In the minority villages of southwest China, houses constitute not only forms of built vernacular heritage that represent living traditions but also historic testimonies to negotiating processes between ethnic communities and with institutional authorities. My research historicises the collectively engaged negotiations that represent contestations of ethnicity in the building, renovation, use and reuse practices related to minority houses; specifically, it expands existing understandings of present community initiatives related to heritage buildings to include past interactive practices involving other actors and actants in the network (Latour 1993). I theorise heritage practice as a reinvention of the conventional wisdom of everyday politics in which both communities and authorities are complicit. Negotiation conventions have had a huge impact on and even shaped contemporary heritage house practices. Without an adequate historical account of the negotiating processes related to representing ethnic identities through house designs, both before and after their inscription into heritage lists, academics will continue to undervalue the significance of these minority buildings as witnesses to a social history from below that promotes the democracy of local societies.
How have conventional negotiations about houses both produced and become the product of heritage practices? My research focuses on Longsheng County in Guangxi Province, where five officially recognised ethnic groups dwell along one river valley within an area of 2500km2. The houses of different ethnic communities look similar in appearance and all have an identical stilt structure adapted to the local environment; however, spatial arrangements and symbolic meanings vary from one community to another due to the diverse customs of their homelands. More importantly, houses are charters by which communities claim their ethnic identities, and the ethnicities of these communities have long been contested, both between neighbours and in response to governmental policies. These horizontal and vertical interactions are preserved in how the communities have built and used houses, which play a significant role in the assertion of a community’s right to interpret ethnicity under the power of governmental institutions, especially when houses become heritage buildings. Thus, heritage practices have become a contemporary arena in which communities negotiate ethnicity with institutional authorities.
This research advances theoretical developments in heritage studies by challenging the generally accepted point of view that heritage is merely an authorised discourse rooted in West-centred modernity. I propose that uses of heritage lie in the everyday practice of conventional negotiations in non-Western societies, bridging Eastern practices of negotiation with Western concepts of cultural heritage. The evolution of negotiation practices is put into dialogue with local concepts of what constitutes heritage and reveals alternative interpretations of why and for whom heritage is significant.
This research also challenges the dichotomy of heritage and history, which has divided academics into totally separate fields (Lowenthal 1998; Hartog 2015). Blending architectural history and cultural heritage reveals that contemporary practices related to houses constitute inheritances of cultural traditions in local societies; thus, I regard the uses of heritage as reuses of conventional wisdom and bring scholarship on critical heritage studies (Herzfeld 2004; Smith 2006; Harrison 2012; Guttormsen et al. 2016) into dialogue with historical anthropology (Crossley et al. 2006; Faure 2007; Faure and Ho 2013; Szonyi 2017) to support a theoretical discussion of cultural exchange and social continuity in the uses of heritage.
Additionally, this research offers new insights into global cultural heritage practices through networks of people and objects. Heritage studies are applied humanities; thus, historicising the cultural practice of ethnicity is vital for any minority community in the world because it allows them to tell their histories from their perspectives and reuse their own conventions when contesting their ethnic identities. This research is intended to initiate a discussion of how academics can empower the general public to hear alternative voices in heritage interpretations such as the contesting histories of ethnicity through house practices in the case of Longsheng.