“Becoming Free” through Fortune-telling: value-seeking, spiritual cultivation and personhood among rural aunties in urban China

Abstract This article examines a distinctive group of fortune-telling aunties in Nanjing comprised primarily of late middle-aged women between fifty and sixty years of age who migrated from rural Anhui and currently engage in non-professional fortune-telling or suanming (算命). Although their work is marked by an unstable income and occupies a marginal position within mainstream Chinese society, the women articulate a sense of “freedom” through their practice. This article argues that their pursuit of spiritual cultivation, grounded in value-seeking, actively shapes both their own personhood and that of their clients. In redefining their social roles, particularly against prevailing expectations of women over the age of fifty, the aunties assert their subjectivity and negotiate their place within the wider socio-economic structure through their work of fortune-telling. This research situates these practices within the wider context of value-seeking in China's continuously evolving society, and considers how they may, in certain respects, be connected to dynamics of individualization and competitive pressures including neijuan (内卷) culture. In this context, individuals may negotiate prescribed social roles and cultivate alternative forms of personhood and ethical orientations that reshape the ethos of relentless striving. A call for a paradigm attentive to holism, relationality and reciprocal ethics in anthropology and the social sciences is at the heart of this article.