A Good Life Foretold: Incense Seeing, Hope, and Healing in North China

My dissertation is an ethnography of lived hope bound up with religious practices in an authoritarian regime. It explores the practices of incense seeing to ask how marginalized social groups in North China pursue their hope for a good life and cope with uncertainty and precarity by consulting folk healers called incense seers. Incense seeing, despite being outlawed as “feudal superstition,” is a form of spiritual healing and fortune telling widely found in China. Faced with a competitive market-oriented economy and profound social changes, millions of Chinese seek help from incense seers for diverse everyday problems in attaining a good life, ranging from health to marriage, education, career, and business success. The study is based on 17 months of fieldwork among seers and their customers in Xia County (a pseudonym), Shandong Province: 13 months continually from 2021 to 2022 under China’s zero-COVID policy, and summers in 2018 and 2019. It details how incense seeing deals with both “empty sickness” (a state of being unwell attributed to the power of spiritual beings and Chinese geomancy) and “solid sickness” (a malfunctioning of body organs and systems), and helps people grapple with hope-related mental distress and conflict through “affective therapeutics”— healing people’s negative emotional states through religious practices. In exploring what happens to these hopes after customers depart from seers’ headquarters, the study unpacks how spiritual experiences influence people’s hopeful dispositions and inspire them to act, resist, and make changes in their lives in contexts of stringent social control such as China’s one-child and zero-COVID policies.

Beyond its relevance to China studies and medical anthropology, this project addresses issues of broader theoretical importance within anthropology and in the humanities and social sciences more generally. First, it deepens the anthropological study of hope by formulating an extended relational framework that is capacious enough to accommodate a wide array of ontological commitments and includes hoping people and spiritual forces. Second, it illustrates how the common hopes of spiritual beings are understood to be revealed through embodied sufferings (e.g., depression and schizophrenia), thus exhibiting a complex temporality that upsets a linear, this-worldly sense of the future in the current theory of hope. Third, the dissertation examines the hopes held for others (e.g., the hopes Chinese parents hold for their children) and its affective impact on people. Attending to hoping for others enriches the anthropology of hope by directing scholars to an important form of everyday hope that permeates social life in Chinese and other societies, and offers a corrective to the current focus on people’s hopes for their own futures. The hoping else also enables us to depict a more balanced account of hope that moves beyond the romance of hope in the current literature, and brings the interdependence and contingency of hope into sharper ethnographic focus. Fourth, my findings reveal that attending to incense seeing deepens our understanding of the religious capacity to aspire for a good life. Instead of perceiving religion to be “the opium of the people,” a palliative distraction that diverts people from real social problems, I contend that incense seeing offers a cultural toolkit, or what I term “a ladder of hope”, that even marginalized social groups can draw on to look beyond a hopeless situation and pursue hopes seemingly out of their reach. The prosaic, individual-oriented or household-based aspirations of everyday lives constitute a fundamental part of the politics of hope: the “infrapolitics of hope.” It’s fundamental because it allows people to get by and to live, has the potential to create an otherwise, lays the foundations for more conscious efforts of building collective hopes, and may make possible social and political shifts. Overall, this project has an ambitious goal: to extend the boundaries of the anthropology of hope and to mark some new paths that future research on hope, including but not limited to anthropological analysis, might fruitfully pursue.