Fate in the Narrativity and Experience of Selfhood, a Case From Taiwanese Chhiam Divination

Abstract

In this article, I examine the deployment of poetry in Taiwanese practices of calculating fate. Observing that fate is both a grounding notion to self‐representation in narrative and to the recognition of efficacious agents in a social field, I analyze texts and interpretive practices of poetic divination, attending to specific features that give fate its compelling qualities. Most important among these features is the chronotopic character of divination poems, which shape the experience of selfhood in alternation and encounter through time. Investigating how poetic contrast sets (such as those between gathering and dispersal, fate as coterminous with a lifespan and fate as linked to specific opportunities) produce these chronotopes, I ask how the poetics of fate informs the distribution and abeyance of agency in particular situations of crisis. In particular, I focus on crises that lead to divination, emerging as fresh junctures in life historical narratives. Finally, in light of the role of fate in the interpretation of these variously distributed junctures and agents, I suggest that the notion of fate could inform ethnographic work on micropolitics. [divination, poetics, chronotopes, narrativity, agency, life history, Taiwan]