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Abstract
The article examines two forms of public pedagogies in a rural region of Southwest China—tourism and ethnic songs—to illustrate their contested roles in transforming local relations with natural and built environment. While tourism development daily alters the village landscape by spatial intervention, demolition, and construction, the ‘landscaping’ is both a visual and conceptual device that produces a pleasurable environment as the ‘other’ and signifies what is tourable and what is to be seen. On the other hand, the echoes of the environment and human-nature relations are central elements in ethnic songs that have been sung for centuries as a major music genre to transmit ancestral, historical, and cultural understandings. Indigenous worldviews and ecological awareness are expressed in songs through imitation of nature and worship of various nonhuman forms of life. The paper argues that a nascent environmentalism and ecological significance of the ethnic songs are increasingly oriented towards instrumental development rationality, while at the same time revived and choreographed in staged tourism performances. Both tourism and ethnic songs offer powerful forms of public pedagogies through which to rethink how incommensurable discourses generate new environmental crises by drastically altering not only the vernacular landscape but also local cosmological beliefs. The short-lived developmental zest and the longstanding local ecological consciousness play out complex dynamics in ‘teaching’ the locals and the tourists about the changing environment of rural ethnic China, and the ambiguities and tensions that exist within the notion of sustainable development.
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Notes
1. See Wong (Citation2014).
2. ‘Indigenous’ is a politically contentious concept in China. The Chinese government believes the indigenous question is a product of European colonialism, associated with discrimination, oppression, and exploitation, therefore not applicable to the Chinese context. While prohibiting the term indigenous, China’s 1956 ethnic identification campaign has produced 56 officially recognized ethnic nationalities who live under the development tutelage of the party state. The dominant majority Han accounts for over 92% of the total population, while the 55 minority groups make up the remaining 8%. See Sturgeon, Citation2007.
3. Autonomy is of course a relative term in Chinese social political context. As tourism planning in Qiandongnan is taken over by external developers, and ethnic singing/dancing increasingly choreographed by urban experts rather than local artists, the limited sense of local autonomy is further truncated.
4. Pseudonym.
5. Although the findings are more appropriately contextualized to the locality, and generalizability is not usually intended in ethnographic works, Geertz’s famous dictum well summarizes the ethnographic merit that ‘anthropologists don’t study villages … they study in villages’ (Citation1973, p. 22). In other words, the in-depth understanding of a specific case provides a bird’s-eye view of issues and phenomena that transcend the geographic boundaries of the research field site and orient towards broader cultural theses. See Geertz, C. (Citation1973). The interpretation of culture. New York: Basic Books.
6. ‘One Conference Two Festivals’ refer to the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Liping Conference held by the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party during the Long March and the 23rd anniversary of the then President Hu Jintao’s speech at the Academic Seminar of the Liping Conference, as well as the celebration of the 4th Kaili Ethnic Cultural Festival and the 3rd Liping Drum Tower Cultural Festival in 2009. Such grand production of festive commemoration is typical of China’s statecraft and its visuality driven political climate.
7. The sense of culpability is stated gravely in a letter distributed by the village government to Longxingers: ‘An important opportunity has arrived for our village to change its fate by turning into a reputable tourism destination. If you fail to participate and cooperate, you will become historical wrongdoers of the village.’
8. From ga wang (songs about the emperor), a big song category in Salong village. See Ingram, Citation2011, p. 446.
9. The land requisition price in Longxing in 2010 was twenty-four thousand yuan (400 USD) per mu. Mu is the customary Chinese unit of measurement for area, and the conversion to acre is roughly calculated at 1 acre = 6 mu.
10. The lament about the loss of lands as a deeply felt personal and communal crisis is also documented elsewhere in nonindustrial societies where incipient capitalism mediates feelings of anxiety and extends land dispossession to psychological problems and moral disorder (see Geissler & Prince, Citation2010).
11. Local farmers who refused to give up their lands were criticized for being short-sighted and jeopardizing the future of the village development.
12. The Kam language belongs to the Tai-Kadai family and is divided into two major dialect groupings: the Southern Kam and the Northern Kam.
13. See Ingram, Citation2011, p. 447.
14. In minority villages such as Longxing, teaching in lower grades of primary school often entails mixed usage of the ethnic language and Mandarin Chinese to help children transition from the mother tongue-only living environment to official language of the schools. The language of instruction gradually shifts to Mandarin only in later years of primary school and beyond.