A Time of Lost Gods: Madness, Cosmology, and Psychiatry in China
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A Time of Lost Gods: Madness, Cosmology, and Psychiatry in China By Emily Karyie Ng A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the University of California, San Francisco in Medical Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair Professor Xin Liu Professor Vincanne Adams Professor Mark Csikszentmihalyi Summer 2016 Abstract A Time of Lost Gods: Madness, Cosmology, and Psychiatry in China by Emily Karyie Ng Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Stefania Pandolfo, Chair A Time of Lost Gods explores madness, haunting, and mediumship in a rural county of China’s Henan province. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, I find that that given the economic and symbolic dispossession accompanying post-Reform rural outmigration, spirit mediums register psychiatric symptoms as signs of moral- cosmological collapse. I consider this in light of a precarious cosmology, wherein the very world of human and nonhuman persons and relationships are experienced as deeply destabilized. This sense of precarity is linked to the loss of Mao as a divine anti-colonial figure, evoking questions of socialist sovereignty alongside those of heavenly mandate. According to the spirit mediums, the Chairman’s death inaugurated the return of demons and deities, none of whom can be fully trusted, as they now mirror the duplicity of the human realm after market reforms. Mediums must work to discern between the true and false, the virtuous and malicious, amid a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits. This contemporary cosmology, I suggest, simultaneously registers the national imaginary of Henan as a quintessential land-locked agricultural province “left behind” in a post- Reform regime of value, and opens up an inverted figuring of the rural as a potential ethico-spiritual center, awaiting apocalyptic renewal. To think with the mediums is to dwell on a historical present of hesitant horizons, at once beneath and beyond discourses of global mental health and religious revival. Across the psychiatric ward of the county hospital, local temples, and home altars of spirit mediums, betrayals of economy and kinship are transmitted through multiple genres of time. In mediumship, the progressive time of the socialist promise merges with a cyclical mode of dynastic anticipation, together carried in a spectral temporality of returns. In the clinic, symptomatic fragments of intergenerational impasse intermingle with the prognostic temporality of diagnostic modernity. After a long century of exasperated responses to the threat of colonial seizure, I approach patients, spirit mediums, and psychiatrists as figures caught in a shared dilemma, in a time when gods have lost their way. 1 A Time of Lost Gods: Madness, Cosmology, and Psychiatry in China Table of Contents Introduction: The China of China 1 The Sovereign, the Ghost, the Medium 3 The Language of Madness 11 Culture Petrified 16 Orbiting the Hollow 20 1. After the Storm 24 Making History Speak 26 Where is the Now 29 Writing about Others 32 Suffering of the Nation 34 Mao and the Cosmocratic Mythologic 37 Existential Politics of Land Reform 39 Wither the People 41 2. Spectral Collision 44 Left Behind, Liushou 45 The Ten-Thousand-Man Pit 46 No Man’s Land 49 Borrowed Mouths 52 Dream of a Dying Hen 56 Distant Intimacy 59 Spectral Collision 61 Fidelity, Suspension 64 Coda: The I, the We, the Ghost 65 3. A Soul Adrift 68 A New Socialist Countryside 70 The Crisis of Filial Piety 72 The People’s Psychiatric Unit 76 A Soul Adrift 78 To Speak, To Love 81 House of Dreams 85 Worlds Apart 88 i 4. Ten Thousand Years 91 Temple of Ancestry 94 Ten Thousand Years 97 When the Chairman Reigned 100 Duplicity, Discernment 106 Precarious Cosmology 108 A Time of Lost Gods 111 5. Vertiginous Abbreviation 113 The Cultural Intimacy of the Psychiatric 114 Havoc from the Underworld 117 A Million Madmen Storm the Palace 119 Travails of the Duplicate 122 Corruption, Cultivation 126 End Time 128 Vertiginous Abbreviation 130 Bibliography 133 ii Acknowledgments I thank first and foremost those in He County, across the three realms, who accepted my presence and made this curious path possible. I cannot do justice to what they have gifted me in time, thought, and unspoken lessons. Deepest thanks to those who shared with me company, conversation, and meals, taking me in as their own. I can only hope that in my rendering, a shattered mirror, they might find a fragment faithful to their visions and struggles. My gratitude also to all those in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing, who each in their own way inspired the questions that have given shape to this work. For sake of privacy they will not be named here, but I have kept them and their words in mind, returning to them across different moments for illumination. Across Berkeley and San Francisco, I am grateful to all those who taught me how to think, from within the terms of anthropology and beyond. Stefania Pandolfo, so much more than an advisor, saw the contours and drives of this project before I could. To her I owe an entire way of tending toward a work, a life, a world, along with a political-poetic insistence to never forget why it is that we do what we do, even if we cannot fully understand. To Liu Xin, who manages to turn the world upside down with his wry wit, all the while carrying the weight of history and thinking on his shoulders. He taught me how to read, and although I will never meet the task he set forth for himself and for his students, in him, I now understand what it is to be a scholar. To Mark Csikszentmihalyi, who generously took me on, with openness to the peculiarities of my efforts. He has shown a warmth, kindness, and depth so rare, which in and of itself is a lesson in living. In that kindness resides a lucid and broad mind, to which I am grateful for bettering my work. And to Vincanne Adams, without whom I would have lost my way, amid many crossroads. She is an exemplary guide—nourishing, buoying, scaffolding. Her cogent counsel and precious encouragement taught me how to hope, when hope was most needed. In encountering my committee members, I could not have been more fortunate. There are many others who I have learned from, in particular, Nancy Scheper- Hughes, Aihwa Ong, Alexei Yurchak, Cori Hayden, Mariane Ferme, Lawrence Cohen, Pheng Cheah, Robert Ashmore, and Ian Whitmarsh, who, in his ethereal style, always demanded that we be faithful to our curiosity. Among the staff, Ned Garrett, hoaxing graduate students into tranquility with his curative nonchalance. Kathleen Van Sickle and Tom Bottomley, managing to squeeze a laugh out of bureaucracy. Carolyn Frazier, securing the fort in more ways than we know. Frances Bright, so attuned to the undergraduates, both day-to-day and when they fall on difficult times. Thanks to my lovely cohort Himali Dixit, Andrew Halley, Callie Maidhof, Rachel Niehuus, Carolyn Sufrin, Marlee Tichenor, Rosalynn Vega, and in particular Jeremy Soh, who has shown me how to work properly, ‘cheerfully.’ Special thanks to Michael D’Arcy, Jason Price, and Jerry Zee for their forms of siblinghood and support. Appreciation to those in the dissertation seminars led by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, including, aside from those mentioned elsewhere, Alissa Bernstein, Rachel Ceasar, Sam Dubal, Ugo Edu, Ruth Goldstein, Martha Stroud, and Noémie Merleau-Ponty. My iii appreciation to those in the Haas group in East Asian Studies, including Matthew Berry, Jesse Chapman, Paulina Hartono, James Lin, William Ma, Jeannette Ng, Sharon Sanderovitch, Jonathan Tang, Yun-ling Wang, Jesse Watson, Trenton Wilson, Linh Vu, and Yueni Zhong. I am grateful also to others who have commented on and assisted with my work along the way: Nick Bartlett, Elizabeth Bromley, Vanessa Fong, Byron Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Janis Jenkins, Andrew Jones, Emily Xi Lin, Bessie Liu, Michael Puett, Hoon Song, and Zhao Xudong. In Los Angeles, gratitude goes to Robert Lemelson and Douglas Hollan, who first brought me to psychological anthropology, and convinced me it was possible to pursue my own questions. Without them I would not have had the privilege of this journey. This undertaking rested in different phases on the generous support of the Berkeley Fellowship, National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships Program, Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Haas Junior Scholars Program in East Asian Studies, Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship, Power Award, and the George A. DeVos Memorial Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Research. Thanks to all the staff and reviewers whose time this depended on. One whole ocean to Samuele Collu, whose Friendship and thinking-with I simply could not have done without. To Yuliya, who has been with me through it all, for decades now, and never stops questioning. To Carrie, across our many manifestations and mergings across that same stretch. To those in the great white north, whose shared leaning toward life at the edges of the world give me a sense of home. To Pete Skafish, who never ceases to surprise me. Infinite gratitude to those who have patiently, profoundly sustained me, across parallel universes. Everything goes to my family—my mom, my dad, and my grandma. It is for them I do, for them I try, even if falteringly. To them I add my aunts, uncle, great aunt, and great uncle, who have offered me harbor across the years. Finally, there is Drew, whose presence made this all possible, who has shown me what it is to care. iv Introduction: The China of China Despite their quarrels over divine detail, spirit mediums who frequented the temple square agreed: it was upon the Chairman’s death that the ghosts returned to haunt.