Abstract The existing literature on destiny shows that people are far from passively fatalistic: instead, they proactively seek either to fulfill or to change the destiny believed to have been predetermined for them. My fieldwork on feng shui divination in contemporary Hong Kong showed that many people apply self-performed feng shui divination regularly in their homes and/or offices with the aim of intervening to change their destinies. I suggest that rather than just accept the existence and the tension of the contradictory features of malleability and fixity of destiny, the paradox is necessary to allow people to claim ownership and be responsible for their own lives. Understanding how people act to change their destinies might potentially allow us insight into the types of divinatory practices that may become more relevant in our urbanizing world. Destiny may have the potential to serve as the ethnographic concept to understand contemporary uncertainty.
L. Yu (Wed,) studied this question.