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ID: 181901

Common, Luxury, and Fake Commodities: Intangible Cultural Heritage Markets in China / Maags, Christina

Christina Maags	Journal Article
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Can traditional cultural practices thrive if they are commercialised? Or should the state protect them from “the market”? This study investigates these questions by studying the marketisation of traditional handicrafts in the tourism sector of Nanjing municipality (Jiangsu Province, China). Building on Boltanski and Esquerre’s (2020) work on the “enrichment economy,” I find that state-led marketisation efforts have simultaneously raised and distorted the value of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) commodities in China. Many ICH inheritors are stuck in the middle: although they benefit from enhanced recognition and valorisation of ICH products, they face difficulties in competing with “fake” and luxury ICH commodities. ICH commodities are thus characterised by an “in-between” status – between the enriched and the mass economy.

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Markets ; China ; Commodities ; Fake ; Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) ; Luxury

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ID: 192980

State institutions as building blocks of China's infrastructures of memory – the case of intangible heritage / Maags, Christina

Maags, Christina	Journal Article
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The past is continuously reinterpreted to serve the interests of the present. Over the last two centuries of turbulent Chinese history, the past has been redefined through narratives and categorisations. How does the party-state manage the diversity and complexity of China's past, and what implications does this have for state–society relations in China? Based on a case study of China's adoption of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Convention, this article argues that the Chinese party-state creates “infrastructures of memory,” which enable it to actively manage China's diverse past through selective institutionalisation. This process creates a “cognitive map” of tangible and rationalised relations and boundaries between vernacular memories as interpreted by the state. Although this map is to shape and direct Chinese collective memory and identity, it also sparks contestation among members of the populace who seek to preserve vernacular and multiple memories of their socio-cultural past.

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China ; Memory ; Institution ; State - Society Relations ; Intangible Cultural Heritage

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