Safeguarding intangible heritage through edutainment in China’s creative urban environments

ABSTRACT

This article critically examines the role of edutainment – the combination of educational and entertainment activities – in intangible heritage preservation. Drawing upon fieldwork in southwest China’s Guizhou province, the article focuses on a cultural park that packages traditional ethnic practices into cultural products and leisure experiences for public participation and display. I consider this site as an example of a new form of hybrid cultural venue that shares similarities with earlier models of theme parks and museums, but also differs from them in important ways. This article discusses the potentials and the limitations of using interactive and experiential elements for facilitating the dynamic safeguarding of intangible heritage in creative urban environments. I argue that edutainment offers new learning opportunities to a public audience and to younger generations, but it inevitably entails transformations of traditional cultural forms and practices. Edutainment, in this context, becomes a strategic tool to preserve traditional skills and knowledge while promoting local cultures.

KEYWORDS:

• Intangible heritage
• edutainment
• dynamic safeguarding
• cultural branding
• China

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my informants, colleagues and family in Guizhou for their help and support during my fieldwork. I would also like to thank my research assistant Liang Shuang who has helped me compile background materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. China has 56 state-designated ethnic groups (comprising the Han and 55 minority groups), and minzu is the Chinese term used to define and recognise ethnic groups by the socialist state since the 1950s. Ethnic diversity is not gauged here by the number of ethnic groups or the ethnic population currently residing in each province, but rather the number of ethnic groups that originally inhabited the area. The seventeen ethnic groups are considered Guizhou’s heritage residents (shiju minzu), who have settled and lived in Guizhou for generations. Yunnan is considered the most ethnically diverse province in China, with 25 heritage resident groups.

2. Source: The Sixth Population Census, 2019 Guizhou Statistical Yearbook, p. 44.

3. UNESCO approved the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003, and it was ratified by China in August 2004.

4. Source: Guizhou Radio Television Station <https://www.gzstv.com/a/061613ebfba94b2fb01cce82fae8f489>, last retrieved on 28 February 2020.

5. This paradox is manifested in an official statement in the development planning of Guizhou’s eco-cultural tourism model: ‘From a post-industrial perspective, unearth pre-industrial resources, create ultra-industrial products, and construct [Guizhou] into a national park province’. Products in cultural and creative industries (including tourism and the arts) are thus considered ‘ultra-industrial products’. Source: ‘Ifeng’s perspective on Guizhou: National Park Province, Colourful Guizhou Wind’ <http://city.ifeng.com/special/kanguizhou> and ‘Uphold Tourism to Develop Guizhou’s Provincial Economy and to Create a “National Park Province”’ <http://www.sh-gzcoc.cn/html/2012729223339-1.html>, last retrieved on 25 February 2020.

6. The Buyi and Dong languages share some linguistic similarities and are both categorised as Tai-Kadai languages.

7. The Miao embroidery inheritor has established workshops and businesses to produce Miao textiles in Guizhou and has won several titles, such as being selected as a representative to attend the National People’s Congress and as an ICH Person of the Year.

8. In 2015, a training programme for the inheritance of intangible cultural heritage, in which university students could participate, was launched by the former Ministry of Culture, together with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this paper was fully supported by an Early Career Scheme grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. CityU 21614618).

Notes on contributors

Yu Luo

Yu Luo is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese and History at the City University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University and was a 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Chinese Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She has published in Modern China, Social Anthropology, Verge: Global Studies in Asias, and Social and Cultural Geography and has contributed to the Handbook on Ethnic Minorities in China. She is currently working on her book manuscript on the cultural production and identity politics of the Buyi (Bouyei) in late-socialist southwest China. Her research interest includes ethnicity and indigeneity, Asian borderlands, heritage and tourism, urban-rural transformations, wildlife conservation, and China’s global nexus.