Three Gestures In A Chinese Poetics Of Place
Stephan Feuchtwang

The three gestures are linking, centering, and gathering. They are part of a single process which constructs place and story. The process is evident to both observer and participant on several scales, from the intimately familial to the political to the cosmogonic. More from the observer’s stance, there is also the scale of historic change registered by these three gestures, and that will be the scale which frames my presentation. It starts from two scenes in post-Mao China, a northern scene of burial and a southern scene of reconstructing an ancestral hall. Both refer to an historic moment of retrieving a past and adjusting to an intrusion, understood as modernity. But I shall also turn back to another moment of historic reconstruction, that of the first Ming emperor, which is a previous drama of enclosure and external influence and intrusion by which I will be able to suggest an historic coordinate of change in the construction of story and place. Here I will refer to Marshall Sahlins’ cosmographies of civilization and the gathering of tribute and trade (1994, ‘Cosmologies of capitalism: the trans-pacific sector of "the world system"’ in Dirks, Eley and Ortner (eds) Culture/Power/History, Princeton University Press). Within this reminder of an irreversible historic pulse, I shall expound the three gestures which accommodate and fashion it.

In the Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard explored domestic space as a figure for the construction of being in the world. Chinese geomancy and death rituals start from the link between grave and domestic shrine in the construction of place and belonging. The figure I will present is both lineal and internalizing. It is a figure of narration in a landscape, a sacred landscape across which lines between centres are drawn. The centres are points for the gathering of influences from outside. It is at once an orientation to prior centres and centres on an encompassing scale, and a linear tracing of many centres. It is a constant adjustment to other homings and encompassments. On the grandest scale, the geomantic compass and Chinese cosmogony posit a single source of everything, but in the geomantic practice of centering there are spaces, openings for correlations between different kinds of influence. In social practice, the drawing of a sacred landscape of responsive gods and geomantic places is open to rivalry and spoiling between centres, a drawing of different landscapes of linked and encompassing centres, in which the largest and most powerful can become a destructive threat to the centricities of the less powerful. The gesture of gathering holds the promise of power and of rising in the scale of encompassment, but at the same time it requires opening to influences which could also harm. Many stories of geomancers hinge on the secret planting of such harm, and the usurping of others’ good influences.

Stories are constructions of a past, of ancestral line, of migration across a landscape between graves, homes and temples. Separation and longing across those distances are a constant theme of classical Chinese poetry and ordinary Chinese rites of parting and greeting. The breaking of those links of parting and greeting, and of dead from living (Yin from Yang) are tragedies of decline and destruction, which envisage a landscape haunted by ghosts. Openings and enclosures, multiple encompassments, rivalrous priorities in the gesture to unity and source (there was always something there before) are constant and unresolvable tensions (antinomies rather than contradictions) in the construction of place and history.

Stephan Feuchtwang is presently a professorial research associate in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. Since An Anthropological Analysis of Chinese Geomancy, he has published The Imperial Metaphor; Popular Religion in China, 1992 and a number of articles and chapters on Chinese religion and ritual which have added practical and historicised contexts to the spatial and textual model he presented in 1974.