of their
contents, format, and authorship can in turn help us to detect the
underlying trends of this lore within technical, cosmological, or even
religious discourses and practices. The talk will offer a comprehensive
picture of these techniques, their users and media, and shed light on
the rationale(s) that ran through the “skills and arts of numbers”.
Matthias Hayek is an Associate Professor at Paris Diderot University, and a
member of the Research Center of East-Asian Civilizations. His research
deals with the history and sociology of Japanese beliefs and knowledges,
with a focus on early modern books on divination and magic, their
contents, authors and reception. As a Visiting Research Scholar at
Nichibunken, he is currently working on late-17th-early-18th century
encyclopedias and essays. He has co-edited with Annick Horiuchi Listen,
Copy, Read: Popular Learning in Early Modern Japan (2014), and his
recent publications include "The Eight Trigrams and Their Changes:
Divination in Early Modern Japan", in Daoism in Japan, edited par
Jeffrey D. Richey (Routledge-Curzon, 2015), and “Urayasan: chūsei makki
no uranai no shosō”, in Mō hitotsu no Nihonbugakushi: Muromachi, seiai,
jikan, edited by National Institute of Japanese Literature (2016).
For detailed directions:
http://www.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/e/institute/access-institute/access_e.htm
École Francaise d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)
Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS)
EFEO
Phone: 075-701-0882
Fax: 075-701-0883
e-mail:
efeo.kyoto@gmail.com
ISEAS
Phone: 075-751-8132
Fax: 075-751-8221
e-mail:
iseas@iseas-kyoto.org
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