Words of Destiny: Practicing Astrology in North India

Caterina Guenzi's Words of Destiny: Practicing Astrology in North India, published by the State University of New York Press in 2021 in its Hindu Studies series, is an ethnography of astrological practice in Banaras built on fieldwork and interviews with fifty working astrologers. Guenzi, an anthropologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, examines astrological counseling as a lived social practice rather than judging whether the underlying system is valid. Its strength is that it fills a real gap in the jyotish sources cited here, which otherwise carry classical authorities such as Pingree and Kane but no scholarly account at all of how the practice is actually carried out today. Its limit is that it describes practice in one Indian city, not jyotish as practiced everywhere.