THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Zheng LIU
Concealment and secrecy: the transmission of Yijing and divination techniques in contemporary China
Friday 17 January 2025, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
This research examines the resilience and vitality of Chinese divination in Mainland China. Condemned as superstitions in China since the early 20th century, and severely repressed during the Cultural Revolution, divinatory knowledge and practices - particularly around the philosophical and divinatory classic of Yijing - have enjoyed a remarkable boom since the early 1980s. Over the past decade, however, condemnation has once again become more virulent, affecting a previously booming divination market as well as the status and work of professional specialists. Against this backdrop, practitioners put in place various strategies of concealment, notably based on a distinction between philosophical texts (highlighted) and practices (concealed). This study is based on fieldwork among communities of students, often from business backgrounds, who attend collective divination courses with masters in Shenzhen. Drawing on the concept of "community of practice" and theories of "secrecy", this research explores how knowledge and practices are structured, ordered and controlled, in a context where strategies of concealment induced by the political context are articulated with a structural secret dimension traditionally associated with the transmission of esoteric knowledge such as divination. Taking the perspective of both teachers and students, the aim is to understand how "secret" knowledge is constructed and maintained within the "Yijing community", and how compartmentalized knowledge contributes to structure and hierarchize this type of community.
Zheng Liu is a third-year PhD student at Inalco. Her research interests include divination and prognostication in China, early Chinese systems of thought, and Yijing and related texts. Zheng Liu's doctoral project, Concealment and Secrecy: the Transmission of Yijing and Divination Techniques in Contemporary China, was funded by RENSEP.