Research On The Traditional Village Cultural Belief Space In Jinzhong Area

Presently, there are two trends in cultural development in China: on the one hand, thenew countryside construction turns out to be featureless, ignoring cultural elements; on theother hand, materialism becomes a dominant factor in the society, and people have lost theirtrue beliefs. On the grounds of the above mentioned reasons, this dissertation tries toinvestigate, from the perspectives of intangible cultural heritages and village belief cultures,the traditional villages in Jinzhong district of Shanxi province.Cultural space is a concrete form of intangible heritages, in which space means theplaces for traditional folk activities; further, it also includes elements as periodic times andregular human activities. That is, the study of civilian constructions must take all kinds ofpublic activities into consideration. The notion of cultural belief space includes the folk-beliefrelated spaces, such as times, events, and places of these activities. Geographically, Shanxi isa narrow territory walking from the south to the north. The south is considered the origin ofChinese civilization and belongs to the central culture circle, with agriculture being the base;the north was affected by the nomads and considered to be in the north cultural circle; whilethe central area--Jinzhong, combines the two different cultures. What’s more, this areacontains a variety of belief cultures because of the ancient trade development.Based on intangible cultural heritage and material culture, material collections were doneon the forms and sizes of traditional cultural belief spaces in Jinzhong area; detailedresearches were conducted on the features and development of these spaces, and theirrelations to the village social structures; as will establish foundations for the protection andinheriting of the traditional cultures, and provides references for the designing of futurevillage spaces.The dissertation can be divided into three large parts: Part I, meaning chapter1-2, is about the research backgrounds, meanings, relatedresearches, and methodologies; detailed interpretations are given on the fundamental theoriesof cultural belief space.Part II, meaning chapter3-5, classifies the cultural spaces and analyzes the developmentof the spaces in Jinzhong area based on on-the-spot investigations. Further studies were doneon the interrelation of traditional villages and cultural belief spaces. These studies willprovide references for future cultural protection works.Part III, meaning chapter6, discusses the inspiring functions of the distribution of thetraditional village cultural beliefs on the construction of new countryside; it also proposes thefeatures of this research and future study expectations.This research is featured with the following new attempts: a) With cultural belief spaceselected as the cut-in point, it combines non-material culture and material culture together,fetching up the defects in related researches; the subject is of great significance because offew studies Jinzhong region faith cultural space of the current knowledge of the literature;b)Through the layout analysis of the traditional village beliefs cultural space in Jinzhong area,this article summed up five hierarchy of the traditional villages beliefs cultural space;c)through study of the type Jinzhong region, morphological characteristics and heritageprotection about the traditional village beliefs cultural space, thesis summed up the value ofreference system and three proposed protection and development of traditional village culturalbelief space， in the height of the integrity protection of the non-material cultural heritage andintangible cultural heritage;d) It is found that spiritual concern on people is rather valid andsignificant for human life, which is also an inspiration to new village planning by thetraditional cultural spaces. Through studies on the modern and traditional space distributions,this dissertation proposes that present village planning should regress from the modernrational designs to the traditional plot-related sensible directions.