Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This essay reflects on the still-present difficulty in approaching contemporary rural mediumship as coeval with their urban psychotherapeutic counterparts. Drawing on ethnographic work in rural Henan province in central China, I describe how both rurality and spirit mediumship have been rendered anachronistic through national imaginaries, anti-superstition campaigns, and psychiatric discourses. The essay centers on the case of a spirit medium located in the psychiatric unit, and the social evolutionary and developmentalist temporalities condensed in her cultural psychiatric diagnosis. I then turn to the medium's ritual work and cosmological account, which invert mediumship's position in space and time. The essay approaches mediumship's rituals as a form of chronotopic labor, which reworks the spatio-temporal coordinates they inherit from within. It closes by bringing together the conundrums of rural mediumship and those of urban psychotherapeutic and diasporic worlds, to consider psychic landscapes of dislocation, and other formulations of futures to come.