Intangible Cultural Heritage and Ethnic Minority Schooling in China: Perspectives, Problems and Possibilities

• In Event: Education at the Margins: Education for Social Equity for Children from Marginalized Communities in China

Proposal

“Intangible cultural heritage” can best be understood by breaking the term into its three component parts. “Intangible” means untouchable. “Culture” refers to identities, values and traditions. “Heritage” is something passed down from generation to generation (UNESCO 2019). Globalization has put intangible cultural heritage, as defined above, at risk of disappearing. To counter this, in 2003 the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) started compiling a list of ICH items, largely local and place-based, to be protected and preserved. These ICH items now number 1,112.

“China is an enthusiastic leader and practitioner in the preservation of intangible heritage,” Pan Shouyang (2008, p. 2) wrote. China’s first national ICH inventory was published in 2006. It listed 518 items in the following categories: folk culture, folk music, dance, traditional theatre, poetry, acrobatics and athletics, fine arts, traditional handicrafts, traditional medicine, and local customs. It is important to note that China is a large, multi-cultural country with 55 recognized ethnic minority groups. Of the 518 ICH items on China’s list, 146 of these are produced by ethnic minorities.

This paper’s authors are part of a 13-member international team of scholars, working under the auspices of Yunnan University’s Center for Comparative and International Education. Since 2018 the team has been studying how ICH is being incorporated into schooling for ethnic minority students. (Yunnan, in the far southwest of China, is the country’s most ethnically diverse province with 25 of China’s minority groups living there in substantial numbers.) The authors have been invited to edit an issue of Chinese Education & Society focusing on ICH and ethnic minority schooling. This paper will serve as a comprehensive literature review in preparation for selecting authors and articles for inclusion in the upcoming issue.

Thus far, we have observed at two Yunnan schools that serve predominantly ethnic minority students. We have interviewed administrators, teachers and students, focusing on how ICH materials have been incorporated into curriculum and instruction. Our research questions grow out of this earlier work:

• At the Funing No. 1 Middle School, an Intangible Cultural Heritage School, located in the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture. The school was designated an ICH school after the discovery in 2006 of the Poya Songbook. The Songbook records Zhuang love songs using pictographic characters passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years.

• At the China Youth Federation Hope Primary School, located in the Long Lake Township of the Shilin Yi Autonomous County. There Sani Yi women called “cultural inheritors” instruct young girls in traditional embroidery. Sani Yi embroidery was listed as a national ICH in 2008. In addition, Sani Yi Dasanxian dance is included in China’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Students learn local dances at school, and performance troupes entertain visitors at tourist sites.

Our paper will include data from these two Yunnan field studies, but we intend to reach out to other scholars doing similar work on ICH and minority schooling at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels throughout China. These will include, but will not be limited to:

• Wan-Jung Wang (2014, p. 46) who has used process drama with a fifth-grade history class to explore “the learning and representation of the ICH of song, dance and rituals of the Papora people.” Process drama is a methodology that allows teachers and students to move in and out of roles in a play in order to explore social problems. The Papora are the indigenous people of Taiwan.

• Cuiyan Wen (2020) who has looked at Big Song or muyuge, a musical genre of the Dong minority in Southern China. In 2006 Big Song was added to UNESCO’s ICH list. In the Pearl River Delta town of Dongkeng, regular muyuge courses are being introduced into local schools. One of the greatest threats to the Big Song tradition is the growing rate of boarding school attendance among rural youth, who in the past would have had muyuge passed down to them through their families (Ingram 2011, p. 442).

• Baocheng Kang, Robert Baron and Wang Dun (2014) who have written about a graduate degree program in Intangible Cultural Heritage management at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. As a result of this, “many minorities are engaged in research and scholarship about their own community” (Kang, Baron and Wang 2014, p. 277).

We, as authors, write from a sociology of education perspective. Theoretically, we look to a definition of “culture” as a “tool kit,” provided by sociologist Ann Swidler (1986, p. 273). Swidler defines “culture” as “a collection of symbols, stories, rituals and world-views, which people may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of problems.” We have seen in our work to date that there are many significant problems stemming from the introduction of Intangible Cultural Heritage into ethnic minority schooling. These problems suggest to us the research questions we will address in our proposed paper:

• How does the global concept of Intangible Cultural Heritage get localized in China and appropriated by different government and non-governmental actors, sometimes in ways that clash with one another?

• How does UNESCO’s goal of “safeguarding” ICH for future generations, through means such as cultural inheritors and performance troupes, conflict with China’s goal of maintaining ICH “authenticity” (Su 2021)?

• How do teachers and administrators at local schools integrate materials identified as ICH into curriculum and instruction, and how does this endeavor fit (or not fit) with China’s presentation of itself as a unified multi-ethnic country, composed of 56 officially recognized groups?

How the relatively new concept of ICH intersects with traditional Chinese culture has been well documented. That said, studies of Intangible Cultural Heritage and its impact on schooling, particularly on schooling for ethnic minority students, are scarce. This paper will build on existing work, but extend it into the field of ethnic minority education. Ethnic minority students consistently lag behind their Han counterparts in academic achievement. Studies such as this one, that illuminate what works and what does not work in ethnic minority schooling, are important.

Authors

• MaryJo Benton Lee, South Dakota State University

• Mei Wu, Yunnan University