Suchergebnisse

Socialist governance and popular sovereignty require state administration of care. In the People's Republic of China (PRC) today, such state care is provided in the form of public services and in the guarantee of social security. Ideally, different levels of government should foster relations of care in local communities and remain responsive to "the people." Local self-government, relations of mutual support and ritual communities, however, reveal the deficits of state care. Much like general philosophies of care, such local ethics of care propose universal benchmarks against which social practice can be measured. This article outlines the main contours of state care in the post-Mao Zedong PRC, and contrasts its findings with empirical research on public services, social security and ritual responsiveness. Mutual help, neighbourhood communities and ritual practice, in particular, provide alternative models of care. As such, they can be extended and universalized, and offer possibilities for a critique of care. (China Q/GIGA)

What kind of knowledge is created through systems of divination? I will contend that the form of such knowledge is a type of pattern recognition—patterns that emerge in reference to a cosmology and by means of a stock of images. Divination creates knowledge of a moment and its circumstances. Reference to a sense of the encompassing world raises the issue of how any one means of divination and its outcomes is bound historically to a civilization. That will be my secondary topic of reflection. I will conclude with a discussion of worlds, recent history, speculation, and the ontology of divination in relation to the experience of uncertainty in which the object of knowledge is the momentary and its circumstances.