Fate Calculation Experts: Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China 9781785339950

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Social and Political Status of Divination in China
Chapter 2. The Practice of Divination and Diviners
Chapter 3. Typical Customers of Divination
Chapter 4. The Moral Discourses of Divination
Chapter 5. Divination as an Aspect of ‘Traditional Culture’
Chapter 6. Divination as Counselling
Chapter 7. The Professionalization of Divination through Associations
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Fate Calculation Experts

Asian Anthropologies

General Editors: Hans Steinmüller, London School of Economics Dolores Martinez, SOAS, University of London Founding Editors: Shinji Yamashita, University of Tokyo Jerry Eades, Emeritus Professor, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University The dynamics of social, political and cultural change in East and Southeast Asia are of central importance in today’s world. Yet the study of this region is often under-represented in mainstream anthropological literature. This series continues the long-standing traditions of anthropological study in East and Southeast Asia by publishing contemporary ethnographic research and anthropological theory from the region. Volume 9 Fate Calculation Experts: Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China Geng Li Volume 8 Soup, Love, and a Helping Hand: Social Relations and Support in Guangzhou, China Friederike Fleischer Volume 7 Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village Donald C. Wood Volume 6 Multiculturalism in New Japan: Crossing the Boundaries Within Edited by Nelson Graburn, John Ertl and R. Kenji Tierney Volume 5 Engaging the Spirit World in Modern Southeast Asia Edited by Andrea Lauser and Kirsten W. Endres Volume 4 Centering the Margin: Agency and Narrative in Southeast Asian Borderlands Edited by Alexander Horstmann and Reed L. Wadley Volume 3 The Making of Anthropology in East and Southeast Asia Edited by Shinji Yamashita, Joseph Bosco, and J.S. Eades Volume 2 Bali and Beyond: Case Studies in the Anthropology of Tourism Shinji Yamashita Volume 1 Globalization in Southeast Asia: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives Edited by Shinji Yamashita and J.S. Eades

FATE CALCULATION EXPERTS Diviners Seeking Legitimation in Contemporary China

n Geng Li

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Geng Li All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-994-3 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-995-0 ebook

Contents

n Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter 1. The Social and Political Status of Divination in China

19

Chapter 2. The Practice of Divination and Diviners

32

Chapter 3. Typical Customers of Divination

58

Chapter 4. The Moral Discourses of Divination

75

Chapter 5. Divination as an Aspect of ‘Traditional Culture’

89

Chapter 6.  Divination as Counselling

105

Chapter 7. The Professionalization of Divination through Associations

118

Conclusion 129 References 137 Index 149

Acknowledgements

n I would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisors at ANU: Andrew Kipnis, Benjamin Penny and Philip Taylor. My sincere love and thanks also go to my friends Yayun and Yen, who have lifted my spirits and have been my lifeline during my research. Most importantly, my research relies on the tolerance and understanding of many diviners I met in the fieldwork. It was their generosity with their time and their willingness to share their knowledge that made this project possible. Thanks of course are due to my family and their unceasing support of my study over many years. My parents protected me from all those social stresses and anxieties with their patience and understanding, as did my uncles and aunts.

Introduction

1

n Divination, according to the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, comprises ‘culturally sanctioned methods of arriving at a judgement of the unknown through a consideration of incomplete evidence’ (Willis 2012: 201). In Chinese, it is often referred to as ‘calculating fate’ (suanming 算命). In this ethnography, divination mainly refers to the multiple forms of Chinese divination using traditional techniques without involving communication with gods and other beings. Its text-based knowledge with a coherent system of symbols and a naturalist ontology are a result of centuries of development. Two reactions were common during my fieldwork on divination. Often, people would laugh when they heard the topic of my research; several people would gather around, and the whole circle would burst into laughter. However, when it was a private chat with two or three people, their response was, ‘Ha-ha! You study fate calculation?!’ But they usually showed great interest after their initial chuckle and would ask me, ‘Do you think it is accurate?’ Another commonplace event was that whenever I met a diviner for the first time, he or she always talked eloquently for hours to convey the positive meaning of their vocation, such as the grand role divination has played in Chinese culture, and the accuracy of their predictions. Anthropologists studying Chinese popular religion often have to deal with ‘people’s insouciant attitude toward explicit interpretation’ (Weller 1994: 7); my informants, on the contrary, had a strong motivation to offer me the meaning of their practice and did it eloquently with an ‘interpretative noise’ through their constant bragging and legitimation efforts. The frequency of these two events made me wonder: Why did people laugh? Which features of this topic made it amusing to a Chinese audience? Why were diviners so eager to defend themselves? Is there any connection between the Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 18.

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audience’s laughing and the diviners’ eloquent self-bolstering? It is important to note here that misunderstandings also probably affected these reactions. Many people in China know little about anthropology and its research objectives, so when I said, ‘I research divination’, they often thought I was learning fortune telling techniques and seeking a doctorate in divination itself. My status as a doctoral student might have made diviners feel they needed to emphasize the academic significance of divination. Anyhow, the laughing and later inquiries also reflect divination’s contradictory position: it is often not taken seriously, but many people get interested and involved with it. Correspondingly, the diviners’ bragging also exposed their coexisting stigma and privilege: they had to defend themselves to avoid being looked down on as ‘superstition experts’, but at the same time, they were proud to be regarded as experts of ‘traditional culture’ whose skills were in great demand in most people’s everyday lives. My research interprets these facts mainly from the perspective of professional diviners, who answer the great demands of a transitional society where the dialectic of agency and determinism is being restructured, and develop multiple strategies to reshape the business of ‘fate’. Their efforts to seek social and political legitimacy give us an opportunity to observe how meaning and justice is negotiated in contemporary Chinese society.

Ambiguous Divination in Contemporary China Xi Jinping, the current political leader of China, officially promotes the ideal of the ‘Chinese Dream’, an equivalent to the ‘American Dream’. Although the Chinese Dream places more emphasis on the revival of collective national prosperity, in which subjects can be viewed as an extension of the socialist project, it still exposes and responds to an atmosphere of aspiration or ambition around the country. Not long after my fieldwork, Evan Osnos, the New Yorker journalist, published his portrait of China with the title Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. The period Osnos spent in China between 2005 and 2013 reminded him of the Gilded Age in the United States. He felt that Mark Twain, Charles Warner and himself had witnessed similar historical moments ‘when the individual became a gale force in political, economic, and private life, so central to the self-image of a rising generation’ (Osnos 2014: 5). The period when Osnos found the Chinese embracing the idea that individuals can be the agent of their own fate was also the time when divination in China was revived. The flourishing of divination was exemplified by the numerous divination shops and booths on streets across the country, thousands of fortune telling requests posted each day on Internet forums, and the enormous wealth accumulated by divination masters, who are active in teaching divination knowledge, writing self-help divination manuals and giving advice on real estate developments. The

Introduction | 3

paradoxical relationship between consulting one’s fate and the strong aspiration to succeed is one context for the book. If we look closer at people’s attitude towards divination, a contradiction caused by the inconsistency between words and deeds also exists. In 2002, the largest national organization of scientific and technological workers in China, The China Association of Science and Technology, conducted a nationwide survey that showed that 40 per cent of 5,000 respondents had consulted with diviners. More than 60 per cent of respondents admitted that their behaviour was influenced by the results of divination. But only 26.5 per cent claimed they regarded divination as reasonable in some degree. While more than 60 per cent recognized the social harm of divination, less than 30 per cent of them supported repressing divination (China Association of Science and Technology 2002). These statistics reveal that the popularity of divination practice and the negative attitudes towards it are related to divination’s illegal status and stigmatized status in ideology and popular culture. Ever since China began modernizing at the end of the nineteenth century, divination has been tagged as a superstition and has been attacked during anti-superstition movements. Diviners have been labelled as frauds and morally corrupt criminals. Divination is not recognized as a legal job in China. The laws and regulations at all levels prohibit the practice of divination, punishing divination in public areas and divination that causes losses of property and life.1 The punishment of public divination is also highly variable across regions and times. When local policy is tighter, diviners on the street are confronted with the danger of arrest; when regional government does not take them seriously, they can conduct their business in multiple ways, including running a studio or office, or just selling their services on the street. Despite its stigmatized and illegal status, divination persists. As a traditional custom, it has never stopped. Even during periods of radical repression by the Communist regime, it took place underground or was just suspended. Since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy in 1978, divination and many forms of religiosity have revived and enjoy a degree of freedom. Probably everyone growing up in China knows or has heard something about it. Even if they themselves have not experienced it directly, they would have relatives or friends who have used divination. Some people regard most divination practice as totally fraudulent but may also assume that divination itself is a field of extraordinary knowledge, which outsiders cannot fully comprehend. Many officials in the current Chinese regime have invested considerable sums of money in divination, and many Chinese intellectuals both practise divination and talk about fate. Likewise, some diviners are well respected by their customers, including by members of the political and economic elite. Several of my informants have accumulated considerable wealth and also achieved great fame. Some divination masters even have disciples with postgraduate degrees from famous universities. Given the problematic social and

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political legitimacy of divination in China, a country that is obsessed with science and progress and influenced by its Communist legacy, the ongoing popularity of this ‘superstition’ deserves more explanation and interpretation, even though divination is already a classic topic in anthropology.

Divination as Social Critique Compared to the extensive anthropological interest in the cognition, function and symbols of divination, little attention has been given to the problem of divination’s social and political legitimacy, or the politics of meaning production around divination.2 Instead of scanning the enormous anthropological literature on divination, here I focus on the most relevant works to my study: those concerned with divination’s social conditions. In some cultures, such as African tribal or lineage societies, for example, most members of society see divination as legitimate, whereas in most of the Anglo-Saxon world, divination is marginalized but has not been outlawed by the courts. Divination in Asian nation states has a more ambiguous status. Modernists suppress and stigmatize divination on the grounds of rationalization and the social engineering potential of scientific thinking. But divination is also a flexible institution with popularity. In terms of the attack on ‘superstition’ in the modernization project, divination’s potential for strengthening national identity, and its status as a cultural industry supported by the development of media and technological development, the following cases have much in common with Chinese divination. Nerida Cook points out that Thai astrology in the late 1980s received criticisms ranging from ‘religious questions of orthodoxy and compatibility with Buddhism, through rationalist queries regarding the credibility of the system in scientific terms, to the questioning of the role of such a belief system in the socio-political order of contemporary Thailand’ (Cook 1989: 90). The defence of Thai astrology ‘reflect[s] the views of the military, bureaucratic, aristocratic and latterly business groups who form the main opposition to the progressives’ (Cook 1989: 91). According to Stephanie Homola, the social stigma of divination in Taiwan as ‘superstition’ originated in the Chinese Modernist revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘The decay of Modernist discourse in connection with the democratization process and the development of the Taiwanization movement in the 1990s explain why divination practices were popularized in the 1990s’ (Homola 2013: 144). Mass media, a cultural industry, and communication technologies created the impression of a boom, which attracted scholarly attention. Moreover, divination is widely regarded by Chinese-speaking groups as better preserved in Taiwan than in mainland China and has become ‘a symbol of national, social and psychological uniqueness’ of Taiwan (ibid.).

Introduction | 5

While Cook and Homola explain the social conditions of divination and only briefly mention the criticism of divination in society and the efforts made to seek legitimation in their studies, I will focus on these questions with detailed ­delineation of the actions of diviners. From a Marxist point of view, David Kim (2009) asked what it was about Korean shamanism and other forms of divination that conjured up ‘the real’ within the larger context of market capitalism. He defined divination as a mirror of the everyday and a medium that channels ‘desire’ itself as a pleasurable form of expenditure. Kim argued that social hegemony, hiding under the mask of fate, was the real power behind the superficial pursuit of happiness in the form of monetary success. Kim drew our attention to a neoliberalist ‘magic’ behind divination; magic promises individuals monetary rewards under the disguise of freedom of choice. Seremetakis (2009), who based on her research on exorcism and divination in Greek urban society, argues that divination and related involuntary gestures of the body show the impact of the social nervous system in Taussig’s sense (Taussig 1993). Here divination is seen not only as redressing the social order in traditional structural-functionalist terms but also as redressing the body that is fragmented by the shocking structures of modernity. As a healing practice, divination counters the distracting and distancing effect of the media and creates touch-ability in social life. The last two examples of divination studies in urban and industrializing societies have been influenced heavily by the social critique of the Frankfurt School of writers. Divination in this theoretical context points to the incomplete articulation of everyday life by neoliberal, globalizing processes driven by capitalism and consumerism. Theodor Adorno points out that it is the susceptibility to astrology more than astrology as such that deserves attention (Adorno 1994: 114). Similarly, I analyse divination in order to find out what it indicates as a ‘symptom’ of Chinese society. The ironies of divination relate to tensions in cosmology, morality, politics and economy as well as the political-social context of Chinese religiosity. Even if divination reknits the social fabric (Winkelman and Peek 2004b: 7), divination itself is also a part of the same social fabric that needs to be reknitted from time to time. I contend that observers of divination in complex modern societies should go beyond the particular setting of divination practice, to look at changes before and after divination, and also take sceptics and critics of divination into consideration. The limited recognition and acceptance of the legitimation efforts of diviners by various social agents are consciously expressed or are implied. Among them, lawyers, ancient philosophy experts, psychological counsellors, divination amateurs and typical customers are the most relevant. Taking various social groups into consideration also allows me to look at divination as a refractor of the impact of

6 | Fate Calculation Experts

large-scale transformations. Complex material and social processes are especially distilled in divination’s scenarios and in diviners’, customers’ and non-customers’ narratives, which weave together their emotions, motives, involuntary actions and messages. Divination has the dual potential to enable a social critique and to reveal the implicit tensions in society. Anthropological studies have shown that by making particular moral judgments, diviners not only reveal the unknown but also combine known facts into a coherent picture, in other words, they make sense of the local world and restore social reciprocity (Fernandez 1991). As ethnographies of divination in Africa and Asia illustrate (Peek 1991; DeBernardi 2006), instructive and admonitory propositions are often sequentially applied by diviners to resolve troubled behaviours. Diviners not only inform clients about the future, they also judge and persuade clients within the morality of a social network. Diviners reshape the ethical dispositions of individuals to help them out, as in daily life, ‘relations of power and dominance driven by greed and lust, envy, anger and aggression are often at the core of the conflict’ (Steffen 2013: 200). Victor Turner’s classic argument about Ndembu divinatory symbolism is applicable here. Turner revealed that a diviner acts to enable social adjustments among local descent groups. The diviner accuses or exonerates individuals in a system of moral norms. Thus diviners play an important role as upholders of tribal morality and rectifiers of disturbed social relationships, especially in a society without centralized political institutions (Turner 1975). However, unlike Ndembu society, the divination discussed in this book is based on a tradition distinguished by its strong reliance on texts (Zeitlyn 2001). More importantly, by contrast with Ndembu society, divination in China is stigmatized and requires political and moral justification. Contemporary Chinese diviners have to assert divination’s moral usefulness, and often present themselves as conservative guardians of morality to do so. Within an unfriendly social and political environment, they even adjust their discourse to slogans of the party-state that emphasize social harmony. Self-representation absorbing state discourses and self-institutionalization that aims at transforming their occupation into a profession both point to the creation of new self-definition. Apart from a disposition to instruct customers through relationally oriented conduct codes, explicit rhetoric about filial piety, karma and kindness helps diviners to enhance their public image and the reputation of divination as such. Previous anthropological research has noticed that diviners often have an anomalous status in their societies. A diviner is typically someone who, by reason of ethnic origin, occupation, physical condition or sexual orientation is considered marginal to ordinary society. Social marginality could help the diviner to ‘see’ the situation of the client with the requisite degree of detachment and overall perspective (Willis 2012: 202).

Introduction | 7

Among Chinese diviners, except for blind practitioners, the text-based knowledge of divination is highly rationalized and can be learned through training rather than spiritual insight. The symbolic calculating and reasoning techniques of divination rationalize divination and elevate it from ‘magic’, which has a lower status in all forms of ‘superstition’. Its inherent cosmology endows Chinese divination with a more rational status and more ordinary disposition. Some Chinese diviners are empowered by their ‘occult capital’ and are often referred to by their clients using the honorifics ‘superior man’ (gaoren 高人) or ‘master’ (dashi 大师). Their charisma is further enhanced by incorporating the occult or spiritual into the politic and economic arena of contemporary China, which is a skill that requires skilfully manoeuvring cultural capital among social networks. At the same time, despite their celebrated cosmology and knowledge and the great demand for their services, diviners are still socially deviant and problematic. Their legitimation efforts, which will be introduced in the book, aim to shake off accusations such as ‘frauds on the street’ to ‘pretenders colluding with the elite’. I would rather call the whole group ‘daily metaphysicians’ who supply a folk service – granting insight into the mundane world. As an ordinary occupational group, diviners earn a living through providing folk consulting services. They can comment on fundamental issues of time, space and fate in a historical moment when their clients feel trapped in a gale of political, economic and private upheavals.

Optimistic Fatalism in Chinese Society A belief in fate is the precondition of divination. The salience of fate (ming 命) in Chinese culture has been widely noticed by a number of Western observers. Ming often occurs in works of film and literature but also in everyday language. For example, it is common to hear people saying ‘his fate is good’ or ‘my fate is not good’; people often attribute a success or failure to fate. By saying ‘it is not my fate to have money’, the speaker means she is doomed to be poor no matter how much efforts she makes, and she has to accept her poor financial situation for what it is. Fate or ming has been such a common concern in Chinese psychic and narrative trajectories that we can say it is life-limiting, but also life-giving. In his edited volume on the idea of fate in China, Lupke (2005) reminds us that diviners, the professional group dealing with fate, should also be analysed. In my research, I found that many diviners detached fortune (yun 运) from destiny (ming 命). Jean DeBenardi translated the pair of concepts respectively as ‘cycles of luck’ and ‘constitutive fate’ in her study on popular religion in Penang Chinese communities (DeBernardi 2006: 15, 63). Diviners explain that one can change one’s fortune in a particular period through one’s own efforts, but that one’s general

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destiny is preordained and is very difficult to change. Ming locks an individual into a predetermined hierarchical position, whereas yun inspires actors to capture opportunities and to work hard. The combination of an overarching frame of fate with the flexibility of fortune is the whole picture of one’s destiny, called mingyun (命运) in modern Chinese. Generally speaking, most diviners acknowledge the extraordinary and decisive power of fate, but at the same time they encourage customers to change their behaviour, to advance their self-cultivation and to improve their social relations and ethics. Many of them, partially to seek profit, are apt to offer methods for enhancing fortune or remedies for bad luck. Occupying a central position in Chinese philosophical and everyday discourse, ming, however, is more complex than ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ in English. The Chinese character ming (命) also means command (e.g. mingling 命令), implying fate is an order to obey given by a supreme authority. Stafford (2012) outlines three ideal-type accounts of fate in Taiwan and China: cosmological (fate is determined in the mechanisms of the universe); spirit-oriented (fate is determined or shaped by the intervention of gods, ancestors or other spirits); social (fate is something we create for ourselves, especially through interactions with other people). The spiritual and social faces of fate are often recognized by both diviners and customers.3 However, the rationale of Chinese divination mainly involves the first account of fate. In this line of thought fate can be presented as a kind of logicalmathematical problem. There is a spectrum of popular ideas about agency and determinism related to fate, including passive fatalism, moral determinism (such as karma – a result of Buddhist influence) and anti-fatalism (Chan 1963: 78–79). The whole picture is also more than being passive and fatalistic. Raphals (2005) finds that, for Chinese, ming does not necessarily mean the demise of free will; there is room for manoeuvre. Ethnographies have also confirmed that in spite of a keen and strong interest in fate and fortune, in practice Chinese people are not very fatalistic; rather, they believe that fortune is heavily shaped by hard work and the manipulation of human relationships (Oxfeld 1993; DeBernardi 2006). The mainstream doctrine of Confucianism stereotypically requests people to behave in accord with ming but also to exert their utmost in moral endeavours and leave whatever is beyond our control to fate, even though it is so random and mystical that it goes beyond the ethical reasoning and rational understanding of human beings. Researchers have confirmed that ideas of strong agency are maintained in conditions of an underlying determinism. Freedman (1979: 208–11) discloses the social competitiveness and assertion of individual rights in fengshui, while Potter (1970: 147) reminds us that the impersonal explanations of success and failure in fengshui soften the defects of social differentiation. Wang Mingming’s research on Chinese notions of happiness and self-fulfilment reveals that people in villages in Southeast China rationalize achievement and failure with two factors: capability

Introduction | 9

and fate. Wang Mingming summarises the double explanations, together with other local social, economic and ritual behaviours and concepts related to happiness, as a ‘social ontology’ (M. Wang 1997). DeBernardi (2006) and Stafford (2012) add the manipulation of social networks and human intersubjectivity to social ontology in their studies about popular beliefs concerning fate and fortune. This ethno-philosophy and worldview bring about a contradictory phenomenon for observers: Chinese frequently refer to fate as though one’s destiny was beyond one’s control. On the other hand, Chinese also stereotypically appear as hardworking, energetic people, obsessed with success from effort and believing in the possibility of discerning and controlling fate (Potter 2003). An extreme case is that even in religious rituals Chinese worshippers often bribe or negotiate with gods instead of offering total devotion. In post-Mao China, the globalized market economy has produced millions of self-managing, competing individuals as well as books about how to succeed, which always occupy the top places in bestseller lists. In general, the diligent work ethic of the Chinese has impressed observers for generations. Anthropologists further explore the contradiction between fatalism and agency with reference to social connection, self-representation and deep structure. Harrell (1987) attributes this contradiction to a practical treatment of fate. Moreover, he explains hard work in an economically rational way, as being determined by a family-centred economic goal (Harrell 1985). Hatfield (2002) explores the importance of ‘fate’ as a grounding notion of self-representation and as a recognition of efficacious agency in a social field. The Chinese fascination with fate and divination, in Sangren’s view, raises human existential issues such as the desires that structure the productive and reproductive process of family and community life (Sangren 2012). After the review of the conceptional foundation of divination, one might want to gain a deeper understanding of Chinese social structure’s role in providing a combined sense of constriction and determinism but still elevate individual agency and a belief in randomness. This leads us to the next section.

Worldly Success, State and Religiosity Larger social forces and cultural norms influence the practice of seeking divination or supernatural help out of self-interest. Obeyesekere’s study on the god Skanda and Xin Liu’s research on fengshui belief are germane to my thinking. Obeyesekere related the rise of the god Skanda to socio-economic frustrations faced by Sri Lankans in the late 1970s. Worldly success, such as a job in the bureaucracy or in a profession, became desirable goals as a result of mass education, political democratization and urbanization. While the aspiration levels were high, the possibility of achieving these goals was limited. Very often feudalistic

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elements, such as patronage systems, or the huge lag in development between the metropolis and the rural area, limited the mobility and prosperity of ordinary people. ‘When the goals are well-defined and highly desired, but the means are ill-defined and problematical, the actor would experience considerable anxiety and frustration’ (Obeyesekere 1977: 388). Obeyesekere presumed that in a psychologically frustrating situation, a person tends to place himself in a dependent position where a strong authoritarian figure can act on his behalf. The deity Skanda became especially welcomed because he was not constrained by socially sanctioned or moral codes. Skanda would achieve the desired goals by any means, as an authoritarian figure, acting on the worshipper’s behalf in a situation of general uncertainty. Obeyesekere’s deduction can be applied in many developing societies in transition, including contemporary Chinese society, where modernization or the introduction of capitalism provokes people to resort to supernaturalism to achieve their desired goals and where the likelihood of their achievement is unpredictable. Xin Liu noticed that people in Beihai city in the 1990s attributed their business success to luck and supernatural powers such as fengshui. This is because local businesses were routinely exposed to unpredictable influences such as discontinuity in policies and excessive state intervention. This business environment, which Xin Liu referred to as a ‘structure of rupture’, was common in most areas of China. To regain a sense of order, it was necessary to believe in something beyond one’s own control such as luck and to resort to support from supernatural powers. I contend that the irregularity of state intervention alone cannot explain the importance of supernatural beliefs in attributing success. Why did people adopt a belief in the idea of fate and luck instead of a resentful attitude towards authority, even when they clearly knew that the intervention from the authorities was excessive? Why did public servants in Beihai also explain other phenomena such as the sudden death of government officials in terms of fengshui? Furthermore, irregularity and uncertainty often promote a belief in luck but not necessarily in fate. The determinism inherent in the idea of fate is at odds with uncertainty and irregularity. The ethnographic depictions presented in this book show that individual success in China is largely influenced by external factors beyond one’s control. Multiple social agencies are at work: guanxi networks, patriarchal family structures, social control through timing and state intervention are just a few examples. Businesswomen can achieve ‘good fortune’ through monetary success but they are still deeply bound by social forces, such as the heavy reliance on the social network of officials who control resources, and responding to the demand to reach life’s ‘milestones’ at the expected time. Public servants cannot predict their promotions. Social relations can destroy or assist people but they are difficult to manipulate, as they involve too many people and are too susceptible to

Introduction | 11

unpredictable events. This unpredictability is made even worse when the rules of the game founded on formal institutions such as a legal system do not work. Xin Liu’s study reminds us that in the field of anthropological studies of religiosity of China the relationship between the state and popular practice has always been a heated topic against the backdrop of modernization and state socialism. The history of the problematic status of Chinese religion dates back to the late nineteenth century, when the building of a modern nation state was launched. A modernist understanding of religion condemned most forms of traditional Chinese religious practice as ‘superstition’ and, later, ‘feudal superstition’. Since then, superstitious Chinese beliefs and practices have been constantly described as what prevents China from developing and enriching itself with the Maoist party-state, who employ the most radical anti-religion policies of all regimes. In post-Mao China, apart from the revival of religion itself, the collective effervescence in spirituality and traditional practical techniques is also remarkable (Chen 2003; Palmer 2007; Boretz 2011; Farquhar and Zhang 2012). Adopting a more tolerant attitude, the state has become regulatory and managerial rather than suppressive (Chau 2011: 8). There are five religions recognized by the state, namely Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholic Christianity and Protestant Christianity. Theoretically, only religions registered by the government and under the leadership of the Bureau of Religious Affairs are recognized and legal. No explicit policy has been unveiled towards popular practices that are not included in the five officially registered religions. In general, reform-era religious policy still prohibits activities once those activities are deemed superstitious and harmful. Writing on the topic of legitimation seeking, I argue that resistance and hegemony coexist in the negotiation process. Moreover, legitimation seeking by diviners is not merely a ‘politics of articulation’ that incorporates popular religious ideas and practices into the main body politic of the nation state (ibid.: 8). The legitimation relationship is not limited to the party-state and a particular occult practice but extends to the other social members, the larger society and culture. Divination in many post-socialist societies brings a sense of the past or an alternative way of seeing the world within a nativist framework into people’s mind. Though the past is deified and mystified, the popular imaginings of an ‘old civilization’ and the ‘wisdom of ancestors’ are in line with nationalist conceptions that are manipulated by the statism of the party-state. The ‘superstition’ and the mainstream could easily meet at a point to form a strong cultural nationalism supported by the leadership.

Methodology Starting from a fresh standpoint, my study de-psychologizes the notion of comprehension and communication, I pay attention to divination as an occupation in

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modern societies that suspect and practise divination at the same time. Thus, divination’s effect in legitimating results or facilitating decision-making is contested, and its social function in eliminating disorder is problematic. In such a setting, the traditional explanation of divination in terms of its social functions and psychosocial effects does not suffice. Moreover, diviners nowadays are increasingly exposed to the public, the media and the state. Their performances, such as running a company, organizing and attending divination-related conferences and giving lectures to club members, attract judgement. Observers may interpret diviners’ legitimation efforts as information control in stigma management (Goffman 1986). In their attempt to gain acceptance for divination and their profession, diviners highlight the positive signs of their practice. In particular, legitimation efforts are pervasive in diviners’ dramaturgy: self-presentation in the public sphere, their encounter with the state and their communication with divination customers. As critics point out, ‘the dramaturgical perspective over-extends the notion of acting or performing’ (Manning 1992). I combine social constructionism with the subjectivity and reflexivity of diviners and argue that the psychic deposition and desire inherent in their beliefs and worldview also shape diviners’ legitimation discourses. I also highlight actors’ critical and creative agency. Here my analytical approach to legitimation is in line with the pragmatic sociology of critique. In their book On Justification, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) delineate the interweaving of multiple ‘orders of worth’ in social life. Civic, market, inspired,4 fame, industrial and domestic orders coexist as principles of evaluation. People constantly justify themselves, reach agreement or disagree with someone else with reference to these six domains of value. Here I do not directly apply their broadly feasible logics of justification to diviners;5 rather, I embrace the approach of new pragmatic sociology that ‘fully acknowledges actors’ critical capacities and the creativity with which they engage in interpretation and action en situation’ (Boltanski 2011: 43). Critical competence not only requires a reverse in power relations but also implies a rearrangement on the ontological level. Therefore, actors can be called ‘daily metaphysicians’. Diviners are typical ‘daily metaphysicians’, as they have to give an alternative interpretation of life, having to be critical when confronted with challenges in their daily life in legitimating their practice, which is deprived of institutional and legal support but enjoys a certain degree of social acceptance. They borrow symbols, rhetoric and logics from nationalism, moral doctrines and modern professionalism to weave a structure for a chaotic world. Their legitimation-seeking behaviour is not merely about ‘articulation’ but also involves a politics of action and identification in the larger context of society and culture. Their sincere pursuit of meaning and cultural identity through divination knowledge also echoes the mainstream society’s own consciousness of reapproaching Chineseness.

Introduction | 13

Fieldwork My personal attitude towards divination went through a series of changes during my fieldwork. At the beginning of the research, like many educated people who regard themselves as ‘enlightened’, I was aloof and even contemptuous toward divination. The first change originated with my own family’s experience with divination. Several of my aunts were ardent consumers of divination and spirit medium healing. I did not directly oppose their activities – how can a student of anthropology present a narrow-minded attitude towards custom! But, I still thought the amount of money my aunts spent on divination and healing was huge. They also consulted with diviners for many members of our extended family, including me. One day my aunt Xia came to me and took out a piece of crumpled paper. On the paper were her notes recording a diviner’s declarations after calculating my birth information. She smiled with a little embarrassment and pointed out that much of the diviner’s description about me was accurate, including my appearance, face shape, character, etc. When I looked through the notes, I was impressed by their accuracy. I was also astonished to see how seriously Aunt Xia as an educated woman took divination. She even wrote notes carefully while listening to the diviner’s judgements and kept those notes for a long time. Later I found out that numerous people with various levels of income, education and status, not just my aunts, were attracted by divination. These experiences convinced me of the importance of this project. During fieldwork, the rich knowledge, the time-honoured cosmology and the logically self-consistent system of divination gradually began to fascinate me. I bought textbooks to learn divination myself and also consulted diviners who I got to know through fieldwork. These studies led me to a new understanding of traditional Chinese practical knowledge. However, once I had returned to Australia after fieldwork, some of my middle-class educated friends often doubted the credibility of divinatory knowledge. I tried to defend divination at first, but later I began to suspect my own gullibility. My intellectual connection with divination was further challenged when I realized the basic premises of divination such as categorizing the world according to yinyang and the Five Phases were not ­necessarily true. My position changed again when I started presenting my work to intellectuals in Chinese universities, including some anthropologists. Some of them admired the mystic knowledge of ancient divination but did not see any great knowledge or wisdom in contemporary divination practitioners; rather, they simply looked down upon diviners as frauds. Their judgements went against my findings, so I felt again the necessity to write a neutral description of divination and diviners.

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I conducted my fieldwork in my hometown, which I will call L City in northern China. This choice was based on several considerations. Divination is found in Chinese-speaking communities throughout the world. As it is not an exclusively local phenomenon, my choice of fieldwork site was mainly based on accessibility. Divination is generally a stigmatized occupation in Communist society, and practitioners have a bad reputation for fraud. As a result, diviners are often suspicious and sensitive towards investigators. In order to connect more easily with professional diviners, I chose my hometown to base my fieldwork in as I had a strong social network. Besides, L City was typical in terms of divination; during the main period of my fieldwork in 2011–2013, there were many divination shops on the city streets of L City. A diviner who often travelled to other cities to work told me that the visibility of divination in other cities was much more restricted than L City. In order to have a comparative view, I went to Beijing, Hebei, Fujian and Malaysia for short visits to gather preliminary data from different regions. L City used to be a poverty-stricken area, lacking an industrial foundation until the 1990s, when commercial industry grew vigorously. A prominent feature of L City is that the private sector contributes most of the local income. A high percentage of formerly rural people in the population gives the city a rustic atmosphere, while fast urbanization is apparent as well. According to the local government’s official website, during 2011–2015 urbanization will be comprehensively promoted. At the time of my research, L City was a prefectural level city with approximately one million people living in its urban districts. L City was one of the main ‘old revolutionary areas’ of China – i.e. scattered locations where the Communist Party successfully built bases during the antiJapanese war (1937–1945) and the civil war (1945–1949). China has a tradition of ‘revolutionary pilgrimage’. Every year public servants and students are encouraged to visit a ‘sacred revolutionary place’ such as L City. The Party attempts to strengthen its legitimacy by revitalizing ‘red’ memory with the help of the tourism industry and intensive ideological propaganda. L City people enjoy countrywide fame as residents of an old revolutionary area, and they utilize it to request financial support from the state and to sell commodities. However, they are also annoyed by the stereotype of being an impoverished area because it is widely known that the Communist Party always built their bases in hard-to-reach poor areas. When people from L City introduce their hometown to strangers they often add that the local economy has much improved since the 1990s. L City people want to shrug off the stereotype of ethical but backward peasants. Like many other Chinese cities, L City is eager to display its economic achievement and the superiority or grandness of its development based on wealth accumulation. During my research in L City, I gradually became familiar with eight local professional diviners of different income levels and genders. In general, my

Introduction | 15

research focused on full-time professional diviners who lived in the urban districts and who used text-based knowledge of traditional Chinese divination. Spirit mediums, monks, Daoists and blind diviners also play the roles of diviners, but I did not focus on them. I mainly looked at divination in urban settings to challenge the stereotype that divination is most popular in rural areas. Researchers in the 1990s declared that ‘urban Chinese [are] strongly unfavourable to traditional folk wisdom’ (Bruun 1996: 52); however, my fieldwork shows that now urban residents are also interested in traditional divination, with a heavier investment in divination-related consumption. I constantly paid diviners visits and observed their business. Some divination consultations were conducted in public with many other customers present. Some customers rarely wished to tell a stranger about what he or she had consulted the diviner for. For them, privacy was a problem. I collected some customers’ data initially from relatives and acquaintances and from anonymous posts on the Internet. These people were more likely to reveal their own or somebody else’s private concerns and issues. In the case of my friends and relatives I already knew about their backgrounds without requiring them to confess. In general, I targeted clients I thought were representative. The opinions of governmental administrators, psychological counsellors and writers in new media and literature rounded out my sources. As for general attitudes to divination, and statistics about divination activity, I consult a series of nationwide surveys conducted by the China Association of Science and Technology. The project with the title of ‘Public Attitude towards Unknown Phenomena’6 was conducted successively in 1996, 1998 and 2002 among 100 counties (or equivalent administrative districts) of the whole country. Investigators were staff of a local branch of China Association of Science and Technology whose semi-governmental status might have influenced interviewees’ choice of answers. Sample methods include stratified cluster sampling, multistage sampling and population proportionate sampling. All surveys were undertaken in the way of questionnaires combined with structural interviews. The surveys conducted in 1996 and 2002 involved 5,000 questionnaires; the one in 1998 involved 5,500 questionnaires. The retrieval rate in 1996 was 51.9 per cent, 72.2 per cent in 1998 and 88.5 per cent in 2002 (China Association of Science and Technology 1997, 1999, 2005). These three surveys had larger sampling sizes than other surveys on a similar topic. They also had questions related to divination practice and related attitude. In his fieldwork on qigong healing in China, Ots (1994) found that in the primary interviews his respondents evoked stereotyped descriptions of qi and of yin and yang. It was only after he had interviewed his subjects repeatedly that their descriptions revealed a complex inner world. Diviners who bragged about themselves using mainstream discourses likewise constituted an obstacle in the early stages of my research. However, then I gained more in-depth knowledge;

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instead of regarding the initial ‘bragging’ as having limited value, I realized the self-promotion of diviners was important. Their performances were a window through which I could observe how meaning was established, making use of and showing commitment to mainstream discourses. By attending to this ‘bragging’, I was also able to observe the inverse in the diviners’ own marginality and discomfort.

Book Structure Chapter One introduces the historical background to divination’s social and political status to help explain the ambiguous position of divination in China. This chapter shows how divination has been evaluated and treated by the state, the intellectual elite and ordinary people, from the beginnings of Chinese civilization until more recent times. History shows that divination has always had an ambiguous position as a popular but disdained practice and knowledge system. However the cosmology behind divination was only overturned in modern times. Chapter Two introduces divination both as a knowledge system and as a business. This chapter highlights the similarity of techniques and beliefs of diviners as well as their inner diversity and stratification. I describe divination’s techniques and cosmology, which comprise the basic frameworks of its intellectual legitimacy. The idea of ‘good fortune’ in divination dovetails with contemporary popular concepts of ‘success’, which constitutes another level of the legitimatization of divination. After categorizing diviners from various angles, I explore the identity of diviners as an occupational group. Chapter Three looks at divination’s customer base in contemporary China and illustrates examples of the use of divination in daily life. Drawing on typical customers’ stories, the chapter provides an analysis of the social motivation for consulting diviners. I argue that individual aspiration and desires activated by new economic and social conditions have to compete with political constraints and social customs. Uncertainty is merely a trait of fate on the surface; the determinate social, structural constraints on agency occupy the foundational layer of fate. Chapters Four, Five, Six and Seven comprise the main body of this book. They are structured around the critical activities diviners use to legitimate their practice in public. Specifically, divination is presented by diviners in four ways: (1) the provision of moral advice, (2) an aspect of ‘traditional culture’, (3) a form of psychological counselling, and (4) an academic profession. Chapter Four argues that although divination implies a concern about individual interests and a utilitarian view on worldly success, diviners have a strong tendency to deliver moral messages to customers. Their moral advice and guidance emphasize relational values and have an affinity with Buddhism. Moral

Introduction | 17

discourses are not only instrumentally functional in presenting divination as a socially meaningful practice but also make divination’s verdicts infallible. Chapter Five traces how diviners use cultural nationalism and the values of a revived tradition. By aligning themselves with one of the most important ancient texts, The Book of Changes (Yijing), diviners regard themselves as protectors of ‘traditional culture’ and promoters of ‘China’s national wisdom’. The alignment with the national tradition not only enhances divination’s social status but also generates more profit for diviners and constructs a limited affinity with official ideology. Chapter Six describes how diviners borrow the established legitimacy of psychological counselling, which is growing fast in China. This chapter explores counsellors’ reactions to this ‘mingling’. I suggest that both divination and counselling are not based on sound institutional foundations and that this may be one reason why mingling can take place. Chapter Seven discusses diviners’ public activities in various academic-style associations and conferences as well as their strategies to circumvent censorship in China. I explain how diviners’ efforts at self-professionalization are an imitation of the modern expert system. Their expert system is highly commercialized, as a diviner can get material profit and symbolic capital through ‘purchasing credit’ from association memberships and conference experiences. I argue that such imitation and commercialization is also a result of the strict censorship on civil bodies and the official ban on divination-related activities. These four approaches are not mutually exclusive, as they have an inner relationship and overlap with each other. Professionalization and the comparison to psychological counselling are often involved with institution building. The diviners’ self-justifications in terms of morality and traditional culture also play a central role in building value for their occupation. To complement an instrumentalist understanding of action, my analysis also pays attention to the ‘passionate structures of internalized emotion and commitment’ (P. Smith 2001: 64) involved in their ‘bragging’. These four aspects of the legitimation of divination are not exhaustive; there are also other methods. However, the four I highlight are dominant and typical in the contemporary public performance of divination. Diviners constantly address these legitimation strategies in their daily practice and rhetoric, consciously or not. Due to methodological limitations, this book has touched on but has not been able to describe in depth the relationships among diviners and the communication modes used between professional diviners, amateurs and disciples. Neither has it been able to discuss in detail the social perceptions of divination. It provides only the first step to understanding how divination has been legitimized with limitation through the actions of diviners. Future research is required to fill these lacunae

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by examining how the diviners’ legitimizing actions gain social acceptance. This should greatly improve our fundamental understanding of how people engaged in certain marginal social activities justify them (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006) and how the everyday reasons we give for our actions are dictated by, and help to constitute, our social relationships (Tilly 2006). This book not only documents the practice of divination in today’s China but also reflects upon the way diviners understand their work and the historical and contemporary discourses that have propelled changes in Chinese divination. By doing so, I shed new light on the reflective and critical stances of diviners themselves.

Notes 1. Chapter 1 contains a more detailed account of the legal status of divination-related activities since 1979. 2. For the politics of divinatory perception within Western societies, see Newman (1999). 3. Most anthropologists would like to attribute most expressions of fate to the third line, as they typically maintain that cosmological and divine power are essentially social. 4. Inspired worth refers to spirits possessing an inspired person. It often invokes an inner exploration of mind and is manifested by feelings and passions. See Boltanski and Thévenot (2006: 159–64). 5. In daily English, the words justification and legitimation are often interchangeable. However, here a distinction is needed. ‘Justification’ refers to whatever is provided as grounds to prove or defend one’s claim or conduct. In this regard to seek justification for a statement or action is the fundamental characteristic of a rational being. Legitimation, on the other hand, refers to the process whereby an act, process or ideology becomes desirable, proper or appropriate within a socially constructed system of norms (Suchman 1995: 574). Compared to justification, legitimation thus has a stronger relation to social recognition and to law, customs, and standards. Justification has an open result, but legitimation implies that something becomes acceptable and normative. Following this distinction, the legitimation of divination cannot be complete without the recognition of law and social standards. As I mainly look at discourses that aim at achieving political and social legitimacy, I use the word legitimation most frequently in this book. 6. To avoid the stigmatization related to divination, magic or other religious issues, the survey uses ‘unknown phenomena’ as a more neutral expression.

1 The Social and Political Status of Divination in China

Divination is embedded in China’s ritual and myth and has been solidly entrenched in its social and political life for at least three thousand years. This tradition has never been static and eternal, and Chinese opinion about divination has been neither consistent nor unanimously esteemed. Thus, the political, social and cultural legitimacy of divination has always been, and still is, problematic. This chapter illustrates the status of divination in politics and society from ancient times to the present, from the various points of view of the state, the intellectual elite and ordinary people.

Premodern China The earliest records of divination in China, including astrology, show its intimate connection to politics (Pankenier 1995). During the Shang dynasty (1500–1100 bce), rulers were theocrats whose legitimacy rested upon their ability to communicate with the supreme deity. Kings relied on the results of divination to make decisions on a wide range of issues. Rulers would also rely on diviners to validate policies that had already been decided, or to help guarantee a desired outcome by seeking a favourable response from the spirits. In this regard, divination continued to play an important role when the Shang dynasty was replaced by the Zhou (1100–256 bce). Diviners occupied official positions in the Zhou court, along with astrologists and experts in calendrics. In both the Shang and early Zhou periods divination remained a royal prerogative, but by the spring and autumn era (772–481 bce) ordinary people started to practise divination as well (L. Li 2000). Many famous diviners with celebrated techniques emerged at this

Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 31.

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time; information about their lives and exploits can be found in historical records (Yuan 2014). The Zhou dynasty established the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命). Heaven was seen as the ultimate authority that determined whether a ruler’s governance and administration was good. Heaven’s displeasure with a ruler or regime would be expressed through anomalies, natural disasters and rebellions. Imperial legitimacy depended on the correct interpretation of signs provided by heaven and a ruler’s ability to properly address and to regulate human affairs. As a political cosmology this belief achieved maturity in the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 CE) (Loewe 1994), becoming institutionalized in the court bureaucracy, in state worship and in secular rituals, which were included in the annual calendar in subsequent dynasties. There have been cases in history when rebel leaders used prophecies to proclaim a change in the Mandate of Heaven, and thus the collapse of the current regime, in order to seek popular support for the legitimacy of their revolution (Perry 2002). Even though the court used divination such as astrology in imperial times, accordingly, most ancient Chinese regimes expended much energy to control popular divination, to wipe out what they claimed were immoral and deceitful practices as well as remove political danger. The fear of the rulers was that diviners would popularize dangerous ideas that ‘deluded the people’, or even pave the way for a popular rebellion or other challenges to their authority. Rulers often sought to ban books and technical instruments used in astrology and political prophecy (chenwei 谶纬) (Y. Sun 2004) and condemned the results of divination about political change as ‘the words of sorcerers’. For diviners, interfering with political affairs and developing institutions were fraught with risk, as the ‘state could crack down upon [them] at any time and accuse participants of heresy’ (Bruun 2003: 70). Even though they controlled the circulation of political prophecy and the results of astrology in society at large, the court itself established official positions and institutions concerned with divination and astrology that served the central administration. From the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the government established prefectural and district schools of ‘yinyang learning’ (yinyang xue 阴阳学) . These schools trained functionaries who could choose auspicious days, conduct geomancy for important constructions, and guide rituals, etc. (Huang 1991). The belief in and practice of divination in private was never particularly dangerous and indeed enjoyed a wide popularity; the regulation of divination and related practices such as fengshui was seldom strictly enforced unless they caused social unrest or went against orthodoxy. While they may formally forbade the common people to practise particular fengshui rites that were at odds with Confucianism, officials in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) clearly believed that it was very powerful, holding the view that great harm could

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be inflicted on an enemy by putting particular objects, characters or signs expressing evil in their family grave (Li and Wen 2007). It was also common for local officials to consult with geomancers in urban planning. In premodern China, intellectuals, especially those with government positions, influenced the ordering of the whole of society, the prevailing ideology and the making of policy. Like the court, the attitudes of members of the intellectual elite towards divination were also ambivalent. Dynasty after dynasty, there were intellectuals who rejected divination and condemned it as duping the people. They also shared the state’s concern with the removal of heterodoxy. The official Confucianism tradition as represented in premodern educational orthodoxy neither prohibits nor welcomes divination. Confucianism accepts the idea that the Heaven has a moral command on humans. Besides a commitment to answering the command, there is also uncontrollable restriction on humans’ fate. However, Confucianism stresses that humans create value through cultivation. The pursuit of external goals (social position, wealth, etc.) should not be the aim of life; rather, the project of self-cultivation should be the focus of attention. Therefore, the gentleman should dismiss concerns of individual fate and should fulfil the commitment to the moral command from Heaven. To intellectuals both in ancient and contemporary China who would have closely studied the philosophical and ethical commentaries surrounding Yijing, an important classic as well as a divination book, focusing on its divinatory aspect to the detriment of the philosophical dimensions would have been seen as trivializing or debasing the book. Usually officials condemned diviners for cheating and exaggerating. In this regard, diviners could not meet the Confucian requirements for moral cultivation. However, after the Song dynasty (960–1279), more intellectuals became involved with divination and also defended related techniques to express filial piety (X. Liu 2013b). Fengshui, for example, was disparaged by some intellectuals but also attracted support from even the most influential of scholars such as Zhu Xi (朱熹), who ardently researched this technique himself (Xiao 2010). He supported it on the grounds that it was an outward expression of the intention to take care of the dead ancestors by burying them in a propitious place. Some intellectuals made friends with diviners or even became professional diviners themselves when they could not find a position in government (X. Liu 2013b). In many rural communities they were the only literate individuals who did not belong to the gentry and could offer services to their fellow villagers; for example, acting as scribes and even serving as village headmen. A literate diviner might earn respect as an intellectual when few others can read. We can also detect this attitude in late imperial China, where there was a popular social ranking system called Sanjiao jiuliu (三教九流), the three religions (Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) and the nine ranks. The major occupations were placed into three classes according to their social position, and each class had nine grades.

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Usually a literate diviner was categorized into the second class, along with doctors, scriveners, professional chess players, itinerant musicians, calligraphers, painters, Buddhist monks and Daoist priests. The second class was lower than the first class of officials but higher than the third, which was comprised of actors, buglers, conjurors, jugglers, barbers, robbers and drug traffickers. Literate diviners also had an affinity with healers. Pharmacists and doctors who made a living in the market sometimes included divination in their services. A famous diviner who was active in the late Qing dynasty and Republican period, Yuan Shushan (袁树珊), is one example. Yuan’s family were doctors for generations, but Yuan’s father and Yuan himself also wrote extensively on divination techniques and history. Yuan made a huge reputation as a professional diviner who offered services to many high-ranking politicians and celebrities. The reputation of divination among the ordinary people was also contested. The story of the diviner Sima Jizhu (司马季主) in the Historical Records (Shiji 史记, first century bce) shows that being a diviner was a common occupation but was viewed by some as ignoble as early as the Han. Two officials in this story show the negative opinion held towards profession diviners. People all say, ‘Oh, the diviners – all they do is talk in exaggerated ways, impose nonsense to play on people’s feelings, make absurdly glorious predictions about people’s fates to delight them, invent stories about disaster to fill their hearts with fear, and babble lies about the spirits to get all their money away from them, demanding generous rewards so they can line their own pockets. (R. Smith 1991: 31) Several historical sources indicate that divination was an ordinary service for all kinds of people. In the Song dynasty (960 –1279), Wang Anshi, a prime minister and major figure of the period, commented, ‘there were several tens of thousands of diviners in the whole country, excluding those in Bianliang. And at least ten thousand diviners lived in Bianliang’ (A. Wang 1996: 158). Considering that Bianliang, the capital city at that time, only had a population of about one million people, the high proportion of diviners is remarkable. The expansion of printing facilitated the penetration of divination even further into Chinese popular culture. Divination was a common theme in poetry, short stories and novels. Divination-related books became more accessible to the general public. Since the Tang dynasty (618–907), almost every family has purchased an almanac for guidance in choosing auspicious days for their activities (Y. Liu 2003). It is not surprising, then, that when Protestant missionaries came to China in the nineteenth century they were impressed by the fact that Chinese took divination as a necessity in their daily life (Doolittle 1986: 331–49; Doré 2009).

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In summary, divination in premodern China enjoyed more political and social legitimacy than it does now. While a small minority within society rejected divination outright, ‘for most, the question concerning divination was not one of belief or disbelief, but rather of which methods were the most effective and to what purpose they were employed’ (Kieschnick 1997: 81). Particular regimes sometimes had a negative attitude and aggressive policy towards divination, as they believed it would erode the purity of orthodoxy on which their power relied. However, although the state often claimed divination deluded people, many kinds of divinatory practice and knowledge related to astrology and calendrics were still valued in premodern courts. This knowledge ‘coalesced into a single administratively-grounded science’ (R. Smith 1991: 18). Some Confucians disapproved of the fatalism behind divination, and it was sometimes despised by members of the elite as a vulgar custom of foolish people (yumin lousu 愚民陋俗), but it was nevertheless routinely part of most people’s lives, in all strata of society. More importantly, the cosmology that frames divination was the same as that which provided the foundations of the political ideology of the Mandate of Heaven and was generally accepted as uncontroversial until the first flowerings of ­modernization in the late nineteenth century.

The Early Days of Modernization: 1880s to 1927 The Qing dynasty faced a series of crises in the late nineteenth century. Military humiliation by Japan and the Western powers not only threatened the regime but also stirred up unprecedented ideological soul-searching. A strong focus on building a modern state emerged, and ideas of progress, modernization and nation building began to replace the previous Mandate of Heaven as measures of ­political legitimacy. Modernization, especially the introduction of Western notions such as ‘religion’, ‘science’ and ‘superstition’, began to reshuffle the cognitive map of spiritual, religious and folk beliefs and practices. According to Goossaert and Palmer’s summary, around the turn of the twentieth century, compatibility with ‘science’ had become the criterion for designating beliefs as either ‘religion’ or ‘superstition’. ‘Religion’ was considered to be a strong, moralizing and unifying force supporting Western nation states and was accepted as positive by Chinese intellectuals. ‘Superstition’ (mixin 迷信)1 literally means ‘misguided belief’, and when compared to religion in the Chinese context, it referred to ‘whatever is not grounded in and strictly limited to the spiritual and moral self-perfection delineated by the theological scriptures of a world religion (Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism)’ (Goossaert and Palmer 2011: 51). The radical iconoclasts and the conservatives both agreed that there needed to be changes in all aspects of society from traditional Chinese scholarship to

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folk practices and beliefs. Even the last imperial house, the Qing, launched a campaign to ‘reform social customs’ (fengsu gaige 风俗改革) in its final decade. The Republican government that replaced the Qing immediately set up a Society for Social Improvement (shehui gailianghui 社会改良会) in 1912. The antisuperstition project culminated in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which involved the wholesale rejection of Chinese tradition including the previously orthodox Confucianism. May Fourth advocates fought against the practice of funeral rites, temple cults and divination, including geomancy. The critique of superstition changed its target from religious belief that lay beyond the parameters of the prevailing religion to a general critique of folklore belief.

Divination in the Nationalist Period: 1927–1949 The Chinese Nationalist government, the ruling authority between 1927 and 1949, launched an all-out attack on superstition. In 1928 new legislation banned professions associated with superstition, including diviners and spirit mediums. The main article of legislation was entitled ‘Procedure for the Abolition of the Occupations of Divination, Astrology, Physiognomy and Palmistry, Magic and Geomancy’. It was first enacted in Nanjing (the capital at that time) and Shanghai and then in the remainder of the territory the Republican government controlled. The legislation ordered all provincial and city police offices to force diviners to take up other forms of work. They were also required to promulgate the idea that superstition does harm to society. Local governments were encouraged to hire former diviners and to provide charitable accommodation to those incapable of other work. The publication of divination material was also prohibited. Moreover, the central government issued anti-superstition propaganda to popularize the idea that the fortune of humankind rested entirely on their own efforts (Nedostup 2009: 205–08). In spite of the state encouraging local government to hire diviners, many found that they could not find alternative employment and petitioned the state to provide further assistance. The Shanghai Association of Blind Fortune tellers (Shanghai Mangshi Gonghui 上海盲士公会) demanded their rights as Republican citizens. Quoting the Nationalist ‘Three Principles of the People’,2 they argued that the state had an obligation to help the poor, crippled and blind to find a means of supporting themselves (Nedostup 2009: 192–93). Diviners’ attempts at deploying official rhetoric and new forms of civic organization did not get them far. The government rejected their request for professionalization and could not guarantee alternative jobs for a large number of diviners. However, their efforts at eradicating it also failed. The practice of consulting diviners persisted throughout the government crackdowns and remained popular nationwide. Rebecca Nedostup found that during the Republic, ‘literary diviners began to fit themselves into arguments about China’s heritage and history as a weapon

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against the growing tide of anti-superstition critique’ (Nedostup 2009: 211). They labelled geomancy as ‘China’s national essence’ with a long history. The cultural value of divination was especially invoked by scholar-like diviners such as Yuan Shushan (袁树珊), who pointed out that even the emperor benefited from learning divination. Diviners also shifted the negative focus away from themselves and towards parallel groups such as spirit mediums, depicting them as loathsome, as spirit mediums denied their customers agency and relieved them of their responsibilities. Diviners instead encouraged people to do good works and adopt positive actions (Nedostup 2009: 211). As I will demonstrate in Chapters Four and Five, these rhetorical strategies are still common today. Even before the Communist Party came to power in 1949, they regulated diviners in their base areas. Mao Zedong pointed to the three main ‘pests’ that existed in the area controlled by Communist Party: superstition, illiteracy and the neglect of hygiene (Q. Hu 1999). The implementation of anti-superstition drives was cautious from the outset. Mao Zedong emphasized the principle of ‘voluntariness’ to show the regime’s respect for people’s opinion.3 A Natural Science Research Council (Ziran kexue yanjiu hui 自然科学研究会) was set up in 1940 in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Communist Base Area that targeted superstition and redirected general ideas and customs towards ‘science’ and ‘progress’ (H. Wang 2010). The regime integrated anti-superstition goals into its propaganda as well as into all levels of education, including schools, cadre training and the instruction of illiterate adults. Publications in popular science and health awareness also assisted the anti-superstition movement. Before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party followed a lenient policy towards superstition as personal behaviour, so as not to alienate support and potential partners in alliances. For popular practices such as geomancy and ancestor worship, education rather than force was used. Those who allegedly used superstition in their occupations came under harsher attack. The derogatory label erliuzi (二流子), which was given to the jobless, opium addicts, gamblers, thieves and prostitutes, was also given to diviners and spirit mediums. The Communist Party accused groups that fell within this category of being unproductive, suspicious, guilty of spreading rumours and doing all sorts of evil. Members of these groups were often denounced and humiliated at public meetings (Zhang 1996: 85–86). Before 1949, the Communist Party was also careful to distinguish between institutionalized religions, especially those important to minority groups, from folk beliefs. Highly organized religions such as Protestant and Catholic Christianity, Islam and Buddhism were recognized so as to gain political support. However, although these more established religions received protection, they were still subject to purges (Bruun 2003: 85). Disorganized and diffuse popular religion as well as divination were more vulnerable in political campaigns and were targeted by local officials with pre-existing negative attitudes towards them, without

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explicit instruction from the central government. Although the Communist Party often took a hard line on ordinary superstition, it viewed its practitioners as essentially harmless in terms of political rebellion and ideological challenge, compared to the potential threat posed by institutionalized religion and what they called secret societies and heterodox sects. This paradox helps to partially explain the Communist Party’s relaxation of hard-line policies towards divination in the post-reform period.

Divination in the Mao Era: 1949–1979 The first thirty years of Communist Party rule was characterized by successive political campaigns, including periods of extreme radicalism such as the Cultural Revolution. These campaigns sought to completely rearrange the previous social structure and to tear down traditional cosmology. While the implementation of the Nationalist regime’s anti-superstition regulations proved difficult, the Communist state had much greater ability and determination to intervene in society. As a result of the adoption of a Marxist theory of history, ‘superstition’ was replaced by the term ‘feudal superstition’. Feudal referred to ‘the psychological manipulation and economic exploitation of the masses by landlords and religious institutions’ (Goossaert and Palmer 2011: 148). The use of ‘feudal’ also implied a contrast between the progress promised by Socialism and the historical backwardness of religion. It was argued that religion, including popular religious belief and practice, was an obstacle to progress and should fade away with the unfolding of socialist modernization. In the first decade of Communist rule, domestic rites and practices such as spiritual healing continued (S. Smith 2006), but the Anti-rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s imposed a more extreme political programme. Constructing tombs and holding religious rituals and related banquets were condemned as a waste of production materials. The Socialist Educational Movement of 1962–64, the precursor of the Cultural Revolution, sought to restore ideological purity and revolutionary fervour to the party and government bureaucracies. Religion, superstition and lavish life-cycle rituals were not only condemned but also criminalized as ‘reactionary’. In the first major initiatives of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong ordered that the Four Olds (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) be abolished. Traditional cultural artefacts including books, paintings and religious symbols and temples were destroyed by a mass paramilitary social movement of young people. The expression of private religiosity was suppressed (Goossaert and Palmer 2011: 165). Some diviners were forced to confess to intentionally fooling people and their houses were ransacked for divinatory books and implements (Bruun 2003: 101). The damage was huge but not absolute. Divination activities continued to be secretly conducted. Blind diviners in L City reported that they were recruited

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into official propaganda teams to sing ballads to spread the Party’s instructions to villagers. At night, however, local people approached them to conduct divination behind closed doors.4 Blind diviners were also sometimes given lenient treatment, as they did not have alternative livelihoods. Many people also hid the old books to protect them from being destroyed in political campaigns. Diviners, together with religious leaders and practitioners of popular religion, were labelled as enemies of the people or parasites carrying out political and economic oppression and were treated as a ‘reactionary class’ in the official taxonomy (Bush 1970: 384). Along with this ideological assault, political control and mobilization also increased. Rural communities were integrated into the state propaganda machine and study groups were established all over the country to ridicule ancestor worship and popular cosmology (Bush 1970: 400).

Since 1979 With the reforms that began in 1979, the focus of the state and society has shifted to economic revitalization with a spirit of pragmatism. The scope of religious freedom has also been broadened. Ancestor worship and religion have revived as public events, graves have been restored and temples and churches have been rebuilt. Divination books started to reappear in the tricycles of street book vendors and bookstores during the 1980s and 1990s, and diviners started to run their businesses in markets and side streets. For most of the reform period there has been a lack of guidelines for the routine management of divination circulated by the central government. Theoretically, only religions registered by the government and under the leadership of the Bureau of Religious Affairs are recognized and legal. In 2005, ‘popular beliefs and new religions’ became recognized as an accepted administrative category in the State Administration of Religious Affairs, but so far no explicit policy towards them has been unveiled. After 1997 there was less possibility of prosecution for divination and related activities. In the 1979 version of the criminal law, frauds and fabricating rumours using superstition carried sentences of fixed-term imprisonment, criminal detention or public surveillance. In the 1997 version the use of superstition is only punishable if it leads to undermining the enforcement of laws or administrative regulations, deceiving another person and causing death, rape or the tricking people out of property. Despite the more lenient policy, however, divination still lacks full legality. Legislation has been brought forward by provincial governments or bureaus to control superstitious activities, especially in public places and in publications. For example, the Measures for the Administration of Public Order in Public Places for Shandong Province (Shandong sheng gonggong changsuo zhian guanli banfa 山东省公共场所治安

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管理办法) prohibits ‘feudal superstitious activities such as fortune telling and physiognomy in public’. In practice, the laws have usually not been strictly enforced unless the government decides to have a crackdown. While always possible, this is unpredictable and not a matter of daily routine. To put it another way, a likely rectification always exists alongside laissez-faire implementation. In the 1980s, several administrative orders were given by the State Bureau for Industry and Commerce to restrict divination under the guise of ‘cultural consultation’, while in the early 1990s a large number of books on various ‘superstitions’, including divination, were removed from the market under a policy of strict censorship (Bruun 1996: 51). Another nationwide repression was launched after the qigong-like spiritual cultivation group Falun Gong’s protest in late 1990s; this led to stricter censorship on publications related to traditional occult techniques, including divination. Another wave of prohibition and restriction emerged in 2013 and 2014 when Xi Jinping took the leadership. Publications on divination that used to occupy the bestseller shelves gradually became rarer and rarer. Typically, almanacs compiled by diviners were published at the beginning of each year for readers to look up their fortune for the year to come, but in 2014 their publication was forbidden. Mai Lingling, a Hong Kong diviner who is popular in mainland China, complained to the Hong Kong media that her publishing agent could not apply for a new publication licence in 2014. Her name was also removed from the covers of her reprinted books (Apple Daily 2014). In 2011, Bishan County in southwest China launched a ‘crackdown on feudalistic superstition’. An official document (Bishan County Bureau of Culture, Media, Press and Publication 2011) outlines the procedure for this crackdown. Its aims were: to publicize the harm of feudal superstition; to tell people not to believe and not to transmit the superstitious activities in the district; to build the new Communist custom of believing in and practicing science; to crack down harshly on crimes that use superstition and to punish such criminals heavily; to eradicate and demolish fixed venues for superstitious activities and divination business; to construct a long-term effective administrative system. The campaign lasted nine months. It was led by the local Bureau of Culture, Media, Press and Publication, in cooperation with other local bureaus, including those in charge of Municipal Administration, Administration of Industry and Commerce and the Public Security Bureau. The first step, according to the plan

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outlined in the document, was to request the crew to investigate the premises of divination businesses as well as itinerant diviners. They then reported the results of their investigations and made suggestions accordingly. During the main stage of crackdown, the crew persuaded, educated and expelled the diviners from the district and confiscated their tools. The police were requested to investigate and punish those diviners who committed crimes of swindling and disseminating harmful beliefs. Generally speaking, the main punishment most diviners would receive was a warning, education on policy, and expulsion from their business location. Only a few would be selected to receive punishment under the criminal law. Because an effective administrative process for follow-up was seldom established, it was common after such a crackdown had ended for the diviners to re-emerge. Even the crackdown on Beijing’s divination street, which had attracted public attention and media reporting, could not stop the persistence of divination services around that area. Some diviners simply covered their signs and continued their activities. In view of such ineffective administration, a legal scholar has suggested in the media that the government should punish those diviners whose customers paid at least 2,000 yuan as criminals. He also suggested the broad mass of the people should recognize that diviners are swindlers, instead of regarding them as innocent (X. Liu 2013a). Since customers have been reluctant to provide evidence, it has been difficult for the police to arrest the diviners as swindlers. Customers either were embarrassed to have been a victim or did not regard the diviner as having cheated them. This lack of cooperation from customers is illustrated in another case from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. According to the local newspaper (L. Li 2010), the local police had arrested a criminal gang for ‘feudal superstition’. Six gang members committed their swindling on the fringes of the city or in remote suburbs. They usually targeted single middle-aged or older woman to be their victims. One member of the gang first struck up a conversation with the woman, getting to know her personal information. Later, another member showed up and offered to give a divination for the woman. The ‘diviner’ claimed her family would suffer future calamities and encouraged the victim to buy a charm or talisman from him to avoid the disaster. However, the police only found one case where the victim was willing to testify. Frustrated by the lack of evidence, the police encouraged other victims to come forward to prosecute the suspect (L. Li 2010). With such irregular political restrictions, diviners and other illegal workers, like prostitutes and pedlars without licences, play a cat and mouse game with the regulatory administrations. When a crackdown is launched, they escape and suspend their business. When the campaign is over, they reappear as though nothing has happened. However, the organs of the Chinese state are officially always

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engaged in an anti-divination campaign of sorts. Official media adopts a mocking attitude towards divination. Stories of diviners who dupe people by making use of the victim’s irrational beliefs flood publications and media reports. The Science and Technology Associations at all administrative levels do propaganda work and organize meetings to criticize divination and other superstitions. Yet, despite years of anti-superstition education, age-old concepts and cosmologies, life-cycle rituals and traditional customs are enjoying a rejuvenation. A sociological survey found that 77 per cent of people in China believed in divine retribution (Yao 2007a). The urban middle class clearly have a strong need for spiritual resources and use traditional concepts to navigate the uncertainties of life. Many of these are notions related to fate, such as predestination (yuanfen 缘分), destiny (mingyun 命运) and retribution (baoying 报应) (L. Fan 2005). However, the label ‘superstition’ still represents a stigma deeply rooted in people’s consciousness. When I interviewed peasants about popular religion for previous research, my informants were shy and embarrassed because they defined their own practices as superstitious. During the reform era, many religious practices found legitimacy and legality within the discursive networks of categories other than religion (Goossaert and Palmer 2011: 342). Divination is a case in point. One such discursive category is that of the market. Some popular religious practices proved to have market value, such as attracting tourists, and therefore were supported by local government. A second shelter for divination is ‘culture’. The branding of local cultural attractions using the concept of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ has also helped build the legitimacy of certain cultural artefacts. Traditional Chinese learning or ‘national learning’ (guoxue 国学) has also been enjoying a revival within a context of cultural nationalism – under rapid globalization, tradition can provide self-esteem – and divination is often categorized under this heading, as I will explore in Chapter Five. During the past decade in China, research in folklore studies, sociology and anthropology have contributed to legitimizing popular religion or folk beliefs. The negative political connotations of divination and the simultaneous great demand for it result in a split between public presentation and belief. While many people practise divination or accept divination as a matter of harmless practical concern, a public expression of belief in it has connotations of ‘being irrational’ or ‘backward’. While there was a reluctance to show support for divination or frequent involvement with it, many people I encountered in my fieldwork who have consulted diviners expressed the idea that one had no choice but to accept (budebuxin 不得不信) the fact that divination is real and accurate in its predictions even though it is difficult to provide a rational explanation why this should be so.

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Summary In premodern China, despite the great demand, divination was marginalized by the state and the intellectual classes. However, knowledge of divination was utilized by the imperial state for ‘the cosmological and spatial/territorial grounding of imperial legitimacy’ (M. Yang 2011: 19). Divination faced the strongest attack when the cosmology that underpinned it became delegitimized in the modern period. Early twentieth century iconoclasm positioned folk religions and practices such as divination against science, the interests of the state and the nation’s rejuvenation. The enthusiasm for science together with a rising nationalism based on evolutionism mired divination in the swamp of ‘backwardness’ and ‘superstition’. With the rise of the Communist movement came attempts to radically destroy tradition and religion. However, the demand for divination never ceased, and the market proved to be highly resilient. The post-reform Chinese state generally has a laissez-faire policy towards divination practice while still officially regarding it as ‘superstitious’, and crackdowns can still be arbitrarily launched at any time. The revitalization of divination and the strategies of its practitioners have thus, in modern times, always been forged in unstable political environments and ­consistent anti-superstition rhetoric.

Notes 1. For the historical change of the connotation of ‘superstition’, see Song (2009). For the alteration of ‘anti-superstition’, see Shen (2006). 2. ‘Three Principles of the People’ is a political philosophy developed by Sun Yat-sen. The three principles are often summarized as nationalism, democracy and the livelihood of the people. This philosophy has been claimed as the cornerstone of the Republic of China’s policy as carried by the Kuomintang (KMT). 3. In Yan’an, the centre of the Chinese Communist revolution from 1936 to 1948, the policy was to ‘make temporary compromise’ and ‘passive opposition’. Geomancers and spirit mediums who offered alternative healing were still in demand by the populace at the time. As there was still little scientific substitute for them, their activities were not strongly prohibited. Rather the government even advised people on the proper fee structure for them to avoid any overcharging for their services (X. Li 2004). 4. Ka-ming Wu (2011) gives a detailed ethnography about the role of grass-root storytellers that blurs with the role of socialist propagandists, diviners as well as supernatural healers in northern rural China.

2 The Practice of Divination and Diviners

This chapter introduces diviners and their practice. I begin with an introduction to divination techniques, the way they are commonly used, including their fundamental cosmology, and the concept of good fortune. Working with the same system of techniques and beliefs, diviners differ from each other in the way they do business, their locations, the way they were trained, their social status and their income levels, etc. To indicate this variety, this chapter presents the stories of three diviners of different social status and income levels. Finally, the identity of diviners on social, individual and ego levels1 is analysed using the indigenous concept of ‘rivers and lakes’ (jianghu 江湖).

Divination Techniques The root meaning of the word divination in English is ‘to be inspired by a god’; however, in Chinese history and culture, divination tends not to be concerned with gods, but rather with occult techniques (fangshu 方术). These techniques are used to predict the future and to nourish and enhance life. They comprise two main categories: (1) health preservation methods and arts, including traditional Chinese medicine, qigong breath cultivation, body stretching, etc.; and (2) numerical techniques (shushu 数术), which include various kinds of divination.2 The idea of ‘numbers’ in divination implies a reliance on reason and calculation, thus the literal translation of the Chinese term for fortune telling is ‘calculating fate’ (suanming 算命). In other words, Chinese divination has a strong inductive and rational basis. In her article theorizing divination, Barbara Tedlock classified the phenomenon by technique:

Endnotes for this chapter begin on page 56.

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Omen divination refers to reading natural signs such as the flight of birds or the road crossings of animals. Pattern divination, such as rod or pendulum dowsing, refers to making a shape or design and then interpreting it by fixed guidelines. Symbol divination includes the Tarot, the Chinese I Ching, and the Yoruba Ifa readings, together with palmistry and geomancy. Here one uses a deck of cards, sticks, lines of a person’s hand, or special landscape features that depend upon a complex, often literary, interpretation system. Trance divination involves contacting spirits to answer questions. Shamans and priests have practiced this mediumistic technique worldwide for generations. (Tedlock 2006: 65) All of the four kinds of divination can be found in China, but most Chinese divination, at least in this research, belongs to the category of symbol divination. Divination techniques in China have differed over time and by region. Divining the future by pyroscapulomancy – i.e. by cracks produced by heating the shoulder blades of animals such as deer, sheep and cattle – was a widespread custom from the Neolithic period in shamanistic cultures throughout North Eurasia and North America. One ancient Chinese method of divination fits this category: bu (卜), using tortoise shell.3 The method was sanctioned by royal practice in the Shang and Zhou dynasties. In many shamanic cultures pyroscapulomancy is a form of magic in which natural processes lead directly to predictions, but in ancient China, pyroscapulomancy developed in the direction of correlative thinking and numericalization, and the art of divination was rationalized into a proto-science (Vandermeersch 2012). Currently in L City and northern China more generally, few diviners specialize only in one technique. It is more common for a diviner to use at least three or four kinds to run a business, sometimes cross-checking their analysis using different methods. The most common techniques of divination adopted by literate diviners include:4 (1) The Four Pillars (sizhu 四柱). This method forecasts the fate and characteristics of an individual on the basis of four components of the time of birth: the year, month, day, and hour. The method has the alternative name of The Eight Characters (bazi 八字), as each of the four pillars is represented by two Chinese characters. (2) Hexagrams (liuyao 六爻). The diviner analyses the hexagram composed of six lines generated by flipping coins. Because this kind of divination was contained in the Yijing (The Book of Changes), one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts, it is also called Yijing divination. (3) Choosing auspicious names and dates. A name in proper accordance with one’s birth chart is believed to have an auspicious effect on one’s fate. It is

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quite common for parents to choose a name for their new born baby from the list suggested by a diviner. Some adults also change their name in the hope of improving their luck. The business of choosing auspicious names has a great market demand, and some diviners make a fortune just by this method and seldom use other techniques. Choosing auspicious dates for weddings, funerals, business openings, moving house, birth and other milestones in daily life is traditionally done according to the Chinese lunar calendar using an almanac. (4) Geomancy (fengshui). Geomancy is used to balance the energies of any given space to assure the health and good fortune of the people inhabiting it. It is especially valued among customers as a way of improving their life rather than relying on a single consultation. Thus, geomancy can be an independent business and the charges are usually higher than for the other techniques. To tell a fortune or to choose an auspicious name and date are the typical jobs for diviners. Some geomancers are also well versed in these skills but they usually only accept cases in their own field. (5) Physiognomy. Palm reading, bone reading and face reading are the most common methods of physiognomy, or xiangshu (相术) in Chinese, which is frequently practised by both literate and illiterate experts. Some people believe face reading is the form of divination that is most easily rationalized as having a basis in reality, as a popular idiom says, ‘appearance originates from the heart/mind’ (xiang you xin sheng 相由心生). Name changing and fengshui are widely believed to be efficacious in changing fate and improving fortune, therefore diviners often recommended these two services following a consultation. They usually cost more than other forms of consultation because of their practical application and because they require more time, but they are also the most profitable items for diviners. It is also common for diviners to sell charms and talismans, which are said to be good for the customer’s fortune. Emily Martin (1981: 45–64) distinguishes interpersonal divination from noninterpersonal divination in her article about the forms and codes of Chinese divination. Interpersonal divination requires reference to gods’ knowledge, e.g. being possessed by a spirit, asking god through fortune sticks. In contrast, noninterpersonal divination does include interaction with sentient beings, e.g. geomancy and horoscope. Most of the popular divination methods described above should be labelled as non-interpersonal divination, although some diviners may adopt interpersonal divinatory methods at the same time or have a cooperation with interpersonal divination. In L city, cooperation between spirit mediums and diviners is especially common in rural areas, with a division of labour similar to that of doctors and nurses. If a diviner ‘diagnoses’ that the reason for a customer’s

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ill fortune is supernatural, then he might suggest the customer ask for a spirit medium ritual as a ‘treatment’. Some diviners also organize and conduct the ritual themselves. Divination and other genres of occultism often merge with the professional practice of Chinese religion. ‘On a juridical level, Buddhism always favoured the prohibition of all forms divination, just as the ritual codes of early Taoism [i.e. Daoism] classify them under the category of pagan arts and heterodox practice. The reality however was quite different, as many examples testify’ (Kalinowski 2004: 237). Individual Daoist and Buddhist clergy have always occasionally offered divination and exorcisms, but their activities are usually not encouraged by their religious institutions. Over time, divination became widespread across the Chinese world and was introduced into Korea, Japan and Vietnam. For example, the Chinese Four Pillars method (sizhu) is known as saju in Korea. As heuristically helpful tools for reading and characterizing the world, Chinese divination and its related cosmology have been assimilated into the cultural imagination of East Asian societies. The circulation of Chinese divination in the Western world is also exemplified by the increasing use of the word fengshui in English (even if it is usually mispronounced). Traditionally, diviners have had to learn their techniques by following an experienced teacher, which requires a long-term close relationship, and often years of devotion. Despite the stigmatization of the occupation, a large number of people have been swarming into the business in recent years, as practitioners can make money with little capital investment. Now many of the newcomers learn in non-traditional ways, by attending training classes of various kinds and learning divination techniques through crash courses. Beginners also often participate in Internet chat rooms or online forums to exchange their learning experiences. When talking with customers, diviners often recite verses. The large number of principles and formulae invoked in divinatory reasoning are usually taught in rhyme to assist memorization. Verses in divination practice are not only used as a tool for reasoning but also as professional jargon, as some are obscure or cannot be fully understood by their customers. Others, however, are very easy to apprehend and remember. These work as a simple language to expound the divination results. Diviners also adopt observational and promotional skills to run their business. As readers of the lives of strangers, they make high probability guesses about their customers; they observe body language, age, clothing, fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Diviners are also linguistically skilled, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects that indicate whether their guesses are in the right direction, emphasizing and reinforcing connections the subjects

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acknowledge and quickly moving on from bad guesses. They often use different linguistic strategies according to the gender, age, emotion and status of customers. The diviner Zhang claimed that, ‘40 per cent of my prediction is based on synthesizing, 60 per cent is from divinatory knowledge’. Synthesizing here means making educated guesses based on the diviner’s social knowledge and experience. Many successful diviners especially impressed me with their ‘social intelligence’, which ‘can be loosely defined as the knowledge, cognitive abilities, and affective sensitivities, such as empathy, that enable us to navigate our social world’ (Snow 2010: 63). They were socially experienced, eloquent and insightful. All of these qualities enabled them to perceive and respond to the dynamics of interpersonal encounters. There is also a stereotypical view that professional diviners are swindlers. Diviners duping people out of large amounts of money is often a topic of media reports. In the local patois, intentional deception is referred to using the term ‘rivers and lakes’ (jianghu 江湖), or by the descriptor ‘fishy’ (xing 腥). These terms contrast with being ‘sharp’ (jian 尖), which refers to authentic divinatory reasoning. There is a proverb of divination: ‘Add xing to jian, and you’ll surpass the immortals’ (xing jia jian, sai shenxian 腥加尖, 赛神仙). This shows the ­necessity of combining divinatory reasoning and non-divinatory speculation. When all diviners are criticized across the board for relying on lies rather sound practice, some diviners actually join in the condemnation and claim intellectual and moral superiority to the rest. For example, the president of a Yijing research society in L City does this by emphasizing that his divination practice has a ‘sturdy’ foundation in knowledge: ‘Those superstitious diviners know little; they only know how to demand preposterous fees.’

The Cosmology of Divination While many people in L City and China more broadly do not believe in divination, more accept the principles of cosmology that underpin it and the mysteries of predetermination.5 Cosmology is important for divination; as Koen Stroeken points out, ‘The specificity of divination lies in the particular cosmological perspective. This cosmological stance emphasises the nonnegotiable given, in other words, the nonsymbolic or “real” dimension of events’ (Stroeken 2004: 53). Many forms of divination in the world claim authority as the means by which messages are transmitted from supernatural beings to human beings, through diviners. While some forms of Chinese divination also refer to the supernatural, a large proportion of Chinese divination methods approach the unknown without recourse to deities. These forms derive from a holistic and naturalist worldview where all reality is a part of and a manifestation of the will of Nature (or Heaven, tian 天).

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The indigenous Chinese view of nature is based on an elaborate classification system, which is founded on various numerical systems: interlaced pairs (yinyang 阴阳), sets of fours (the four directions and four seasons), sets of fives (correlated to wuxing 五行 or the Five Phases), sets of eights (bagua 八卦 or the Eight Trigrams), sets of twelves (twelve months, twelve Earthly Branches, and twelve seasonal nodes), etc. This system pervades the entire culture and is found in many forms of practical knowledge. From this holistic worldview develops a way of thinking that takes the coincidence of events in space and time as something more meaningful than mere chance. In this mode of thought, named ‘coordinative thinking’ by Joseph Needham,6 conceptions are not subsumed under one another but placed side by side in a pattern; and patterns that emerge in one place influence those in another by a kind of mysterious resonance (Needham 1956: 280–81).7 Jung has described the character of Chinese Yijing divination with his concept of ‘synchronicity’ (Jung 1967). Synchronicity refers to the association of images, events or conceptclusters related by meaningful disposition rather than physical causation. One example of this way of thinking is the cultural logic of ‘harmony’. Proper alignment of the individual and the cosmos leads to harmony, and this harmonious situation is the fundamental operational principle to produce ‘good fortune’, wellbeing or happiness. Harmony in human bodies as well as social relations is regarded as essential for health and social happiness. Yiyuan Li (1998) argues that harmony of the three levels of body, society and nature connects the grand tradition of the gentry and the popular traditions of ordinary people and forms the basis on which many Chinese practices take place. In his empirical research on dangki (Taiwanese spirit mediums who divine and heal), Li found that their explanation of the workings of fortune is derived from basic Chinese holistic and correlative ideas of the wholeness of the universe, of which man is an inseparable part. Addressing a client’s problems as questions of someone adjusting to the universe, and to the complexities of social relations, the dangki could bring insight into the causes of the customer’s problem but left a resolution up to the customer himself (Y. Li 1976). It is safe to say that coordinative thinking lays the foundations for the fatalism and daily metaphysics of Chinese life and, as Durkheim and Mauss found, it constitutes the essential grounding of the techniques of Chinese diviners (Durkheim and Mauss 1963: 67). The term yinyang wuxing (阴阳五行) is used to refer to this cosmology as a whole and the coordinative thinking beneath it. The correlational connections between nature, the human world and the supernatural, together with the indigenous classification system and numerical reasoning, make fate and the discernment of fate reasonable. Within this highly symbolic and sophisticated system of thought, the art of divining becomes a matter of learning natural symbols and then utilizing formulae and principles, logical reasoning and observations. To put it another way, divination is a matter

38 | Fate Calculation Experts

of finding the clues to the will of Nature as it is revealed in symbols, themselves natural or inspired by natural forms and cycles; for example, the landscape, the timing of events and the hexagrams.

The Definition of Good Fortune in Divination The definition of good fortune or a blessed life in divination practice and the texts associated with it not only reflect the particular desires of the individual but also constitute a ‘world view’ in Geertz’s sense, which gives a comprehensive idea of order, oneself and society (Geertz 1973: 127). There are several forms of good fortune: merit, fame, wealth, glory, health, having male descendants and longevity, etc. For most ordinary people, especially in rural communities, wealth, happiness, long life and new generations of offspring are the decisive elements in living a good or blessed life.8 Traditionally in China, good fortune is strongly linked to material satisfaction (fu 富) and social recognition (gui 贵). The life of a person with good fortune is often called fugui ming (富贵命). For a common person the chances of obtaining a high official position are slim, so wealth becomes their primary goal by default. Intellectuals used to be the main occupants of official positions, so when the customer is a well-educated person, the diviner usually pays more attention to their chances of obtaining fame and a political or academic position, instead of money. In a nationwide investigation, 50 per cent of respondents regarded officials as the group who could most easily obtain a high income, while 28.8 per cent of respondents chose people with good education (P. Li 2005). These data indicate there is still a close relationship between power, cultural capital and material success. Diviners still regard a high level of education as often pointing to a distinguished pattern of fortune (guige 贵格). The following table was posted by the diviner Chan on his blog.9 It shows how contemporary divination practice defines quality of life. The table is translated and taken from a diviner’s blog ‘Xuanxue Tong’ at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6fa8e32c01011izg.html (accessed 28 June 2014). The original three columns paralleled each other horizontally; I separate them into three columns vertically for the convenience of formatting. The table separates people using three criteria: wealth, power and cultural capital. Each category runs parallel to one another. For example, a leading role in a government department has an equivalent rating of good fortune or success to a professor in a university or a wealthy man with more than 10 million yuan in family assets. An individual’s level in life depends on his own position in social hierarchies and those of his family members. It is important to note that what is being evaluated is a family position, rather than an individual position, suggesting that happiness is heavily family-focused. For example, if a father has high status in society, his wife and son will also benefit and their quality of life will be improved.

The Practice of Divination and Diviners | 39 Table 2.1  Evaluation criteria for fortune telling (2012). Unit: A couple with children younger than 35. Reproduced with the permission of Li Chan.

Rich Middle class Well-off family Working class Poverty

Wealth Family (F) annual net assets (ten thousand yuan)

Family (F) annual net income (ten thousand yuan)

F>1000 1000>F>500 500>F>200 200>F>50 F80 80>F>40 40>F>16 16>F>4 F