A Polyphonic World is a collection of academic essays and interviews edited by the editorial board of Xinrui Weekly, published by CITIC Press (Jianshi Chengcheng) in 2023. The word "polyphony" in the title is borrowed from music, where multiple voices proceed simultaneously, each independent yet interwoven. The editors use it to stress that understanding today's world cannot rest on the voice of a single discipline; it requires philosophy, sociology, anthropology, history, archaeology, brain science, art, and more to speak at once. The book is divided into four parts: "The Human Condition," "Rebuilding Connections," "In the World," and "Experiencing the Future." In "The Human Condition," writers from anthropology, communication studies, and the philosophy of technology discuss how anxiety, the body, disability, and technology shape one another. In "Rebuilding Connections," a philosopher calls for reconnecting with nature and rethinking natural history in an age centered on technology; a sound researcher reminds us to reflect on hearing in a visual age; and an anthropologist invites readers to see humanity through the eyes of animals. In "In the World," a sociologist discusses how modernity shapes the experience of time, a historian presents "living history" through fieldwork, and an art historian examines the tension between the local and the global in experimental art. "Experiencing the Future" examines the future we are living through from the history of brain science, the gaming generation seen through an existentialist lens, and future archaeology. The book brings together essays by twenty-five scholars (some sources say twenty-two). Luo Xin, professor of history at Peking University, wrote the preface, calling the essays "all chisels breaking through high walls, opening new vistas, bringing a new beam of light into our intellectual life." Chen Jiaying, Xiang Biao, and Wu Guosheng also recommend it. The book is best treated as a volume of intellectual notes to leaf through at leisure: open any essay and you enter the problematics of a discipline, hear different voices echoing one another, and gain a broader, more patient perspective.
这是一本很难归类的书，而这恰恰是它的价值所在。它脱胎于中信出版集团旗下的思想文化刊物《信睿周报》，把散落在各期里的学术随笔、访谈与书评重新编排成四个主题篇章，让人类学、传播学、技术哲学、社会学、历史学、考古学、脑科学与艺术史的声音同时发声，这也是书名“复调”的来源：不是唱同一个调子，而是让不同声部彼此支撑。 对那些既不想读过于通俗的“知识快餐”，又苦于专业著作门槛太高的读者来说，这本书的位置恰到好处。每篇文章都不长，却保留着学者本人的问题意识和概念密度；读者跟随一位作者走进一个学科，再换一位作者、换一种视角，渐渐体会到问题从来不止一个侧面。罗新在序言里说这些文章能“凿穿高墙，开启新视野”，项飙则提醒我们“复调的生活不是失调的生活”——这两句话几乎说明了这本书的用意：不是给出现成答案，而是提供词汇、视角和耐心。 装帧朴素、定价适中，适合放在床头或办公桌上，每次读一两篇。读完不必记住多少结论，重要的是学会在同一个问题上听见不止一个声音。
Founded in 1988 and affiliated with China CITIC Group, CITIC Press focuses on business and economics, social sciences, literature and children's books, with common categories covering social sciences, finance, literature, Eastern philosophy and literary appreciation. Its library holds 91 titles, including Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens trilogy, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Wu Xiaobo's Thirty Years of Strife: Chinese Enterprises 1978–2008, Nelly Sachs's The Weight of Butterflies: Selected Poems of Nelly Sachs, as well as New Interpretations of the Analects and Chiang Hsun's lectures on Dream of the Red Chamber. Its authors and translators include Lin Junhong, Ba Shusong, Chen Li and Chang Fen-ling. Overall, the press introduces influential works in finance and social sciences while balancing classic translation and local appreciation in literature and Eastern philosophy, combining academic depth with accessible reading.
