The quest for a good life: Incense seeing and the porous and dividual hoping person in North China

Abstract

The focus on human intention and action in anthropological studies of hope has made it difficult to attend to the aspects of a hopeful life that lie outside a hoping person's purpose and control. This article brings the concepts of porous and dividual personhood into conversation with the fast‐growing literature on hope to explore how spiritual forces shape the hoping person and the practices of hope for a good life in North China's Xia County. The lived experience of my Chinese interlocutors calls attention to the fact that hoping persons are often entangled in extended relationships with spiritual forces as well as other humans. An extended relational framework allows us to attend more carefully to the contingency and complexity of hope, and brings a more nuanced lens to personhood, one that rejects the Enlightenment idea that persons are autonomous, bounded agents, fully in charge of their own worlds.

Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda’s Capital City

“…Among these less controllable aspects are various forms of spiritual experience and the divinities or other spiritual beings who often appear as agents in people's narratives of ethical transformation. The possibility that such beings are involved in collectivities capable of shaping the self has received only occasional attention (Mittermaier 2012;Lambek 2010;Stonington 2020;Laidlaw 2013;Scherz and Mpanga 2019;Scherz 2018a;Qu 2022). This lack of focus is surprising given both people's explicit articulations of divine action as an explanation for personal moral transformations (Daswani 2015) as well as the current disciplinary interest in questions of ontology and phenomenology.…”

“…Life-transforming guidance is received in dreams. Yet, with several key exceptions (Mittermaier 2012;Lambek 2010;Stonington 2020;Qu 2022), anthropologists working to understand processes of ethical transformation in anthropology have sidelined these aspects of people's stories. So, while some anthropologists have given careful thought to how cultural discourses and practices might produce spiritual experiences (Luhrmann 2012;Csordas 2002;Cassaniti and Luhrmann 2014), less is known about the effects of these experiences themselves.…”