Presentation and Elaboration of the Folk Intangible Cultural Heritage from the Perspective of the Landscape

Abstract

The folklore of intangible cultural heritage (FICH) is mainly expressed in folkloric activities, which include traditional festivals, living customs, production practices, folk beliefs, life rituals and folk costumes. The more reasonable and efficient ways to achieve conservation and transmission of FICH have become an urgent problem to be solved. Landscape presentation offers a potential method to address that by excavating the landscape characteristics of FICH based on its in-depth connotation and development history. This study aims to explore the cultural connotation of the FICH and extract the elements of landscape design, thus presenting and expressing the FICH using landscape as a carrier, to achieve the conservation and inheritance of the FICH. This research took the Taishun Hundred-family Feast culture, one of FICH in Sankui Town, Taishun County, China, as the study case, and extracted the landscape design elements in FICH after its content excavation and conducted presentation with cultural objectification, landscape narrative and contextualization. The results showed that the Hundred-family Feast culture contains rich landscape genes which can be divided into the ritual culture, food culture, festival culture and spiritual culture. Some of the elements in the Hundred-family Feast culture in terms of patterns, forms and colours for the content of activities, material carriers and spiritual places were also extracted for the landscape presentation. According to the different types and places of the Hundred-family Feast culture activities, the centre of Sankui Town is divided into four landscape thematic areas, namely the Hundred-family Feast cultural entrance experience zone, the food culture experience zone, ritual culture experience zone, and activity performance experience zone. The landscape element and spatial carriers were designed and illustrated for conserving and recovering the Hundred-family Feast culture, respectively. This study innovatively analyses the FICH from the perspective of the characteristics and constituent elements of the landscape and establishes a more reasonable framework system for the method of landscape presentation of the FICH in a structured and comprehensive manner. It enriches the theoretical system of intangible cultural heritage protection and its inheritance via landscape presentation methods for folklore activities.