Description
Book SynopsisThe recent heritage boom in China is transforming local social, economic, and cultural life and reshaping domestic and global notions of China's national identity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted largely by young anthropologists in China, Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China departs from the dominant top-down UNESCO-influenced narrative of cultural heritage preservation and approaches the local not as a fixed definition of place but as a shifting site of negotiation between state, entrepreneurial, transcultural, and local community interests. The volume takes readers along an unusual trajectory between a disadvantaged neighborhood in central Beijing, metropolitan centers in Anhui and Sichuan, Quanzhou in the southeast, and Yunnan in the southwest before finally ending at the great Samye Monastery in Tibet. Across these sites, the contributors converge in apprehending the grassroots as an arena of everyday life and belonging underpinning ordinary social interactions and cultural practices as diverse as funeral rituals, Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimages, and encounters between young contemporary artists and the Bloomsbury Group. In examining the diversity of local cultural practices and knowledge that underpin ideas about cultural value, this volume argues that grassroots cultural beliefs are essential to the liveability and sustainability of life and living heritage.
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Grassroots Values: Issues, Questions and Perspectives on Local Heritage
Harriet Evans & Michael Rowlands
Chapter 1: What and Whose is Local Heritage? Perspectives from Everyday Lives in an “Old Beijing Neighborhood”
Harriet Evans
Chapter 2: Encountering Virginia Woolf in Dashalar: Heritage Quests and Local Efficacies
Beverley Butler
Chapter 3: Rediscovering “Huangshan” in a Heritage Context: Spatial Strategy and Invisible Locality
Luo Pan
Chapter 4: ‘Slave(s)’ to the Great Museum: Heritage, Labor and Ethics in the Jianchuan Museum Complex
Zhang Lisheng
Chapter 5: Between State and Local Residents: Heritage Perspectives and Their Combination in Quanzhou, Southern Fujian
Stephan Feuchtwang
Chapter 6: Naming the Living Heritage in Quanzhou
Michael Rowlands
Chapter 7: Commitments to the Past: Cultural Transmission in a Naxi Village
Peter Guangpei Ran
Chapter 8: Threads of Time in a Small Naxi Village; Women, Weaving and Gendered Dimensions of Local Cultural Heritage
Harriet Evans
Chapter 9: Destruction, Devastation and Reinvented Tradition in Heritage Construction in Dukezong, Shangri-La
Wu Yinling
Chapter 10: From “Cultural Relics” to “Sacred Objects”: A Case Study of Local Heritage Protection in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery
He Beili
Afterword
Wang Mingming
About the Contributors
