Fluctuation between AHD and cultural intimacy: heritagisation of a historic private house in Qingtian, China

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the heritagisation of a private house in Qingtian, China, a city whose identity is known as a ‘hometown of overseas Chinese’. Utilising the concepts of ‘authorised heritage discourse’ and ‘cultural intimacy’, I explore the local community’s fluctuation between official self-presentation in responding to the AHD and their understandings of the pasts in cultural intimacy. Based on my ethnographic study, I suggest that the community has developed a binary relationship with the AHD. On the one hand, the community has conspired with the AHD by helping to pick memories and move irrelevancies to the sidelines to make a patriotically themed heritage site. Heritage is thus used as a resource by stakeholders. On the other hand, the community retreats into its spaces of cultural intimacy and implements an alternative form of indigenous heritage conservation for oral traditions and lineage genealogy, which is largely limited to private cultural spaces. I conclude that although the AHD has shaped how the community has constructed and reconstructed the pasts for official heritage use, the criteria valued by local people about how the pasts could be preserved and valued are still overwhelmingly dominating mundane everyday life within the spaces of cultural intimacy.