"Emily Ng's multitextured ethnography complexifies how we think of China today. Cosmological, ghost-centered, psychiatric, and literary framings of the current ethos jostle and mix, obscure and illuminate a world of relationships and psyches that seemingly has experienced every danger and multiple transformations. A book of troubling juxtapositions and uncanny connections that frees the local to resonate with global preoccupations."--Arthur Kleinman, Harvard University " A Time of Lost Gods breaks new ground by reconsidering the long-vexed relation between mental health, spirit possession, and the state. With beautiful clarity we are brought into a contemporary Chinese world in which, despite the purificatory coercions of developmentalist state surveillance and violence, national history remains a revelatory ordeal that shatters any simple boundary between madness and divine intervention. A truly fascinating study."--Stuart Earle Strange, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Yale-NUS College "This stunning ethnography brings to life the cosmopolitical world of interior China haunted by the specter of Chairman Mao, the ghosts of market reform, and spirit mediums who conjure visions of a revolution. Uncompromising in its critical engagement with postsocialism and secularism, this is a timely and innovative intervention in understanding Chinese modernity.

"--Mei Zhan, author of Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames "This work is a brilliant reversal of the historicist orthodoxy that unabashedly names the present time as "postsocialist." It does so by patiently listening to spirit mediums who await Mao's return to complete his revolution. The author accesses such a dimension of historical critique by daringly bringing together the topics of religion and medical anthropology with that of state politics. This is a major contribution of a genre-defying kind."--Hoon Song, author of Incompossible North Korea "An extraordinary study of spirit mediums, madness, and the religious imaginary in post-Mao China. Based upon extensive ethnographic research, Ng beautifully explores the ways that mediums in Hexian understand Mao, the past, and the world to come. This is a tremendously powerful work that contributes dramatically to our understandings of the religions and cultural politics of China."--Michael Puett, Harvard University.