The focus on human intention and action in anthropological studies of hope has made it difficult to attend to the aspects of a hopeful life that lie outside a hoping person's purpose and control. This article brings the concepts of porous and dividual personhood into conversation with the fast‐growing literature on hope to explore how spiritual forces shape the hoping person and the practices of hope for a good life in North China's Xia County. The lived experience of my Chinese interlocutors calls attention to the fact that hoping persons are often entangled in extended relationships with spiritual forces as well as other humans. An extended relational framework allows us to attend more carefully to the contingency and complexity of hope, and brings a more nuanced lens to personhood, one that rejects the Enlightenment idea that persons are autonomous, bounded agents, fully in charge of their own worlds.

This article presents an ethnographic examination of state intervention in popular religion temples in Fujian, southeast China. Specifically, it surveys the state presence in four temples, explores how and why the local state adopted a varied approach to religious organizations in the same religious tradition, and examines the mutually legitimating relations of state and religion. State-religion relations are constantly changing, highly variable, and context-bound. The state-religion interactions in Fujian demonstrate that to a certain extent the uneven revitalization of temple-based popular religion shaped, and was shaped by, the degree of state presence. I argue that the performance-based legitimacy of the nation-state has been fortified through local-state projects devoted to religious tourism, intra-religious competition, and the Taiwan issue, and that the Chinese state has the potential to influence a reemerging traditional form of authority at the local level through varying degrees of state presence in religious organizations.

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In Recovering Histories, Nicholas Bartlett shares his intimate, decade-long relationships with a group of recovering heroin users in Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as the "Tin Capital." When the marketization of the mining industry in Gejiu stimulated a booming private sector, the use of heroin gained popularity in the 1980s and peaked in the 1990s. During this period, heroin even "became a symbol of wealth, bravery, and belonging for a group actively questioning inherited economic and social traditions" (42). By the early 2010s, however, the once sizable heroin-using community had shrunk to approximately 2,500 local residents because of the heavy death toll of overdoses and infectious diseases, intense police crackdowns on drug dealing, as well as the stigmatization of heroin use. This book, thus, is an ethnography of recovery rather than of drug use. Rather than conducting fieldwork in spaces dedicated to drug treatment, Bartlett's ethnographic research took place in a variety of everyday spaces, including a drop-in center for heroin users, private homes, outdoor restaurants, hot springs retreats, wedding ceremonies, and family-related events from 2008-2018. Informed by the phenomenological approaches of David Carr, Paul Ricoeur, and Sara Ahmed, Bartlett captures drug users' lived experience of disorientation and their attempts at forging new lives, while at the same time attending carefully to the ways in which the shifting collective experiences associated with China's reform and development impact recovery.