Cultural Carriers and the Discourses Surrounding China’s Heritage Regime
A lecture by Dr. Timothy Thurston, Lecturer in Chinese Studies, University of Leeds
for Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University
In recent years, the People’s Republic of China has emerged as an increasingly assertive and divisive member of the global community, while also being an active and influential member of UNESCO’s ICH convention. The contrast between China’s significant human and financial investments in safeguarding ICH and active restrictions on the transmission of minoritized religions and languages is especially important in the context of China’s emphasis on soft power and changing global attitudes toward the country. How then can we understand this complex and selective support for traditional knowledge, the elite intervention into community traditions, and its disconnects with Western ideas of cultural transmission? And how can a better understanding of the discourses in China’s knowledge regime help to shape international engagements in this area?In this talk, I introduce wenhua zaiti (cultural carriers)—a concept referring generally to the objects, channels, and media that enable the transfer of cultural values—as an important part of China’s cultural discourses in the twenty-first century. Through examining the contexts in which academics and politicians have frequently deployed the term and what it says about how culture is operationalized and reified in contemporary China. Through showing how the term is used in academic and political discourse about culture, tourism, and political education, I show how wenhua zaiti shapes cultural policy and State interventions into the construction, authorization, and transmission of culture in China.
