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Contribution short abstract

Drawing on ethnography of China’s Body Mind Spirit milieu, this contribution asks how spiritual healing responds to conflict and moral breakdowns —sometimes smoothing division, sometimes sedimenting critique and uneasy coexistence.

Contribution long abstract

This roundtable contribution draws on ethnographic research in China’s Body Mind Spirit (shen xin ling) milieu to open a conversation about spirituality in an increasingly polarized world. Rather than asking whether spirituality heals or divides, I ask: what kinds of coexistence does spiritual healing make possible under conditions of moral breakdowns, political constraint, and geopolitical tension?

In urban China, spiritual practices framed through metaphors of flow, blockage, and release promise repair—of the self, the family, and the nation. Emotional release workshops, lineage healing, and spiritual self-cultivation seek to restore harmony by keeping affect in motion. Yet these same practices unfold amid deep fractures: between individual suffering and collective obligation, care and governance, global spiritual imaginaries and nationalist affect.

Attending ethnographically to moments of fatigue, ambivalence, and emotional residue, I suggest that spirituality does not simply resolve division. It also absorbs and redistributes it. What cannot be healed—exhaustion with positivity, unease with gendered and familial demands, quiet mistrust of moral authority—settles as affective sediment. These sediments mark sites of moral injury, but also generate fragile ethical relations: forms of coexistence based less on consensus than on shared endurance, mutual attunement, and partial repair.

By foregrounding spirituality as an affective infrastructure shaped by—and responding to—polarization, this intervention invites dialogue with other ethnographic contexts represented in the roundtable. It asks how spirituality helps people live with difference when political, moral, and geopolitical divisions cannot be transcended, only inhabited.