Reassembling The "Suocheng":Heritage Construction And Community Practice

The current research of heritage can be broadly categorized into two groups:the first group of studies mainly explore the value of heritage from a multi-faceted perspective;and the second group mainly carries out critical reflections over heritage,such as discussing the rights related to heritage.Against the background of global popularity of heritage,the incorporation of anthropology in heritage research has highlighted an understanding of the complexity of the relationship between human and heritage,as well as analysis of the value and significance of "human" in heritage.To a certain extent,this has compensated for the missed sociocultural perspective in research of heritage based on certain disciplines and enriched the existing studies.Building upon careful fieldwork investigations,this paper adopts methodologies of ethnographic description and interpretation to examine the construction and restructuring of a coastal defense fortress(Suocheng)in the coastal region of South China.The research analyzes the cultural process in which the Dapeng Suocheng has evolved from a settlement to a "heritage",and explores the roles played by diverse forces in the local area and the degrees of their participation.On that basis,this research further elaborates on how actors as protectors and developers of the heritage interacted with each other centering around the Suocheng heritage,and thus created the local narratives and advanced cultural reproduction of the local heritage.As a Suocheng settlement evolving from the coastal defense history since the Ming dynasty,Dapeng Suocheng has its spatial pattern closely intertwined with the historic progress of different families and social life landscape.Distinct spatial landscape structures have been preserved in communities.Behind the formation of the"four gates and four villages" pattern lies the collective memories of local communities,revealing that different families created a new order,value and meaning through a multitude of public,familial,belief-and taboo-related spaces,and in the meantime,constructed local landscapes.These memories represent a body of local knowledge that cannot be overlooked in understanding heritage.In the late 1990s,the arrival of the three "Heroes" in Pengcheng and the establishment of the Gucheng Museum marked a heritage path officially pursued by Dapeng Suocheng.After experiencing a series of multi-cultural practices centering around shaping Suocheng heritage,Dapeng Suocheng gradually transformed itself from a declining fortress settlement into a "national heritage".The heritagization path and the prosperity of tourism in Suocheng made Dapeng Suocheng the center of attention for multiple interested parties.A range of stakeholders,from the Gucheng Museum which obtained knowledge and cultural capitals from its early solicitation of Suocheng culture,to the Management Committee as the direct manager of Suocheng heritage,to Huaqiao City,a state-owned enterprise functioning as the operator of Suocheng heritage,and to locals and new migrants who expect to gain substantial benefits from tourism development of the heritage,have engaged in a series interactions and competitions over the issue of protection and development of the Dapeng Suocheng heritage.This has advanced the generation of local heritage;and the different roles that they have assumed collectively "made" the mode of the Suocheng heritage as we see today.We argue that the creation of Suocheng heritage is actually a practice of heritage reassembling.As pointed out by Bruno Latour,the social is closer to a movement that links things.Reassembling is a special movement of re-linking and re-combining.From the heritage creation surrounding the Dapeng Suocheng,we can see how local community actors associated with the heritage participated in the vein of the local heritage reassembling.With different layers of social mechanisms playing a dynamic role in heritage construction,local "cultural traditions" were also re-created and represented.Arguably,it was through discursive expressions of identities of government officials,intellectuals,media and locals that such shaping of the heritage image has been collectively constructed and manipulated.Such a heritage restructuring process participated by a diversity of actors has also continuously distilled new vitality and connotations to the Suocheng heritage.In a word,from the coastal defense fortress in the past to residential settlement to the coastal heritage that we see today,the heritagization process of Dapeng Suocheng lively unfolds the cultural process experienced by local heritage,as well as the related actor-network and identification construction.This process did not happen spontaneously over time.Instead,it is the product of the participation of different actors taking different stances.This also reminds us that it is imperative to pay attention to the formation process of heritage.Previous anthropological studies on heritage largely focus on the heritage itself or a monotonous factor influencing heritage,while overlooking the diverse participation and actors’ imitativeness in the formative process of heritage.The case of Dapeng Suocheng indicates that the formation of heritage is a process of constant reassembling.The planning,representation,restructuring and consumption of heritage are all actually a kind of"translation" centering around the local culture related to the heritage,which will be re-embedded into life as a new practice.As such,only by focusing on the formative process of heritage,tracing the actor-network and exploring a series of connections woven by actors around the heritage can we truly understand the production of heritage and its underlying stories,which is also the most important implication of "Reassembling the Heritage"-the core concept of this paper.