LOCATING THE SPIRIT BODY IN HAKKA WORLDS OF HEALTH: SPIRITUAL COLLISION AND ITS POTENTIAL FOR HEALING THROUGH A FEMALE SPIRIT MEDIUM TRADITION IN SOUTHERN CHINA

Abstract

The intensities and rapid speed of cultural change within a highly competitive and developing new China has produced various states of certain crisis for both individual and social bodies. Strained familial, work and social relations, as well as deficiencies in health and welfare resources amidst increasing sicknesses and mental health issues, are major contributors. There is a great need to explore modalities and practices that might relieve such problems. Popular religious practices are often overlooked in health care research within China. Yet these practices are today being relocated and reoriented into daily life across various Chinese localities. This is the case for many Hakka Chinese populations - a people who categorize themselves as a sub-ethnic group of Han. In this research, I look at the idea of a spirit body that can be found in popular religious practice and how people in one southern Hakka region are locating it in their worlds of health. I focus on contemporary experiences of spiritual collision – an occasion where an offence between the world of the living and the netherworld is said to be committed - where local female spirit mediums called shenpo (神婆) are sought out for mediation. The application of a shenpo’s talismanic therapy partly constitutes the healing process for spiritual collision. This is explored here. I argue that these therapies not only offer a way for revitalizing a divine moral system in society, or the social body, but also for revitalizing an individual person’s jingshen (精神) – a traditional bodily knowledge referring to the essential animating spirit of life within physicality. Jingshen is often overlooked in studies of Chinese medicine and religion yet is connected to an array of symptomatic expressions. Experiences involving jingshen inform a hybrid negotiation between sacred and secular bodily knowledge, particularly that of soul loss and depression. This is the crux where spirit medium practices may be explored as health assets in modern China.