MCLC: Chinese theme park (2)

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Chinese theme park (2)
From: Magnus Fiskesjo 
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Readers may be interested in my recent article “Wa grotesque” that discusses the original Splendid China park, in Shenzhen, and also includes a number of references to previous research on it. My main focus is however the attached (same-ticket) half of the park called the Zhonghua minsu cun (China folk culture villages) park, and its spectacle of Wa culture, which is repackaged in exoticizing form and presented there mainly for Chinese domestic tourists, who indeed also see the same minority dancers perform at the tourist shows at the Jingxiu Zhonghua (Splendid China) section of the park. I also discuss another nearby park a couple of kilometers away, the Shijie zhi chuang (Windows on the world) where Wa dancers, because of their darker complexion, are hired to pretend to be Africans, American Indians, and New Zealand Maori (yes they stick out their tongues) for Chinese domestic tourists hungry for the exotic and the primitive. (I mainly wrote about “Africa”).
See:  http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/3qKFJc2NdrghdX2eWKzb/full (The link is supposed to allow the first 50 people to download the full paper. If it runs out, write to me)
Magnus Fiskesjö, “Wa Grotesque: Headhunting Theme Parks and the Chinese Nostalgia for Primitive Contemporaries.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (published online 20.8.2014)
ABSTRACT
The Wa people have long occupied a special place in the state-directed political spectacle of minority nationalities, in both China and Burma. This fascination builds on older views of the Wa as dangerous barbarians, and closely evokes other primitivisms from around the world. In China and in neighbouring countries, state policy has recently combined with commercial entrepreneurism to cultivate a new, selective nostalgia for ‘primitive-exotic’ peoples like the Wa. In this paper, I discuss mainly China, and how the ‘wild’ Wa headhunting paraphernalia prohibited by the Chinese in the 1950s now reappear as kitsch. Some Wa of older generations see such revivals as dangerous, but younger people may embrace the revival. I discuss the new Chinese repackaging of primitive violence and the different Wa understandings of these staged exoticizations of their culture, including ways the staged representations are taken up in Wa attempts to revive aspects of their cultural past.
KEYWORDS Primitivism, grotesque, kitsch, cultural theme parks, Wa, China, Asia
by denton.2 at osu.edu on September 10, 2014
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