Melancholy White Water Terraces ----the Contemporary Performance Of Ethnic Identity By Shangri-La Sanba Naxi

Sanba Naxi of Shangri-La County, Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China, is an ethnic group between Tibetan and Naxi. The ethnic identity representation, such as religion, daily life, language and so on, embodies the characteristics of not only Tibetan but also Naxi. The overlapping phenomenon of administrative area and cultural area hidden behind Sanba Naxi is a good example of "Layer Overlap Mode" about ethnic groups which across regions.With the tourism development in recent years, Sanba Naxi conducts a series of divine culture construction about White Water Terraces, a natural landscape. This kind sanctity and ecological construction helps Sanba Naxi to compete with Lijiang Naxi which is more and more labelled with commercialization in the tourism development level. What’s more, it also helps Sanba Naxi develop unconscious self-imagination and continuously strengthen internal integration and competition. In Sanba, under the background of tourism development, five natural villages surrounding White Water Terraces perform a kind of ethnic cultural heritage movement led by individual elites. The tendency of collaboration, disintegration, differentiation and competition in ethnic cultural practices triggered by external economic motive, is the insurmountable social process in the minority areas with modernization development.Through the logic of "do culture", Sanba Naxi perform their ethnic identity. With rational calculation of economic interests and emotional appeal of ethnic identity mixed in performance, writing culture about Sanba Naxi has the format of "Melancholy" ethnography.