Contenu du sommaire : Questioning Cultural Exemplarity: Two Decades of Intangible Heritage Practices

The intangible cultural heritage (ICH) concept has been operational in China for almost 20 years. One integral part of China's ICH landscape is a range of exhibition spaces and museums that specialise in the display, performance, and transmission of ICH. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at different exhibition sites, this paper provides insights into what these exhibition spaces look like, how they function, how ICH is exhibited within them, and what exhibitions mean to different heritage actors. The article shows how ICH exhibitions have themselves become a sociocultural phenomenon, bringing together a variety of actors who experiment with different forms of display and types of exhibitions in an ad hoc, spontaneous, and unregulated way. The paper also contributes to the broader discussion on ICH as a political intervention that transforms the cultural practices and expressions it normatively sets out to safeguard.

Chinese martial arts are traditionally transmitted through the private master-disciple relationship. In recent years, some masters have been expressing their concern about the desuetude of their art, which calls into question the confidential modes of transmission and what is held to be orthodox in it. Concurrently, intangible cultural heritage (ICH) taken by a wide range of social actors, including the masters, attempts to valuate practices and perpetuate lineages. Fieldwork observations, however, enable the analysis of complex lineage functioning and a certain embarrassment linked to historicity and martiality when it comes to promoting traditional martial arts outside the private sphere. This article draws on masters' narratives (oral testimonies and written sources), taking xingyiquan (“form and intention boxing”) as the main case study, conducted in Shanxi Province in 2017 and 2018. It aims at questioning the constraints balance arising from efforts to preserve cultural integrity, on the one hand, and engaging in valuation and standardisation processes, on the other.

The concept of community has become the dominant focus of academic discussions in the field of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) research. Some scholars have criticised the idealised usage of this concept as obscuring the empirical tensions and suggest that it should be replaced by “actor-network.” Instead, this article argues that even when there is no real network among actors, heritage community may still rely on social imaginary to exist. It is the relationship that people establish between the present and the past that is key to understanding the safeguarding of ICH. This article focuses mainly on the Jingxi fanhui, a national ICH festival in Beijing's western suburb. The entire area has been almost deserted for nearly 20 years, as the villagers are now dispersed in Beijing city. But every year during the traditional Lantern Festival days, former villagers still return to the abandoned villages to attend the parade ceremony, even though there is no real social network linking them. People are driven by different values, which are often diverse and contradictory, to participate in the ceremony. The common imagination of their community is rooted in a shared understanding of what heritage means to the groups. It's under the flag of national ICH that the consensus is reached, a sense of community is fostered, and the village festival continues, even after village life has ceased to exist.

Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as an administrative category has been used in Chinese official discourse since the early twenty-first century. It tends to standardise in a systemic vision what practices should or should not be included in the updated definition of Chinese tradition. The role played by the central government is of utter importance, drawing on China's administrative and legal framework. However, local dynamics and reasoning sometimes occur off the beaten track. Shadow puppet troupes are a good example of a long tradition all over China that almost disappeared during the Maoist era, but which was resurrected during the 1980s, and is now listed internationally as a form of ICH. In Hua County (Huaxian), Shaanxi Province, one of the practitioners discussed in this article belongs to a family renowned for its puppets, and he has participated in the revival of shadow puppet performances. The second case examined here is of a troupe performing in the Yongxing Fang tourist area in Xi'an. The leader of the troupe is registered on the list of heritage transmitters at the provincial level. The discourse and practice of these two troupes exemplify different attitudes towards official recognition. Analysing the Huaxian shadow puppets, I will try to find out if ICH is only a new label stuck on an older tradition or if it has a deeper influence on the survival of living traditions.

This paper delineates unequal inscriptions of the Yulan Festival, whether as national intangible cultural heritage (ICH) or local ICH, for different ethnic groups in Hong Kong. I argue that the authorised heritage discourse that underlies the inscription of the Yulan Festival is based on the fossilised imagination of ethnic traditions and identities. Classifying the Yulan Festival according to ethnic ritual traditions implies an assumption on the existence of a homogenous ethnic community and tradition, and seems to overlook the dynamic of ethnic tradition, as well as the hybrid and flexible nature of culture and identity. This authorised system has acknowledged and exaggerated differences between various ethnic traditions and has understated the importance of integrated practices, diversified, flexible, and hybrid practices, the changing ethnic complexity of local communities, as well as the subjective agency of individuals. A gap between what was practiced and what was institutionalised is noted, and individual agency is observed in negotiating the festival in relation to the institutionalised heritage designations.

From the end of the Second World War to the Cold War era, Chinese theatre troupes and performers endorsed by “bifurcated homelands” – the Republic of China (ROC) in Taipei and the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Beijing – travelled to Southeast Asia to battle for the hearts and minds of the Chinese diaspora through one potent means: dance, which has so far not garnered the attention it deserves. This article locates the performative linkages in two scenarios: (1) the Chinese Communist Party-affiliated theatre troupe Zhong Yi and its diasporic tours in Singapore and Bangkok in the immediate postwar era; (2) the experiences of the Taiwanese folk dancer Lee Shu Fen and her dancing legacy in Southeast Asia during the Cold War era. Situated in the burgeoning field of the “Chinese cultural Cold War,” this article argues for a “performative” angle that examines both the tours and the performing arts in the context of the shifting power realignment as a manifestation of Cold War geopolitics in Asia. While stressing the competing nature of the idea of “bifurcation,” this article goes further to prove the mutual influences and mirroring effects in the imaginings of Chineseness by both the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).