Study On Place Ballet And Place Meaning Of Ancient Villages In Southern Anhui Province

Phenomenology is a philosophical framework that studys on people’s awareness and understanding of their living world. It has been working on various fields. Many geographers use the phenomenology method on understanding the relationship between people and place, which leads to a new interdisciplinary:humanistic geography. The core theory of the humanistic geography is place. David Seamon, a humanist geographer, developed Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of place which is full of movement into a new concept:place ballet, which is formed by the people’s body ballets and time-space routines in their daily life.The ancient villages in southern Anhui, especially like Xidi and Hongcun, represent the Chinese historical and cultural villages. The tourism not only promotes local economic development, but also changes local villages’ life and their mode of production. Besides, place function and place meaning also change too. Based on the place ballet theory, literature survey, questionnaire, interview and observation method are adopted in this paper to investigate the local people’s daily activities, place ballet and place meaning in Hongcun and Xidi. The results show that work play the most important role in Hongcun and Xidi villagers’ life. Therefore, space-time routines switches from home to work place according to the working time. The characteristics of place ballets in Hongcun and Xidi are:the daily life of villagers focus on work, lacking of leisure activities; the simple time-space alter between home and work place; the small scale and few participants of place ballets; concentration in neighbors’ space; growing in the tourism industry. The article also points out that the place ballet plays an important role in building place function, sense of place and promoting tourism development. Finally, on the basis of the research, the author give some advices on protecting ancient village place ballet.