Spirits of Uncertainty: Eventologies of Nature on China’s Frontiers

ABSTRACT

Studies of the environmental spirit world have been pursuing two main lines of inquiry: (1) that indigenous claims on ecological thought, including beliefs in chthonic spirits and mountain deities, are the outcome of a global process of abstraction and the commoditisation of nature which acts as technology of governmentality for the production of discursive formations through which neoliberal environmental subjectivities can emerge and (2) that the pitfalls of the nature/culture dualism can be avoided by giving priority to nonhuman subjectivities and positing sociologies of nature as subordinate to ontologies of the self-other divide or action-orienting cosmologies of local ‘nature’. The contributors of this collection engage with the spirit worlds and other invisible agents that constitute the everyday landscape of a number of ethnic groups in western China. While declining to engage with the notion of animism or subscribing to totalising ‘cosmologies’, the authors prefer to extract the eventfulness of haphazard and radically uncertain interactions with spirits or wondrous signs apt to be transformed into marvels and rumours. The ethnographies presented in this collection reveal an eventology of spirit worlds and landscape on China’s borderlands, an inquiry that – unlike history – does not study ‘events’ as such but the relation between what is deemed to be an event, a surprise, or a manifestation of wonder and what is deemed to be the innate, natural, ordinary, everyday life.

KEYWORDS:

• Spirits
• nature
• uncertainty
• events
• wonder
• life
• vitality
• cosmologies
• western China
• witchcraft

It follows that to the Zande witchcraft is a normal event of everyday life, through which he may suffer at any hour of the day or night. (Charles Seligman (1937, xvii; emphasis added, Preface to the unabridged edition of E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande))

This collection deals with a number of forms and logics of the effects generated by environmental spirits and other ‘earth beings’ (De la Cadena 2015) in China’s borderlands. Taken together, the collection explores from different points of view how spirits constitute with humans an interactional order of radical uncertainty affecting the everyday life of a number of ethnic groups located in western Sichuan and Yunnan, namely Wa, Drung, Naxi, Premi – and in Shaanbei, a Han-majority region in north-central China. As a whole, this issue deals with different manifestations of what could be encompassed within the idea of an ‘eventology of nature’. While refusing to engage with the concept of animism or subscribing to totalising ‘cosmologies’, the authors prefer to extract the eventfulness of haphazard and uncertain interaction with spirits. The articles suggest that rather than relying on an ideal typification of ontologies of nature in Philippe Descola’s sense, or developing an alternative mode of identification encompassing China’s cosmologies – as Matthews (2017) and Feuchtwang (2017) recently proposed through the notion of ‘homologism’ – one should ethnographically accept that borderland societies discussed in this issue do not appear to present a unitary conception or ‘cosmology’ of what nature is. What is, however, notable is that nature provides the most fertile ground for activating different strategies of thought through ill-encountered events or prodigies. I take here inspiration from Daston and Park’s (2001) magnus opus on the history of wonder and the argument that the dichotomy of nature and supernature – (the latter term also equated with ‘spiritual’) may be just an oversimplification of early Western cosmologies. In medieval theologies, unusual phenomena or events such as miracles and witchcraft were instead subsumed into natural philosophies. Medieval theology developed a distinct ontological category, suspended between the mundane and the miraculous, called the ‘preternatural’ – from Aquinas’s phrase praeter naturae ordinem – constituted by unusual occurrences that required no suspension of God’s ordinary providence.

Analytically, one can heed to the ‘modes of religiosity’ involving the ‘spirit world’ by adopting either an internalist or an externalist approach. In the first case, a critical feature of religion would be ‘belief’ in, and communication with, ‘spiritual beings’ (cf. Tylor [1871] 2016, 383), ‘a supernatural’ or ‘transcendent’ other world. The emphasis is on the internal commitment and the propositional content of religiosity. Or, one could follow Needham’s (1972, 193) advice to abandon ‘belief’ from comparative epistemology because of its propositional existence and rather adopt an externalist approach, that is, to consider preternatural encounters and accidents as metapragmatic moments (Boltanski 2011) emerging out of interactional orders where actors are forced to confront an emerging situation of radical uncertainty.¹ What I propose to draw from the ethnographies presented in this collection is an eventology of the spirit world on China’s borderlands, an inquiry that – unlike history – does not study ‘events’ as such but the relation between what is deemed to be an event, a surprise, or a manifestation of wonder and what is deemed to be the innate, natural, ordinary, everyday life. An eventology would study ethnographically the ways in which different perceptual regimes extract and frame events out of the immanent and radical uncertainty of everyday life with environmental spirits. The following collection aims to provide an eventological voice that joins a resurgent chorus of works on animism by highlighting a distinctive image of the haphazard, the misfortunate, and the marvellous affecting the everyday interactional order between humans and spirit world in China’s borderlands.²

Events and Signs

The category of ‘event’ has been treated heterogeneously in anthropology: events may be considered as major historical happenings or contingencies domesticated by cultural logics and mythopraxis (Sahlins 1991) or conceptualised as perceptual encounters – images concealing actions and aesthetic forms to then be decomposed by a performative seeing (Strathern 1990). In the last decade, the category of the novel ‘event’ has emerged as particularly fruitful for exploring the rise and reassemblage of new subjectivities in times of conversion or radical change (Robbins 2004). These approaches attempt to trace the reconfigurations of subjectivities emerging out of historical ruptures, moral breakdowns, or transformations of the order of things. Recent theoretical discussion on the breakdowns of social life (cf. Zigon 2007) as revelations that seem to give insight into the social as such, or their normative frameworks, have recast ethnographic attention on how certain events might impinge on one’s psychology or modes of inhabiting the world, thus requiring some reappraisal of forms of life. Perceptual encounters could also be ‘events’, since things can claim or appropriate us just as we are intent on grasping or appropriating them. But rather than an analytics of events, I wish to focus on the ‘event-density’ of the regions examined. As Ardener ([1987] 2012) puts it, some social spaces are more event-rich than others, that is, in these regions more happenings are registered as events and more behaviours registered as actions. Event-richness is a feature of remote areas in particular, where all singularities of the social space are continually reinforced in response to the intruding world. As individuals and actions are defined by their social space but are also definers of the space, for Ardener, event-richness is both a defining feature and a consequence of the definition.

Musing on the proliferation of omens, wondrous signs, portents, auspicious, or inauspicious signs in the everyday life of Inner Asian societies, da Col and Humphrey (2012) have developed the notion of ‘quasi-event’: a happenstance that summons an endless trailing of causal connections aimed toward the future, the activation of attention, or an ‘excess of wonder’ (Eco 1992, 50) at the signs or signatures of the world.³ As Seligman’s epigraph reminds us, a classic domain of anthropological inquiry was born out of the study of ‘events’ and their relation toward the ordinary and the everyday. The ethnographies in this collection do not present ‘landscape’ or a ‘cosmology of nature’ as ordered totalities but describe a number of fragmented, interactional orders where spirits or other forces seem impossible to predict or reconcile. The originality of the collection is not to study ‘cosmology’ or ‘ontology’ as properties of things but to highlight how societies on China’s frontiers find it impossible to avoid misunderstandings of ‘nature’.

Taking ‘Nature’ Less Coherently

Two major changes affecting the formation of ‘images of nature’ in western China have been the 1998 national commercial logging ban in the upper Yangtze and Yellow river basins, and the 1999 Sloping Lands Conversion Project, which transformed agricultural lands into forest lands. This major decrease in primary resource extraction was followed in 1999 by the ‘Open up the West’ (Ch. xibu da kaifa) campaign, which aimed to reduce economic disparities with western provinces and promote political stability in areas predominated by non-Han minority nationalities (Ch. shaoshu minzu). The expansion included a number of infrastructural developments – road constructions especially – and a number of crucial ‘soft power’ (ruan shili) strategies fostered by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), through the development of multiple initiatives for natural conservation and ethnic tourism aimed toward the production of an ideal ‘ecological state’ (shengtai lizhou). In ethnically sensitive areas, the CCP learned that military repression might be replaced by the transformation of ethnic regions into themed parks for tourists and the appropriation and renaming of traditional religious representations (Kolas 2007). Rapidly, like the matsutake mushrooms and caterpillar fungus sold on the Japanese and foreign markets, indigenous ‘natures’ and minorities cultures (minzu wenhua) have become commodities in a global network connecting nature conservation with eco- and cultural tourism, which are to be managed according to a ‘scientific conception of development’ (kexue fazhan guan).

In one of its first guises, this project aimed to unfold the ways ethnic minorities and Han communities on Sino-Tibetan borders and rural China reacted to Western epistemologies that confront ‘spirits’ as beliefs rather than social agents and how nature, environmental policies, development, and globalisation influenced this vision. The collection was motivated by the realisation that previous literature (cf. Litzinger 2004; Hathaway 2013) was lacking in ethnographic depth on indigenous cosmologies. This literature’s was also largely restrained to accounts of the commoditisation of nature and minorities’ culture revitalisation as a technology of Han neoliberal governmentality (focusing on the production of discursive formations through which lineaments of identity or emergences of the ‘indigenous’ were made possible by the epistemic birth of the concept of ‘nature’). However, the hybridisation of the actors involved in this process rapidly increased its complexity. Dangers stemming from violations of spirits’ territorial agencies, or the depletion through mining of the ‘properties’ of mountain and chthonic spirit-masters, have been quarrelling with epistemologies of nature, political ecology, and the commoditisation and exploitation of landscape for the production of cultural authenticity. Political decentralisation has led local leaders in rural parts of China to achieve their legitimisation through nonauthoritarian means (Feuchtwang and Wang 2001) and partly encouraged by the CCP’s effort to construct a ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui) in dialogue with local cosmologies. In western China, ethnic cadres employ diviners and lamas, entertain personal relationships with prominent religious leaders, participate in rituals, and increase their references to folk cosmologies and idioms of reputation and authority to increase the effectiveness of their political strategies. Yet, the previous research on prime tourist and ecological regions, such as Yunnan, focused on the emergence of new subjectivities and neglected to illustrate the development of grassroots political theologies or the rise of cultural brokerage achieved through manipulative deployment of local cosmological knowledge. This argument emerges at the crossroads of two major processes: indigenous social movements and a serious consideration – beyond reducing them to putative notions of folk ‘beliefs’ – of bottom-up ethnographic studies of the ‘invisible’ world, animism, and nonhuman entities.

As Marshall Sahlins would put it (2017), the societies described in this collection are not responsible for ‘producing’ or even ‘conserving’ nature in the same way, as they do not create their own means of existence independently but are given them from the spirits. He writes,

In conventional terms, it could justifiably be said that the spirits own the means of production – were it not that the ‘spirits’ so-called are real-life metapersons who in effect are the primary means-cum-agents of production. (2017, 23)

These themes have been receiving major attention in other ethnographic contexts, such as Amazonia – through the work of Viveiros de Castro (2016) and Descola ([2005] 2013) – the Andes (De la Cadena 2015), and in Science and Technology Studies (especially via Stengers (2005) conceptions of ‘cosmopolitics’. Amidst this interdisciplinary chorus of discussions of animism and earth beings, anthropologists working in China’s borderlands have been strangely silent and have refrained from providing an original ‘ethnographic theory’.⁴ The contributors to this issue do not posit indigenous cosmologies of nature as homogenous and explicitly constructed theories, conveniently packaged for students’ appraisal. Rather, they argue that people do not picture their cultures as systematic wholes but combine fragmentary points of view and fuzzy knowledge, which manifests differently according to contingent language registers.

Thus, Stéphane Gros argues that nature conservationists may have a tendency to ‘de-nature’ the natures of other people for whom there is no ‘nature’ to preserve or protect, but diverse entities with which to relate, fight, or share. Gros talks about a ‘de-naturalisation process’, since

modernity has naturalised nature, making it a universal category, and that to challenge this understanding of the world as one socio-natural formation, nature needs to be de-naturalised. On the other hand, if we are to use ‘nature’ as a short-hand translation of the dominant scientific discourse, by ignoring ‘animist’ or ‘analogist’ ontologies (Descola [2005] 2013, 129–143, 201–231), can be said to have finally ‘de-natured’ the cosmos of peoples. (this issue)

Where Gros tries to reconcile the semantic field of ‘many natures’, Charles McKhann rapidly dispels the ‘green environmentalist’ soul, which is often attributed to the populations of northwest Yunnan. Drawing on the work of Terence Turner, McKhann argues that Naxi do not entertain any general idea of ‘nature’ and are not exempt from using the environment instrumentally, destroying natural entities in order to pursue individual and collective pragmatic interests. He writes,

Naxi do have their sacred groves – small stands of old trees, where rituals are performed and a strict ban on timber cutting is in force – but they have also decimated plenty of forests, and still today hunt any number of exotic animals and birds, with little regard for strong anti-hunting laws or endangered species acts.

The emerging conception of nature is far from being nurturing and appeasing. As McKhann notes, the relationship between humans and the Naxi chthonic snake-like spirits (shu) is not harmonious. Dongbas shamanic rituals aim to control not to celebrate the shu.

We are used to seeing state intervention as disruptive of the traditional ecological relations, but what happens when the state as cosmological God disappears as a source of certainty and stability? What Koen Wellens presents is the extraordinary account of the desire of Premi villagers to accommodate the uncertainties generated by the post-Mao demise of communist social security. The absence of party-state, which penetrated the lives of people through forest protection and birth control, resulted in the revitalisation of ritual practices and relations with spiritual entities. Wellens highlights the uncertain cosmology affecting the Premi villagers on the Sichuan-Yunnan border: ‘Humans can never feel that they have full control over their existence by just performing the right rituals at the exact time’ (Wellens 2017, 370). By focusing on the ‘effects’ of spirits and divine beings, Wellens shows that Premi are preoccupied with the spirits’ agencies on their well-being and welfare rather than accounting for a totalising and coherent cosmology. In this milieu, ‘belief’ is manifested as ‘trust’ in a fully inscrutable and retaliating intentionality, resilient to overlapping political cosmologies:

Traditionally, divine agency built on a strong authority over the forces of nature, which was maintained by an inscrutable intentionality. Since villagers were uncertain about how their necessary disturbances of forests, bodies of water or other elements of their natural surroundings might be offensive to divine and supernatural powers, they were at the mercy of these powers for re-establishing a balance with nature. At the end of the Mao period, the lwéjabu and other deities managed to demonstrate their agency once again by displaying an extreme vengefulness towards those who had questioned their authority or even their existence. (Wellens 2017, 368)

Wellens provides a gloss on Sahlins’ insightful point on spirits being the owners of relations of production. Remarking on the increased recording of transgressions against spiritual beings, he writes, ‘The killing of a deer, cutting of a tree, or polluting of a river is not a transgression against these entities in themselves but against the deities who own, cherish, or abide in them’ (Wellens 2017, 379). We could only hint in this introduction on whether ‘production’ should be the primordial ‘mode of relation’ (Descola [2005] 2013) and engagement with spirits rather than ‘protection’, ‘predation’, or ‘masterhood’. Costa and Fausto’s (2010) acute observation that native theories of alterity like ‘perspectivism’ are predicated on a ‘venatic ideology’ is crucial here. If this is true (and their argument on the role of master–pet relationship in Amazonia is indeed convincing), a ‘mode of relation’ would predate a ‘mode of identification’, to speak in Descolese. If we were to pose ‘hospitality’ as a dominant mode of relation in a number of societies examined in this collection, what would be the corresponding ‘mode of identification’? Fausto (2012, 29) has noted that the tendency of viewing South American lowlands as a society of equality and symmetry has neglected the relevance of the asymmetry introduced by Amazonia ‘masters’ and ‘owners’ of domain. In his inaugural Hocart lecture, Sahlins (2017) gives this idea a global resonance by arguing that even so-called egalitarian societies from Amazonia to Siberia and southeast Asia are subjected to the domination and even coercion of metapersons such as species-masters.

Gros and McKhann (2017) emphasise the overwhelming presence in these regions of spirit ‘masters’ over a particular domain (animals, plants, or sources of prosperity), which needs to be constantly propitiated to acquire ‘fortune’ and wealth. For example, Gros writes, ‘humans can prey on animals, but consent to hunt a wild animal must be obtained from the spirit called “master of game” (shā ăqkāng)’. Rather than examining human relations of conservation or production of ‘nature’, Gros takes spirits as the referents to examine several subsistence activities marked for nonexclusive and unstable modes of transaction with them, namely demand-sharing, exchange, predation, and debt and affecting the generation of fertility, and vital principle, including ideas of collective and personal fortune.

Gros and McKhann’s points resonate with other findings from Naxi and Tibetan communities in northwest Yunnan (cf. Yang 1998; da Col and Humphrey 2012) that present in these regions a widespread conception of the dwelling space materially cognised as a container of life-fortune constantly in danger of leaking, and give rise to countervailing pressures toward accumulation, storage, maintenance, or production of a fleeting vitality that has to be held in check continually through forms of material accumulation, ritual action, speech, and offerings to prickly land-masters – such as mountain-gods – that bestow life and prosperity to humans. The house is the prime place where the passage or penetration of the body of the other is enacted, where kinship manifests as a coercive property through commensality and the related danger of poisoning (Wellens, 2017). Within this milieu, how do persons ‘find their way around’ hosting situations where fear and anxiety potentially inhabit their primary fields of activity? How would a ‘landscape’ look like in a context of generalised mistrust, where spirit-masters are depicted as untrustworthy and unpredictable and guests/visitors as potentially parasitic or violating? One of the main strategies of vitality’s counter-leakage is the fabrication of worlds that ward against the loss of vitality or uncontrolled interpenetration of foreign bodies. These pairing worlds are part of a continuous ecosemiosis where life is articulated through different forms of material ‘bracketing’. Among the Tibetans, the most important items to exert this control are the quiver and the arrow of fortune (g.yang mda) and the fortune-vase (g.yang ‘bum) stored in a fortune-cabinet (g.yang sgam); among the Naxi, the wooden ladder and bridge held by the Naxi bride – thought to generate ‘roads’ (Naxi ri) of ‘flesh’ to hold patrilineal ‘bones’ together – are contained in the life-basket, which ensures the vitality of the house (McKhann 1989). The house and the material lifeworlds of container objects should not be approached as a symbolic arrangement but as relational ritual form condensing contradictory connotation (cf. Houseman and Severi 1998) – such as containing while leaking – for the generation of value and the enhancement of vitality within a condition of permeability and constant exposure to potentially harmful intrusions of ghosts and strangers. Hospitality and hosting (cf. McKhann, 2017; da Col and Humphrey 2012; Chau 2014) are the primary modes of relations of the societies described in this collection. Ritual performance is tantamount to a hosting ‘framing device’ where all productions of value can be ideally encompassed within acts of invitation, address, welcoming, guesthood, and separation.⁵ This equivalence of ritual to hospitality seems pervasive among several societies in southwest China, where any human act of place-holding or house-building entails a confrontation with an ‘owner’ or ‘master’ of the place. Ritual is framed along tropes of hospitality and personhood is masterhood, which is the capacity to engage with the domus of a potentially adverse other and either tame him or establish a contractual relation of hospitality.

Landscape as Witchcraft

In his well-known fourfold classification of ‘schemata of praxis’ through which different people apprehend the world around them, Descola ([2005] 2013, 226ff) describes ‘analogism’ as a ‘mode of identification’⁶ – particularly resonant in China and neighbouring regions – positing a world composed by multiplicity of essences, forms, and substances differentiated through fine distinctions and linked by a dense network of analogies so that it can be very difficult to distinguish where a being’s domain of interiority (mind, soul, intentionality) and physicality (form, body, substance) lies. This world is marked by anxious, obsessive, and inventive ways to track all resonances between what is within and without human life, given that nonhumans affect humans from inside (as forces of fate, for example) and from the outside, through the ill-encounters with unavoidable spirits.

The anxiety marking analogic modes of identification were widely noted in ethnographies of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. Tucci (1980, 172–173), for example, noted that

The Tibetan lives in a permanent state of anxious uneasiness; every physical or spiritual disturbance, each illness, every uncertain or threatening situation leads him to embark upon a feverish search for the cause of the event and the appropriate means to ward it off.

Hence, the life and world of a Tibetan man could be classified as either being trashipa (bkra shis pa) or tra mishipa (bkra mi shis pa), either auspicious or misfortunate (Tylor [1871] 1980, 176). Conceived evenementally as a transit (‘gro) punctuated by obstructions (bar chad) and interfering beings (bgegs), the Tibetan person is thought to have a series of encounters with favourable or ill-fated ‘coincidences’ (rten ‘brel yag/rten ‘brel yag ma byung). Where animism is the attribution of intentionality to any being, what we are encountering is an interest in animism as a life process of communication of symptoms. Curiously, a number of societies in southwest China (and other regions of Inner Asia) seem to offer ethnographic buoyancy to Tim Ingold’s idea that ‘life is an emergent property of a relational system in which everything is in perpetual flux and movement’ (Rival 2012, 130). Animism, for Ingold (2006) is rather animation, a flow of signs of intentionality in a network of intertwined relationships existing through an (phenomenological) original enmeshment between organic and nonorganic things and events. Contrary to Ingold’s relational animism, this enmeshment in southwestern China is rather asymmetrical and distressing.

Magnus Fiskesjö points how the Wa’s relation to the spirit worlds is peculiarly human-centred. For Fiskesjö (2017),

The Wa conception of a grim landscape devoid of help and benefit from any spirits or deities whatsoever may derive from the tenuous and challenging historical situation of the Wa, which has placed a primacy on the creative capability of the living themselves to fend for themselves in this world – the only world that matters.

 The egalitarian ethos of the Wa, according to Fiskesjö, results in the absence of belief in benevolent and transcendent gods, but a world of unknowable spirits that share the same human vices and harbour malignant feelings that can harm whoever crosses their path. The Wa, according to Fiskesjö, has erected ‘a general theory of misfortune in which human enmity exists alongside and also “enlists” the blind spirit forces which share our world, thus menacing us-the-living at every turn’ (this issue). The prophylactic device to counteract these spirit threats is sacrifice, which seems omnipresent in the life of the Wa to the point that every meal is considered to have a sacrificial component. Fiskesjö discusses the dramatic consequences of massive relocation affecting the Wa in the 2000s, when they removed their relationship with the spirit world, disrupting their sacrificial practices and leaving them defenceless, so to speak.

McKhann notes that offerings to the shu water spirits were made in the case of illness caused by soul-stealing, after transgressions of their domus and in the aftermath of natural disasters. Here, McKhann presents the event of a magnitude 7.0 earthquake occurring in Jade Dragon Mountain near Lijiang, in Yunnan province, where 200 people were killed and 14,000 were injured. Rumours were that Naxi failed to protect the mountain god Saddo from tourist defiling meadows and pine forests on the mountains thus failing to be good guests and custodians of the mountain. However, McKhann crucially adds, these ‘crimes against nature’ are endless; and so too is the need to placate the offended shu spirits.

Ultimately, the ‘landscape’ depicted by our contributors emerges as an unfathomable and germinating living entity, which Descola’s ([2005] 2013) animistic and analogic modes of identification could hardly exhaust. Far from being inert, this landscape is rather imbued with relentless agency. A source of signs and symptoms, landscape is an innate, self-manifesting set of vital nexuses and intentionalities that may be counted without being fully accounted for. In the cosmologies presented in this collection (especially Premi, Drung, and Naxi), we encounter a number of strategies for controlling the landscape. Two main motives emerge from the ethnographies presented: lists and sacrifices. The peoples in the regions under scrutiny make wide use of lengthy and seemingly inexhaustible lists – of sacred sites, abodes of spirits – appearing in all main ritual formulas and speeches preceding crucial rites of passage such as weddings (but also offered to chthonic spirits). Lists are technologies of subjugation, allowing humans to account for potentially overwhelming categories that are in principle countable, yet can hardly be exhausted. This radical uncertainty of the chthonic world is also the source of its potency. This leads us to a further claim of this introduction: in the societies presented in this collection, nature can act as witchcraft.

We can then take inspiration from Seligman’s epigraph on Azande’s witchcraft to question why the societies discussed in this collection present a propensity toward an ‘extractive economy’ of events, where nature is not only considered as a source of vitality and fortune but also radical uncertainty, and the lives of humans are marked by a series of unavoidable misfortunes or ‘queer’ arresting images (Chau, 2017). As Fiskesjö notes (this issue) in his description of afflictions among the Wa, these ‘cosmologies’ denote a surprisingly fragile human condition: ‘The general absence of beneficent deities or spirits is striking, and even seems unusual ethnographically’ (Fiskesjö 2017, 347).

Nonetheless, a tendency in anthropological inquiry has been to focus on specific classes of humans as a source of (voluntary or involuntary) misfortune and harm for their neighbour and fellows. I am not hereby advocating for a posthumanist approach to witchcraft. I rather approach ‘witchcraft’ as a symptomatology. Evans-Pritchard noted that witchcraft is not just an indigenous epistemology to fill the missing gap in a chain of causation, or account for contingencies and synchronicities but it has an organic existence (mangu’s black substance) and is Azande’s ‘natural philosophy’ (1937, 63). Belief in witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard writes, is consistent with a rational appreciation of nature. Witchcraft, Cohen (2007) argues, is nothing but a product of normal cognition employed in the categorisation of the social domain into natural-like types.

Even by using the best Occam’s razor, we cannot remove from any definition of witchcraft its elements of doubt, anonymity, invisibility, and radical uncertainty versus the regularities contained in any cosmology of nature. The societies examined have a limited personalisation of ‘witchcraft’, rather supernatural harm from humans is mostly ascribed to malicious gossip. In southwest China, environmental spirits and mountains are the main agents of ‘supernatural’ illnesses and misfortune and constitute an invisible foregrounding, a crucial sort of absent-yet-contingent presence in the social fabric. When illness, misfortune, or death emerges, nature reveals its symptomatology: it signals a moment of total uncertainty, of failure, and moral scrutiny. It raises one’s attention immediately by turning to the outside, transforming each man into a physician. Let us recall Seligman’s epigraph to this introduction: witchcraft is the Zande’s event of everyday life. Here, we have no quandary but the formula for the radical uncertainty affecting the societies under scrutiny: the actions that defile and offend the chthonic beings and other malevolent ghosts, spirits, or demons are so essential to everyday existence that it is simply futile to think one can avoid ill-matched encounters or events. As Fiskesjö writes (this issue), ‘The capricious menace of disease and death can only be managed or warded off to a limited extent’.

Witchcraft opens a crack for different strategies of thought, and in this sense, to say it with Severi (2013), acts as a philosophy without an ontology. Claude Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966, 224–25) noted that sacrifice voluntarily establishes a desired connection between two unrelated entities. Thus, where sacrifice belongs to the realm of continuity, witchcraft, one could argue, connects and establishes an undesired continuity. Witchcraft, one can argue, is nature’s dark play, hence its association – especially among the Premi, the Naxi, the Drung, but also among ethnic Tibetans – with ways of draining vitality or hacking the forces of luck and fortune (cf. da Col 2012). Whereas play is an action framed as ‘not really real’, witchcraft reframes ‘life’ and prosperity-producing activities as ‘dark play’, hacking all activities that normally require cooperative behaviour, egalitarian ethics, and normativity but that also are deemed to have a random component and are thus beyond human control. Thus, the quietly menacing wider transformations of rural Chinese society form the broader backdrop of the landscape where ordinary Shaanbei villagers would inadvertently turn into rumour mongerers when they conjure up images of ‘human organs in oil tank trucks’ as they shoot the breeze in complete nonchalance (Chau, 2017). We can see such ‘monstrous’ imageries as products of conceptual witchcraft as Chau invokes the image of the ‘conceptual clutch’, extending Severi’s (2015) insights on ‘mental artefacts’.

Marvels

Adam Yuet Chau’s concluding article might seem the odd one out in this collection because is not dealing with an ethnic minority, nor is it explicitly engaging with ‘nature’ and realms of rocks and forests but an extractive and recombinative approach to images and rumours among Shaanbei villagers in north-Central China, a Han-Majority region bordering Inner Mongolia’s Mongol groups and Hui Chinese Muslims. Chau proposes a peculiar methodology named extractology, an analytical mode that treats ‘moments and iterations of acts of extraction, both real and metaphorical, within a particular socio-cultural and historical moment and uncovers the cultural logics behind the forms in which these extractions take’. As humans extract riches from the earth, thus Shaanbei villagers seem particularly anxious to extract imagery of ‘queer facts’, out of everyday life, which include miraculous stories relating to deities and spirits, adventures, and quarrels. One could approach these stories through the lens of gossip and literature on rumours, but Chau focuses rather on the imagistic and marvellous aspect of these extractions, especially one concerning the secretive transport of human organs in oil tank trucks. He writes (this issue),

These ‘facts’ were ‘queer’ because the primary purpose of their telling was to provoke a sense of wonder (or at least interest and attention) in the audience: ‘Huh?’; ‘Oh yeah?’; ‘Is that so?!’; ‘How queer!’.⁷

Chau shows Shanbeei villagers try to extract ‘arresting images’ – wondrous image-events – to banter about to generate ‘red-hot sociality’ (Chau 2008). The ‘natural philosophy’ foregrounding Shaanbei villagers rumours is not a collection of magnificent meadows and snowy peaks but a Wunderkammer of fetuses, human organs, oil tanks, crocodiles’ hearts, mangoes, and multifarious vessels. According to Chau, focusing on bantering events ‘effectively points to the possibilities of uncovering native conceptual logics without evoking [a] “cosmology”’ (2017) or a cohesion of ordered beliefs. What matters is to employ signs (like the proliferation of the oil trucks) to construct events to banter about.

Conclusion. On Bracketing Nature

An ordinary outcome of the epistemic inquiries into Chinese cosmologies of nature involves the determination that minority x has no ‘real word’ of ‘nature’ (cf. Weller 2006). Thus, one could argue that the Mandarin ziran or the Tibetan rang byung cannot be translated as ‘nature’ or comply to the work of purification of western naturalism. ‘Nature’ is inserted in quotes and bracketed but never dismissed since the analytical conundrum is posited as one of the translations. Unless we understand concepts and their ‘equivocation’ (cf. Viveiros de Castro []2016), we cannot accommodate the destabilising epistemic import of alternative ontologies. Unless we determine an ontology – i.e. the systems of properties attributed to a being – we cannot conceive of the relational system bringing together those beings. This line of inquiry suffers from the language is isomorphic to the world and allegedly determines both what we know and what cannot ever accommodate from the other. Similarly, if knowledge of nature would amount to what fits in our lexicon, unless we apprehend a folk cosmology we would not comprehend the extent of traditional environmental knowledge and conservation. Thus, should we want the most authentic translation of ‘nature’, we should replace the Mandarin term ziran with tian, representing the divine order of heaven reflected in the ethical order of the material world, or qi, the vital and animating force permeating all things and beings, or replace the Tibetan rang byung with the configurations and economies of the vital bcud essence. This strategy is certainly commendable and exhilarating for the anthropologists eager to construct an account of a local cosmology or to play the theologian. It is, however, a second-order representation, privileging the order of concepts over the order of practice. There is no space in this introduction to address the larger implication of an interactional perspective for the study of China’s borderlands. This collection is a first attempt to highlight a number of ‘societies of events’ where subjectivities are reconfigured through an interactional order of misfortunes and dangerous relationships with an invisible cosmoeconomy of beings. Marvels and events, one could argue, are what humans need to find their nature.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the contributors to this special issue for their patience during the lengthy process leading to the publication of the collection. My warm gratitude goes to the editors of Anthropological Forum, especially Mitch Low and Nicholas Harney, for their patience, guidance, and support during the editorial process. This collection spins from an edited volume originally conceived with a geographer, Chris Coggins, and titled Tibetan Natures. Part of this project has been completed during a fellowship at the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona (Switzerland) led by Angela Hobart, whom I thank for the support to this research. Warm thanks to Luiz Costa, Michael Puett, and especially Adam Chau for their excellent comments and to Michelle Becket for her dedicated editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A comprehensive engagement with Boltanski’s approach by anthropologists is provided by the special section edited by Berthomé, Bonhomme, and Delaplace (2012).

2 See, for example, the collections by Brightman, Grotti, and Ulturgasheva (2014) on animism in Amazonia and Siberia; Århem and Sprenger (2015) on southeast Asia.

3 See also da Col (2007), where I began my reflection on the evenementality of nature among Dechen (Tib. Bde Chen; Ch. Deqin) Tibetans in northwest Yunnan.

4 But see the recent contributions by Matthews (2017) and Kipnis (2017).

5 Cf. Feuchtwang (2014) for an engagement for a paradigmatic distinction that Chau (2014) proposes between hospitality and hosting in China.

6 The other three modes of identification, according to Descola, are animism, totemism, and naturalism. In animism, beings are thought to share the same interiority and differ through distinguished physicalities. Totemism is defined as a symmetrical schema characterized by a double continuity between beings (such as humans and animals) of both interiorities and physicalities. In naturalism, a shared physicality of beings is associated with a contingent interiority affecting all beings, having similar bodies but different minds, souls, inner natures.

7 One could notice how these ‘queer sessions’ could resemble ‘bull sessions’ as referred to by Frankfurt (2009) in his On bullshit.