The Spatial Practices of the Chinese Diaspora in Western Australia: An Investigation of Human-Nature Interactions Influenced by Feng Shui Principles

Resumo

Abstract

Nature is an agent. It helps us assess the values in our life-experiences in places and reconstruct new spatiotemporal domains. Different senses of places are formed through daily sensory experiences in relation to the material world. From the perspective of the Environmental Humanities, this article explores the Chinese diasporic sense of place derived from individual and collective spatial experiences in the Western Australian natural environment. For the Chinese diaspora, the creation of sense of place involves forging a new spatial connection between homeland and host land as well as between past and present. In the context of the new diasporic space, sense of place becomes associated with a sense for the present through different embodied practices such as walking. In a shared diasporic space, collective spatial practices reinforce the social relations between individuals and evoke a communal sense of belonging. In this ethnographic research on the dialogical relations between Western Australia’s Chinese diasporic people and the local natural world, Feng Shui is regarded as both an ancient system of traditional Chinese environmental philosophy and a key spatial practice transposed to the Perth environment. The discussion of Feng Shui is closely bound up with the Chinese sense of WA’s natural world, traditional understandings of everyday spatial practices and the interdependent relationships between humans and nature within the new spatial assemblage.