Paper short abstract:

Divinatory counselling addresses stress, doubts, and anxiety, exemplifications of fortune and destiny, by giving a direction or proposal to practitioners how they can work or re-work on the predetermined everyday crisis.

Paper long abstract:

The existing literature on destiny shows that people are far from passively fatalistic: instead, they proactively seek either to fulfil or to change the destiny believed to have been predetermined for them. Hong Kong is a city that is famous for its high cost of living and high-pressure education system. The political and pandemic situations in recent years have added more uncertainty to the already uneasy lives of the local inhabitants. Unlike many existing research on divination which focus on diviners, my fieldwork on Fengshui divination in contemporary Hong Kong looks at how divination practitioners, including masters, clients, and divination learners, use and value divination in their everyday lives. I found that many people apply Fengshui divination repeatedly in their habitual spaces, such as their homes, to cope with their daily lives/ uncertainty and intervene to change their destinies.

Looking beyond the tension between agency and predetermination, I suggest that Fengshui divination creates a formalised space within which practitioners can transcend the human realm and alter the destiny predetermined for them in the cosmic realm. Ongoing learning and practice of Fengshui divination, and adherence to its advice, demonstrate practitioners’ determination and effort to improve their fortunes proactively, thereby proving that they deserve a better destiny.

Paper short abstract:

Why do many young Chinese females watch mass tarot divination videos on Bilibili, a well-known Chinese video-sharing website? Through examining video configurations and people’s watching experiences, this paper explores online tarot divination as a social and therapeutic activity.

Paper long abstract:

How is online tarot divination practiced, and what does its experience do to and for young Chinese females within its socio-cultural contexts? Choosing mass tarot divination (dazhong zhanbu 大众占卜) clips on Bilibili as a “bounded moment” (Singler, 2020), I analyze how the website’s built-in features, such as barrage subtitles or the bullet screen (danmu, 弹幕), configure watching these clips into a social event, on the one hand, for these clips invite both diviners and video viewers to encounter, gather, and interact with each other virtually.

On the other hand, watching mass tarot divination videos is a therapeutic activity. By examining a prototype of a mass tarot divination clip on the theme of love fortune, I illustrate that tarot divination, leveraged as a coping strategy and therapeutic resource, manifests young females’ creativity in expressing their distress of female liminality while maintaining their psychological well-being.

By describing how the ritual ought to be performed, I demonstrate that diviners and video viewers create a focused situation—a momentarily shared reality—which thereby generates solidarity and symbols. Through these brief moments of cyber encounter, participation, and interaction, individuals who perform rituals accordingly obtain agency—or emotions and emotional energy (Collins, 2005), which provides reassurance, boosts confidence, and encourages one to take the initiative.

I also acknowledge how the discourse which emphasizes tarot divination’s therapeutic effect is both enabling and disabling. While de-stigmatizing the practice, it inevitably juxtaposes tarot divination and psychotherapy, resulting in the criticism of the former under the criteria of the latter.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the case of divinatory arts in contemporary Taiwan, this paper examines changing patterns in the circulation of traditional knowledge as former "secret knowledge" become increasingly available on social media.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines changing patterns in the transmission of traditional knowledge in contemporary Taiwan, based on the case of divinatory arts. In post-war Taiwan, Mainlander practitioners played a vital role in transmitting horoscopy techniques to native Taiwanese, mostly through a narrow and secretive mode of transmission based on the personal, elective relationship between master and disciple. Starting at the end of the 1980s, Taiwanese practitioners launched a popularization process that questioned traditional modes of knowledge transmission and reformulated concepts and theories to make them fit modern societies' expectations. This process went a step further more recently with the boom of the Internet and social media. Based on a mixed methodology combining anthropological fieldwork among practitioners of horoscopy in Taiwan and digital ethnography, this paper examines tensions in the vulgarization process of esoteric knowledge. In the past, the development of printing technologies and publishing industries at various times constituted both a challenge and an opportunity for the dissemination of esoteric knowledge and practices. As they increase the speed and outreach of knowledge circulation, information and communication technologies constitute another disruptive innovation likely to redefine the dynamic of esoteric practices. This paper examines to which extent they threaten, challenge, or nourish the strategic disclosure or concealment that characterizes esoteric practices, and how they redefine the social basis of both masters and disciples in contemporary societies.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at popular "divination vernacular" in China as a way of coping with crises. How divination talks situated in a wider social geo-political context cultivates language to address pain, to speak the "unspeakable", and creates resilience through articulating a sense of cultural unity.

Paper long abstract:

In early 2020, when the rest of the world has not yet been "shellshocked" by the pandemic, a Weibo account went viral for posting fortune-telling predictions on a "widespread disease of the respiratory system". There has been a longstanding fatalistic tradition of mantic elements relating to collective and individual misfortunes in China. These mantic languages are gaining a new life in the post-pandemic world and geo-political uncertainties we live in/with today.

This essay wishes to examine the emergence of a popular "divination vernacular" in China, using divination language as an explanatory model. Building on the notion that continuing experience of uncertainty evokes psychic pain and real suffering that dwells in the "between-places" of clinical and political language, divination as an intersecting point of what is psychological and what is political, provides a glance at the psycho-politics of wellbeing in China today beyond clinical encounters. The researcher reflects upon her own intermittent participation in divination and also looks at two ethnographic encounters: one on divination consultation as a way to cope with an existentialistic crisis; one on political metaphors and divination, divination vernacular as an alternative to discuss politics.

Divination cultivates an emotion of unity by acknowledging a wider fatalistic uncertainty beyond personal endeavours. By addressing the unspeakable and touching the intangible, divination vernacular empowers its participants with an alternative language to discuss what is psycho-political, transgressing the "incommunicability of pain" (Das, 1997), and acts as a mobilisable cultural resource to carry on living.

Paper short abstract:

Bucharest professionals use self-divination as a tool to make sense of personal events and thoughts. Learning from experts and online resources, people use imagistic, metaphorical and epistemically-detached interpretations as a form of therapeutic and exculpatory self-understanding.

Paper long abstract:

Urban Romanians increasingly appeal to divination for answers related to love, family, money or health. After seeking experts who read astral charts or tarot cards, some decided to take matters into their own hands. This paper explores the practices and representations documented in participant observation and interviews with middle-class Bucharest individuals who became self-diviners using online resources, especially during the pandemic.

For Boyer (2020), divination provides a coordination tool for socially-difficult decisions yet his model cannot account for practices which only involve solitary individuals. However, this paper argues that epistemic detachment explains the use of apparently-random signs to create relevant and self-empowering interpretations of personal facts. Thus, self-divination became an alternative form of therapy to make sense of difficult personal decisions or troubling events yet without the social stigma and internal discomfort associated with mental problems.

The imagistic aspect of stars, cards and other divination materials offers an intuitive framework for those finding the analytical psychological lexicon too limited or too threatening to describe their life or sentiments. Cognitively opaque but hermeneutically-promising metaphors create a narrative in which things happen for a reason but without assigning guilt to themselves or others. The open-ended character of astrological or tarot symbols provided a starting point for personal reflection yet also helped people avoid self-criticism and deflect blame towards mystical spheres. However, self-divination explanations belong to a growing pattern of radical individualism and self-indulgence when they serve to disconnect from social accountability for choices which harmed others or themselves.

Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the factors and reasons individuals participate in religious/spiritual practices and how the broader social, religious, and mental contexts impinge upon their experience. Qualitative data collected during the Pandemic from London Sufis have been used to investigate this.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to present the role of weekly religious/spiritual practices in the well-being of regular members of Sufi gatherings in London. It is framed by the secularisation thesis and the distinction between spirituality and religion alongside the well-being effects of the practice/rituals. This is used to examine the role of well-being in online gatherings during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper investigates the factors and reasons individuals participate in online gatherings and investigate the difference between in-person and online gathering on the individual’s well-being, especially during the lockdown that affects human interaction and leads the individual to isolation. The paper investigates the factors and reasons individuals participate in religious/spiritual practices and how the broader social, religious, and mental contexts impinge upon their experiences. Qualitative interviewing has been used to collect data from the individuals’ experiences. Qualitative data identified two main domains, ‘dealing with uncertainty’ and ‘having social support’ helped the participants during the Covid19 Pandemic. The religious/ spiritual gathering positively impacts the individuals’ general well-being, especially during the uncertainty of life and the pandemic.