The Intangible Cultural Heritage Study Under Nation, Market And Society

The conflict between cultural diversity and unity caused by globalization has enabled the intangible cultural heritage relying on which the national culture is subsisting to become the symbol of a nation. The intangible cultural heritage reflects the most prominently the logic of cultural change, and the deep heritage of the cultural tradition and social life which have been performed for generations. The intangible cultural heritage implies the cultural essence and historical memory of a nation, and meanwhile it is an important link to maintain the ethnic identity. The situation of intangible cultural heritage in the modern context of a nation is the epitome of social and cultural changes, especially recently, tremendous changes of representative culture of each nation had happened through the media, race performances, tourism industry and so on. This kind of cultural change has gone far beyond the sight of folk custom research, and is enveloped in the spring tide of social transformation. This research takes the multi-dimensional perspective of nation, market and society to study the changes of national culture, trying to go beyond the single perspective of studying culture from the perspective of culture. This research discusses kinds of issues such as time, system, power and gender, and focuses on the research of intangible cultural heritage, which is a kind of epitome of national, social and culture changes.The perspective of a nation pays its attention to, in the development process of the state-led culture, how the national culture is shaped into a system of knowledge which cultural owner himself is not familiar with; how the intangible cultural heritage is intervened into the culture as a power which is alien but to protect the community and what kind of impact it plays on national identity and national consciousness. The level of daily operation shows the country is not as whole as a iron plate, basic-level government, operating department and autonomous organization carry out various analysis and flexible execution of national system, which makes culture present a highly differentiated lineage even within a countryThe finding of the value of the coiled embroidery of the Tu Ethnic Group, in fact, is owed to the market force. With time as the basic clue, this study investigates both the village farmhouse triggered by early Japanese tourists, and the large tourism industry such as tourism garden and minority garden and so on, the intervention ofthis type of power makes coiled embroidery become a symbol of the Tu Ethnic Group’s performance, and a kind of culture and tourism commodities. Various kinds of theme parks, coiled embroidery company, retail traders, inheritor and technician in the market, the male and female, the poor and the rich, residents and villagers in daily life, are all characterized as different actors in the cultural change. What these various actors show is no longer a static map of folk custom, but a set of modern landscape driven by the market.The perspective of social particular emphasises on the Tu nationality itself, and analyzes the role and function the coiled embroidery dowry plays in traditional context on a female’s adult ceremony in the Tu Ethnic Group community, and the changes of the coiled embroidery after the intervention of market, tourism and government policy of intangible cultural heritage, etc..It also analyzes the social gender, the urban and the rural, the stratum and the problems of ethnic identity reflected by coiled embroidery in social change. This kind of change is not due to the coiled embroider entity itself, but that a series of changes of social, economic and cultural system which affect coiled embroidery make tremendous changes of people’s understanding and value judgment on the coiled embroidery.By the case study of the state-level intangible cultural heritage the coiled embroidery of the Tu Ethnic Group, we actually intended to explore the logic of ethnic cultural change during social transformation under the three-dimensional view of national, market and society. Folk culture is affected by the national policy of intangible cultural heritage, tourism and market, and changes of civil society, and is growing into a public culture. This study is based on the conflicts and problems in the process of this change, to discuss the possible coextensive space of Mr Fei Xiaotong’s cultural consciousness theory in the analysis of cultural changes of ethnic groups, and to carry out the preliminary thinking and discussion on the contemporary China’s state-led culture protection policy.In this study, a further decomposition was carried out on national, market and society in the concrete operation process, but how to deal with the relations among them, especially how to embody the influence of them on intangible cultural heritage and cultural change, and how to sum up at the theoretical level, are the challenge of this study.