Ethnography On "Representative Culture" Constructing

Religion is a kind of mental activity and a form of consciousness of human being and also an important social and cultural phenomenon. As the most important religious tradition of China, popular religion has been integrated into and rooted in the local society and is leading the ways of thinking, productive practice, social relationship and political activities of most of the public, and it has also formed a conflict and complementary relationship with the structure of the superstructure and the symbolic system.In view of the above phenomenon, a large number of scholars have analyzed the popular religion in terms of culture and power, state and society, integration and order of elites and civil society, symbolic capital and social memory to research the relationship between the popular religion and the modernization, the state and the society in the field of religion, and the mutual construction of the popular religion and the local society. The focus of the scholars is the dynamic relationship between the popular religion and the state power. However, all researches in the past was carried out under the duality-opposition framework of State-society Relationship, which has neglected the institutional background that China is a state of authoritarianism and its"split"administrative system and has excluded the local government (grass-roots government) from the research on power relationship and thus ignoring the empirical social process and the mechanism, in which the religion space is generated in the microcosmic level. Therefore, in my mind, we have not had a clear understanding about the revival and the space reconstruction of contemporary popular religion.To explain the above issue, I will take BingYang County located in south central Guangxi as the case and the Firecracker Dragon Dance(Wu baolong,local language), a local traditional activity, as the research subject and how does the Firecracker Dragon Dance become a Local Representative Culture as the starting question of the research, and will study the detailed process of the revival and the space reconstruction of the popular religion from four aspects in this article: the status of the Firecracker Dragon Dance in the traditional culture of BingYang County; the process of nationalization of the Firecracker Dragon Dance; production of the Firecracker Dragon Culture and the Culture--politics pratical logic behind the production; the new relationship between the reconstruction of the Old Temples and BingYang sociaty. Through the above research and the analysis, the following basic conclusion has been made in this article: the fact that the people of BingYang County have tried their best to make the Firecracker Dragon Dance a cultural identity that they can display to the external is an expression of the local consciousness under the context of"protection of intangible cultural heritage"and tourism space and a community consensus achieved based on the special history and actuality of BingYang County. The Firecracker Dragon Culture production is a symbol of the culture and power structure and a result of the negotiation and construction of different groups of people to the same cultural phenomenon under the same space-time environment. The reconstruction of the Old Temples not only revives and rebuilds the local knowledge, but also realizes the linkage of the Firecracker Dragon Culture and puts an end to the Firecracker Dragon Culture production. Thereby, the process of the Firecracker Dragon Dance becoming a local representative culture represents a process of cultural practice, which includes reconstruction and invention of the tradition and is a processed unique local culture which is used by the government and the local power together and has combined the history and the actuality based on the specific landscape of BingYang County, and it is actually a process of localization and narration of the Chinese Dragon Culture in BingYang County. The reconstruction of the religion is not only a construction of power relationship which involves the power, social order and other problems, but also an effort to rebuild the local worship and local image.We can say that the case that the Firecracker Dragon Dance is shaped into a local representative culture has represented the complete process of"revival of popular religion"and"reconstruction of religion space"under the context of the contemporary Chinese social culture. From one small clue, one can see what is coming; and I hope my research can give some enlightenment for people to understand the common phenomenon of"revival and space reconstruction of popular religion"better. Theoretically, the fact that the state, local government, local elites, mass media and the general public have shaped the connotation of the Firecracker Dragon Culture together, especially the reconstruction of the Firecracker Dragon Old Temple, shown by the research in this article tell us that the popular religion space is a space which is full of strategies and struggles and can be constructed, and this space is a result of the dynamic situation of the competitions, negotiations and compromises among the state, local government and the public, which is not stable or rigid but constantly changeable. In practice, the case of BingYang Country shows that although"protection of traditional culture"has become a contemporary mainstream discourse, instead of making endless concessions, the local government or at least some officials still keep a distance from the public on purpose in the revival and reconstruction of the popular religion.