Emily Ng, "A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao" (U California Press, 2020)

Beyond the Margins: The University of California Press Podcast · Jun 22, 2021 · 58m

If China’s Mao era is seen by many as a time of great upheaval and chaos, there are also people and places for whom things appear quite different. Writing from one such place in A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (U California Press, 2020), Emily Ng foregrounds the perspective of a rural population in Henan province whose cosmological visions frame the Mao period as a time of relative calm, when a powerful sovereign brought order to both human and sprit realms.

Throughout this book, cosmological disturbance, ghosts and psychiatric disorder become lenses through…