Transnational Sacralizations: When Daoist Monks meet Global Spiritual Tourists

Abstract

This article examines the production of sacrality in the context of globalization, through the case of encounters between international spiritual tourists and Chinese monks. The sacred mountain of Huashan has historically been localized in the context of Daoist cosmology, Chinese imperial civilizing, socialist nation-building and, now, global capitalism. While the monks experience Huashan as a gateway for embeddedness into Daoist lineage, ritual, and cosmology, the spiritual tourists approach it as a fountain of raw, consumable energy on a path of disembedding and individuation. But encounters between the two groups lead to the mutual interference and interpenetration of both trajectories. Undermining dichotomist concepts of the sacred which define it as either essentially Other or as socially constructed and contested, the sacrality of Huashan serves as both an anchor for multiple centralizing projects and forces, and as a catalyst and node for the formation of interconnecting and expanding horizontal networks.

Keywords:

• Sacrality
• globalization
• Daoism
• spiritual tourism
• dwelling perspective
• qigong

Notes

Qigong is neologism which gained currency after the medical authorities of the Peoples' Republic of China attempted to secularize and modernize the practices in the 1950s. See Palmer (2007) for a socio-political history of qigong in modern China. For ethnographic studies of qigong in post-Mao China, see Hsu (1999), Chen (2003), and Palmer (2008). For a historical overview and technical description of many of these practices in pre-modern times, see Kohn (2008).

Pseudonyms.

This project was conducted in collaboration with Elijah Siegler of The College of Charleston, as part of a study on transnational encounters between international (primarily American) ‘Daoist’ practitioners and Chinese Quanzhen monks. For other publications emanating from this study, see Siegler (2010, 2011), Palmer (forthcoming), and Siegler and Palmer (forthcoming). My field research for this project was made possible, thanks to grants from the Sociology Department of the London School of Economics and the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China.

A point in the lower abdominal region, which is an important energy centre in Daoist inner alchemy.