Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

On April 3rd 2016, an elaborate 100th birthday celebration was organized by the local state for villager Ma Yihua, the representative-inheritor to the Cultural Heritage Relic of Jinyun Paper-cutting, and a valued person in her home-village of Heyang, situated in Jinyun County, Zhejiang Province, China. Using this highly orchestrated spectacle as a point of entry, this paper considers the intersections between “cultural authenticity,”“invented traditions,” and community identity and cohesion, against the drawback of a contested space that is already grappling with the delicate balance between heritage preservation and tourism development in the context of contemporary China. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork conducted in Heyang, this paper hones in on the ‘main event’ of the celebration, which was the performance of a traditional “life release” (fangsheng) Buddhist ritual in a pond at the centre of the tourist site. Although fangsheng has deep roots in Buddhist culture, its village-wide performance was unprecedented in Heyang. Through the incorporation and staging of this highly publicized event by the local state, it was, on the one hand, an opportunity for the estranged state to re-embed itself into society and attempt to regain its legitimacy in charting the village’s development; while on the other hand, the ritualization of fangsheng has become an invented tradition that manages to imbue the pond with cultural, and even a feigned sense of historical continuity, despite the fact, or perhaps, because of the fact that the pond itself was a completely new – and highly contested – addition to the heritage site.