Transcript

Graeme Smith  00:07

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast, which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I'm Graeme Smith from the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs, and I'm joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We're recording this podcast on the lands of the Ngunnawal Ngambri and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, and we're continuing 60,000 years of storytelling.

 

Louisa Lim  00:37

This year, we're focusing on belief systems in today's China, examining what's happening beneath the surface of this technologically advanced society. We've examined innovations in ancient practices in the form of digital spirituality, and we've also looked at a new openness by the Communist Party to use belief for its own ends. For example, with Buddhism. This month, we're looking at a resurgence in shamanism in today's China.

 

Graeme Smith  01:05

And we're delighted to be joined by Professor Feng Qu from Nanjing Normal University, currently in Alaska, and Mayfair Yang, a cultural anthropologist from UC Santa Barbara. Mayfair, let's start with you. You've spent three decades doing fieldwork in the city of Wenzhou, a place better known for its entrepreneurialism and its Christianity, and you've done some very interesting research there on shamans. Maybe just start by telling us what modern shamans are and what shamanism means? I mean, when we think of shamanism, we typically think of spirit possession. I mean, what kind of spirits are people possessed by? Or is that kind of the wrong way of looking at it?

 

Mayfair Yang  01:45

Well, I define shamanism pretty interchangeably with spirit possession. There was the classic work done by Mircea Eliade, which I and many other scholars, disagree with, where he says there's something as a true authentic shamanism, which issues out of North Asia, versus the other, what he calls spirit possession, which is secondary and not authentic. So, I disagree with that kind of distinction, because actually, if you look at the work of Buyandelger, who's a cultural anthropologist at MIT, she herself is from Mongolia, outer Mongolia, the country Mongolia, and she studied shamanism there. Shamans also are spirit mediums, where Mircea Eliade portrays authentic shamanism, or the original shamanism, as humans who can make flights to other worlds and they travel to other worlds. Whereas spirit possession are spirit mediums who stay on this earth, and they get possessed. Their bodies get taken over, their throats and tongues get taken over by gods or ancestors who speak through them. So Buyandelger found that shamans in Outer Mongolia, they also get possessed. So, the two are different versions of the same phenomenon. So that's what I'm saying, is that a general open ended, flexible definition of shamanism would be talented people who can communicate with other worldly beings, whether they be deities or gods or ancestors or other kinds of nature spirits. And they can transmit this to ordinary humans who don't have that access to these other beings.

 

Graeme Smith  04:14

And where does it kind of fit in within the pantheon of Chinese belief, you know, within compared to, say, Buddhism or Taoism, I mean, which are better known. Where does it fit in?

 

Mayfair Yang  04:28

Well, I think that Taoism and Buddhism mean Axial Age (500—300 BCE) religions. It's a… I think it's a useful way to think about this. Axial Age religions generally come to societies, archaic societies with state formations, and they have writing. And so, they come with sacred writing, sacred scriptures, and they generally have dedicated religious personnel. So, these traditions in Asia, whether they be in India or China and other places in Southeast Asia, the Axial Age religions like Buddhism and Taoism tend to be fairly tolerant and encompassing. So, the older, more archaic indigenous traditions, religious traditions get absorbed into them, maybe hierarchically. So, for example, Taoism was always very close to popular religion and indigenous religions and Taoism absorbed their gods, rather than shut them down or eliminate them, but they made the local Gods more lower ranking. Okay, so in general, that is what in Asia Axial Age religions did, which is different from the Abrahamic religions of declaring one single God of truth. They generally would eliminate the previous religions as unworthy.

 

Louisa Lim  06:13

Feng Qu, you've just come back from doing field work in Dongbei 东北 in the northeast of China. I mean, tell us a little bit about what shamans look like there nowadays?

 

Feng Qu  06:25

Manchuria or Dongbei, Northeast China is a very important area in shamanism studies. It's thought that Dongbei or Northeast China, it has a typical shamanism in China or in the north of the world. So actually, shamanism in Dongbei is not a single phenomenon, because Dongbei has native groups and also Han Chinese. Well, shamanism declined in some groups such as Hezhe 赫哲 or Nanai group and Oroqen and some tribes among Ewenki, but it has a great revitalization among other groups such as Mongolian, Daur and the Bouyei people, and also it's arises a lot among Han Chinese people, but they all have different characteristics. They are different. So Dongbei has diverse expressions of shamanism.

 

Graeme Smith  07:46

And could I ask you, in your field work, you actually saw someone possessed by a spirit? Can you maybe take us through what did that look like and what was the purpose of it?

 

Feng Qu  07:59

So I recently, I visited several groups. The first is Mongolian group in Jilin Province, there is a county is called Gorlos [Qianguo County 前郭尔罗斯蒙古族自治县]. I think there are several hundred shamans. They all are Mongolian people, they have spirit possession, the spirits are ancestors and animals. I witness their rituals when they call ancestor to them to possess their bodies, they will drum and sing some invitation sounds, and then the ancestral spirits, or animal spirits, will follow the drumming and music to come to possess the shaman. And then they change voice; the spirits will communicate with the audience or other shamans or some people else. Sometimes it's about fight or something, people have problem. They need ancestors to help them to resolve the problems. But sometimes they just normal talk. Sometimes the advice is to be with them, to share the music, to share their talking. It's just they want to meet. They have a great spirit possession among Gorlo people, but in the other group, such as Manchu people, normally there are several shamans. They mostly hold the rituals for their clients, families, they will cite prayers. They will chant and draw me to give thanks to spirits or ask a blessing from the spirits many families in the festivals and special days such as wedding and they will invite shamans to go to their home to do some ritual like that. So, no possession, but just a few shamans, like shaman Shi Guanghua and Shi Zongduo in Shi family, they have ability to call spirits to possess them. But those spirits one coming, they just have amusements with the people. So, it's not the big part in the ritual. And I also visited a group. This is very special group. They are Manchu-ized Han Chinese. But they identify, they are part of Manchu. Actually, originally they were part of Han Chinese from Shandong, but afterwards they joined the Manchu army. So, they are called the Jilin Han army. They have different shaman rituals from Han Chinese, from Wenzhou shamanism, and also different from Manchu shamanism, spirits who are from Chinese cultures, like a king of Tang Dynasty, soldier of the dead, soldier, heralds of Tang Dynasty. They also have spirits from Manchu shamanism, like the tiger spirit, eagle spirit. So, they combine some Manchu customs and Chinese customs together to form a new style of shaman rituals.

 

Louisa Lim  12:13

May, how different is what Professor Feng is describing to what you see in Wenzhou are the spirits that possess shamans different?

 

Mayfair Yang  12:24

The major difference between Northern shamanism and Southeast China shamanism is that you can be in the north you can be possessed by an animal spirit, but in Southeastern China, I have never heard of animal spirits possessing spirit mediums. So generally, the forces that possess spirit mediums are gods and deities or ancestors. So, they're human-like figures, because most gods, even if they have a provenance, and maybe is a star deity and or so forth, they are generally represented and humanised. They represented in a humanised sort of form. So that is the case in Southeastern China is that it's a kind of humanised deity who speaks through spirit mediums, who possess humans.

 

Graeme Smith  13:31

And are shamans found all over China, or are there some parts of China that you’re more likely to come across shamanism?

 

Mayfair Yang  13:39

I think they're all over China with ethnic minorities you have shamanism too, but I don't know too much about them. But I think that shamanism is very ancient and that it comes in many different forms across the whole world. I would also like to touch upon the subject of varying degrees of institutionalisation. So, I think that usually shamanism is associated with talented individuals. So, I think one feature commonly found with shamanism is that they tend to be special individuals who have this ability to communicate with spiritual beings. And it's not the institutionalisation is not highly developed, and that's one reason, I think, why in China, officials are generally and also public opinion generally look askance or look down at shamans. It's because they're individuals, so operating on their own, and there isn't a large, elaborate social institutions. I have come across a temple, an edifice, a building that a woman spirit medium had erected. It looked pretty impressive as a temple, but that is really the exception, rather than the rule. So generally, shamans operate as individuals in their homes, private homes, so their clients and customers will come into their homes individually or sometimes in small groups, and they operate there. But it's very rare for a shaman to be able to get a permit to operate, to be legitimately out in the open, so it's a kind of clandestine affair. They have to hide, so to speak. They can't broadcast themselves too publicly, but they are generally allowed to operate by local officials who know about them. But if things get out of hand, if they start to gather a large following and they start to build a temple, then it will be shut down. Generally, if you want to build a temple, then you have to present yourself as Taoist and join the Taoist Association. And even maybe even if you've gotten as far as building a temple, these things happen, without getting official permission, then you're going to be forced to join, learn Taoist rituals and be accepted into the Taoist Association, otherwise your temple will be torn down. So, there's a push that I noticed in Wenzhou to get these individuals to join institutionalised religion. That is what the Chinese government feels comfortable with, Taoism, and even more comfortable with Buddhism, which is more institutionalised, even more than Taoism.

 

Louisa Lim  17:22

So when we talk about institutionalisation, I mean Feng Qu, you've written this fascinating paper about an official association, an organisation of shamans, in northeast China, which was actually a kind of theme park called the Shamanic Joy Park in Changchun, which opened in 2005. And you write about how thousands of shamans kind of met there and got together there. I mean, tell us a bit about the history of this, this place, and why you think the state allowed that to happen?

 

Feng Qu  17:57

So, it's influenced by a new shamanism in the West. In United States, there are some organisations about shamanism. So, this influence the whole world, including China. So there, he's not scholar, he's a businessman. He's very smart, but he has a lot of shamanism knowledge, and he has a good connection with scholars who study shamanism. So, from 2004 he started to build the shamanism park. The main purpose for him has two. The first, he liked shamanistic cultures very much. He wants to use this style to protect the shamanism, because many people think shamanism is declining in the modern period. So, this, this is one of his purposes. But the other purpose, because he's a businessman, he doesn't hesitate to tell us he wants to make the shamanism commercialised.

 

Graeme Smith  19:24

I was going to ask, what does it actually look like? How do you, how do you make money out of shamanism? I mean, are people paying to be, you know, undergo sort of spiritual experiences? Or, how do you commercialise shamanism?

 

Feng Qu  19:39

So, he invited some shamans from Mongolia, from inner Mongolia, from Heilongjiang province, from Jilin province, including Mongolian shamans, Han Chinese army shamans, and also Hezhe specialists, not shamans. And also from Manchu shamans to perform in his park. He used this shamanic performance to attract tourists to come to his park. And he doesn't use the shamanism to earn money, but he used hotels, lodges and the restaurants to earn money, but the shamanic rituals or performance became a very attractive characteristic of his park. So, he was very successful. But his work has also encounter some problems when scholars and some government people support because this part of the inheritance, cultural inheritance, but the other government people think it is superstitious behaviour, so they are against the park. But more people in 2000s the first decades of new century, 21st century, most people in governments and the scholars supported him, so his work, his career, survived. And in 2021 he met big problems. So, he has a title from the state government is called shamanic culture, inheritance base, this title was cancelled.

 

Mayfair Yang  21:43

It sounds familiar, because just last week, or maybe it was this week, the Shaolin Temple hyped up very commercially by Shi Yongxin has been shut down. Or Shi Yongxin has been shut down for various reasons, including sexual shenanigans as well as over commercialization.

 

Graeme Smith  22:13

We feel a little bit bad about that. Our producer is claiming credit because our episode, which featured the Abbot, appeared two days before he was shut down. So yeah, she's claiming credit for bringing him down, but I don't think that's quite true. I mean, Mayfair, or both of you, really, you said that the ordinary people looked askance at shamans, and yet people are going to this theme park in droves. When I was living in Anhui, we came across a shaman. Everyone referred to him as a shaman, and the attitude of my colleagues, who had no spiritual interest, was fascinating. They'd never talked about spirituality at all. And when they saw this guy, they were absolutely terrified and in awe of him, and they had the belief that this shaman basically had amazing spiritual powers. They didn't want him to notice them, or, you know, come across them, and they believed that he could get rid of the party secretary if he wanted to, like if he chose to, he was that powerful. I mean, what do ordinary people think about these shamans who've persisted despite all these campaigns?

 

Mayfair Yang  23:20

I think people can be very self-contradictory. So, there's multiple layers that people are subjected to and that they absorb from the larger society. So, one very important layer that continues to exert influence is 19th century European social evolutionary discourse, which hit China very hard. So, there's also this kind of implicit evolutionary ranking of different forms of religiosity. So, something like shamanism and spirit mediums are at the lower end. They're considered more backward. And then, you know, of course, Christianity is the most advanced and most modern and so on. So, to a certain extent, that is the colonising influence of the modern West and the protestantization of the globe. So, Protestants couldn't abide by Catholicism, because they in fact, the very word superstition, superstitious was levelled by the Protestants against the Catholics. They thought the Catholics were too much into the mumbo jumbo ritualism. They cut down Christian rituals a great deal. They took out the saints and even the Virgin Mary. So, the saints were for them, were a throwback to polytheism and so forth. So anyway, I think China really adopted that discourse. So that is a certain layer. But on the other hand, people can jump from one moment to the next, where they also uncover deeper layers of ancient Chinese approaches to religion, and so you have a lot of fortune telling and divination and Fengshui. You know, meeting and hybridising with commercialism very well today. You know Fengshui masters can command a great deal of money. So that is all coming back at the same time too. And I also wanted to say something about gender. I found, I guess, in Wenzhou, a very entrepreneurial culture, but at the time that I was doing field work, they didn't have a real razzle dazzle, kind of Super Male entrepreneur like the one that Feng Qu discovered. And so most, the vast majority of shamans and spirit mediums were women, women with low educational levels, so that also contributes to the way the society looks at shamanism. You know, what I saw in Wenzhou as something backward and superstitious. The other thing about shamanism, besides the fact it was mainly women, is that it's definitely something that involves the human body. Much of the world's religion highly involves the body. So, spirit possession really is something that works on the body, where the body loses control. And I've seen a shaman in Taiwan at a storefront temple to Matsu [mazu] 妈祖. And you know, Taiwan has the highest density of 7-Elevens. This was Taichung, a very modern urban city with traffic running in front of the temple back and forth, and 7-Eleven on one end of the block and another on the other end of the block. And he had just been talking about the stock market, and he was watching the stock market on TV. All of a sudden, the goddess Matsu took possession of him, and he was rolling around on the floor, and he was frothing at the mouth and uttering incoherent words. And everybody gathered around, and they were very moved by the presence of the Goddess, and they started crying. So, there is something very palpable with shamans, is that they can elicit so much emotion where you palpably feel the presence of the spiritual being that takes possession of them. And that is why, in Wenzhou, often, I find that shamans are the spark that start up a new temple or religious movement. So, they are the ones, because everyone feels palpably the presence of the spirit or deity. So, you need that spark in order to say, this temple in this place, this site is a good place to build a temple. You need that kind of stamp of approval by a supernatural being.

 

Louisa Lim  29:03

I just wanted to come back to that dividing line between belief and superstition and how the state differentiates or views Shaman. I mean Feng Qu, maybe you could talk a bit about how that works. You know, for example, with the Shamanic Joy Park, how it was acceptable and then it suddenly became seen as superstition. How does the state decide?

 

Feng Qu  29:30

This is a very interesting question. In 2021 when the businessman's park, the base was cancelled by the government. The Jilin Provincial Government has a meeting with the scholars and the government people together; they have a very interesting decision about shamanism among people in Jilin Province. They think Manchu shamanism and the other ethnic groups' shamanism; they are kind of cultural inheritance. I think in China there is some tolerance policy of ethnic groups, but small, strict policy to Han Chinese cultures. So, they think the shamanic rituals among Han Chinese people, those are superstitious phenomenon. So, they think most of Han Chinese healing, especially healing rituals are not real or mainly for money. And they don't believe the power the efficiency of healing, so they think they are cheating people, and also they are kind of backwards superstition. So, they have a distinction like this.

 

Louisa Lim  31:02

Mayfair, do you think there's also an element of fear about security? It's just more like when a shaman gets kind of big and has a following, then they move to shut it down?

 

Mayfair Yang  31:17

Yeah. There is fear and insecurity, definitely, but I would phrase the fear in this way. There's something about spirit possession of the body, where it's out of control, and that is the first thing that is feared, and especially in our age of rationality. But even if you go back into Imperial China, the Ming Dynasty, founded in 1368, by Zhu Yuanzhang, where he elevated Confucianism, even though he came up on the throne, because through a kind of sectarian Buddhism White Lotus rebellion. It was kind of Buddhist Millenarianism, but he knew how he came to power. So he was always very afraid of these out-of-control religious movements. So, he tried to shut that down. He put up orders that really different religious movements would be shut down. And so he elevated Confucianism, which has, for you know, 2000 years, been tied up with the state, highly ritualised state formation. So that is kind of the beginning of persecution and marginalisation of shamanism, because shamanism makes claims to an independent religious authority that speaks without being controlled. Whereas you know, Buddhism and Taoism are pretty much penetrated by the state, and it is pretty obedient. But shamans are usually individuals, and they get possessed, and they don't necessarily speak with one voice, with the state. But, you know, during the Maoist period, it was pretty much fully shut down, and now it is, you know, revived, but also has more controls at the same time. So, it's living this kind of precarious revival.

 

Graeme Smith  33:42

Yeah, I mean, it's astonishing to me that it's surviving and seems to be thriving in this sort of society led by these very colourless engineers. I mean, Feng Qu, you've looked at this historically with the Manchu shamans, and you classify them into court shamans, clan shamans, and wild shamans. Do any of these threads survive these days, or have they become something completely different to what they were in the Qing Dynasty?

 

Feng Qu  34:10

So Manchu shaman is different from other groups. So Manchu shamans had two types. One is clan shaman. The other is wild shaman. So wild shaman has ability, capacity to call spirit to possess them. They may also have ability to have their souls to fly to the other worlds. For clan shamans, the many who host the rituals for their clan people. So, for Manchu people, the definition of shaman is to work for their clan who have the ritual, whether it's fainting or just praising rituals. So even though they have a spirit possession or they don't have they all are shamans. Even in Qing Dynasty state, the rulers, Manchu rulers, they don't trust and believe the healing power of wild Shaman. So, they banned the wild shamanism, but they still follow. So, the clan shamanism had no problem in Qing dynasty. Even the Emperor's Ai Xin Jue Luo 爱新觉罗 [Aisin Gioro], the Emperor's family in the palace, they have their own clan shaman rituals every day in the palace. So among the common peoples, because of the policy, they have clan shamanism, family shamanism, but only in the remote area of Qing Dynasty in Dongbei, they still keep the wild shamanism. So today, Shamanism among Manchu people declined. So before the Republic, foundation of Republic of China, in the statistics, we know there are maybe around twenty wild shamans, but now they only have one or two wild shamans. The other shamans are clan shamans, but not too many.

 

Louisa Lim  36:37

It just seems so anachronistic that this technocratic society, which is run by engineers, still allows shamans. I mean, do you why do you think, Mayfair, that they've been allowed to continue and survive? Is there any particular kind of use that the Communist Party has for shamans?

 

Mayfair Yang  36:58

I don't think the Communist Party encourages it, but it's just because it's just too difficult to shut it down. And so, the best thing is to allow it to persist, even to get some new life, but to monitor it and re-channel it and control it. I think that is generally, yeah, it's not that they are encouraged at all. But I think Feng Qu brings up an interesting point, that globalisation allows them to look at it with perhaps a new respect and acceptance, but it's very revealing that they're especially suspicious of the native Han Chinese. So, it's very different from what happened in modern South Korea. So, in the case of South Korea in its modernization drive under Park Chung Hee and so forth earlier in the 20th century, the government also had a very dim view of shamanism and wanted to snuff it out because it was not modern. It was an embarrassment, and it wasn't playing a role in Korea's modernization. But at a certain point, they started to look at it as kind of national identity. So, once they became prosperous, and they no longer felt as if they had to slog their way, struggling to modernise, once they kind of started to enjoy their modernization and economic success, they turned around and viewed it as a part of their national heritage. And there was a kind of cultural pride to support, including government support of shamanism and today, you know, it has both commercial success as well as national pride. The government designates certain shamans as National Cultural Heritage people, so you really see that with globalisation. And you have also, you know, if you have the stamp of approval from the West, that also really helps you, too. And you have Westerners pursuing shamanism and indigenous religions and affirming, okay, if the West affirms that, that must be good.

 

Graeme Smith  39:37

I'm quite curious about the foreign influence factor because, you know, Feng Qu, you mentioned neo-shamanism, and how that helped the theme park, that there was this foreign interest in shamanism and Taiwan, you know, basically, shamanism seems to have continued uninterrupted. I mean, how much is the survival of shamanism down in some ways, to foreign influence, if you like?

 

Feng Qu  40:03

In the West, new shamanism is very different from the traditional shamanism. So, there are lots of debates about the concept of real, genuine shaman in China. They also have some modern characteristics. They also want to make money for themselves, for their families, and the meanwhile, they keep their traditional way. So, this is kind of modernity and the globalisation. And also, there are some young people who learn some knowledge about shamanism. They open some training classes who call some people to be in the class, to train them, for them to pursue spirituality. So, this is quite like some new shamanistic groups in the West. So, there are several layers in China.

 

Mayfair Yang  41:10

There's also examples. So, Taiwan's Dangki tradition, it's generally male, very male, and I've read work on Southeast Asia shamanism. Canadian anthropologist Jean de Bernardi, she did fieldwork in Chinese enclaves in Malaysia, and she studied shamanism there, and it shares with Taiwan's Dangki tradition as being very bloody. They are into real kind of punishment of the body. I would say they stick spears and needles into their bodies. It's very male, kind of macho too. So, and then there's, you know, they walk through hot coals and flames, and so it's all kinds of things that is very much testing of the body. Making the body go through extremes and showing that people in trance are resistant to the pain that these experiences can inflict on the body. So that is a tradition that I don't see in Wenzhou. So, I wonder where, and I've read some place that it is hybridising with native Southeast Asian tradition, non-Han Chinese tradition, and somehow that makes it distinctive. That does not involve the west at all. So, it's very interesting how Southeast Asian Chinese as well as Taiwan shamanic traditions all have this kind of violence done to the body, kind of dimension that is not necessarily very strong in Han Chinese mainland traditions.

 

Louisa Lim  43:15

To finish off, I wanted to ask both of you to talk a little bit about what you think the future of shamanism in China is? Feng Qu, maybe, let's start with you. And one thing that I'm interested in is the extent to which shamans might adapt their practices for the digital age. I mean, we've heard all about AI fortune telling and people giving offerings online and this kind of thing. Do you think that Chinese shamans will innovate in this way? Or how will they look?

 

Feng Qu  43:51

The traditional idea about shamanism, especially in the 1980s, 1990s scholars think shamanism is primitive phenomenon. It's very Asian phenomenon, with the developments of society, with the social development from the several thousand years ago. So today, it's gradually declined and almost disappeared. Only in some remote areas, there are some cases. So, they are living fossils. So, scholars should go to this area, record to write down this special cultural inheritance, or to protect alive shamans, alive shamanic cultures. But to my opinion, so shamanism is phenomenon in the past, but also in today, also in future. It will not decline, because the people grassroots in the folklore society, people has a great means to have shamans who have to help them resolve problems in daily life, and to have shamanism as their local cultural identity. In my interview, in my field work, I found people generally, they are proud, they have their shamanist and shaman rituals as their cultural identity. For example, I recently visited the Han army village in Jilin province. I asked the people about their shaman rituals. They are very proud their family, their clan, has this, they said, without this, we don't know our life, our plan will not have others. They enrich our life. They make us too happy to have hope in our life. And also, many people have some health problems. If they failed to be helped in hospital, they look for shamans to help them. And there are also a lot of successful cases, including Han Chinese shamanism or shamans. So everywhere they have great means for this. So, I think in future, shamanism will continue.

 

Louisa Lim  46:35

And Mayfair, do you think in 50 years’ time, shamanism will still exist in China, and if so, what will it look like?

 

Mayfair Yang  46:42

Yeah, I definitely think so, and I totally agree with Feng Qu that we've got to study and understand the indigenous, localised, grassroots shamanism and their continuities with the past, going back to ancient traditions, we also have a sort of globalised interest in shamanism. We have shamanism coming from different parts of the globe, forming a kind of global shamanism. And that's all the more reason why we need to understand indigenous, localised shamanism, to be able to tell the difference and to see the different layers, because they're getting they're getting mixed up now. So, I think that for the future, for modern societies, shamanism will have new life, because it produces altered states of consciousness, and we need that. We need people in modern societies to extract themselves from reverie and sleepwalking in modern, capitalist, industrialised, polluting society that produces and exaggerates, speeds up climate change. We need to yank people out of this terrible sickness that we're in, pursuing unlimited growth, polluting the earth and causing massive extinctions with other species. This is a way that we can yank ourselves out of that reverie. The other thing that is lost, I think, is that so many ancient indigenous shamanic cultures, they had the ability to switch from human to animal. And I think that's amazing. We need to bring that back. We're causing the extinction of so many animal species. So for example, if you look at Bronze Age culture, is something I want to talk with Feng Qu again, I think you wrote a piece about K C Zhang, who is arguing that the Shang Dynasty was a shamanic culture, and that even the king himself was a chief Shaman. You know, northern China still has fox spirits. So Kang Xiaofei has written a book about fox spirits, huli jing 狐狸精, and we don't have that animal transformation, as far as I know in Wenzhou. So that is also going to be enriching for us, if humans can transform into animals and vice versa, animals can possess us and give us messages and communicate with us. I think that's something that we need to explore. We need to find out more about those shamanic cultures.

 

Feng Qu  49:52

Actually, it's the challenges the traditional anthropology theory like dualism because that is human centred. But shamanism is not human centred, shamans respect and also summons and also they are tribal people. They're villagers. They respect animals. They think animals and human are equal, and they respect the nature's environment. Everything they think has a spirit. So, they respect the world, the nature. So, it has lots of traditional knowledge how to maintain the world, to continue.

 

Graeme Smith  50:42

Mayfair, Feng Qu, thanks for joining us.

 

Mayfair Yang  50:44

Okay, thank you. Bye.

 

Graeme Smith  50:45

You've been listening to Little Red Podcast which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests, Mayfair Yang and Feng Qu. Thanks also to my co-host Louisa Lim. Our editing is by Andy Hazel. Our background research is by Wing Kuang our transcripts and social media is by Juliette Baxter. Music is by Susie Wilkins, and our cartoons and gifs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.