Thank you so much, Professor Lackner, for the generous introduction, and thank you so much

for coming, and thank you for inviting me to share my work with you.

This is a particularly nice way for me to revisit some of my Shanbei materials.

I did my fieldwork on the revival of popular religion

in rural China in the 1990s.

But since then, after the publication of my book

in 2006, I moved to other topics and sort of put down

my Shenbei materials.

But in recent, in the past two or three years,

I've revisited some of the Shenbei materials,

especially for a group project based in Paris

on religious masters.

So I'm working on a particular kind of master,

which is spirit mediums in Shanbei.

So that will bring me back to Shanbei

for field work this summer,

after an absence of almost 20 years.

So it's kind of very nice to be revisiting old materials.

And the divination materials I will be speaking about today,

I have not really analyzed very well in the past.

And this is a really good opportunity for me

to think through a lot of really interesting materials

that I couldn't incorporate into my monograph

on the Black Dragon King temple.

So I hope this will be of use to some of you,

and I really welcome your comments and criticisms

on my presentation.

Since so many of you specialize in the topic of

prognostication and divination,

whereas I'm only coming into this topic

as a sort of a newcomer.

So I thank you for this opportunity

to let me analyze some of the materials.

I have tried to do some kind of outreach

to people who are not necessarily working on Chinese religion,

to stop them from asking me and some of my colleagues,

how many religions are there in China?

I usually just will stop them and say,

no, that's not a good question.

You should ask instead,

how do Chinese people do religion, actually?

Because religions such as Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism

are actually conceptual fetishisms

that religious elites or politicians

are interested in constructing.

But in fact, when Chinese people do religion,

they are doing religion in a particular way.

They are doing religion in a particular modality.

So one of these five modalities,

or rather sometimes a combination of two or three.