Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor.
J Hist Behav Sci June 22, 2021 Emily Ng 1 citation
Spirit mediumship in rural China is often treated as backward compared to urban psychotherapy, but this essay argues that such a view is shaped by national anti-superstition campaigns and psychiatric discourses that render rural practices anachronistic. Drawing on ethnographic work in Henan province, the author describes a spirit medium in a psychiatric unit whose diagnosis reflects social evolutionary and developmentalist ideas of time. The medium's own rituals and cosmology invert these spatio-temporal assumptions, performing what the author calls chronotopic labor. The essay connects the dislocation of rural mediumship with urban psychotherapeutic and diasporic experiences, considering alternative futures.