This book includes ethnographic studies of social belonging and knowledge manifest in everyday ideas about cultural practices and their transmission in China. Intersecting with state, entrepreneurial, and transcultural interests, the contributors argue that the grassroots is where cultural beliefs are sustained as the condition of living heritage.

The recent heritage boom in China is transforming local social, economic, and cultural life and reshaping domestic and global notions of China's national identity. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted largely by young anthropologists in China, Grassroots Values and Local Cultural Heritage in China departs from the dominant top-down UNESCO-influenced narrative of cultural heritage preservation and approaches the local not as a fixed definition of place but as a shifting site of negotiation between state, entrepreneurial, transcultural, and local community interests. The volume takes readers along an unusual trajectory between a disadvantaged neighborhood in central Beijing, metropolitan centers in Anhui and Sichuan, Quanzhou in the southeast, and Yunnan in the southwest before finally ending at the great Samye Monastery in Tibet. Across these sites, the contributors converge in apprehending the grassroots as an arena of everyday life and belonging underpinning ordinary social interactions and cultural practices as diverse as funeral rituals, Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimages, and encounters between young contemporary artists and the Bloomsbury Group. In examining the diversity of local cultural practices and knowledge that underpin ideas about cultural value, this volume argues that grassroots cultural beliefs are essential to the liveability and sustainability of life and living heritage.

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Grassroots Values: Issues, Questions and Perspectives on Local Heritage

Harriet Evans & Michael Rowlands

Chapter 1: What and Whose is Local Heritage? Perspectives from Everyday Lives in an “Old Beijing Neighborhood”

Harriet Evans

Chapter 2: Encountering Virginia Woolf in Dashalar: Heritage Quests and Local Efficacies

Beverley Butler

Chapter 3: Rediscovering “Huangshan” in a Heritage Context: Spatial Strategy and Invisible Locality

Luo Pan

Chapter 4: ‘Slave(s)’ to the Great Museum: Heritage, Labor and Ethics in the Jianchuan Museum Complex

Zhang Lisheng

Chapter 5: Between State and Local Residents: Heritage Perspectives and Their Combination in Quanzhou, Southern Fujian

Stephan Feuchtwang

Chapter 6: Naming the Living Heritage in Quanzhou

Michael Rowlands

Chapter 7: Commitments to the Past: Cultural Transmission in a Naxi Village

Peter Guangpei Ran

Chapter 8: Threads of Time in a Small Naxi Village; Women, Weaving and Gendered Dimensions of Local Cultural Heritage

Harriet Evans

Chapter 9: Destruction, Devastation and Reinvented Tradition in Heritage Construction in Dukezong, Shangri-La

Wu Yinling

Chapter 10: From “Cultural Relics” to “Sacred Objects”: A Case Study of Local Heritage Protection in a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery

He Beili

Afterword

Wang Mingming

About the Contributors