People

Prof. Dr. Scott Davis

Internationales Kolleg für Geisteswissenschaftliche Forschung "Schicksal, Freiheit und Prognose. Bewältigungsstrategien in Ostasien und Europa"

• E-Mail: scott.davis@ikgf.uni-erlangen.de

IKGF Visiting Fellow Jan. – Dec. 2012

(Last change of profile by end of stay)

IKGF Research Project:

Writing, Texts and the Divinatory Mission in Archaic China

Curriculum Vitae

I was born in Ohio on December 6, 1951. I graduated from The Ohio State University in 1976, having studied anthropology, philosophy and Asian art history, among others, in a self-designed Honors program called "Interdisciplinary Studies." I also began to study Chinese and after graduating went to Taiwan, to the Inter-university Program administered by Stanford University. I studied there in 1976-77, and later from 1980-81. After the IUP, I stayed in Taiwan studying Southern Min and Japanese languages, along with classical literature. In graduate school at Harvard, I spent two years in the Regional Studies: East Asia Masters program. In 1982, I entered the Social Anthropology doctoral program, studying Medical Anthropology under Professor Arthur Kleinman, and Chinese archaeology with Professor K.C. Chang. I conducted fieldwork with spirit mediums in Taiwan under the auspices of a Fulbright grant, and received my Ph.D. in 1992, having written my dissertation "The Eccentric Structure of Shamanism: An Ethnography of Taiwanese Ki-Thong, With Reference to the Philosophical Anthropology of Helmuth Plessner." In 1993, I received a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Contemporary China Centre at Australia National University, followed by a two and a half year post-doctoral fellowship in the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy in Academia Sinica, Taiwan. My research concerned both Chinese folk religion and classical texts. I have worked in Miyazaki, Japan for fourteen years (1998 to the present) teaching anthropology and Chinese studies at Miyazaki International College.

My primary research interest has been the compositional structure of the Yi jing and divination's relation to the invention of writing and the subsequent textual tradition of ancient China. I am finishing the revisions to the manuscript which will be published as a book next year by Cambria Publishers, entitled Ancient Thought, Ancient Text: The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context.

Education / Training

Positions and Honors

Selected Publications