Cultural Heritage Politics in China

Tami Blumenfield is the James B. Duke Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Furman University. An anthropologist of China and documentary film producer who earned her doctorate at the University of Washington in 2010, she has spent more than four years conducting fieldwork in ethnically diverse regions of southwest China. Supported in part by a Fulbright fellowship and a grant from the Association for Asian Studies China and Inner Asia Council, she has researched educational practices, cultural heritage politics, and social change. Much of her research has explored social change in Na villages located in and around tourist zones near Lugu Lake. Her book manuscript Screening Moso: Communities of Media in Southwest China, supported by a publication fellowship from the American Association for University Women, discusses a collaboration and participatory media project with the Moso Folk Museum. Blumenfield has also begun a project examining growing inequality in tourist areas of northwest Yunnan. She is a founding board member of the Cool Mountain Education Fund, an organization that supports students in Liangshan, China. Helaine Silverman is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois and Director of the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy (CHAMP). She is a member of Forum-UNESCO, an Expert Member of ICOMOS’ International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management (ICAHM), and an affiliate member of ICOMOS’s International Scientific Committee on Cultural Tourism (ICTC). Her current research is a critical analysis of the cooperative and conflictual production of archaeological monuments as cultural heritage sites for visual, performative, economic and political consumption as undertaken by national governments, regional authorities, local administrations, community stakeholders, and the global tourism industry. Most of her research around these issues is conducted in Peru. In addition to her own authored works on cultural heritage, tourism and museums, she is the editor of Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America (University Press of Florida, 2006), Cultural Heritage and Human Rights (Springer, 2007), Intangible Heritage Embodied (Springer, 2009) and Contested Cultural Heritage: Religion, Nationalism, Erasure and Exclusion in a Global World (Springer, 2011). She serves on the editorial boards of American Anthropologist, International Journal of Heritage Studies, Heritage & Society, and World Art. She currently edits the “Heritage, Tourism, and Community” book series (Left Coast Press) and is a co-editor of ICAHM’s “Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Archaeological Heritage Management” book series (Springer Press).

PART I: INTRODUCTION

 

1. Cultural Heritage Politics in China: An Introduction

Helaine Silverman and Tami Blumenfield

 

2.  Does the Institution of Property Rights Matter to Heritage Preservation? Evidence from China

TANG Zijun

 

PART II: Local, Regional, National and International Interests in a World Heritage Era

 

3. Chinese Cosmopolitanism (tianxia he shijie zhuyi) in China’s Heritage Tourism

Margaret Byrne Swain

 

4. Groping for Stones to Cross the River: Governing Heritage in Emei

Yujie ZHU and Na LI

 

5. Local versus National Interests in the Promotion and Management of a Heritage Site. A Case Study from Zhejiang Province, China

Wei ZHAO

 

6. Tourism, Migration and the Politics of Built Heritage in Lijiang, China

Xiaobo SU 

 

7.  Dancing in the Market: Reconfiguring Commerce and Heritage in Lijiang

Heather Peters

 

PART III: CULTURAL HERITAGE AND TOURISM IN UNDESIGNATED SITES

 

8.  Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: Claiming Heritage in the Longji Terraced Fields Scenic Area

Jenny T. CHIO

 

9. Re-constructing Cultural Heritage and Imagining Wa Primitiveness in the China/Myanmar Borderlands

LIU Tzu-kai



PART IV: THE POLITICS OF MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS

 

10.  Beijing’s Museums in the Context of the 2008 Olympics

Curtis Ashton

 

11.  Community Empowerment at the Periphery? Participatory Approaches to Heritage Protection in Guizhou, China

William Nitzky

 

PART V: ROUTES AS HERITAGE – BRANDING SPACE IN A GLOBAL[IZED] CHINA

 

12.  The Ancient Tea Horse Road and the Politics of Heritage in Southwest China: Regional Identity in the Context of a Rising China

Gary Sigley

 

13.  Branding Tengchong: Globalization, Road Building and Spatial Reconfigurations in Yunnan, Southwest China

ZHOU Yongming

 

14.  The Role of Underwater Archaeology in Framing and Facilitating the Chinese National Strategic Agenda

Jeff Adams

 

PART VI.  AFTERWORD

 

15.  China’s Tangled Web of Heritage

Stevan Harrell