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Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor

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 ana...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Ng, Emily
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8362005/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34159585
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22101
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author Ng, Emily
author_facet Ng, Emily
author_sort Ng, Emily
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description 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.
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spelling pubmed-83620052021-08-17 Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor Ng, Emily J Hist Behav Sci Special Issue Articles 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. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2021-06-22 2021 /pmc/articles/PMC8362005/ /pubmed/34159585 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22101 Text en © 2021 The Authors. Journal of The History of the Behavioral Sciences published by Wiley Periodicals LLC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
spellingShingle Special Issue Articles
Ng, Emily
Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor
title Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor
title_full Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor
title_fullStr Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor
title_full_unstemmed Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor
title_short Ritual futures: Spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor
title_sort ritual futures: spirit mediumship as chronotopic labor
topic Special Issue Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8362005/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34159585
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.22101
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