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Accepted Paper:
Divination as a medicinal language of pain: navigating around psycho-political ruptures
Fei Liao
(SOAS, University of London)
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.
"Attract good fortune? I am counting on that": divination as energizing practices in uncertain and changing times
Session 2 Wednesday 12 April, 2023, -