The three gestures are linking, centering, and gathering. They are part of a single process that constructs place and story, stories and schemes of fengshui, from the intimately familial to the political to the cosmogonic. The talk examines two scenes in post-Mao China, a northern scene of burial and a southern scene of reconstructing an ancestral hall. Both refer to an historic moment of retrieving a past and adjusting to an intrusion that is understood as modernity. Modernity can be visualised as linear and as vanishing-point perspective, and it is also experienced as a destructive abstraction of space, against which "tacit space" circumscribes a place of safer negotiations.

Stephan Feuchtwang, Professor in the Anthropology Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, is the author of Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor (2001). He is one of the few China scholars in the world who have written on fengshui, an ancient art or technology which tries to improve people's physical and spiritual life by aligning the buildings they live in and the graves their ancestors are buried in, to harmonize with and tap into the flow of the "primordial energy" or qi of the earth.

This event is cosponsored by the IHC East Asian Studies Research Focus Group, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, Department of Religious Studies Department, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.