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Paper-Cuts in Modern China: The Search for Modernity, Cultural Tradition, and Women’s Liberation

Ka-ming Wu

in Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism

This chapter examines how folk paper-cuts have served as a site of intellectual expressions and debates about the meanings of—and the entangled relationships between—culture, gender, history, and the ... More

This chapter examines how folk paper-cuts have served as a site of intellectual expressions and debates about the meanings of—and the entangled relationships between—culture, gender, history, and the state in modern China. It first takes up the question of folk traditions, gender, and modernity before discussing the practice of paper-cutting in the Yan'an period (1937–1947) and in the late 1970s. It then considers how gender figures in the narrative of the folk cultural form of paper-cuts in Yan'an and its later deployment by urban intellectuals in various nationalist campaigns. In particular, it looks at women paper-cutting artists in contemporary Ansai County and describes how folk paper-cuts have become that “site of awkward engagement” where the agenda of the state, global capital regimes of values, and local tradition forces interacted with each other. The chapter suggests that, through the representation of paper-cuts, the binary oppositions of gender and rural–urban divide have become part of the meanings of Chinese modernity itself.Less

Paper

in Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

This chapter captures the types of interactions that individuals have historically undertaken with paper. The question here is not what paper did to people, but the other way around: what did people ... More

This chapter captures the types of interactions that individuals have historically undertaken with paper. The question here is not what paper did to people, but the other way around: what did people do with paper? With this in mind, the chapter takes advantage of the recent turn that attends to questions of embodiedness when it comes to reading, the way our gestural interactions with media affect the meaning of what is mediated. If paper was an important material paratext that helped construct new kinds of coherent reading communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it also conditioned new kinds of interactions with printed and nonprint material. With its “openness to alliances and ability to insert itself into a multitude of routines,” paper supported, shaped, and inspired a wide range of routines and techniques of culture, ranging from the pedagogical and scientific to the sociable and artistic. Accordingly, the focus here is on three principal forms of interactivity—folding, cutting, and pasting—and the ways these interactions served different kinds of purposes across different social groups, including child readers, domestic collectors, scholarly editors, and devotional communities.Less

Narrative Battle: Fabricating Folk Paper-Cutting as an Intangible Heritage

Ka-ming Wu

in Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism

This chapter examines how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village in Yan'an was transformed into a container of tradition and the practice of paper-cutting into an intangible cultural heritage. It first considers ... More

This chapter examines how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village in Yan'an was transformed into a container of tradition and the practice of paper-cutting into an intangible cultural heritage. It first considers the origin narrative of Xiaocheng Folk Art Village before discussing how China's urban intellectuals in the fields of folklore, religious studies, and anthropology have sought to re-understand the meanings of their work in the broader national and international framework. It then explains how Xiaocheng Folk Art Village emerged as a site of local, national, and international interests, with particular emphasis on the birth of creative rural subjects, reconfigured domestic relations, and a new public life in the village. It also describes the village's democratic struggles over folk art and concludes with an analysis of the politics of cultural authenticity and the invention of tradition in the broader context of intense urbanization and agrarian crisis in China. The chapter argues that heritage making in China is a process of “narrative battle” in which various actors construct differentiated meanings of history and tradition against the official party-state narrative.Less

“Papa! What’s Money?”: An Enduring Question Finds Answers in Burning It for the Spirits of the Dead in China

C. Fred Blake

in At Home and in the Field: Ethnographic Encounters in Asia and the Pacific Islands

This chapter explores the nature of value in ancient Chinese spiritual practices of burning paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family ancestors. Paper ... More

This chapter explores the nature of value in ancient Chinese spiritual practices of burning paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family ancestors. Paper money (zhĭqián) is used as the central motif in this discussion. It refers to paper replicas of things that take the form of money plus all the things that money can buy. Furthermore paper money is an integral part of local Chinese customs and ritual practices. Thus the chapter examines how discourse on the value of money can reveal the “bigger questions” implicit in becoming human, by exploring the particular rituals of Yu County—whose citizens traditionally engage in the paper-cutting craft to augment their income from agriculture.Less