Rethinking Feng Shui

Abstract

Feng shui has been a problematic concept both in archaeology and Western culture as a whole. This chapter is an attempt to rethink feng shui in order to rehabilitate it as an archaeological concept. I suggest the decisive distinction between feng shui and dominant Western understandings of spatiality centers on a difference in their source of intelligibility—between transcendent logical order and emergent aesthetic order. Taking examples from painting, formal garden design, architecture, and mortuary practices, I provide examples of the pervasiveness of this difference. Finally, I suggest productive ways in which archaeologists might use the concept of feng shui in their interpretations of Chinese sites in North America and beyond.