These gods partake in the fight for spaces in the demolishment campaigns, thus being renewed and strengthened by different players. I will provide a description of these war of "gods", and explore human spirituality and belief intermingled in the war against materials in a time of "materialization."

The second theme of the paper is to interpret 'Home' （家园）, a frequent key symbol in the process of China's urbanization and urban redevelopment. In recent years, it has become a common practice for Chinese citizens to resort to the slogan of 'protecting our homes' in their campaigns to protect their legitimate rights and interests.

'Home protection' is in line with the basic political doctrine in Chinese socio-cultural discourse. For example, it goes with the idea of 'protecting one's life and one's own home'（保护身家性命）. At present, the politics of ordinary people and their political life starts with how they feel about their homes and how they protect them. The concept of 'home' thus does not go well with such fashionable concepts as community, civil society, or 'individual-society' in socio-political theories. When 'home' becomes the starting point of substratum political practice, socio-political theories should consider a paradigm shift to the study of 'body, home and nation/country'. For example, a political study on opposing officialdom should start with the experience of 'body-home', replacing the idea of 'state -society' and the polarized social theory of 'individual vs. society' with a framework of 'body, home, nation/country and universe（身家国天下）'.

The Uyghur meshrep in Xinjiang is a ritual practice among the Uyghurs which includes a series of cultural activities such as performing music, singing, dancing, telling jokes, drama, poetry, games, penalty activities, and etc. In 2010, the Uyghur meshrep was in the UNESCO's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. While highly valued for its social roles, the Uyghur meshrep in Xinjiang today increasingly faces new challenges in the wake of the globalization of the Han dominant majority culture. Although many studies have been conducted on the characteristics of music, dance and literature of the Uyghur meshrep, research applying anthropological theories to examine anthropological aspects of the Uyghur meshrep is rare. Using Victor Turner's theory of ritual process, this paper analyses the process and characteristics of the Uyghur meshrep in three phases, namely preliminality, liminality and post-liminality. This paper seeks to establish that the ritual practice of the meshrep has been playing an important role in strengthening traditional forms of transmission of cultural knowledge among the Uyghurs in contemporary Xinjiang.

Rooted in Western ideals of heritage preservation, the authenticity approach takes on new meanings in China as it is interpreted and implemented with a government-led approach implicated in the Chinese state's political and economic strategies. Meanwhile, the global movement of heritage conservationists on authenticity becomes continuously and dynamically negotiated with respect to local conditions. The juxtaposition of different value systems on heritage policies in the process of globalization and modernization continuously leads to diverse practices in China. The notion of authenticity has emerged as practices for local govenment, tourism operators or companies' engagement in the heritage discourse and thus acts as a locus for new forms of agency.

Drawing on 12 months fieldwork in southwest China, this paper examines the politics of conservation for both tangible and intangible heritage in China and the complex role authenticity plays in the process. I argue that the Chinese official interpretation for authenticity has increasingly confronted the shifting power structure of new social orders constructed by different actors in the social network. Different value systems have been conflicting and negotiating with each other against the background of the country's political, social and economic transitions. Regarding the practices of heritage development, the search for authenticity has formed a lived and dynamic presentation through the local development of modernization, commercialization and marketization.

In the 1950s, ethnic minority groups in China assumed new positionalities and identities under the national identification program. Under a new system of ethnic classification, applying the Stalin ethnic nationality five criteria approach and Morgan-Engelsian evolutionary theory, ethnic minority were designated social "living fossils". Thus began a new policy for ethnic minority nationalities whereby they were located along social lines, deemed "primitive" and "backward" compared to the "modern" Han, and required integration into the modern socialist nation. From a museological perspective, ethnic minorities have been framed between the 1950s to the early 1980s under this ethnic discourse. In the context of a recent trend museum development and tangible and intangible heritage protection since the 1990s ethnic minority cultures have been reimagined as "living cultural heritage". The establishment of ecomuseum projects in southwest China as an attempt to preserve ethnic minority cultural heritage in-situ differs from traditional displays that communicate constructed bounded, a-political, and a-historical ethnic identities, are representative of this endeavor to mark ethnic minorities as living heritage. This paper explores the historical ideological shift in imaginings of ethnic minorities in modern China. Drawing on fieldwork in Guizhou and Guangxi, this paper elucidates how ecomuseums are spaces where local ethnic minority populations are imagined as "living heritage" and where local ethnic minority populations use such political rhetoric to imagine their own ethnicity and heritage, and create new subjectivities. Yet, through such new museological approaches can ethnic minorities escape the living fossil discourse?

We are becoming increasingly aware of museum boom and new trends of museum movement in China, yet a theoretically informed and methodologically systematic study assessing the meaning of new museum practices is still lacking. This paper investigates China new museum movement by diachronic and synchronic approaches, and tells what is happening in China right now within the development of new museological approaches. In 2011, 398 museums were established in China making the list now come to approximately 3700 nation-wide. Almost half of these new museums are about local village history. They represent a foundation upon which the construction of new interpretations and expressions of local histories are made and displayed, specifically rooted in oral history and collective memory. These local history museums are a new approach to museology in China in that they offer an unofficial history of local place and society, unlike traditional museums that promote national history narratives. From these local history museums, we can learn the multiple histories and life of local villages and villagers that have historically been unrepresented in Chinese museums. Looking at specific practices among these new museums, this paper introduces the change in museological approaches in China, specifically reviewing the shift in museological philosophy in the evaluation of objects, museology, technological practices, and curatorial methods recently introducing the protection of intangible cultural heritage. This paper will also address how the focus of local exhibitions has changed from displaying a macro history to now local stories and memories, providing a living history.

Paper is one of the four great inventions in ancient China and also plays a key role in the world modernization together with printing. Meanwhile, Xuan paper makes contributions to development of Chinese traditional painting art, as the thousand-year Xuan paper preserves painting works perfectly and makes it possible to hand these works down from generation to generation. However, only the paper strictly made according to traditional technology can display the creation of painters maximally and has longer lifetime. The core objective of this documentary project is to utilize local natural materials and traditional technology to recover the making flow of high-quality Xuan paper.

The rural area development is one of the most crucial problems in nowadays China. As we know, the inner structure of rural community and the rural policies of the nation are affecting the individual village from within and above, so the policies coming from outside world can hardly join the metabolism system of rural society. From the view of sociology, this report tries to study the discipline of social-cultural changes, setting on the case of Hua'xian Shadow Play. We propose the perspective endogenous of China's rural social and cultural. And try on the logic among the mode of production, lifestyle, demographic composition and cultural consumption patterns. Then we do some thinking on the structural changes of the rural culture of thinking.

This paper addresses informal and officially promoted so-called representative bearers (daibiao chuancheng renwu) of tradition in Zhejiang province. In China the government has nominated representative bearers of tradition in different fields and on different levels of the state administration. The paper provides an overview of this policy and the selection process at both the national and local level. One crucial issue is whether such a policy helps protect the intangible and tangible heritage and what other mechanisms and local grassroots initiatives that exists. The paper focuses on both bearers of tradition within the religious field as well as intangible heritage nominations in the form of ancestral ceremonies and temple festivals as they are closely interlinked. My case study consists of two villages in Zhejiang and is based on participation temple festivals and ancestral ceremonies as well as interviews with those who organise them and who are involved in the writing and printing of genealogies and other important objects used in the rituals.

China has committed resources to a large museum/theme park development plan with support from international agencies and support. Yet it occurs at the same time as the huge destruction of urban and rural landscapes. The paradox relates to a deeper question of the role of museums in development , in the branding of cities having heritage value and the long term role of museums relating to well established ideas of collecting and preserving pasts in China.

plans

In contemporary China, images are playing a vey important role in minority tourism. The two parts integrated together, and even can not be separated from each other. Meanwhile, with the decolonisation and postmodernism, meanings of photos in tour are also getting a great change. Visible images, which are taken or made from minority tour, on the one hand, transform memorial and ritual interpretation by means of photos and videos ; on the other hand, all kinds of images not only involve the meanings of tourist gaze but present different deep-seated ideologies of different interest groups; further more, also represent interesting relations between tangible materials and corporeal images. I would like to analysis and interpret them with my case-study of Dai, in Yunnan, China.