Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article examines how customs inspectors in contemporary China manage the ongoing suspicions of their bureau and their own moral careers through two distinct models for dealing with uncertainty: risk management and fortunetelling. While risk management has become a key sign of the ‘modernising’ professional ethos of the Chinese Customs Administration since the early 2000s, curiously fortunetelling has also emerged as a popular pastime among many officials eager to grasp the cosmic signs of mis/fortune in their midst. By attending to the distinctive chronopolitics and calculative logics at play in models of risk management and fate calculation, I analyse the ways in which customs inspectors try to hone an ethics of timely response in a globalising world imagined as irreducibly opaque and polyrhythmic in its patterns. This is a world especially open to compossible renderings of ‘fortune’ as a cosmo-economic force that resonates across systems of speculation.
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