A01=Emily Ng
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anthropology
Author_Emily Ng
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HD
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
central plain
china
chinese history
chinese religion
COP=United States
country
cultural history
cultural revolution
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divine sovereignty
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
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eq_society-politics
folk religion
folklore
ghosts
hallucinations
henan
history
home altar
insanity
Language_English
madness
mao
mediums
mental health
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peasants
politics
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
psychic
psychology
religion
rural
semi colonialism
softlaunch
spectres
spirit
spirit world
spirituality
temple
Product details
- ISBN 9780520303027
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 12 May 2020
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so-called end of history?
The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.
The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. Here, those who engage in mediumship offer a different history of the present. They approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. Following pronouncements of China’s rise, and in the wake of what Chinese intellectuals termed semicolonialism, the stories here tell of spirit mediums, patients, and psychiatrists caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way.
Emily Ng is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam.
