VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

Shaowu Nuo Dance was inscribed on China’s national intangible cultural heritage list in 2008. This study investigates the negotiation of subjectivity among Shaowu Nuo Dance inheritors in China, focusing on their dual roles as ritual practitioners and cultural performers within the government-led intangible cultural heritage (ICH) system. While existing research on Shaowu Nuo Dance emphasizes its performance forms, folk beliefs, and modern adaptations, a critical gap persists in understanding how tensions between authenticity and innovation shape inheritors’ subjectivity during its “ICH-ization”. Though studies on traditional dance ICH often critique the “disembeding” of folk practices, few examine how this institutionalization reconfigures inheritors’ subjectivity. To fill this gap, the study employs semi-structured interviews with six inheritors (three traditionalists prioritizing ritual contexts and three adaptationists engaging in stage-oriented innovations) and NVivo-powered thematic analysis. Findings reveal how government intervention widens factional divisions within the inheritance group and affects the construction of inheritors’ subjectivity. In the process where sacred rituals are transformed into government-recognized cultural spectacles, traditionalists who are marginalized by bureaucratic certification criteria struggle to legitimize their ritual-based identities, while adaptationists, embedded in official cultural departments, navigate commodification risks to secure resources. Non-representative inheritors, despite embodying grassroots cultural vitality, remain excluded from policy protections, forcing adaptive survival strategies that further erode their subjectivity. By framing subjectivity as a negotiated outcome of power dynamics and cultural recontextualization, this study challenges top-down ICH preservation models. It calls for a reflection on the authenticity-innovation paradox of ICH in rapidly modernizing contexts.