Received: 16 February 2021 Accepted: 10 June 2022

DOI: 10.1111/etho.12366

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Decolonizing affect: Resonance as an ethnographic

technique

Anna Iskra

Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen,

Copenhagen, Denmark Abstract
This article is a call to decolonize affect theory through deep-
Corresspondence ening its engagement with fieldwork conducted in the global
Anna Iskra, Faculty of Humanities, the University of
South. It examines the native Chinese concept of ganying, or
Copenhagen, Denmark
Email: annaiskra@hum.ku.dk resonance, as an ethnographic technique by engaging with
the author’s fieldwork experiences among Body Mind Spirit
Funding information practitioners in China. Participating in ganying captures the
Research Grants Council, University Grants formation of affective atmospheres through the ethnogra-
Committee, Grant/Award Number: HKU
C705218GF pher’s involvement in their co-creation. Where attunement
functions as a normative ideal, resonance becomes a tech-
nique of embodying responsiveness and cultivating intimacy
that supports efforts to narrativize affect. Examining the
genealogy of ganying and its ethnographic applications reveals
this concept’s alignment with influential theorizations that
in recent decades have been constructed as “new” and
“paradigm shifting” contributions to the affective turn. It
cautions against the risks of erasure resulting from such
Eurocentric negligence of kindred notions circulated in
scholarly and vernacular contexts outside of the global
North.

KEYWORDS
affect, resonance, attunement, ganying

In The Anti-Witch, France’s leading anthropologist Jeanne Favret-Saada (2015) builds on decades of study-
ing witchcraft in the Mayenne countryside to outline a project of anthropology of therapy. She recounts
how her engagement in dewitching seances made her reconsider the notion of affect. Implicitly echoing
the language of a larger turn to affect in the discipline, Favret-Saada rejects the “oxymoronic” task of par-
ticipant observation, based on the assumption that it produces a false sense of empathy, conceptualized as
grasping other people’s affective states. Instead, she proposes that

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130 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/etho Ethos. 2023;51:130–145.

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DECOLONIZING AFFECT 131

one must occupy these positions rather than merely imagine them, for the simple reason
that what occurs within them is literally unimaginable—at least for an ethnographer used to
working on representations. When we are in such a position, we are bombarded with specific
“intensities” (let us call them affects) that generally refuse expression. This position and the
intensities that come with it must therefore be experienced: it is the only way to address them.
(Favret-Saada 2015, 104)

This article discusses the Chinese concept of ganying, or resonance, as an ethnographic technique to
capture how affective atmospheres are co-created in spaces where attunement functions as a normative
ideal. The vignettes discussed here come from the fieldwork among mainland Chinese practitioners of
Body Mind Spirit (shen xin ling), historically known as New Age, who occupy therapeutic spaces akin to
Favret-Saada’s bewitched and dewitchers. Implicit in the affective atmospheres of Body Mind Spirit semi-
nars are the dynamics of ganying that consist in cultivating embodied responsiveness to the world that is key
to producing affective atmospheres characterized by shared intention towards attunement. The choice of
the term “technique” rather than “method” is deliberate. Like geographer Derek McCormack (2015, 92), I
appreciate the “light precision” of this term and how it implies a form of doing through “skillful practice”
rather than a set of “methodological protocols.” In this sense, technique “seems to better complement the
ethos and enactment of non-representational styles of thinking as a kind of ‘weak theory in an unfinished
world’.”
Examining ganying/resonance as an ethnographic technique is a response to the growing body of schol-
arly works that critique the hegemonic genealogies of the affective turn. Social anthropologist Yael Navaro
(2009) describes these dynamics as a form of “ruination” that associates innovation in knowledge pro-
duction with erasing approaches that do not neatly fit into the new paradigm; these dynamics displace
and misrecognize other(ized) voices within and outside academia. While a growing number of feminist
works critique the hegemonic patrilinies of the affective turn, little attention has been paid to assessing
new affect theory’s historical embedment in concepts that emerged in the global North and the resulting
efforts to decolonize affect. Even though affect theory is mobilized as theoretical framework for a plethora
of anthropological projects based in the global South, most of them rely on Euro-American theoretical
toolboxes. This article bridges ethnographic method and theory by calling for deeper engagement with
fieldwork conducted in the global South to bring out new theoretical approaches that challenge, enrich,
and transform the Euro-American body of affect theory.
Ganying is an ancient Chinese concept derived from the study of acoustics that was later incorporated
into cosmological theories and applied in a plethora of fields including religion, government, and medicine.
It is a compound word: gan meaning “stimulate” or “affect,” and ying signifying “respond.” However, gany-
ing does not point to a simple stimulus-response mechanism. Instead, it connotes “a resonating feedback
loop based on the intrinsic affinity between all things in a sympathetic universe” (Sundararajan 2015, 97).
In the social realm, affectivity governed by ganying is other-centered, as it prioritizes cultivating the ability
to respond (ying) to impact (gan) from others, making nurturing responsiveness central for the self’s “being
in the world.” This, in turn, translates to co-producing sociality.
As an ethnographic technique, affective resonance is a modality of knowing through feeling (Pritzker
2014). Engaging in ganying allows one to grasp how affective atmospheres emerge as systems of inter-
personal resonances in which the quality of being-in-resonance is not a sum of individual affective states
but a result of dynamic chains of impact and response. Doing ethnography through the lens of ganying
challenges the important role of empathy and sympathy in affect theory, highlighting their genealogies as
colonial constructs that are otherwise universalized and used to apprehend otherized feelings (Yao 2021).
This article first situates the discussion of resonance as an ethnographic technique within scholarly calls
to decolonize affect and question the “whiteness” of mainstream genealogies of affect theory. Next, it
offers a genealogy of ganying that highlights how ganying resonates with a Euro-American conceptualization
of affect that crystalizes at the intersections of psychology, philosophy, and physics. The central section,
“Resonating with Chinese New Agers,” discusses the practical dimensions of ganying as an ethnographic
technique. The main benefits are twofold. First, engaging in affective resonances in the field provides
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132 ETHOS

insights into the dynamic architecture of affective atmospheres, highlighting the social importance of
responsiveness to others. Second, it functions as a technique of intimacy that facilitates the joint effort of
the ethnographer and other people in the field to narrativize shared experiences of co-producing sociality
through affective resonances. I conclude by locating ganying as part of a subaltern history of ideas that are
too often framed as “new” in hegemonic scholarly discourses despite being well-articulated and rehearsed
outside of the global North.

DECOLONIZING AFFECT

Since the mid-1990s, the affective turn in the humanities has intensified scholarly interest in embodied
action rather than talk and positioned affect as an uncircumscribed force that transcends individual bodies
and connects humans through its transpersonal capacity to affect and be affected (Clough and Halley
2007; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Sedgwick 2003). Within this orientation, the burgeoning literature on the
concept of atmosphere incorporates nonhumans, including objects commonly conceived of as inanimate,
in analyses that underscore the in-betweenness and unboundedness of affective circulations (Anderson
2009; Ash 2013; Stewart 2011. Scholars debate the paradigm shift resulting from this renewed interest in
affect that “return[s] critical theory and cultural criticism to bodily matter, which had been treated in terms
of various constructionisms under the influence of poststructuralism and deconstruction” (Clough 2010,
206).
What is striking about this transdisciplinary field of inquiry is the repetitiveness of scholarly genealo-
gies that academics working with affect tend to invoke. These genealogies are usually traced twofold.
One trajectory builds on the work of psychoanalyst Silvan Tomkins’s concept of emotional contagion and
theorizations of affect as the primary motivational system (Frank and Wilson 2020; Sedgwick and Frank
1995). The second trajectory derives inspiration from Euro-American anti-Enlightenment philosophical
traditions, with works by Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari regarded as foundational
(Anderson and Harrison 2016; Massumi 2002; Thrift 2008).
In recent years, feminist scholars have drawn attention to alternative sources for theorizing affect, point-
ing out that the emphasis on “newness” of the current affective turn risks muting earlier scholarly accounts
of feeling (Boler 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016; Fischer 2016). They trace alternative feminist genealogies
that centralize gender in the accounts of people’s affective lives and critique the emotion-reason dichotomy
(Hemmings 2005). Some scholars conceive of the omission of feminist works in the hegemonic genealo-
gies of the affective turn as a deliberate strategy to differentiate the new (biological, embodied, material)
from the old (constructivist, linguistic, disembodied) and depoliticize affects (Ahmed 2008; Fischer 2016).
As the feminist voices critiquing the oft-referenced patriliny of the affective turn and its con-
structed “newness” become more widely heard, little attention has been paid to evaluating new affect
theory’s historical embedment in concepts that emerged in the global North. While anthropology
boasts a long history of searching for local, distinct terms for affect and emotions (e.g., Myers [1986]
1991; Rosaldo 1980), these ontologies of feeling, sometimes presented as radically alter (Holbraad
2012), have nevertheless been approached with epistemological tools that emerged in the context of
Euro-American academia. Today, anthropologists conducting fieldwork in the global South increas-
ingly engage with affect theory (e.g., Rudnyckyj 2010; Salazar Parreñas 2012; White 2022). These
projects echo earlier scholarly attempts to theorize subaltern feeling by relying on predominately Western
toolboxes.
Navaro’s (2017) recent call to “diversify affect” arises from the growing frustration with the circular
evoking of well-rehearsed Western genealogies of affect within scholarly communities. It echoes a ques-
tion explored in 2005–2006 by an interdisciplinary research team at the University of British Columbia,
Canada: “To what extent can we think meaningfully about affect outside the concepts and terms of
European psychoanalysis?” (Gunev 2009, 15). A contributor to these discussions, Sneja Gunew (2009,
15) calls for “decolonizing affect,” observing that “affect is typically equated with intensities, the halo
effects surrounding moods or emotions. But intensities too have their disciplinary regimes and appropriate
displays.”
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DECOLONIZING AFFECT 133

In Disaffected, literary scholar Xine Yao (2021) skillfully examines claims to universality embedded in
affective regimes by tracing how in the United States sympathy became a fundamental mode for appre-
hending affects and deeming them legitimate in the nineteenth century, positioning whiteness and “white”
feeling regimes as hegemonic. Yao’s work demonstrates that critiques of Euro-American genealogies of
affect theory should consider that “affect’s deracinated universality is part of its appeal as a critical turn”
(5). Challenging the “whiteness” of affect studies resonates with works produced by postcolonial schol-
ars like Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) who called to “provincialize Europe” by destabilizing the universalist
claims situated at the heart of European “tradition.” It is also part of the larger initiative to decolonialize
anthropological theory by giving space for not only Native voices but also Native theory (Rosa and Bonilla
2017). This project is not only about increasing representation or provincializing the global North. It also
unsettles hierarchies of knowledge production and promotes epistemic justice (Santos 2014). Creating res-
onances between the Euro-American affective turn and theory born in the global South is a step in this
direction.

A CROSS-CULTURAL GENEALOGY: GANYING/RESONANCE

On a hot afternoon I found myself in a room with 50 other participants of a four-day holistic spirituality
seminar organized in a self-cultivation clubhouse in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. I was paired
with a woman in her 50s. We stood facing each other. The teacher instructed us to imagine that the person
in front of us represented our mother: “This is a special time for you to let out all the grievances toward
her, even those dating back to your childhood.” The lights dimmed, and cries, screams, and curses quickly
filled the room. Meanwhile, one corner of the room remained silent. I stood in front of my “mother,”
looking into her eyes and feeling my throat tighten. Finally, I let out a couple of phrases in Mandarin:
“How could you? Why weren’t you there when I needed you?” As I heard myself saying these words in a
quasi-dramatic voice, they felt flat and fake. I hesitated, then uttered more complaints. Despite the heavy
atmosphere in the room, I was unable to shed a tear. Finally, the facilitator asked us to switch roles. As I
stood there awkwardly, my “daughter” cried and yelled at me. Her anger and sadness were so palpable that
she no longer seemed a 50-year-old “auntie” but a teenage girl, a child, a baby. After the activity ended,
we shared our experiences. The woman looked at me and said seriously: “You were just like my mother.
Distant and aloof. I could feel her presence.” As I listened to her, I could not help but wonder whether
the grievances I blurted out were really directed at my mom. Or was I cursing myself for my inability to let
my emotions flow in Mandarin? I felt confused and moved.
The vignette above depicts one of the first “emotional release” (qingxu shifang) sessions I attended during
10 months of fieldwork conducted in 2016–2017 in southern China in the emerging holistic spirituality
milieu known as Body Mind Spirit and historically as New Age. In the early 2000s, Body Mind Spirit
teachings became popular in mainland China, where they were imported from the global North via Taiwan
and Hong Kong. Most practitioners in China are middle-class urbanites, and around 80 percent are women.
Individual teachers and companies that promote shen xin ling seminars in China experience a problematic
positionality. On one hand, the teachings they disseminate are saturated with the psychological language
of self-betterment—a trait that resonates with the Chinese state’s neoliberal policies. On the other hand,
Body Mind Spirit practices involve elements that can easily be classified by the state as religious, which can
result in being branded an “evil cult,” or xie jiao (Iskra 2021, 2022).
During fieldwork, I attended 48 seminars, workshops, and discussion clubs and spent time with Body
Mind Spirit practitioners outside of these events. Every time I entered seminar spaces, I was perceived
as a participant. As hours passed, I gradually revealed my second identity as a researcher. During the
events, I did not record any personal details of the practitioners. I only collected personal information dur-
ing semi-structured interviews, with written consent. In total, I conducted 66 semi-structured interviews
with 64 individuals, both practitioners and seminar leaders. These interviews were digitally recorded and
later transcribed. All names of Body Mind Spirit practitioners invoked here were changed to protect their
anonymity.
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134 ETHOS

Just like Euro-American Body Mind Spirit milieus, shen xin ling encompasses a variety of methods such
as chakra opening, healing with crystals, energy manipulation, and reconnecting with the inner child.
As I explored these spirituality networks, I observed that they all shared an intense focus on emotional
expression and management. Almost every event that I attended included emotional release sessions
where participants were encouraged to share intimate stories of parental neglect, marital conflicts, sexual
harassment, abandonment, loneliness, and despair. They were followed by powerful collective emotional
releases during which people cried, screamed, laughed, crawled, rolled on the ground, and hit and threw
props prepared by seminar organizers. These behaviors were perceived as facilitating the process of
“opening of the body” (dakai shenti) to let blocked emotions flow unobstructed.
I began my fieldwork with an assumption that my positionality was advantageous. As a European
interested in psychology and undergoing weekly therapy sessions in Hong Kong, a special administra-
tive region that shares a border with Shenzhen (my main fieldwork site), I believed the concept of “inner
work” to be familiar and comprehensible. Knowing that in the Body Mind Spirit milieu emotional sup-
pression is presented as the root of all problems, I prepared to share my emotional pain with other seminar
participants. Initially, it was difficult, as my awkward response to my Chinese “mother” indicates. Never-
theless, I was struck by how this woman managed to engage with my flat affect, make sense of it, and
respond. It seemed like my Mandarin language abilities—which may have been sufficient for past work
experiences as a Polish-Mandarin business interpreter but made me feel inadequate when mobilized to
express my emotions—did not matter as much as our affective exchanges. Even though I said little and
could not hear the woman clearly among all the crying and screaming in the room, I felt that I impacted
her and, in response, she pulled me into a chain of affective exchanges that continued throughout my
fieldwork.
The opening vignette is an example of an instance in the fieldwork process when an anthropologist’s
immersion in an affective atmosphere expresses social dynamics that I describe as resonance. My point of
departure is the concept of ganying, derived from classical Chinese cosmological theories. The origins of
ganying can be traced back to the fourth century BCE, when it was used in the study of musical phenomena,
such as the resonance created by a vibrating pitchfork. British biochemist, historian, and sinologist Joseph
Needham (1900–1995) was the first Western scholar to translate ganying as resonance in acknowledgment
of Chinese people’s early experimentations with acoustics. In later centuries, ganying was developed into
cosmological theories that were based on older beliefs in sound as a cosmic power, associated with wind
and qi (Chinn 2013). The cosmology based on ganying conceived of the universe as composed of “endless
chains of correspondences between different parts” (Le Blanc 1995, 73). These parts were imagined as
interrelated and interacting according to patterns dynamically emerging through these interactions, cre-
ating an impression of spontaneity, and not as caused by an external agent. The dynamics of ganying can
be illustrated by a large dance performance. Unlike an orchestra, there is no conductor to control the
movements of the members of the ensemble (no external agent). Instead, the dancers read each other’s
bodily cues and adjust their movements accordingly: “Each dancer influences the actions of every other
dancer. Yet, we cannot say that each dancer causes the other dancers to act. . . . The dancers resonate their
respective actions and responses amongst themselves” (Sim and Vasbinder 2020, 11).
What makes the dancers affect and respond to each other? We can find an eloquent response in the claim
made by the Buddhist thinker Yan Yanzhi (384–456): “Things do not interact at random; they are respon-
sive [gan] to each other according to categorical correlations [lei]. Of all the things, the human heart/mind
[xin] has the greatest capacity for responsiveness in kind [ganlei]” (cited in Sundararajan et al. 2021, 2). This
responsiveness to things similar in kind, or ganlei, is felt rather than perceived and gives rise to a cosmology
that is innately affective (Sundararajan 2015).
While ganying emerged as a cosmological principle, it was later applied in a variety of fields, including
ethics, religion, and medicine. For example, in Buddhist tradition, it denotes the response from the deity
to the pleas or chants coming from the devotees. At times, it has been mobilized as a tool of political
legitimacy with omens and signs interpreted as signifying either the loss of the mandate of heaven by
the ruling dynasty or heaven’s approval of its virtuous dominion (Ho 2017). In the context of Chinese
medicine, ganying describes exchanges between the porous bodies of the practitioner and patient that allow
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DECOLONIZING AFFECT 135

deeper connection and healing (Pritzker 2014). In all these contexts, ganying points to the understanding of
affective energies as situated in-between, mediated by qi, and connecting the inner and the outer. In this
ontology, affective flows are not inherently within the individual or the external world but are produced
as a result of dynamic interactions between these two planes, as expressed by a Chinese early medieval
thinker, Dong Zhongshu (179–104 BCE):

When the sky is dark and it is about to rain, a person’s sickness affects him first, because
the force of yin rises in response. When the sky is dark and it is about to rain, people want
to sleep, because the material force of yin is at work. People who are sad want to lie down
because the yin of sadness and lying down seek each other. And people who are happy do
not want to lie down because the yang of happiness and staying up require each other. . . .
When the universe’s material force of yin arises, man’s material force of yin arises in response.
Conversely, when man’s material force of yin arises, that of the universe should also arise in
response. (Cited in Chan 1963, 283–84)

The vision of humans as containers of affective energies that are activated as a response to impact
appears in Nature Emerges from the Decree, a recently discovered text from the fourth century BCE that
states that “the energies of joy, anger, sorrow, and sadness are given by nature. When it comes to their being
manifested on the outside, it is because things have called them forth” (cited in Seligman et al. 2008, 32).
This understanding of emotions as flows “in-between” differs from their mainstream conceptualizations
in Euro-American contexts, where they are cast into the discrete realm of “inner life.” In the cosmology
based on ganying, affective states within individuals emerge because of being in resonance with others.
The cosmology of ganying shares kindred notion with the concept of “affective resonances,” devel-
oped by Rainer Mühlhoff, a philosopher, mathematician, and programmer at Technical University Berlin.
Mühlhoff (2019, 191) derives this idea from physics, pointing out that “the most interesting cases of res-
onance occur when multiple oscillating systems are coupled to form, as a whole, a new dynamic system.”
One example is the state of “orbit-orbit resonance” between the three moons Ganymede, Europa, and Io
and the planet they rotate around, Jupiter, in which the rotation of each moon is a process of being affected
by and affecting the other two moons:

the solar system is full of such highly symmetrical rotational resonance couplings, and this is
what makes it dynamically stable. Through orbital resonance, the various rotational objects
jointly establish a dynamic in which each of them behaves slightly differently from the
case without interactive coupling (“individualistic case”). But in turn, this dynamic being-
in-relation, as a whole, is mutually stabilizing in the sense that it may resist smaller a-periodic
perturbations (such as asteroids and comets). (Mühlhoff 2014, 1010)

This conceptualization of rotational resonance in modern physics conveys ideas akin to the “large dance
performance” of affecting and being affected that characterizes ganying. It also shares kindred notions with the
immanently resonant yin-yang dialectics depicted by Dong Zhongshu that “invest the cosmos and myriad
things with dynamic force, continuous flux, harmonious operation, and sustainable development” (Jia
2016, 461).
The affectivity governed by ganying/resonance is other-centered, suggesting an intersubjective openness
where “stirring in itself is less significant than developing the capacity to be stirred” (Owen 1992, 89). It
focuses on the affective disposition of responsiveness as central for the self’s “being in the world.” As
such, it shares similarities with phenomenological approaches, encapsulated in Martin Heidegger’s In-der-
Welt-sein (Sundararajan 2014, 182) and Edmund Husserl’s conceptualization of being actively receptive to
reality as “our most fundamental intentional activity” that consists in “giving attention to that which affects
us” (Brown and Cordon 2009, 63). The dynamics of ganying underscore the importance of expressing one’s
response to impact and evaluating such responses positively—both as a method for self-cultivation and to
produce sociality.
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136 ETHOS

Ganying as self-cultivation points to notions especially prominent in Chinese Daoist traditions, which
conceive of the sage, or the True Man (zhenren), as one who has achieved a state of total resonance
with the universe (LeBlanc 1995). Ganying as a dynamic that gives rise to sociality can be understood
through the lens of sociothermic affect, proposed by anthropologist Adam Yuet Chau (2008). Chau con-
ceives of festive sociality as co-produced by a “resonant body person” who participates in the honghuo
(red-fieriness) and re’nao (hot-noisiness) of a social gathering by responding to the affective impact of
its atmosphere. Implicit in these dynamics is the concept of ganying, conceptualized by Chau (2008, 491)
as

responding upon feeling, which foregrounds the moral obligation of responsiveness . . . [and]
stresses the action in response to the feeling rather than merely an interior “echo” (Merleau-
Ponty) or “attention,” somatic or otherwise, to one’s own and others’ bodies (Csordas).

Psychologist Louise Sundararajan (2015) observes that ganying shares similarities with the extended mind
hypothesis formulated by philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers (1998), who argue that, rather
than a discrete brain event, the mind should be conceptualized as distributed outside one’s individual
body and involving an encounter with the world. The “resonating feedback loop” embedded in the affective
cosmology of ganying is also compatible with a philosophy of mind modelled after the “protoconversa-
tion” between infant and caregiver (Trevarthen 1993). Protoconversation “refers to affective prelinguistic
exchanges . . ., in which the child or the caregiver functions not as independent organisms, but rather
as part and parcel of the larger co-regulation system which functions to maintain shared homeostasis”
(Sundararajan 2015, 98). Daniel Stern (1934–2012), an influential American developmental psychologist,
examines the dynamics of the protoconversation in ways that are consistent with the impact-centeredness
of ganying. He proposes that in their early developmental stages, infants cannot distinguish between dif-
ferent emotions such as joy, sadness, or anger. What they register are the so-called “vitality affects,” the
fluctuations of intensity that underlie people’s speech, actions, or gestures. Stern argues that infants’ smiles
are not related to specific goals or behaviors but are a mode of communion centered on being with and
joining in the inner state of the other person. In that sense, protoconversation is “topicless, behaviorally
irrelevant, and world-indifferent” (Stern 1985, 76). It is a resonating feedback loop of ganying, maintained
by an affective relationship of mutual attraction.
Inspired by Stein’s theorizations as well as Spinozian ontology and the works of Henri Bergson and
Gilles Deleuze, Mühlhoff (2019, 193) discusses affective resonance as

a dynamic concept . . . [that] is experienced immediately as a force-like entanglement of

moving other(s) and being moved by other(s); it is a movement-in-relation which is only
partly under my control. In the unfolding of resonance, I contribute to a group dynamic, and
at the same time, I am gripped by it. The dynamic acts on me, it makes me move—not in
an externally determined way, but in my own way—and thereby it gets enacted and carried
further by me. Although the affects of each individual may be different, the affective quality
of being-in-resonance is not a composite of individual affective states, but something that
happens between individuals.

Akin to ganying, this conceptualization of affective resonance centralizes the significance of responding
to impact. Such responsiveness does not result in people achieving the same or, sometimes, even similar
affective state. Instead, it leads to the crystallization of an affective atmosphere between individuals, rather
than from within them. Knowing about the chains of ganying emerges from feeling its impact and cultivating
affective responsiveness. As an ethnographic technique, participating in affective resonances does not
translate into gaining straightforward access to people’s affective states through empathy, a claim that
can be classified as a form of epistemic colonization (Yao 2021). Instead, it can capture the formation
of affective atmospheres, not just as personally “observed” or narrativized by others but through the
ethnographer’s engagement in co-creating them by cultivating responsiveness.
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DECOLONIZING AFFECT 137

RESONATING WITH CHINESE NEW AGERS

On a Sunday morning, I stood in darkness surrounded by people crying, screaming, and hitting pillows
attached to chairs with metal rods as their emotions were stirred by dramatic music and encouraging
words from the seminar leader. It was my first emotional release session. Most people in the room rushed
to grab various props distributed on the floor: human-sized cages, chains, plastic poop-shaped toys, and
masks with various signs, such as “I must win,” “Perfection,” “Help me,” or “I’m bad.” Several masks
still lay on the floor in the corner of the room where I rested for a moment, too overwhelmed to move.
Next to me sat a quiet young man. His eyes never left the floor. Without thinking too much, I took
the mask with a sign that read “I don’t feel anything” and handed it to him. He looked at me without
saying a word. Amid the cacophony of voices, we both remained silent, unable to speak or move. As I
looked around the room, I noticed that there were several other people who seemed detached from all the
intensities released around us. Later, I learned that most of them were new to Body Mind Spirit practices.
We all found it difficult to “open up” and join the collective “circulation of tears” (Analiese and Rudnyckyj
2009).
As I attended more seminars, I looked for strategies to “find a feeling state” (zhao dao ganjue), an expres-
sion commonly used by Body Mind Spirit practitioners to denote a state of full immersion in the emotional
release. Initially, just like other Body Mind Spirit newbies, I was scolded by seminar leaders who urged
me to stop relying on my intellect and, instead, immerse myself in the affective atmospheres of their
workshops. My occasional emotional detachment, diligent notetaking, and endless questions were some-
times perceived as disruptive. It quickly became clear that my insufficient responsiveness to the affective
atmosphere of the seminars could disrupt emotional releases for everybody. Since I found myself in a ther-
apeutic milieu that moralized authenticity, faking my emotional releases seemed problematic. Gradually, I
realized that my presence at the Body Mind Spirit seminars would be welcomed only if I engaged more
actively in the affective circulations in these spaces.
Teacher Juezhe, the owner of the self-cultivation clubhouse where my first emotional release session
took place, was the first person to openly express concerns about my lack of sufficient affective respon-
siveness. After scrutinizing my behavior during numerous events in her clubhouse, she told me: “You rely
on your head too much, analyzing all the social factors.” I explained that, parallel to my research, I also
personally benefited from participating in the seminars. Still, on the next day Juezhe announced that she
would refund the money I had paid for her new “advanced” seminar. She politely explained that maintain-
ing a “full immersion” environment was crucial for the event’s success, and she could not risk allowing my
overly intellectual approach to undermine it.
Juezhe mentioned that in the previous session of this seminar she had participants who struggled to
achieve sufficient immersion. One of them might have been Zhuling, a woman in her mid-30s, who was
with me during my first emotional release session:

Initially, the emotions I vented were not that strong. She [Juezhe] was saying many things,
and after she was done, she put a metal cage [a seminar prop] over my head. I shook it off
because I didn’t want it. After a while, she started throwing masks at us with signs such as
“I’m useless,” or “I’m not good enough.” . . . I didn’t really use any of the props. But other
people did, . . . [especially] those who repeatedly participated in such seminars, each time
releasing emotions very well. They put a lot of things on their bodies, . . . [representing] their
burden. . . . I just sat quietly in the corner. . . . I didn’t have any strong reaction. . . . It was
only in the evening that I managed to let out the guilt toward my parents. . . . I said a lot of
things . . . incessantly. I didn’t care about the people around me; I was immersed in my own
state, and I had a big release. At that time, I couldn’t even feel the blister that formed on my
hand from squeezing the metal rod. But when I touched it later, the skin peeled off. After
crying, I felt very comfortable.
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138 ETHOS

Zhuling’s account of “finding the feeling state” is illuminating, as it involves learning to respond affec-
tively to impact. While Body Mind Spirit practitioners usually do not use the expression ganying when
discussing their affective releases, its dynamics are implicit in the “affective pedagogy” of shen xin ling
seminars. This implicitness of ganying in social dynamics resonates with the case of Shaanbei villagers
discussed by Chau (2008, 501), who argues that ganying points to the “underlying inter-subjective and inter-
responsive nature of [their] sensorialized sociality.” During Body Mind Spirit emotional release sessions,
the “circulation of tears” turns crying and weeping into ritualized affective practices that are encouraged
through dramatic music, body movements, and verbal guidance from seminar leaders. Tears not only cir-
culate through the bodies of those engaged in emotional releases but also are elicited through interactions
between participants in an escalating manner, so that sometimes almost all people in the room are crying.
In the initial stages of fieldwork, I observed that for many participants the sheer affective impact of such
an atmosphere seemed enough to trigger their own emotional releases. While witnessing such intensity
was powerful, I often felt frozen and unable to respond. A turning point was a conversation with 25-
year-old Tianyi, whom I met during Juezhe’s seminar. When I told her that I found “faking” (jiazhuang)
my emotional releases problematic, she reassured me that “by repeatedly faking, you can really ‘enter the
[desired] state’ (jinru zhuangtai). . . . [During an emotional release session], the teacher said that it did not
matter if we felt no anger. She advised us to mimic her . . . so we could, step by step, enter [this angry
state].”
Tianyi’s prescription to “fake it ’til you make it” might seem at odds with the “feeling rules” typically
associated with New Age / Body Mind Spirit milieus. In the Euro-American contexts, emotional authen-
ticity is moralized: participants are expected to experience consistency between personal inner emotional
states and their outward expressions (Heelas 1996). It did, however, reflect the politics of ganying to prior-
itize the moral obligation of responsiveness to feeling (Chau 2008). Here, it its helpful to point out that
the modern Chinese term with a meaning closest to emotion is qinggan or ganqing. The term qing connotes
“facts,” “what is genuine,” “what essentially is,” as explained in the pre-Han dynasty texts (500–200 BCE).
These meanings point to two different registers: the world and the mind. When referring to the world,
qing means a true condition or situation. When used in the context of the mind, it means “essential, indi-
vidual sentiments, feelings, or convictions” (Sundararajan 2014). As discussed previously, gan refers to the
capacity to stir or move.
Etymologically, we can see how the modern Chinese compound qinggan/ganqing points to the other-
centeredness of emotion that is pulled out of the self as a response to impact. It exists in the
“intersubjective space opened up by gan, the capacity to be moved” (Sundararajan 2014, 192). Seen from
this perspective, rather than an art of deception, the “fake it ’til you make it” strategy suggested by Tianyi is
more about training the affective self to respond to impact so that the authentic qing can eventually surface
and begin to flow in the space between the individual and the world. It prioritizes developing a sensitivity
to respond to the world affectively, as part of the endless chains of ganying.
In her reaction to my insufficient immersion, Juezhe identified me as an “affect alien,” a stranger that
gets in the way of the collective experience of “fellow feeling’” (Ahmed 2014, 14). There were many other
situations in which I experienced such affective alienation. As a queer person in a same-sex marriage,
I found the rigidly heteronormative framework of Body Mind Spirit seminars oppressive and, at times,
difficult to relate to. If I wanted to remain sincere (and I pledged that to myself), discussing my relationship
with my wife was inevitable, since almost every shen xin ling event featured group activities related to marital
affairs. As I repeatedly experienced challenging “coming outs,” my ability to cultivate responsiveness to
others was sometimes compromised. On other occasions, other participants interpreted my sharing of
queer identity as authenticity and openness, which align with the normative framework of Body Mind
Spirit seminars. This encouraged some participants to approach me, usually the only foreigner in the room,
and pull me into the chains of ganying.
Juezhe’s reaction to what she perceived as my “disaffection” (Yao 2021) also demonstrates that in the
Body Mind Spirit milieu, harmonious attunement through ganying functions as a normative ideal, a form of
affective labor, and a moral pedagogy. However, as Zhuling’s account and the vignettes recounted above
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DECOLONIZING AFFECT 139

illustrate, such attunements are laden with “noise” (Zhang 2020): frictions, inconsistencies, and impasses.
Feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2014, 16) observes that

perhaps one difficulty is that attunement is understood not only as being with, but being with
in a similar way. . . . Attunement might register that we are affected by what is around, but it
does not necessarily decide how we are affected.

Like Ahmed, I subscribe to a less idealistic conceptualization of attunement: I understand attunement

not as an attempt to achieve “sameness,” or “likeness” but rather as oriented toward being with others
and as a joint effort of cultivating receptiveness to affective impact. As a fieldwork technique, engaging in
affective resonances underscores that “attunement, as an aspiration modelled on an image of what matters,
can sometimes ask too much of us, discard too much of us. Perhaps exposure, as an experiential opening
up to the other, is all that we can guarantee” (Zhang 2020, 650).

Embodying responsiveness

Cultivating responsiveness to impact requires transformations in embodiment that “‘calibrate our bodies
as instruments’, [which is] a manipulation of will and skill to engender different capacities to be attentive”
(Zhang 2020, 648). Teacher Gandong proudly shared how she successfully assisted a young woman in
cultivating crying as a form of responsiveness:

Crying. It seems so simple but it’s very difficult. It’s not easy to make yourself cry. But that
student’s subconsciousness must had already opened because she was thinking: “I don’t care,
I just embrace myself.” As soon as she relaxed her body, she was able to [cry].

Gandong’s account illustrates how individual immersion in the affective atmospheres of the Body Mind
Spirit seminars is a process of opening the body to release bottled-up affective energy. Prior to this open-
ing, the body is imagined as “hard” (ying) and nonporous, which obstructs the circulation of emotional
energy. It is a shell that needs to be stripped off, as depicted in the account of a 37-year-old woman who
experienced such somatic opening while participating in a seminar:

As I was lying on the floor, it felt like my body was covered with heavy armor that I was
forced to wear but wanted to shake off. . . . I felt it was opening. I had a splitting feeling here,
on my hand. . . . [My body] suddenly felt very soft, because the shell was stripped off.

Teacher Gandong’s words indicate that releasing emotions as water (tears) is a clear sign of personal
transformation, as it indicates that the body has softened and the person is more receptive to impact. Those
who struggle to join the “circulation of tears” are perceived as internally “blocked” or too “inside their
heads.” On multiple occasions, I was also labeled as insufficiently responsive, which resulted in various
setbacks, such as Juezhe’s refusal to allow me to participate in her seminar.
I responded to these difficulties by gradually applying Tianyi’s recommendation: I dove into the sensory
environment that surrounded me. I immersed myself in sad music. I allowed the reverberations of weep-
ing, screaming, and, sometimes, solemn silence to enter my body and move me. As I began to resonate with
other people’s affective releases, the intensities I experienced in my body became enwrapped in intimate
meanings: painful memories from my teenage years, recent relationship troubles, work stresses. And so I
gradually began to sob genuinely and join the collective circulation of tears. Interestingly, my initial anxi-
eties related to expressing my emotions in Mandarin gradually dispersed. During most emotional release
sessions, the words I said were relatively unimportant as long as I was able to join the affective chain of
ganying by emotionally responding to impact.
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140 ETHOS

As an ethnographic technique, ganying cannot be likened to empathy. The work of cultivating respon-
siveness to impact from other participants did not directly inform me about their individual emotional
experiences in those spaces. Instead, occupying positions in the chain of ganying is a form of “carnal
ethnography” (Wacquant 2004) that gave me insights into how affective atmospheres, a “paradigmatic
non-representational object . . . that heightens the challenges the non-representational supposedly poses
to social scientific habits and practices of description and explanation” (Anderson and Ash 2015, 48),
emerge during Body Mind Spirit seminars. This approach resonates with positions adopted by nonrep-
resentational theorists who think of affect as unanchored in the self and call for research methodologies
that uncover the forces underlying fieldwork, as well as “prefer to study the unsaid and the barely sayable”
(Vannini 2015, 9).
Here, I want to look back at the words of Favret-Saada (2015, 104), cited in the beginning of this article,
where she argues that rather than simply relying on imagination, occupying positions within an affective
field is essential because what “occurs within them is literally unimaginable.” Favret-Saada criticizes Anglo-
American anthropologists for whom “participation” in the witchcraft milieu is reduced to the observation
of what they claim to be “facts”: accusations of witchcraft that people were throwing at each other. This
focus on observation, erroneously framed as “participant observation” (my emphasis), fails to address a
plethora of questions such as “How does one enter into the state of being bewitched? How does one
escape from it? What are the ideas, experiences, and practices of the bewitched and of witches?” (99). The
reason these questions are left unaddressed in such work is that the answers to them cannot simply be
observed or imagined; they must be experienced.
As I cultivated responsiveness, I experienced a gradual acquisition of a particular bodily habitus: soft
and porous. In this process, new questions emerged: How does one get caught in the chain of ganying?
What can pull a person out of it? What is read as impact (gan): words, gestures, facial expressions, crying,
screaming, or maybe even aloofness and detachment? What are the rhythms and cadences specific to
affective resonances (how do they accelerate, cascade, slow down, or come to a halt)?

Resonance as a technique of intimacy

Little Qi is a 19-year-old Body Mind Spirit teacher who runs her own self-cultivation clubhouse where
she promotes paida, a healing massage based on tapping movements of the hands that can be both self-
administered and performed on another person. This method draws inspirations from Traditional Chinese
Medicine, Chan Buddhism, and New Age healing. One afternoon, Little Qi allowed me to experience the
limitations of my “head.” Until that point, I had been practicing paida mostly with Channa, a man from
Guangzhou in his mid-30. When he was tapping me, I did not feel much. On that day, Little Qi instructed
Channa to concentrate on my head since she perceived me as a person who “relies on the head too much.”
When Channa began tapping me, the only sensations I felt were painful vibrations inside my skull. Then,
suddenly, the feeling in my head changed completely. It was because Channa had moved aside and Little
Qi’s hands began to work on my head. I experienced a sudden wave of sadness and burst into tears. A
few minutes later, I realized it had started raining outside. Two streams of water, tears and rain, flowed
simultaneously, which felt like a weird synchronicity. “You have emotions coming from your parents stuck
in your body since you were 14,” said Little Qi half an hour later, as we sipped green tea. My hands still
trembled as I recalled painful experiences from that age.
Favret-Saada (1990, 192) discusses how people started talking about their actual experiences only when
she let herself “be affected” by dewitching practices “without trying to inquire or even to understand and
remember”:

Thus, they only spoke to me about it once they thought that I too had been “caught” in
it—i.e., when uncontrollable reactions on my part showed that I had been affected by the
real (and often devastating) effects of particular words or ritual acts. Some people took me
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DECOLONIZING AFFECT 141

for a dewitcher and asked me to help out, while others thought I was bewitched and offered
their help. Notables aside (who were happy to speak of witchcraft the better to dismiss it),
nobody ever discussed these things with me because I was an ethnographer. (Favret-Saada 2015, 101–102,
my emphasis)

Similar to Favret-Saada’s openness to being affected by witchcraft, my body’s powerful response to

Little Qi’s impact, which I did not try to understand or contain, allowed me to become “caught” in
affective resonances with the healer. This in turn deepened the conversation that followed Little Qi’s pro-
cedure, where we evoked the shared experience of ganying as a point of reference and a sign of unspoken
understanding. Little Qi revealed that prior to placing her hands on my skull, she formulated an intention
to help me soften my “head” so that affective flows could circulate more freely between my body and the
world. This experience resonates with the dynamics of ganying implicit in the acupuncture treatments for
chronic pain that trigger “an embodied experience of sociality . . . [through] enhancing a sense of togeth-
erness between individuals” (Hsu 2005, 85). Viewed from this perspective, engaging in ganying in the field
is a technique of intimacy that enhances interpersonal trust and encourages narrativizing experiences that
otherwise might have remained unsaid. It involves a “felt engagement that emerges through relationship,
an embodied equivalence that is not dependent on words per se but that is disclosed in language” (Pritzker
2014, 8). This engagement foregrounded my conversations with shen xin ling practitioners.
Resonating in Body Mind Spirit spaces led to “raw moments” (Hastrup 2010) that were new and dis-
orienting, yet endowed with deep ethnographic significance. One such “raw moment” occurred during
a seminar promoting the teachings of Oneness University, a new religious movement with headquarters
in southern India that enjoys popularity among practitioners of holistic spirituality in China (Iskra 2022).
After 40 minutes of intense chakra-opening exercises, I lay on the white cloth covering the floor, along
with over 80 other practitioners. I felt reverberations of calm in my body as the cries and screams from
earlier emotional releases gradually ceased. After a while, we were asked to sit up. When we opened our
eyes, we saw teacher Kaiguang sitting on a white throne, flower petals scattered at her feet. Slow, mysti-
cal music sounded in the background. A bright light from the lamp illuminated Kaiguang’s face. As her
eyes filled with tears, she slowly entered the state of egolessness to become a channel for divine energy.
We began the open-eyed Oneness Meditation (OM). We fixated our gaze on Kaiguang’s face as her eyes
slowly lost any anchoring or focus. Suddenly, I realized they had become completely black. Or was it just
the shadow play from the lamp? People began to weep as Kaiguang’s black eyes moved slowly through the
room. Tears poured down my face as I recognized a loving, all-accepting mother in those hollow eyes, and
I felt seen.
“When two people are affected, things pass between them that are inaccessible to the ethnographer;
people speak of things that ethnographers do not address; or they hold their tongues, but this too is a
form of communication,” notes Favret-Saada (2015, 105). The two vignettes presented above point to
the potential of ganying as an ethnographic technique that can be used to initiate communication emerging
from the shared experience of co-creating affective atmospheres. The experience of resonating with other
New Agers during seminars became a starting point for our shared effort to narrativize and make sense of
what happened in those spaces. This transformed the structure and content of the interviews. While I still
asked about their life stories and why they had become involved in the milieu, we often paused to wonder
about Kaiguang’s black eyes or the tingling circulations of energy under Little Qi’s hands. These exchanges
were foregrounded in shared experiences of cultivating responsiveness.

CONCLUSIONS
In The Affect Theory Reader, Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth compare trying to capture affect
to “chasing tiny firefly intensities that flicker faintly in the night, registering those resonances that
vibrate, subtle to seismic, . . . dramatizing . . . what so often passes beneath mention” (2010, 4).
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142 ETHOS

This article examines the concept of ganying as a way to register such fleeting affective resonances.
As an ethnographic technique, ganying is an example of a “weak theory in an unfinished world” that
aims

not to judge the value of analytic objects or to somehow get their representation “right” but
to wonder . . . what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already
somehow present in them as a potential or resonance. (Stewart 2008, 73)

Engaging in ganying allows the ethnographer to capture the formation of affective atmospheres through
active participation in their co-creation, and not just as personally “observed” or narrativized by others. It
is a technique of embodying responsiveness and cultivating intimacy in the field that fuels the efforts to
narrativize affect.
Tracing the genealogy of ganying and its potential both as an ethnographic technique and a theoretical
contribution to the project of decolonizing affect reveals that this ancient Chinese concept aligns with sev-
eral influential conceptualizations that in recent decades have been constructed as “new” and “paradigm
shifting” contributions to affect theory. As such, ganying cautions against the risks of erasure resulting from
the Eurocentrism of the affective turn, as it points to kindred notions circulated in scholarly and vernacular
contexts outside of the global North.
In classical Chinese literary and medical works, emotions are understood as structured displays of affec-
tive energy, or qi, functioning as dispositions to react in a certain way to external circumstances (Puett
2004). This conceptualization implies a fluid connection between the emotions and the external world
through affective responsiveness to impact. While the concept of the “inner” (nei) has been used in Chi-
nese language for centuries, it can “exist meaningfully only when it is manifested to the outside. There
is no meaningful inside that is without an outside correspondence in speech, action, or inaction” (Zhang
2007, 61). This “in-betweenness” of affect fueled by the impact-response dynamics of ganying resonates
with how Euro-American nonrepresentational scholars conceptualize affect as a transpersonal embodied
capacity to be moved and to impact others (Anderson 2006; Vannini 2015).
Ganying also points to attunement conceived of as a normative ideal, rather than a goal achievable for
all co-creators of an affective atmosphere. In classical Chinese philosophy, the state of total resonance
with the universe is only accessible to the one who has attained the highest level of self-cultivation: the
sage. Engaging in affective resonances through ganying is an expression of a desire for attunement that
usually does not result in an experience of shared affective state. This understanding of ganying resonates
with the recent scholarly critiques of the attunement as a state of sameness (Ahmed 2014; Stewart 2011;
Zhang 2020). Cultivating affective responsiveness oriented toward attunement can be compared to the
ambivalence of love, described by Lauren Berlant as “a rhythm of an ambition and an intention to stay in
sync” (cited in Zhang 2020, 648). Love as an intentional relationship does not lead to perfect attunement
or harmony; it is an orientation toward these goals.
Finally, engaging in affective resonances as an ethnographic technique carries the risk of the intellectual
disintegration of the research project, especially if it is carried on in affectively dense atmospheres, such
as Favret-Sadaa’s dewitching sessions or the Body Mind Spirit seminars discussed here. The research aims
can slip out of view as the ethnographer’s body is shaken by powerful affective resonances occurring in
those spaces. During Body Mind Spirit seminars, I have experienced instances when releasing personal
emotional pain distracted me from mindful observation of my surroundings. However, if “the intellectual
project is somehow still afloat at the end of the journey, then ethnography is possible” (Favret-Saada 2015).
Such “resonant ethnography” invites the reader to join the chain of ganying and respond to its affective
impact.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work described in this article was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project no. HKU C705218GF on “Infrastructures of
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DECOLONIZING AFFECT 143

Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road”). It was also funded by the Sin-Wai Kin Junior Fel-
low Programme and the Lee Hysan-HKIHSS Fellowship, awarded by the Hong Kong Institute for the
Humanities and Social Sciences, the University of Hong Kong.
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers, as well as Laura Meek, David Palmer, Priscilla
Song, and other members of the writing collective of the University of Hong Kong Anthropological
Network for helpful advice and constructive criticism on the earlier versions of this article.

ORCID
Anna Iskra https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3005-403X

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ANNA ISKRA is a postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen,

How to cite this article: Iskra, Anna. 2023. Decolonizing affect: Resonance as an ethnographic
technique. Ethos 51:130–145. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12366
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
DECOLONIZING AFFECT

Denmark.