[Liu Xiaochun] Whose original ecology is it? Why authenticity?

[Abstract] In the context of intangible cultural heritage protection,"original ecology" has gone from invention to popularity, and has even become synonymous with the authentic intangible culture imagined by the public.

It is a myth created by popular culture.

Once folk customs, as daily life, become the "heritage" of intangible culture, they are separated from the cultural environment in which they survive and enter the "defamiliarization" process of being produced and constructed, making intangible culture more and more distant from their daily life.

The true appearance of the form.

The pursuit of "original ecology" in the context of intangible cultural heritage protection is closely related to folklore's search for authenticity and the romantic tradition of folklore.

The tradition of exploring authenticity in folklore mainly includes two aspects: exploring the authenticity of mediated folklore and exploring the authenticity of folk culture itself.

In the process of globalization and modernization, the tradition of exploring authenticity mainly focuses on the latter, and has triggered a discussion of folklore on folklore; The tradition of folklore romanticism is a combination of archealism, romanticism and nationalism.

In contemporary society, it is manifested in the exploration of unique local culture.

Through cultural contrast compared with modern urban culture, it uses cultural elements with great differences.

Stimulate people's desire to consume local culture, and local governments build their own cultural identity.

There is no folk custom as a "living fossil" in real life.

Only when people abandon the illusion of "original ecology" and view folk custom from the perspective of inheritance, change and development, can folk customs that have become intangible cultural heritage have endless vitality.

[Keywords] Intangible cultural heritage Original ecological authenticity Romantic nationalism Introduction Intangible cultural heritage is a brand new concept.

Because it is closely related to government-led cultural administration, the theoretical nature of this concept has always been questioned by scholars.

In fact, there are profound academic origins behind this concept.

Intangible cultural heritage includes intangible cultural heritage, oral and spiritual culture.

The purpose of protecting intangible cultural heritage is to advocate cultural equality, emphasize cultural diversity, and emphasize the context of globalization.

The identification value of local culture, its academic logic, academic pursuit and cultural and political significance are in the same vein as modern folklore's focus on local folk culture and anthropology's focus on other culture in distant time and space.

Therefore, the current theory and practice of intangible cultural protection are inevitably influenced by the academic concepts of modern folklore and anthropology.

Different from cultures that are inherited through words and material materials, intangible cultural heritage is a living culture passed down orally and spiritually.

This inheritance method determines that intangible cultural heritage has the characteristics of variation.

Even the same type of customs will be due to local culture and individual differences of inheritors.

The so-called "ten miles of different styles, hundreds of miles of different customs", The intangible cultural heritage recorded by both words and modern multimedia technology can only be a description in a specific time and space context, and cannot fully present the local, living, and constantly changing and developing intangible culture.

It is precisely because of the rich forms produced by mutation that in the current process of protecting intangible cultural heritage, it is common for multiple places to compete for the origin of a famous legend.

In addition, with the changes in cultural ecology, some intangible cultural heritage is indeed endangered.

In order to protect the endangered intangible cultural heritage, academic circles, media, government and business circles have jointly created a myth of "original ecology" of intangible cultural heritage.

All these phenomena that appear in the process of protecting intangible cultural heritage contain profound academic problems.

These phenomena are actually closely related to the long-standing In search of authenticity of folk phenomena in the academic community, closely related to the academic philosophy and academic pursuit of modern folklore and anthropology, and also related to the intellectual tradition of folklore, the cultural and political significance contained in local cultural resources in the process of globalization and modernization.

Original ecology: What is authenticity in the context of intangible cultural heritage? In the field of folklore, according to German folklorist Regina Bendix, the authenticity of folklore implies a search for authenticity.

Due to the polysemy and difficult to grasp nature of this search, it is difficult for academic circles and society to reach a consensus.

[1]This shows that the authenticity of intangible culture is a characteristic that cannot be clarified.

In the current practice of intangible cultural protection, authenticity (Authenticity) demands are becoming increasingly mainstream discourse, mainly manifested in two aspects.

One is to emphasize that intangible cultural heritage, as a historical and cultural tradition, has its unique local character, and each intangible cultural heritage has a "real" and "original"."Real" and "original" intangible cultural heritage are often in an endangered state.

What needs to be protected is these "original" intangible cultural heritage.

This type of voice is often expressed as the demands of scholars and intellectuals at first, but then gradually becomes entertaining due to the intervention of the media.

The most representative words are "protection" and "original ecology"; The other aspect is mainly manifested in the joint participation of local governments, scholars, media and social forces led by commercial capital, trying to "heritage" folk culture with a long historical tradition and still exists vividly in daily life.

It is extracted from the context of daily life and shaped into cultural heritage that transcends the local area and represents the cultural image of the local area.

Since the protection of intangible cultural heritage is a complex systematic project and hides huge social, Economic benefits, intangible cultural heritage has become a traditional resource that promotes the political, economic and cultural development of local society.

In a sense, this demand has often become the mainstream voice in the process of protecting intangible cultural heritage.

The most representative words are "Development" and "utilization".

In many cases, the above two aspects are often intertwined.

On the one hand, the purpose of excavating and protecting the original ecology is to serve the shaping of the image of local culture.

Folk culture as daily life is shaped as an image representative of local culture, divorced from the context of its life, and thus becomes intangible cultural heritage with public significance., becoming an object to be displayed, appreciated, and shaped; On the other hand, local governments, scholars, media and commercial capital continue to strengthen the "real" and "original" cultural elements of intangible cultural heritage, and through a series of complex symbolization processes of cultural production, they are gradually finalized and solidified, thus constructing the "authenticity" of intangible cultural heritage.

In the era of globalization, when the local and diverse significance of folk culture is explored and invented, folk customs are transformed into "intangible cultural heritage", which also highlights its cultural and political significance.

The academic debate on authenticity in the academic tradition of folklore has gradually transformed into how to "truly" display local culture in the cultural administration of intangible cultural heritage protection, because folklore is no longer a backward, irrational, and absurd culture passed down by marginal ethnic groups and lower-class people.

It is a local "heritage" and a nation-state "heritage", with immeasurable political, economic, and cultural value.

Excavating and displaying the "real","unique" and "unique" folk culture and transforming it into "intangible cultural heritage" has become the pursuit of every effort by local governments and scholars.

It is against this background that the word "original ecology" has gradually become deeply rooted in the hearts of the people due to the intervention of the media and has become synonymous with the authentic intangible cultural heritage of the public imagination.

Due to the "heritage" value of intangible culture, intangible culture has derived cultural and political significance.

In the intangible cultural heritage protection movement under the background of globalization, the concept of romantic nationalism in the period of the origin of folklore has been carried forward.

[2]The key to the problem is not the excavation, display and promotion of the value of intangible cultural heritage, because this itself is a process of imagination and construction, but whether the intangible culture being excavated and displayed is the "original ecology"? What kind of "original ecology" is this? Is it the "original ecology" in the sense of daily life? Or is it the "original ecology" that scholars and other forces colluded to imagine and construct? In an era of globalization and modernization, is there still an "original ecological" culture that has not been influenced by any external factors? From the macro perspective of globalization and modernization, we can find that the main body of imagination and inheritance of folk culture is still in pre-modern society, separated from globalization and modernization, and is the main concept that governs the invention of "original ecology".

Under the influence of this concept, the word "original ecology" can easily make people imagine the inheritance subjects who inherit intangible cultural heritage as people who are separated from the outside world, have no history, are backward, and are still in a traditional society.

This kind of lofty elite culture is obviously relative to the progressive nature of elite culture.

Anthropological research results have denied this existing prejudice.

American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins cited the encounter between non-Western and Western cultures as an example and pointed out that the view of describing non-Western indigenous people as "people without history" is actually a less enlightening argument.

This view holds that before the people of America, Asia, Australia and the Pacific Islands came into contact with Western culture, they were called "indigenous peoples" and "indigenous peoples" by Westerners.

They had no historical connection with other societies.

They were "distant" and "unknown".

Non-Western society exists as the "other" of Western society.

The "primitive" and "distant" culture of non-Western society exists to answer the evil of Western racism, sexism, and imperialism.

Salins went on to point out that in fact, the struggle of non-Western nations to create their own modern culture destroyed the widely accepted concept among Westerners that tradition and change are opposed, custom and reason are opposed.

It is particularly obvious that it destroyed the famous 20th century concept of the opposition between tradition and development.

[3] P109 - 125) The indigenous people have not lost their culture or completely died in the face of external modernization forces.

The indigenous people have their own historical consciousness and the power to create history.

This is the localization of modernity.

Therefore, when looking at cultural encounters from a macro perspective of the process of globalization and modernization, any party that encounters each other, whether it appears to be a strong or weak culture on the surface, cannot be powerless and has no historical initiative.

In this sense,"original ecology" is not so much the true appearance of an intangible cultural existence, but rather the product of the joint imagination and construction of scholars and different social forces.

Taking a specific intangible culture as an example, we can also find that the changes in social culture will have a profound impact on the inheritors of intangible culture and the culture they inherit.

Take the Hakka folk songs in Meizhou investigated by the author as an example.

Before liberation, folk songs were regarded as inappropriate songs, or even obscene songs that were offensive to customs.

The singers surveyed by Xu Xiaoying said,"In the old society, people who sang folk songs would be scolded.

The family members of the eldest uncle's family would scold them if they sang on the street.

Folk songs were sung on the mountains.

(Singing on the street) Just talk bad, talk bad." "Many women know how to sing.

They are tired of going up the mountain to dump firewood and mow, so they sit down and sing like this when they rest...

Women sing like they sing on the hills, but they can't sing in public.

There are no women singing in the park...

In the old society, women sang in places where there was no one in the wild.

Women pick things and sing long distances on the road, but housewives never go out to sing in public." [4] P68 - 69) After 1949, due to the influence of the Communist Party of China's literary and artistic policy, traditional folk literature and art were incorporated into the track of New China's literary and artistic construction, given positive significance in cultural construction, and had a positive image.

After successive political movements and social changes in the process of reform, opening up, and urbanization, the inheritance of Hakka folk songs has taken on new characteristics, from singing in the mountains and fields to public entertainment and leisure, from the love life of men and women who mainly expresses "romance and sister romance" to the combination with the nation-state modernization movement, from the development of transmission of memory and impromptu singing to the separation of folk song creation and singer singing, a group of professional and semi-professional singers have emerged.

From word of mouth to widespread dissemination with the help of modern multimedia technology, from personal self-entertainment to organized performances by various folk folk song groups, etc.

[5]Overall, the singing content and performance space of Hakka folk songs have undergone major changes, lacking the traditional "mountain flavor", while the tunes, cavity boards, form requirements for the songs, etc.

of their singing have basically remained unchanged, and they still maintain the traditional charm.

Therefore, due to the oral and psychological characteristics of intangible culture and the influence of cultural changes, it is difficult to regard the performance form, oral form, shape of handicrafts, production process, etc.

in a specific time and space as a "real" version or "authentic" appearance.

Instead of determining the authenticity of intangible culture from a stagnant perspective, it is better to examine the authenticity of intangible culture from the perspective of development and change.

The word "original ecology" has gone from invention to popularity, deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and has even become synonymous with the authentic intangible culture of the public imagination.

From this production process, it can be found that "original ecology" is actually a symbol of popular culture and a myth created by popular culture.

For a long time, people have gradually forgotten or abandoned folk culture because they appear as the opposite of modernization and are "backward" cultures.

When folk customs re-entered the public's vision in the name of intangible cultural heritage, people discovered that what was originally called folk customs actually has political, economic and cultural value.

It is against this background that the production machines of mass culture use intangible culture to try to "re-charm" the already "disenchanted" mass culture, covering it with a layer of primitive, authentic, unknown, and distant homeland.

The mysterious veil of gradually being forgotten.

Therefore, in essence, those who flaunt the so-called "original ecological songs and dances","original ecological music","original ecological singing methods","original ecological tourism", etc.

under the banner of intangible cultural heritage are all cultural production in the era of technological reproduction.

Intangible culture has been separated from the cultural ecology in which it exists and has become an object to be displayed, appreciated, and shaped.

Its uniqueness has been destroyed, its sense of distance and distance has disappeared, and the living world in which it exists has been stripped away.

If technology reproduces the authenticity of art in the era The disappearance of the aura of (echtheit) is due to the close relationship between art and etiquette that causes people's sense of worship for art to disappear.[6] P88 - 107) Then, the "inheritance" process of intangible culture separates intangible culture from the cultural environment in which it exists and enters a "defamiliarization" process of being produced and constructed.

This process has made intangible culture increasingly distant from its true form of daily life.

The origin of the issue of authenticity The academic community and the general public are so obsessed with the myth of "original ecology".

Where does the academic tradition of this concept come from? This concept is actually closely related to the academic tradition of folklore in exploring authenticity.

Specifically speaking, the tradition of folklore in exploring authenticity mainly includes two aspects: one is the authenticity of mediated folklore, and the other is the authenticity of folk culture itself.

The research tradition of folklore almost covers intangible cultural heritage.

Among them, oral traditions, local performing arts, customs, handicrafts and cultural spaces are all traditional research objects of folklore and have profound academic accumulation.From the perspective of the research history of folklore, due to the inheritance characteristics of objects, when folklore transforms from oral inheritance, physical inheritance, and technical inheritance to the process of recording and dissemination by words or other carriers, it will inevitably lead to more or less distortion.

In addition, folk culture will change with the changes of society, history and culture, and there will be variations in inheritance.

Therefore, the study of intangible culture passed down orally and spiritually in folklore can always be said to be accompanied by fierce debate between true and false.

The issue of authenticity runs through the entire history of folklore research.

In Western academia, folk customs are truly recognized and valued by people, starting with the Italian thinker Giambattista Vico.

During the Enlightenment, Western academia still regarded folk culture as a fallacy of the human spirit, but Vico emphasized that historians cannot and should not ignore the popular traditions that Enlightenment thinkers have rejected or are rejecting.

[7] P110) Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers, he regarded fables, proverbs, and anecdotes as part of history, and did not regard them as fallacies of the human spirit.

[7] P106) Vico's exposition on the authenticity of the historical culture created by the ancient people, namely the barbarians, and the concept of cultural relativism formed by these discussions not only shook the enlightened reason, but also laid the foundation for folklore.

It was under the influence of this ideological concept that people began to collect, record and create their own folk traditions.

However, due to the extensive discovery of folk traditions, it must go through the process of moving from oral tradition to written writing.

In this process, factors such as the person's personal understanding, the purpose, method, technical conditions of the recording, etc.

will inevitably affect the description and presentation of folk culture.

For a long time, scholars have been worried about whether mediated folk customs truly represent folk culture itself.

In the 1760s,"Ossian" published by James Macpherson,"Collection of Stories of Children and Families" published by the Brothers Grimm from 1812 to 1815, and the Finnish national epic "Kalevala" published in 1835.

These three works with great influence in the history of folklore have all been questioned about their authenticity.

Detailed research by later generations of the original materials of possible Gelgosian poets shows that although McPherson elicited the true origin of oral legends in the Scottish Highlands, he was not loyal to the original materials, and the story lost its original tragic nature, touching and noble character, and almost lost its original meaning; researchers also have evidence that the Grimm brothers not only tampered with the stories they claimed to have been recorded directly from farmers, but also forged the providers 'materials; As for Kalevala, folklore scholars believe that it is entirely a typical example of pseudo-folklore, which literarily embellishes or even rewrites plots that may or may not have been originally told orally.

[8]Despite this, the nations that inherit these oral traditions do not deny the authenticity of these folk songs, stories, and epics because of the self-creation, adaptation, or even tampering of the compilers.

Due to the strong romantic and nationalist traditions of these nations, people believe that the significance and value of these oral traditions are far more important than the truth of the inheritance of oral traditions, because these folk songs, stories, and epics have become symbols of the national spirit and are important for enhancing national pride.

Maintaining national identity plays an important role.

The discussion on the authenticity of folk culture itself can be explained from the debate on the "Homer Question".

Whether Homer existed and whether Homer's epics were oral poems have always troubled later people.

As early as ancient Greece, the famous historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and later the Roman poet Horace all believed that the author of the epic was Homer.

However, Vico put forward new ideas in New Science.

He believed that Homer did not exist, but was the general representative of Greek rappers.

The two epics were not written by one person, but history in the memory of all the Greek people.

The works we call Homer's epics today were processed and compiled by many poets.

Therefore, Homer was not a person, but a group of people.

In the 20th century, Milman Parry and Albert Bates Lord conducted long-term epic field surveys in Yugoslavia, combining their research results on the living forms of the Yugoslav epic with the philological tradition of Homer's question to answer Homer's question again.

They believe that the creator of Homer's epics was an oral poet, and the evidence comes from the stylized expression of Homer's epics themselves.

[9] P204) Different from previous folklore research methods, the oral formula theory reveals the dialectical relationship between tradition and variation in the epic performance process based on the experience of field surveys and the discussion of authenticity issues.

They pointed out that if you want to define an "oral" epic, what matters is not the oral performance, but the creation within the oral performance.

[9] P6) They have repeatedly emphasized that we must eliminate from the word "performer" the impression that he is simply repeatedly making something created by others or himself.

Our oral poet is a creator.

The man sitting before us reciting the epic is not only a carrier of tradition, but also an original artist who is creating tradition.

[9] P18) Every performance of an epic singer is a self-creation based on inheriting tradition.

There is no fixed original text.

The epic is always in a state of flow and mutation.

The epic singer has never recognized that there is a fixed song content or words, that is to say, the singer inherits ancient stories from tradition, and each performance is his own.

They believe that this is a unique way of oral inheritance.

[9] P218 - 219) Since the middle and late 20th century, the process of globalization and modernization has greatly affected the inheritance of folk culture.

The academic community's pursuit of the authenticity of folk culture is more reflected in exploring the authenticity of folk culture itself.

People have found that compared with the relatively stable inheritance of folk phenomena in traditional societies, the inheritance of folk customs in modern and changing societies has changed.

Some new and modern cultural elements have begun to infiltrate into traditional folk culture.

In particular, folk customs have begun to become heritage, become objects to be appreciated and consumed, and are re-invented, folk customs gradually transcend the cultural time and space in which they exist and are utilized by third parties.

Scholars began to think about the authenticity of folk culture in changing societies.

The key question is, in the face of folk culture in a changing society, is the task of folklore scholars to be as obsessed with tracing the original form of a certain custom as traditional folklore? Or should we restore folk customs to a historical state and examine the development forms of folk culture in different historical periods and even contemporary times from a local perspective? In fact, when local and "past" folk customs become the cultural heritage of the entire nation that transcends the local area, both scholars and the public will generally doubt the authenticity of the heritage.

Because folk customs are conventionally regarded by the public as historical existence, rather than daily life related to specific time and space and passed down to this day, folk customs are fixed in the "past" by the public's imagination, and heritage is re-invented by different forces and become an unnatural cultural creation divorced from the "past" native environment.

At the academic level, there has been academic discussions on "folklore" that emerged in Germany and then spread to countries such as Northern Europe and Japan.

[10]When the authenticity of the real heritage is questioned, people naturally call for imaginary folk customs that belong to the "past" and "original ecology".

Why need authenticity? After examining the academic origin of the myth of "original ecology", what still needs to be asked is, in such an era of technological reproduction, why are people still obsessed with authenticity in the process of protecting intangible cultural heritage? Why are you still immersed in the illusion of "original ecology"? On the face of it, this seems like a self-evident question.

Actually, it's not.

This issue is also closely related to the academic tradition of folklore, mainly romanticism, as well as the cultural and political significance contained in local cultural resources in the process of globalization and modernization.

In the middle and late 18th century, when folklore was sprouting in Germany, the authentic discourse of folklore began to emerge.

The pursuit of authenticity in German folklore was directly linked from the beginning to romantic nationalism.

In this movement, enthusiastic patriotic scholars searched for folk records of the past, not only to understand how people lived in history, but mainly to discover and reshape the present and build a "historical" model for the future.

The nation is based on historical traditions and myths-that is, folk customs-rather than current political reality.

[11] P819 - 835) According to early German folklorists, the strange factors in self-culture were the antidote to the pathology of civilization.

For them, local history is a better, more dynamic, and more authentic embodiment of discovering a certain self-culture.

They criticized the lack of authenticity of the social customs of their own era and expressed their critical attitude towards society.

The goal of their criticism was actually the civilized customs of noble people.

As representatives of the new bourgeoisie, they tried to seek an authentic culture to replace the inauthentic culture of citizens.

[12] P33 - 34) This search for authenticity was more clearly expressed by Johann Gotterried Herder (1744 - 1803), whose work implied an attitude against urban life; opposition to affectation in language, behavior, and art; opposition to the extravagant life of the aristocracy; and his belief that a pure, unpretentious state of existence was needed.

These imaginary, purely human conditions of existence are Rousseau's "barbarians" or those external others who seem not yet corrupted, but who live in distant places.

[12] P35) In 1773, Held systematically elaborated on the words of authenticity in his correspondence "On The Song of Exiang" and the Poems of Ancient People." In this communication, Held expressed his fascination with the origin of ancient poetry.

He summarized "Song of Exiang" as a poem full of emotion of nobility and innocence, full of the simplicity, power and well-being of human life.

Poetry can stir the hearts of many people.

The words Helder chose for these descriptions formed the most original semantic range that later summarized authenticity.

He combined simplicity, innocence with nobility or dignity, gave honor and importance to the poor, and transferred to the poor these characteristics that had traditionally been assigned to the social elite.

He did not express his disappointment at the degeneration of his civilization, but was delighted to have discovered the fresh and unpolluted voice of "Song of Exiang".

[12] P37 - 38) Held's work aroused the search by other folklore scholars for the authenticity of national culture, which was best reflected by the Grimm brothers.

The collection of folk stories pioneered by the Brothers Grimm uses restored texts and cleansed texts to bring folk stories back to the people, making this cultural heritage continuously full of vitality and improving its status.

[12] P44) The folk stories collected by the Brothers Grimm evoke natural metaphors through many powerful images and establish an authentic vocabulary.

Like children and nature, people's artistic talents have not been abandoned, and reading folk stories may expose readers to what seems lost in the shattered strata of civilization.

The brothers Grimm compared folk customs and oral poetry to lonely ears of wheat that survived a storm, claiming that nothing that flourished in ancient times could be left behind except folk songs, certain books, legends and innocent family stories, even dim memories...

In these folk songs and stories, there flowed the same purity that made children feel so surprised and sacred.

Innocence, purity, and sanctity are words that describe the authenticity of morality and religion.

[12] P51) It is in the academic tradition of folklore exploring authenticity constructed by Held that the academic tradition of folklore romanticism was formed.

The tradition of folklore romanticism is a peculiar combination of romanticism, antiquity and nationalism.

This is the most far-reaching conceptual tradition in folklore.

It can be said that many of our imaginations about intangible cultural heritage and the cultural ecology of its survival are closely related to this concept and tradition, and we can find the inheritance of mutual knowledge pedigree.

The romantic tradition of folklore not only criticizes the "excessive civilization" of Western society, but also gives folklore a backward-looking and unique "anti-" modernization vision.

The romantic tradition of folklore has its own unique rhetoric methods.

In their works, they often construct a simple society far from modern life.

A group of people live in this almost isolated society.

These people's lifestyles are far from modern civilization and their lives are simple and outdated.

However, they are kind by nature and almost never leave their native homes."These people often become alternative groups constructed by people using alternative ideals, and are often typed.

They are either noble barbarians, or gentlemen shepherds or farmers, whose lives obey the changes of nature and are in close harmony with nature.

Regarding the classic description of folk performance situations, this rhetoric has also profoundly influenced our imagination about folk customs.

In the long harsh winter and cool midsummer nights, when farm work may not be too busy, old people who still remember the stories and songs they heard when they were young sit around the winter fire, or sit on the corridor and around the campfire on midsummer night.

Late at night seems to evoke memories of rural people, the existence of many generations and memories of the past.

In the past era, people listened to old people telling stories and singing folk songs." [13] P3 - 37) In fact, in the romantic discourse of folklore,"min" is a pre-modern person who lives a pre-modern life, and "min" is constructed as a "local other." Those groups that are constructed as "local others" and the cultures they inherit are endowed with strong cultural differences when compared with modern urban culture.

In such an era of globalization, postmodern culture, it is precisely because of the locality, diversity and relative marginality of intangible cultural heritage that it provides sufficient imagination space for people who understand, understand and consume these cultures.

Stimulate people's imagination about the culture of the "other".

These strange and exotic cultures bring cultural shocking experiences to consumers.

Some scholars pointed out that "the transformation to postmodern culture is to introduce such a movement, It is far away from the universally recognized and universal standard of judging cultural tastes, and has entered a more relative and diverse landscape.

The cultural tastes of all living beings that were previously excluded, strange, alien, and common people may now be accepted." [14] P155 - 156) From this perspective, many of the current original ecological songs and dances are the exploration of unique local cultural factors, and through the cultural contrast compared with modern urban culture, use different cultural elements to stimulate people's consumption desire.It is for this reason that American scholar Louisa Schein (Luoisa Schein) believes that the song and dance performances of ethnic girls in China's tourism culture since the 1980s are related to the endless desire for consumption of China's national culture at home and abroad.

She found that after the Cultural Revolution, most of the images of others in China's ethnic songs and dances were represented by women, presenting women as a youthful fusion with backward rural characteristics, and adding non-mainstream cultural flavor.

Become part of the common expression of the other characteristics of the nation.

She went on to point out that the image of ethnic women since the 1980s seems to be a contrast to urban elite culture, and the difference between the two reflects both the desire for modernity and the nostalgia that this "progress" often arouses.

[15]P98-121) Another important aspect of the romantic tradition formed by folklore's pursuit of authenticity is to construct a national self from the nation's ancient, still passed down, oral and heart-to-heart intangible cultural traditions.

Whether it is the importance of "Kalevala" in the process of building modern Finnish nation-national identity,[16]P217-229) or "The Song of Exiang" that created a local literature and a new kind of history for Celtic Scotland,[17]P21) or the Grimm brothers created Germany's great national heritage through folk stories,[8] From these successful cases of "creation" of folk customs in the history of folklore, We can then discover the secret of why the current "original ecology" myth is constantly being created.

In a certain sense, the current protection of intangible cultural heritage is a manifestation of local cultural consciousness in the process of globalization.

In the face of globalization, local people have begun to recognize and understand local culture and realize the importance of local culture.

According to Mr.

Fei Xiaotong, the significance of cultural consciousness lies in that people living in a certain culture have "self-knowledge" of their own culture and have a full understanding of the development process and future of culture.

[18]This cultural consciousness in the intangible cultural heritage protection movement is to a greater extent manifested in the use of local cultural resources and the construction of local cultural identity.

However, it is important to recognize and remain vigilant that when localities explore "original" cultures, they are not just demonstrating, but also expressing, so that the identities they envision can be recognized by the larger world.

In the process of this cultural creation, the key question is whether to produce self for others or for oneself.

Unfortunately, in the current exploration of "original ecology" culture, the former is more manifested.

In fact, there is no such thing as a so-called "living fossil" of history in real life.

Only when people abandon the illusion of "original ecology" and view folk customs from the perspective of inheritance, change and development, can they become intangible cultural heritage.

Only then can folk customs truly have endless vitality.

In the context of intangible cultural heritage protection, the appeal for authenticity is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, through the construction of the "original ecology" myth, the public can objectively re-understand and understand their own national culture, enhance the public's awareness of the protection of national cultural heritage, and promote national cultural awareness; On the other hand, the display of "original ecology" intangible cultural heritage, because it is a cultural display separated from the context of daily life, inevitably causes the public to misunderstand the true form of intangible culture.

This misunderstanding may be fatal to the survival and development of intangible culture.

Each cultural product produced for others has to continue to cater to others 'stereotypes of intangible culture.

Once the distorted image created through this stereotype is internalized into the self-identification of the holders of intangible culture, we can't help but ask: Is this "original ecology" promoting the inheritance and development of culture or the beginning of a new round of destruction? (This article is one of the results of the 2006 general project of the Ministry of Education's Humanities and Social Sciences Research,"Folk Customs and National Identity", project approval number 06JA850009).

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(This article was published in Academic Research, No.

2, 2008)(The author's unit, China Intangible Cultural Heritage Research Center, Sun Yat-sen University)