Where Spirits Still Speak: Chinese Mass Shamanism and the Unfinished Project of Modernity
Highlights in Art and Design May 28, 2026 Yiming Sun
Shamanism has gained growing popular attention in China despite the state's official secularism. Through analysis of literary works, documentaries, social media, and interviews, the paper shows how artistic representations aestheticize and simplify shamanism. It argues that Chinese mass shamanism is a cultural response to structural and affective predicaments of contemporary China, including instrumentalism in diffused religion, social atomization, and the erosion of 'the nearby'. The phenomenon is presented as a hybrid formation born of modernity's failure to achieve complete disenchantment, situating it within modernity's entanglement with occultism.