Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on contemporary practices in the folk cultures in Yan’an, Shaanxi province of China, Ka-Ming Wu’s new book, Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism, explores how traditional Chinese folk cultures have been revived, repackaged, and reinvented as they tangle with political, financial, and local forces to gain new meanings and acquire new functions in the contemporary contexts of China, where national modernization and rural urbanization have made radical changes to rural life and folk culture.
The significance of this book lies in its placement in Yan’an. As the author states, the book’s keywords are folk culture and Yan’an. Yan’an has its particular natural, historical, and political characteristics. It has been one of the poorest areas in China due to its severely rugged topography, droughty climate, and barren terrain. Yan’an is also in the zone of an ancient Yellow River civilization and the region has preserved colorful traditional Chinese cultures. In addition, as the capital of the Chinese Communist Party from 1937-1947, Yan’an has been a mecca for Chinese socialists. Today, Yan’an is still in a leading position in promoting the socialist legacy and the Western economic development agenda. Thus, Yan’an provides the best vantage point to examine the relationship between party-state politics and folk traditions, historical representations, and contemporary discourse and practices of folk traditions.
Based on multiple-site participant observation in Yan’an region—in Yan’an city and the two counties of the area, Ansai and Yanchuan—the author’s ethnographic accounts of the transformation and invention of traditional cultural forms focus on three rural cultural practices, folk paper-cutting (jianzhi), folk storytelling (Shannbei Shuoshu), and spirit cult practices (wushen), that have been widely practiced as typical local folk culture in Yan’an and have been reworked and reinvented to serve contemporary purposes. Yan’an paper-cutting, traditionally practiced by females as a kind of domestic handicraft, has been transformed into a commodity, a form of intangible cultural heritage that promotes local tourist development, regional branding, gender equality, and the socialist legacy through reworking by the modern Chinese state, urban intellectuals, and rural practitioners. The story of Xiaocheng Folk Art Village offers readers a tale showing how a poor, remote village has been developed into a well-known tourism village through promotion of paper-cutting as intangible cultural heritage under the new interpretation of folk culture. The new feature of contemporary folk storytelling practices in Yan’an is exemplified in the storytelling performances of Master Xu, who went from serving as a state propagandist to his current role of providing a spiritual commentary on religious rituals, responding to new social desires and challenges. The Yanchuan Musical Drama Troupe schedule of performances shows that, instead of being under the control of the party-state as in the Mao era, this folk practice today intertwines with various work-units, public relations, and campaigns. Traditional folk art forms develop new contents, functions, audiences, and visibilities in the age of urbanization and marketization. Whether depicting in detail two ritual performances of a spirit medium in rural Yan’an, the dancing deity (the Black Tiger God Dance), or elevating luck (The Queen Mother of the West’s Divination), the author suggests that spirit cults today provide the occasions for the expression and experience of disappearing communal relations and folk values and practices. A spirit cult in Mojiagou village exhibits the construction of a new kind of communal gathering and sociality in the changing rural community.
With these case studies, the author attempts to identify both historical situations and the new features in play in the transformation of these traditional cultural forms in the social context of late-socialist China, where strong party-state control, market forces, urban development, the vanishing traditional rural community, and demand for consumption of folk authenticity compose a particular symphony in the modernization process in contemporary China. A core term the author uses to interpret contemporary discourse and practice of folk tradition is “hyper-folk.” Using this term, the author argues that today the folk tradition has become a site of complex struggles engaged by multiple social forces for various purposes.
Looking at the scholarship on the concept of tradition, we encounter either an old model stressing the authentic original tradition or a newer approach viewing tradition as a constructed object to be continuously reformulated to serve contemporary social demands. This book uses solid ethnographic data and rich research findings in the field to provide convincing support for the newer trends in the theory of tradition. The profound analyses make a strong case for the argument that tradition is changeable. The authenticity of tradition is determined by the ways local and civic initiatives and practices enter into negotiation with particular political, social, and economic factors. Tradition in this vision has an active role to play in contemporary social processes.
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[Review length: 785 words • Review posted on May 18, 2016]