Nurturing the socialist spiritual civilization: Interplay between anthropology and politics

Since the 1940s, rural traditional dance of the North-West region plays a pivotal part in the making of cultural policy in RPC. Transformed and politized by cultural cadres at Yan'an, social and recreational practices such as yangge dance became propaganda tools for addressing revolutionary issues among local population. Compulsory supervised activity in work-units, it embodies the New China promoted by Mao Zedong until the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In the 1990s, yangge dance reappears in the form of everyday urban carnivals. Groups of neighborhood dancers, so-called spontaneous or religious/traditional, revive this tradition of gathering for ritual or profane occasions. Yangge fever takes hold of society and such dancing practices are gradually recuperated to breathe new life into official narrative: the Chinese socialist spiritual and material civilization promoted by Deng Xiaoping. Major cultural surveys on folkloric practices carried out in the 1980s across the country have paved the way for the revival of inventorying projects on cultural heritage alongside interests for Chinese presence and visibility on the international UNESCO arena. The paper build on empirical case studies from Beijing and Shaanxi Province that reveals conflictual modalities of the interplay between various stakeholders involved in the promotion of such dancing activities. Issues related to transmission modes and legitimate recognition of “authentic” practices are discussed to better understand the selection criteria that endorse a new “healthy” civilized lifestyle within the Chinese population. This also includes the role played by anthropologists on the ground as both as sustainer and disrupter of the performative meaning assigned by the cultural authorities.