FENG SHUI, SELF-CARE, AND TECHNOLOGIES OF HOPE IN URBAN CHINA

Abstract

This thesis theorizes Feng Shui as an everyday technology of hope and self-care. I use Feng Shui to examine key issues concerning the making of everyday spaces of hope and care in a society undergoing rapid socio-cultural transformations. From a stigmatized “superstition” in the past to a fashionable middle-class practice, Feng Shui’s resurgence demonstrates the changing cultural legitimacy of alternative hope-making practices in the context of fast-paced economic growth and the increasing uncertainties of living in urban China. With the mediation of Feng Shui, both the material and immaterial elements borrowed from natural and lived environments can provide new spatial coordinates of a sense of being in control. Perceived by middle-class Chinese as a form of indigenous geography with a long history, Feng Shui brings light to specific logics and techniques of re-organizing spatial-social relations in one’s immediate environment as a culturally informed expert craft that can potentially transform lives.