For well over a century Chinese fengshui, or geomancy, has fascinated Western laymen and scholars. Today hundreds of popular manuals claim to use its principles in their advice on how people can increase their wealth, happiness and longevity. The focus of this academic study is on fengshui’s significance in China over the last 150 years, augmented by anthropological fieldwork in rural China. Eschewing Western intellectual preconceptions and penetrating the confused mass of old texts and divergent local practices, the author argues that fengshui serves as an alternative tradition of cosmological knowledge which is used to explain a range of everyday occurrences in rural areas such as disease, mental disorders, accidents and common mischief. Opposing the Chinese collectivist ethos and moralizing from above, fengshui represents an alternative vision of reality, while interpreting essential Chinese values in a way that sanctions selfish motivations and behaviour.
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