Abstract
Landscape is an important object for research on local culture from a cultural geographical perspective. It is the spatial nature of memory that has seen the integrative study of memory and landscape receive increased attention from human geographers. The Qiqiao Festival is a traditional folk festival in the Lingnan region of Southern China. After half a century of suppression, the Qiqiao Festival in Zhucun was publically revitalized as the Guangzhou Qiqiao Cultural Festival, which coincided with the changing structure and significance of the landscape. This paper selected Zhucun, a typical urban village, as its case study and constructed an index system of festival landscapes. Through in-depth interviews, this paper studied the revival and restructure process of the Qiqiao Festival, and the role that landscapes play in the formation mechanism of memory on the part of subjects with different identities. The results showed that the elite and the local government selectively restructure festival landscapes, replacing authentic landscapes with “official” ones. The selection and production of a festival landscape constructed different memories among the subjects, where the festival memory of grassroots villagers was self-constructed and mostly came from traditional festival landscape elements while top-down interventions in the festival landscape constructed a different “official” memory for citizens and migrants to those of the villagers. The contemporary festival deviates from the original, which has weakened the conscious degree of cultural evolution and has had a reaction on the authenticity of memory. This research serves a reference for approaches in planning and conserving intangible cultural heritage in historic villages.
Highlights
The impact of the cultural turn has been such, that research emphasizing landscapes has been transformed to focus on the forming processes and symbolic significance of landscapes [1]
The Qiqiao Festival is an important part of traditional folk customs in the Lingnan region of Southern China, but it vanished for half a century, due to the outbreak of the anti-Japanese war and the Cultural Revolution
From the perspective of the theory’s origins, memory studies in the field of human geography are deeply influenced by Halbwachs’ collective memory theory and Nora’s recent work [21,22]. These scholars have set up the sociological analytical framework on sites of memory, which have provided a spatial junction for the cooperation between geography and other disciplines
Summary
The impact of the cultural turn has been such, that research emphasizing landscapes has been transformed to focus on the forming processes and symbolic significance of landscapes [1]. With the acceleration of urbanization, Zhucun has become a typical urban village due to the expansion of Guangzhou’s downtown area, the constraint of the urban-rural binary system, as well as governmental acts and actions by developers to avoid economic and social costs [4] During this process, villagers rented out their residences and ran businesses after losing their land, being forced to change their means of production and lifestyles, which resulted in the breakdown of former settlement patterns and local order, and migrants crowding into the village. During the rapid urbanization process, changes taking place in the living environment of Qiqiao culture transformed traditional festival landscapes; one of the most important reasons lies in the organizers’ subjective disregard of the memory of traditional festival landscapes. The conclusion interprets the outcomes of memory construction as reflected by the Qiqiao Festival landscape and provides a reference for the planning and conservation of the non-material cultural heritage of historic villages
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