Unthinking and Rethinking Categories: Madness, the Spiritual Realm, Gods, and Greed

00:00:06 Dr. Ng

Madness comes to take on a very different sense because it's madness that infects everybody. The sense that there's something off about our society today, there's something off about the way that people are living, the way people are relating to each other, and this is something to be changed collectively and not through individual modes and therapies.

00:00:33 Cathy

Hello everyone. This is Cathy, and you're listening to “Ever Though About?” created by undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. We hope to bring you exciting episodes about the diverse research undertaken around campus. Sit down with us as we chat with Penn professors about the work they've dedicated their lives to. In this episode, we explore research on anthropology with Professor Emily Ng. Dr. Emily Ng is an assistant professor of anthropology here at Penn, researching medical and psychological anthropology. She is interested in how psychic life can help rethink politics and has conducted ethnographic research in urban and rural China. She has trained as a therapist and published a book, “A Time of Lost Gods,” which discusses religious life in China after Mao. At Penn, she teaches courses in the ASAM and Anthropology Department, including "Madness and Mental Health in East Asian Worlds" and "Psyche, Trauma, and Culture". It's a pleasure to have you here today, Professor Ng.

00:01:25 Dr. Ng

Thank you so much for having me. 

00:01:27 Cathy

Just to get started. Could you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in East Asian cultures and more broadly in medical and psychological anthropology?

00:01:35 Dr. Ng

Yeah, so I found my way to anthropology a little bit sideways. Like many undergrads, I think I didn't know much about it, and I was interested, actually, in issues of mental health, of clinical psychology. And what happened was that I realized the way psychology tended to be taught is pretty quantitative these days, in the way it approaches the psyche. It was a little bit different than what I was looking for, so I got lucky and running into the field of anthropology and specifically psychological anthropology, which I noticed was dealing with issues that I was interested in in a way closer to what I had been trying to think about, which is to unthink some of the categories that were given and to think about mental health in non-modern Western settings as well, and to question the categories a bit.

00:02:30 Cathy

It started from a mental health interest that then became anthropological focused, I guess? 

00:02:35 Dr. Ng

Yeah, exactly. I think that it's the kind of how do we question what mental health is in and of itself? How do we question what's considered normal, categorized as normal or abnormal, and compare that across time and space and think about it across time and space, rather than trying to find one single universal answer to it?

00:02:55 Cathy

It's very interesting for sure! Could you maybe talk a little bit more about what made you ultimately decide to pursue your current career path as an ethnographer? What even is an ethnographer for those of us who don't know? 

00:03:04 Dr. Ng

Sure. Yeah, I think that it was, it was a very piece meal and wandering, I don't think that I had thought many years ago I would be an anthropologist or an ethnographer. Ethnography is just the genre of writing that anthropologists tend to take part in, and it often relies on kind of dense descriptions of a place and weaving in across people's stories and theories and concepts. There is a storied element to it, as well as a kind of thoughtful element to it. And it's kind of an in between genre, almost hard to define, but I think that being able to write in such a way within the field of anthropology also gave me a creative and intellectual outlet that I found to be just continuously generative as a way to, you know, think with myself and think with others. And writing as a way to be in conversation with other people's thoughts as well. So, I think in terms of the path, it was just following various trajectories, including undergoing clinical training, and then weaving back into anthropology and how to bring those fields together.

00:04:11 Cathy

Yeah, that's something I was really interested in as well, actually. We decided to interview you because my friend mentioned taking your class and that, you know, you didn't really have the most like “I always knew that I really want to do this” kind of conviction, right? How did your training as a therapist affect the way that you do your work now?

00:04:26 Dr. Ng

I think that it taught me to listen differently. It taught me to slow down and try to get a sense of where people are at, whatever that means, and that might include for an anthropologist particularly, but I think also for clinicians include taking an account of where they're at historically, contextually, geographically, politically. Like, what are they brought into in the world? What are they born into? How are their families situated in the world? What do they bring into a little room? that's otherwise some feel somewhat decontextualized, but they bring a whole world with them. So, what is that world? and how to listen for it in the voice of one person and in the voice of every single person? In fact, many voices are carried. It's not just that- Does that make sense? It's not just that particular person in their life, but many lives of those who brought them into the world, those that they're surrounded by. So, I think that bringing together the clinic and something like anthropology allows for different styles of what we might be listening for, and what questions we ask, and how we try to relate to people. I think another aspect of the clinic is learning how important trust can be. And so, what it means to create that kind of mutuality when you're sitting with someone.

00:05:52 Cathy

And that's part of your work, right? To sit down with people and talk to them.

00:05:54 Dr. Ng

Yeah, that's yeah.

00:05:56 Cathy

All right, can you tell us a little bit more about your work? On your biography page you mentioned that you study madness, subjectivity, religion, and cosmic politics. And these are words that are kind of big ideas. So, could you define them and how did you come to focus on these topics?

00:06:10 Dr. Ng

Yeah, definitely. I think that they're words that are really hard to define, and I tend to be a person that doesn't lean toward defining things in a positive sense, like setting out a definition. And so, I often think of myself in the way I relate to this work, as almost a work of the negative, like sculpting. So, let's say there are existing terms out there that certain people use in certain ways, in a discipline or on popular media or in whatever other spaces. So, to take a look rather at how people use these terms and what might be the problems or limits, or how do the terms kind of limit how we imagine these things, and then how do we think our way out of them or sideways from them? And so, I think a lot of my work involves how to rethink terms, but not necessarily how to define them as if one definition could capture that thing better. This question reminds me of a philosophy teacher I had a long time ago who I asked, “what is creativity?” and he said: You know, a lot of times people these days think that creativity means making something out of nothing, and that's a comment, you know, artists create something out of their minds or whatnot, and it's an expression almost out of nowhere. He sort of turned this around, he said: “Creativity, instead, can be thought of as what we can make within the constraints we're given and through the constraints that we're given.” And I think this was a really different way of thinking about creativity than I had heard before. And so, in a way, what it means to be intellectually creative, or at least experience the sensation of intellectual creativity could also be, what does it mean to rethink something given the constraints of the terms that are available at the moment that one is thinking about these things? So, I can try to give an example through the terms that you've asked about, maybe- you look like you have a thought.

00:08:15 Cathy

I’m trying to figure out the way of example chipping away at the way that we currently think about these terms and kind of get up underneath that. When I saw “madness” and like a psychologist who studies people who go crazy, like, what does it mean to be mad? And then I looked at some of your published works and none of it has to do with like, mental disease, it's all more like madness after the Cultural Revolution in China and I was like, how, how does that, what is, what does madness mean in that context? 

00:08:42 Dr. Ng

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think this is a good example of that kind of term where I take it from the critical theorist Michel Foucault. And so, he essentially writes a kind of long critical account of what is the history of madness. And he keeps the term madness open. He precisely doesn't define it in any strong way, and instead he's sort of digging through archives and historical accounts looking for almost traces of what these days in the kind of modern western epistemology might be deemed mental illness or mental disorder, psychopathology. And he says if we look historically into different types of accounts and archives, we see that the mad person and I’m putting air quotes here, “the mad person" exists in very different ways with the relation to society, and wasn't always considered someone that needed to be locked up, hospitalized, treated with pharmaceuticals, etc. There were different ways that people engage with madness and with madness as a very broad category of different ways of being considered off or different from the rest somehow, but not always in a negative sense, sometimes in a sacred sense. And he traces us in very different kinds of contexts within European history. So basically, to just evoke something like madness today creates a kind of counterpoint to the idea of mental health and mental illness, which I, think is much more common as ways of thinking about this, at least with students today. And I think madness just creates a kind of counter concept that are there limits to the way that we think about mental health today within the boundaries of psychiatry and psychology. I'd like to bring it back to what you were asking. It's true that what I ended up writing about in the context of China started with this question of madness in the sense of mental health. But because I went to sites beyond the hospital, I also went did the interviews, but I went to temples and home altars of spirit mediums and other kinds of spaces. I started trying to understand the way that spirit mediums, which are basically people who channel deities and gods and ghosts and other entities that other people can't see. So basically, spirit mediums who spoke about madness in the present and psychiatric disorders in the present as a very almost deep twisted sense of how the spiritual realm has gone in the contemporary. So, the sense that the spirit world has itself gotten mad, and that's why humans today are also a bit mad, and they focus on the question of being mad with greed related in particular to the rise of the market economy after the end of Mao's life. And so, the kind of shift from more socialist economies and ways of living toward more of what people call post-socialist or more market oriented, privatized ways of living. So, madness like your right, comes to take on a very different sense because it's the sense of madness infects everybody. It's not the sense of madness, as in here's one particular person who is different from the other people. It's a sense that there's something off about our society today. There's something off about the way that people are living, the way people are relating to each other, and this is something to be changed collectively and not through individual modes and therapies.

00:12:20 Cathy

You mentioned also on the topic of society how if there is this kind of unsettled, like something is off about the way the society is functioning right now. How does your work as an anthropologist help answer questions about that? And what is the difference in approach that a sociologist, for example, might take towards these kinds of questions?

00:12:38 Dr. Ng

One answer would be they don't necessarily have to be different. It really depends. There are very different kinds of sociologists, just as there are very many different kinds of anthropologists. Essentially, I think sociology developed historically in the modern West as a social science that studies the West itself, just to kind of simplify. And anthropology in its history grew out of colonial histories in which people of the "West" in quotes again, it's if they're it's very hard to define what the limits of that are, but essentially, particularly countries that were participating in colonial enterprises and faraway places, feeling like they needed a study in order to understand the lands that they were engaging with---whether that was trade or involving forms of political and military violence and overthrow. It's a question of how we understand those people? So, it's a very fraught history in the discipline, and there's also a kind of openness to it. There is a very violent history in the sense of what does it means to try to understand people far away whose lives and worlds that one is trying to extract resources from in a very uneven way. What does it mean? What does that form of knowledge mean? And what are the implications of creating that kind of knowledge? And at the same time there you know, if you read the accounts of early anthropologists, which also included missionaries who were going to evangelize and this kind of question of what it is to understand the other, I think also goes beyond just the kind of broader context of domination and the sense of conversion. But this question of how do we understand something radically, seemingly radically different than what we're used to? And so, sociology, I think, has some parallel questions but has historically had been kind of posed to different. And I think these days sociology might lean a little bit more on quantitative methods, whereas anthropology, cultural anthropology, at least and medical anthropology somewhat leans toward a bit more humanistic approach, but not necessarily.

00:15:00 Cathy

I'm just curious also about, I read recently in one of my classes about missionaries and their work and how in trying to spread their religion they ended up spreading ideas like Western science and you know the idea that Western science is the right science. It's the, you know, it's modern, it's more effective, right and how that ended up you know, creating the divide between Western science and non-western science and I was wondering if there's any kind of parallel between that and the work that you do. Is there ever any concern that the work that you're doing is rather than unifying is actually creating these divides and what are the implications of the knowledge that you're generating? 

00:15:31 Dr. Ng

Yeah, that's a really, really great question. I think that that is a question and problem that haunts anthropology continuously. And will, you know, because it's born out of that history. And I think that's precisely the work of trying to unthink and rethink categories. I think that's not the only work that needs to be done. But it's one of the types of work that I think precisely trying to acknowledge this history and trying to imagine what would knowledge mean if that wasn't the aim? And I think it's an open question. And I think in the earlier definition part of the question, I think precisely something like religion is often taken for granted. Let's say historically, anthropologists and missionary-dash-ethnographers have gone to different places and said, well, what are the three religions of this place, and tried to delineate and separate them. And the long term effects not necessarily related to the conscious intentions of the first, you know, people who are trying to figure this out, but the effects of this really came pretty dramatic in certain places. Like if we take the case of China. Essentially, missionary definitions of what counts as religion versus what counts as quote-unquote "superstition", which was also a Christian category for those who weren't practicing properly. So, administrators went and tried to find what is then a proper religion and what is a superstition, which were categories that didn't exist there before. And so that got coded into modern law, which meant that certain practices were supported by the state, and other practices were banned, other sites were destroyed, certain temples were, whether a temple was kept or destroyed really depends on these definitions that were inherited from other places. And so, I think that the implications of categories and definitions can become pretty strong in moments where a state or a place is trying to struggle to find its place in the world in encounter with these European categories. And so, though some people's answer is to let go of the discipline, part way with the discipline as such because there's something, there's something so deep in the discipline that it can't be rescued. Other people have a very different response in doing something different. Changing anthropology from within.

00:18:00 Cathy

And clearly you did not abandon the study...

00:18:03 Dr. Ng

Not yet!

00:18:04 Cathy

Not yet, oh! Next, let's talk about your book. You published a book called "A Time of Lost Gods", which, as you mentioned you did research in temples, hospitals, and home altars. So, your book draws on research from these areas, what's it like doing work in these areas and how do you approach it respectfully and also how do you get information from these sources?

00:18:25 Dr. Ng

That's an interesting pairing of what is it to be respectful and what is it to get information? And I think this is precisely one of the sources of tension, because there's something very political or powerful or power related about getting information. In different contexts, there are different senses of why someone would come from afar and try to get information. I think in the context of the temples and the home altars, there was really a sense by the mediums that because the present is spiritually corrupt in a sense, and corrupt in specific manner that is extremely greedy, whether it's greedy for wealth, greedy for cash, greedy for other things. If someone shows up and is greedy, let's say for information, there's a kind of suspicion. What is the purpose of that curiosity and what's the purpose of that knowledge? And I don't think it's assumed that the desire or curiosity for knowledge or information is assumed to be neutral at all, whereas I think in a space like the university we might be encouraged to say, be more curious. Be curious about everything, right knowledge is always valued positively somehow, but I think in places like that who have faced really difficult histories of war and famine and occupation when someone from outside comes in to ask about something, there's a question of what for? Locally, I think there's a sense of those who come from afar to ask for information is either related to the state or real estate developers, right, who might take over your land. I think it takes a lot of time to give people a sense of who you are, and why you're interested in the things that you're interested in. And ultimately, it's up to them what they want to share and not share. And I think what I learned in spaces like the temple was that asking questions is just not the right mode, because it's not something you ask about. It's something that you be present to just as other people are there for. Essentially, people wait at the temple amid ritual to bump into those who are possessed by similarly hearted deities. In a sense, this is the only premise in which knowledge can be asked for.

00:20:43 Cathy

As a cultural anthropologist, you're saying you don't ask, you don't go up to somebody and say, you know, what do you think about XYZ? You actually participate in the ritual, or do you just observe and like...

00:20:54 Dr. Ng

I think it can be both. There are a lot of people observing. And I think there's an it's an open question, what participation is because these are very... They're not rituals in the way that we imagine is something where everybody knows the same steps and you're going through a ritual. They're rituals in the sense that they invoke the other world and there are extremely potent symbolic elements that people are using, but they're extremely open-ended. So, a lot of the time many people are gathered around and who's being possessed or who is being affected, or who's participating in what ways it is at every moment is not necessarily so obvious. It doesn't mean that you have to be the set person at the center of it all to be participating, and so even being there to what you know, an outsider would see as mere observation might also mean participation in a different sense.

00:21:42 Cathy

Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah. Do you talk a little bit about how other cultural anthropologists find their sources and how else cultural anthropologists do their research?

00:21:52 Dr. Ng

Sure. First of all, anthropology in the US is called what people call four-field. So, there's archaeology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology and cultural anthropology. So, all of those have somewhat different or quite different methodologies. Within cultural anthropology, there are legal anthropologists who really focus on the law and comparative studies of law and how laws actually practice locally and what's written versus what's practiced, for instance. There are anthropologists of food who focus on food practices across places. There are psychological anthropologists, like, you know-

00:22:30 Cathy

Is that sort of what you do?

00:22:31 Dr. Ng

Yeah, I would consider myself to be influenced by psychological anthropology. There is a kind of tendency toward these questions of how people are both collective and singular at the same time. 

00:22:40 Cathy

One last question before we wrap it up is what still excites you about medical / psychological / biological anthropology, which I guess you do all of those? And what do you consider are some of the future directions of this field?

00:22:53 Dr. Ng

I think it's always changing. Medical anthropology, psychological anthropology. I think what will be exciting is what students bring to it. Honestly, I think it's every generation of students bring their own questions to it. I think that what's important for every moment will keep changing. I know that's an extremely vague answer, but I think there's no particular, I think topically people are doing such interesting work in so many different directions. And I think what's exciting is that that will change, will shift with the times.

00:23:26 Cathy

What is most exciting will change?

00:23:28 Dr. Ng

I think that's something that's really, exciting about fields like anthropology or East Asian studies or Asian American studies, is that students really get to focus on questions that are important to them and create something that might not have existed quite like that before like that before, drawing on their own personal histories and their own influences, their own interests, their own families, their own communities. And something else that's really wonderful in the Anthropology department is this focus on environment as well as questions of the Anthropocene and what's going on with climate change right now. So that's another direction that medical anthropology has taken. There's also a wonderful center called the Center for Experimental Ethnography, where people are doing works with film and sound and different modalities and how that can speak to decolonizing anthropology through the senses. They also, students are really, really lucky to have an amazing Asian American studies program at Penn, which is really unique and really a growing, rapidly growing field. So that's something to really take advantage of if people are here, take some courses and see what you learn.

00:24:49 Cathy

Thank you for bringing up Penn students. So on that topic, how can Penn students who are interested in anthropological research get involved?

00:24:54 Dr. Ng

Start with some classes!

00:24:56 Cathy

Start with some classes! Any recommendations?

00:24:58 Dr. Ng

There's so many great classes, I think just taking a look, there are wonderful medical anthropology courses that we have, and I think they're always going to be ways to get involved. People just have to kind of ask around. Ask your instructor, ask your TA, ask them how they got into their work, ask the undergraduate advisors what kind of opportunities there are. I think Penn is pretty well resourced for things, and it's possible to- I think what's important for students to hear is that if they have a question that they feel like is hard to answer with what exists, I think anthropology is a nice space to really creatively find new ways to answer some questions that students might have and to be in conversation with their instructors, their TA's, whoever their fellow anthropologists, to think about what would be a new way to answer this question. And I think that that's the space anthropology has to offer.

00:26:01 Cathy

And with that, I'd just like to thank you one more time for coming in. Thank you so much for sharing what you had to say and for being here today.

00:26:09 Dr. Ng

Thank you so much.