The Futures of Communities and Intangible Heritage: Social Pressures and Local Responses in Korea, Japan, and China

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

The conservation of cultural heritage has become a major social phenomenon of our times. This panel highlights case studies in East Asia in which local groups struggle to take control over their futures and their intangible cultural heritage in the face of external pressures and threats. Community performers face a wide variety of challenges, such as social inequality and injustice, migration, economic disparity, and environmental disaster—this effects both the retention and interpretation of cultural heritage forms and intergroup relationships. How can performative elements of intangible cultural heritage stay "authentic" to an idyllic past and attract performers in a relentlessly modern present? How do performers negotiate the control and ownership of intangible culture as relations within communities and with government and public agencies intensifies? How can a tradition survive disaster, as in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan? How is heritage tied to locality, to home and community?

Papers in this panel introduce three sets of key actors—a community leveraging their local heritage to sustain traditions, elderly performers seeking to sustain their community after it has been uprooted by disaster, and a group of performers seeking to sustain the heritage item they are tasked with protecting by expanding their mission. Through these case studies and with the facilitation of our discussant, we introduce different approaches to understanding the relationship between communities and heritage in different socio-cultural contexts embroiled in threats of cultural loss and the double-edged sword of economic pressures and benefits in utilizing heritage.

Area of Study

• Northeast Asia

Session Organizer

• CedarBough T. Saeji, Research Institute of Korean Studies, Korea University

Chair

• CedarBough T. Saeji, Research Institute of Korean Studies, Korea University

Individual Presentations

• Revitalizing and Authenticating Heritage: Community Participation and Heritage Work in Rural Ethnic China - William Nitzky, California State University, Chico

• Who Needs the Shishifuri Lion Dance?: Interpretations and Changes to Intangible Cultural Heritage after the Great East Japan Earthquake - Hyeonjeong Kim, Tohoku University

• Ameliorating Precarity for Traditional Artists: An Expanded Role for Preservation Associations - CedarBough T. Saeji, Research Institute of Korean Studies, Korea University

Discussant

• Jongsung Yang, Korea National University of the Arts