Yang Shen (Cultural Anthropology; Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen)

Qian or lottery divination in Chinese temples is a convenient self-help technique to generate creative self-knowledge. My recent fieldwork in east China indicates that divination-seekers distinguish a lot from a poem. The most critical transformative moment occurs in the ritual action of seeking the lot, by which temple-goers performatively turn themselves into a divine communicator. Interpretive relationships are secondary; they happen between various actors who share the temple spaces contingently and are established case by case through a sequence of entrustment moves. The study develops a ritual attunement approach for re-considering generic participation in Buddhist temples in contemporary China. In a late socialist temple settings where specialized diviners are institutionally excluded, self-help lottery divination gives us a case to rethink the social constitution of religious knowledge.