A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after MaoTraversing 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. |
Contents
| 1 | |
After the Storm | 35 |
Ten Thousand Years | 56 |
Spectral Collision | 80 |
A Soul Adrift | 101 |
Vertiginous Abbreviation | 126 |
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accounts amid Anagnost Arthur Kleinman body Cai Huiqing Cai Huiqing’s California Press campaigns central Chairman Mao China Confucian contemporary cosmology corruption cosmic cosmocratic cosmology Cultural Revolution deities demonic divine dream dynasty earthly encounter engagements entities figure filial piety forms Fuxi Fuxi Temple ghosts gods Hanwei heaven Henanese Hexian hospital human incense Kleinman labor language Liu Shuhua living madness Mao Zedong Mao's Maoist mediums in Hexian mediumship mental health modern moral mother neurasthenia Nüwa one’s otherworldly past patients peasant peasantry People’s political possession post-Mao postreform potential precarity present psychiatric question realm reform religion renminbi revolutionary ritual rural secular sense Shaanxi Shenzhen social soul sovereignty speak spectral collisions spirit mediums spirit money superstition Suzhen symbolic temple square texts tion tradition translated University Press urban village violence Wang Weihong ward writes Xia Peizhi Xu Liying yin and yang York Zhao Yun Zheng Yulan