THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Anna Iskra
Feeling Social Change: The Chinese Body-Mind- Spirit Milieu and the Production of Emotion
Friday 24 September 2021, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
This talk is an anthropological journey through the growing Body-Mind-Spirit (shen xin ling) networks in urban China. The shen xin ling milieu is a product of the history of transnational circulations into the Sinosphere of Euro-American pop-psychology and New Age spirituality that began in the late 1970s.
Central to this milieu are collective practices of emotional release that consist in dramatic expressions of anger, sadness, and anxiety, tied to personal problems such as professional advancement, or marital discord. Focusing on the case study of Shenzhen, this research weaves the popularization of such emotional management practices into the fabric of accelerating economic and social developments in the city, showcasing how they produce both apprehension and hope.
Anna Iskra is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. She is an anthropologist researching the intersections between the state, spiritual movements, and self-formation processes in China.