Contenu du sommaire : Chines, l'État au musée

Like other minority groups in the People's Republic of China, the Drung (Dulong) have their own “festival” – officially known as Kaquewa, in Mandarin, and now part of the national inventory of intangible cultural heritage. This double institutionalisation is somewhat paradoxical in light of the fact that the people in question no longer engage in the festival. This article examines the disappearance of this ceremony and its accompanying ritual, as well as its brief resurrection following negotiations between villagers, local state officials and the resident anthropologist. Its reinstitution, qua ephemeral responseto the “obligation to party”, involves participants in a necessary reconstruction of Drung “culture” which calls into question the role of the community which it is supposed to represent, as well as its relationship to tradition, and simultaneously interrogates problems of cultural transmission and disappearance.

Processes of urban renovation and modernisation have remodelled Chinese cities at astonishing speed since the 1980s and led to the disappearance of “traditional” districts and ways of life. The last few years, however, have witnessed the emergence of efforts to reappropriate some aspects of this heritage. This can be seen in the creation of museums, but also in the establishment of monuments deemed typical of national culture and history. The upshot has been a blurring of boundaries between the “authentic” and the recreated, between historians' history and the history of state institutions, and between exteriority and interiority. The past is reinscribed in the present by means of an act of forgetting its shadow-side. This article explores some of these intermediate spaces where spatial and chronological fixed points begin to blur.

Through an exploration of the history and development of Taiwanese local museums, this article aims to analyse the relationship between cultural construction and collective identity born of the encounter between local society and nationalist ideology. The analysis follows two distinct but complementary paths. On the one hand, it engages with the political anthropology of the Nation-State, resituating the three distinct waves of museum-building in their local context and seeking to identify the different forms of state intervention in local affairs. It highlights the ways in which politics imbricates itself in cultural representation under different political regimes. And on the other, it looks at the inextricable conflict between diverse forms of Taiwanese nationalism. The author draws on and develops ideas of the cultural imaginary and state formation to explore what he terms “the disappearance of society”, a phenomenon he locates in the construction of local museums, caught up in an identity complex which is part and parcel of wider democratic processes.

The building of the Three Gorges Dam produced dramatic changes in the landscape of Yunyang (Chongqing) district, China, displacing part of the population and leading to the reconstruction of whole towns. Over the years, local government developed a number of museographic exhibitions devoted to these processes. This article explores two such projects, one of which is still ongoing. It explores the inception of the two projects, considers their respective programmes and looks at the role of local politicians. The attribution of meaning to their architectural structure is read as revelatory of attempts by local authorities to re-imagine their district after these profound changes. The article proceeds to analyse two new concepts developed by local authorities, intended to justify the forced displacement of the population and commemorate the inhabitants' patriotic spirit. It concludes by examining the place of regional ecology in these cultural institutions and efforts by local authorities to present a local world in which past and present form a seamless whole.

This article takes as its object an agricultural village in the suburbs of Beijing, home to a community of artists who were, until recently, seen as both illegal and illegitimate by the powers that be. In the last ten years, however, their work has become a globally recognised brand – that of “Songzhuang, China”. Through analysis of the creation of the artists village and the process of brand development, the article shows how a local community is produced through the commodification of local space. It focuses on three social groups and their tutelary authorities : the entrepreneur for native inhabitants ; the moral elite for the artists ; and the state official for local authorities. Studying the creation and development of this local space allows us to interrogate the question of the relationship between state and society in contemporary China.

As part of the Taiwanese government's multicultural minority protection policy, the Ministerial Committee for Hakka Affairs (Keweihui) is planning to build eighteen “Hakka Culture Halls”, one in each county and municipality. This article charts the creation and implantation of one of these halls, located in the northern part of the island, over the course of the last ten years. The hall involves local artists in the reinvention of a national Hakka tradition. The article shows how the hall's inception was situated at the intersection of top-down policy and a grass-roots project. It demonstrates the importance of notions of yingti (hardware) and ruanti (software) in the hall's creation, and suggests that they produce both opposition and complementarity between “content” and “receptacle”, “state” and “society”, and this at every step of the process.

According to official religious policies in China, the activities surrounding popular religious temples such as temple festivals are considered superstitions to be eradicated. However, during the reform period in the past thirty years, local temple leaders in many rural areas have been engaging in the politics of legitimation to protect and expand their communities' temples and related activities. At the same time, the de-centralisation of political power in China has resulted in wide-spread rent-seeking practices among local state agencies. The convergence of these two interests, from the rural communities on the one hand and from the local state agencies on the other, has produced a “channeling zone” of benefits flowing in opposite directions and that cover a wide range of sectors (e.g. heritage protection, commerce, education, forestry, tourism, etc.), resulting in the consolidation of legitimacy for popular religious activities. This article presents the case study of a rural temple, the Black Dragon King Temple, in Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi Province), which exemplifies the intricate processes and mechanisms of such a politics of legitimation. The ethnographic highlight is a “plaque-hanging ceremony” that took place during the annual temple festival that marked the transition in status of the temple from superstition to officially-recognised religion.

Born in 1916, Gilbert Rouget was an ethnomusicologist and assistant to André Schaeffner at the musée de l'Homme. In 1946, he took part in the Ogooué-Congo expedition. This article draws on the analysis of several previously unexamined documents, notably Rouget's fieldnotes, as well as a number of interviews, to describe the epistemological contours of the encounter between ethnography and the use of sound-recording techniques. This allows the author to situate the Ogooué-Congo expedition in the wider history of ethnomusicology, which was, at the time, still in the process of acquiring official institutional status.

The masks of the Kwakiutl of Vancouver island and Fraser valley have been brilliantly analysed by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Wayne Suttles. In both cases, however, the mask's plastic qualities have been regarded as mere form, representing nothing in particular. This article, in contrast, aims to demonstrate that the mask's morphology represents the original superhuman beings, whose profoundly hybrid nature partakes of a transformative ontological schema. It then moves on to show that the Coastal Salish's mask seeks, albeit in a quite different way to that of their more northerly neighbours, to represent the ceaseless transformations of supernatural beings in its physical protuberances and chimeric constructions. The precise arrangement of these visible protuberances places the observer in a situation of ontological uncertainty regarding the nature of the being in question. This state of cognitive dissonance is also proper to visionary states among the Coastal Salish.