Fate calculation experts : diviners seeking legitimation in contemporary China

Abstract

While anthropology has had an extensive interest in divination, little attention has been given to the problem of divination's social and political legitimacy. Divination in China has often been stigmatised as immoral and illegal 'superstition', and contemporary Chinese diviners' practice is often shaped by the ways in which diviners counter such stigmatising discourses. China's rapidly changing society is forcing people to confront and reinterpret the relationship between individual agency and fate. As a consequence, divination enjoys a revival. As 'daily metaphysicians' operating in this environment, diviners answer the need to develop new strategies to conceptualize and deal with the business of 'fate'. How do professional diviners legitimize themselves when they are regarded as being engaged in an immoral and irrational occupation? What does the widespread interest in divination say about a Chinese society that otherwise identifies with modernity, science and rationality? This thesis attempts to shed light on each of these questions. Although there are many types of diviners, I have focussed on one that is most apparent in public life, especially in cities, namely literate diviners offering face-to-face consultations in fixed business locations, and using indigenous divination techniques that do not attempt to invoke spirits. The main data were collected through long-term ethnographic observation of diviners and their customers in a prefectural city in northern China. This data was supplemented with less extensive research conducted in several other cities. I examined diviners' rhetoric and practice from four perspectives: their invocation of morality, their use of cultural nationalism, their self- comparisons with psychological counselling, and their attempts at professional institutionalization. I show that diviners achieve legitimation by associating their occupation with modern knowledge production systems, by forming academic associations and by representing their work as a form of psychological counselling. Diviners' claims to moral authority and traditional culture also play a role in building a positive social image for their occupation. Moreover diviners' legitimation efforts are not only matters of image management, but also inhere in the basic social relationships and the fundamental cultural values they develop in their practice. Drawing on divination consultations with typical customers, I also reveal how individuals' need for self-governance and self-responsibility in China still has to contend with overwhelming social coercion and political uncertainties. I argue that the standard definition of good fortune and happiness in indigenous Chinese divination dovetails well with contemporary social contexts. As a result, it is easy for diviners to exploit customers' anxieties about high levels of uncertainty by implying that divination is able to predict what fate has in store for them. Diviners' efforts to seek legitimacy provide an opportunity to observe how meaning is negotiated in contemporary Chinese society and to learn about implicit social tensions. The processes of legitimation described in this thesis are likely also to be found among other social actors. Therefore this inquiry may also prove useful for understanding justification processes among a range of marginalized social groups or those in engaged in various forms of stigmatised behaviour. Show more