Emily Ng | Madness, Religion, and Political Cosmologies: Thinking through China

Drawing on ethnographic research across psychiatric settings, temples, and charismatic churches in urban and rural China, this talk reflects on the mutual reorientations between madness, religion, and political worlds. Those who engage in spirit mediumship and charismatic practices offer different histories of the present, which map onto distinct political cosmologies. For the spirit mediums, Mao’s reign was not simply one of earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty. For the charismatics, the now of China is experienced in terms of a longer Biblical history. This talk explores these themes through accounts of psychiatric illness, spirit possession, and divine sensoria.

About the Author

Emily Ng is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work centers on madness and subjectivity, religion and cosmopolitics, and how historical worlds and wounds reverberate across geographies and generations. Her book A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao was awarded the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology. Recently, she has been working on sensory experiences of the unseen across religious communities in China.