Introduction

3This Chinese ethnic distinction separates the population between the Han majority (93% of the population) and the minority nationalities (7%). According to a strange equation, the former, considered as civilised and educated, would be the representatives of the Chinese nation (Ch. Zhonghua minzu 中华民族) and would include the latter, considered as backward and lacking civilisation (Harrell 1995; Mullaney 2004). This “civilising project” that aimed at governing minorities has gradually become a consumption pattern pursuing the same objective. New romantic media representations on minority nationalities and the state’s narrative of a supposedly common past, led millions of Chinese, most often from urban areas, to travel domestically each year (Chio 2014; Zhu 2018). During these journeys to minority nationalities territories often considered as “ethnic cultural heritage” sites, or even minority theme parks, these Chinese middle-class vacationers, whatever their own ethnic origins, can experience the boundaries between “civilisation” and “primitiveness” (Fiskesjö 2015; Oakes 2006; Sofield & Li 1998).

4Since the mid-2000s, minority nationalities experiencing tourism started to perform “traditional” dances during “bonfire festivities”, a standardised cultural form dating back to the 1990s (Mueggler 2002; Liu 2006; Nyíri 2006, p. 16). Like for many others among China’s, dances have become an integral part of cultural identity construction (Mueggler 2002). With the signing of the 2003 UNESCO Convention, these kinds of cultural practices have been valorised as intangible cultural heritage (hereafter ICH; Ch. feiwuzhi wenhua yichan 非物質文化遗产, often shortcut as feiyi). In the Lugu Lake area, Na dances became one of the most famous Na intangible cultural heritages when Sichuan Province focused on labelling, inventorying, and listing cultural practices to catch up with the Yunnan part of the lake in terms of tourism development.

5Heritage can be considered at first as a broad institutional category of goods, practices or monuments considered as cultural. ICH is its latest trend. This is also a puzzling notion that expresses a certain cultural authority through an increasingly homogeneous, but implicit and diffuse language of what culture and tradition are. However, heritage is a set of “complex processes of selection and requalification, bringing into play more or less shared values” (Bondaz et al. 2012). Heritage commodification is also prone to bring new values to cultural practices (Dutournier & Padovani 2021; Zhu 2018; Zhu & Maags 2020). In the first part, I attempt to contextualise the meaning ICH takes in the Chinese heritage context characterised by tourist situations.

6Yet, local worlds from which cultural expressions originate often have totally different conceptual universes conveying quite dissimilar social values with heritage institutions. For example, Na dances have long played a significant role in the social reproduction of communities. They were usually performed at particular events in community life, following rituals such as year-end celebrations, the completion of house construction, and gutch ceremonies – used to celebrate cohabitation between partners and, today, marriage. This was still the case until 2014 in the non-touristy village of Lijiazui 李家嘴, located in the hinterland of the Yongning 永宁 Plain in Sichuan Province.

7This paper aims at comparing the festivities between two Na villages, Lijiazui and Xiaoluoshui (located in Yunnan Province), to grasp sociocultural changes that are gradually reshaping Na social organisation toward a market-oriented national economy (Blumenfield 2014, 2018; Mattison 2010; Milan 2012, 2019, 2021; Walsh 2005). As a component of Na people’s social life conveying values and norms, I argue that dances have been seriously challenged by tourism growth and heritagisation processes. Drawing on fieldwork findings that were followed by ongoing online exchanges with key interlocutors and online research on ICH processes and narratives, the article seeks to grasp both the Na people’s agency and new subjectivity that have been remodelled within this new context. I ask how locals negotiate, contest, and accommodate China’s ICH policies that are part of the nation-building. Throughout the article, I examine these issues by investigating the meaning that the Na people have of the core notions of ICH like culture, tradition, identity, and transmission.

8As part of my doctoral research investigating social change and economic transition, the collected ethnographic data comes from participant observation of daily life, festivities, and tourism activities. While I lived in two Na houses, one in each village, between 2012 and 2014, I actively participated in their daily life in many ways, such as serving tourists, cleaning, working in the fields, etc. Caught in village social relations, I was able to investigate what Walsh (2005), following Goffman’s concept (1973), calls the “backstage”, where people hold private speeches that contrast with public ones, especially those held on the tourist scene (Milan 2012, 2019). Such “backstage” information is particularly explicit if we observe the way the Na call themselves. They have been officially identified as Mosuo in Yunnan Province in order to differentiate themselves from the Naxi 纳西 minority nationality in the late 1980s (Walsh 2005, p. 451). In Sichuan, the Na were categorised as Mongols (Ch. Mengguzu 蒙古族), but an increasing number of Na also identify themselves as Mosuo because of the increasing popularity of this ethnonym in tourism.

9In this article, the core ethnographic material draws from daily conversations, first conducted in Mandarin, collected during multiple fieldwork since 2007. The extended period of time over which the research took place provided an emotional closeness and a high degree of trust that fostered informal feedback on tourism, with a particular focus on the festivities and the villagers’ hopes and fears. This positioning allowed me to further investigate these issues in their own language, as learning the Na language was necessary to access what James Scott calls “the hidden transcripts” (1992). The knowledge my interlocutors had of the two villages under scrutiny is central to the data collected. Their comments on my account of my activities during my stay in each village helped to capture the similar sociocultural contexts and an emic perspective on the changes occasioned by tourism.

10Their comparative comments on the festivities also provided insight into “the qualities and logic that guide them” and the judgments they rely on “to act in the world” (Fassin 2009, p. 1238). Following Didier Fassin’s revisited concept of moral economy, I thus seek to capture the grammar of emotions, values, and norms that underlie the dances and give them different efficiencies and logics in each village. I thus also use the moral economy in the same structural way as Edward P. Thompson (1971, 1991) and James Scott (1976). Both authors link moral economy to economic issues while looking beyond them to lived experience. Extending this definition, Scott links moral economy to the ethics of subsistence, which, according to Karl Polanyi’s (1983) idea, is embedded in broader relationships. While Scott sees it as an opportunity to explore rebellion or resistance, I also understand the notion of moral economy for its ability to highlight explainable regularities and as a part of the social fabric that can reveal antagonistic power relations.

11In the first part of this article, I will shed light on what is considered as heritage by the Chinese government among the Na and on how this process is closely related to tourism. The following section will cover the people’s trajectories and livelihood opportunities in the two Na villages under scrutiny. I will then describe the Na dances in the non-tourist village, one among many in the hinterland, while accounting for their importance in the social organisation and Na’s understanding of what tradition is. Next, I will address dances in the context of tourism to show how Na people took hold of the cultural encounter with Chinese (mainly Han). Finally, I will turn to the cultural heritage valorisation, more specifically to the ICH narrative to highlight the existing discrepancies with the Na’s understanding of what culture and tradition are.

Heritage and tourism strategy in China

16Scholars have pointed out the direct chain of causality between China’s long tradition of recording folk customs and heritagisation processes surveys (Bodolec 2012; Wang 2018; Bodolec & Obringer 2020). According to the well-documented long-standing state interference in minorities’ cultural affairs (see Trebinjac 2000; Wellens 2012), it is not surprising that heritage is viewed as a new cultural policy of the same order as governing minority nationalities (Shepherd 2006, 2009). Heritage is indeed often seen as China’s international cultural “soft power” (Huang & Sheng 2006; Li 2009), and generally goes hand in hand with the ideology of the “harmonious society” (Ch. hexie shehui 和谐社会) promulgated by Hu Jintao (Bodolec 2012, p. 249). It enables the spread of a nationalist, modernising and socialist discourse linking ethnic harmony with Chinese (Han) nation-building goals (Ai 2011, p. 130; Maags & Svensson 2018; Shepherd 2006, 2009, p. 62; Sofield & Li 1998, pp. 370-371).

17UNESCO’s conceptual devices often lead to unique heritage regimes at the national level due to selective or complementary applications (Bendix 2011; Bendix et al. 2012). Through heritage narratives, China aims to enhance cultural diversity by highlighting minority heritage and traditional culture to provide new narratives about the past that are suitable for the nation-building process (Ai 2011). Culture (Ch. wenhua 文化) and tradition (Ch. chuantong 传统), two key words in UNESCO’s heritage policies, are, along with safeguarding, the best narrative tools. They became highly politicised and strategic in justifying cultural policies in China.

Two villages under scrutiny

19The Na people usually reckon descents along the mother’s line and live in the same house (Cai 1997; Shih 2010). However, multiple house configurations can be observed. Usually, three generations live together, wherein sometimes nearly twenty individuals can live in the same house. The house can be divided if it becomes too crowded (Nru. zitu). I argued elsewhere that Na houses are more than a basic social unit of social organisation, they are also a kinship group (Milan 2019, 2021). Hence, people from different houses might belong to the same matrilineage. Individuals are identified by the name of their house, which may be the name of the matrilineage or another name referring to geographic location. Siblings most often live together with the women’s offspring. Property is transmitted collectively from one generation to the next. Daily organisation and extraordinary events are often managed by women, while men are responsible for public relations. If genitors do not belong to the same lineage they can invest time, money, and emotions on their offspring (Mattison et al. 2014). Fathers can also live with their children, as conjugal ties are increasing. While marriage has become more common since the period of collectivisation, more Na people are getting married in tourism impacted areas. However, the institutionalised visiting system (Nru. sessee), whereby men visit women at night and live in their matrilocal houses, remains the main pattern of sexual relations. Depending on their gender equilibria or the people living together, a house can be neolocal, matrilocal, natalocal (Milan 2021).

20The Na people are quite different from the simplified narratives about them. Indeed, succinct tourist and heritage accounts often present them as a remnant of the past, and even as a matriarchal society. This overview of their sociological characteristics is also breaking from the popular misconception that they are a society without fathers or husbands (Cai 1997). These narratives have so well infused popular representations that in the eyes of Han tourists, (Mosuo) Na cultural identity is perceived as stable and almost unchanging, gliding through history sheltered from any influence, cultural contact, and social change. However, the Lugu Lake area is inhabited by many other ethnic groups. Migration patterns and ethnic contingency are such that it is doubtful that the Na have not been influenced and affected by their sociocultural environment. Even in the tourist village of Xiaoluoshui or in Lijiazui, everyday life is more complex.

21Xiaoluoshui Village was inhabited in 2013 by 250 Na people distributed in 24 houses. Before 2007, this village was mainly surrounded by arable lands cultivated with potatoes and corn. According to my interlocutors in the village, people were still conducting collective work on a mutual aid basis in 2007 (see Milan 2021). Afterwards, tourism spread, following the successful development of tourism in Luoshui Village in the 1990s and in Lige Village里格 in the 2000s. At that time, the few hostels were run by outside investors and the locals had to rely on displaying their culture and hosting dinners to benefit from tourism. To attract tourists, the villagers had to rely most of the time on their connections with other villages judged “more traditional” than Lige or Luoshui. If enough visitors come to eat or enjoy the few guesthouse facilities, villagers would hold a party and perform Na dances on the elementary school basketball court. Two years later, in 2009, the number of tourists had increased, due to the availability of new tourist facilities such as guesthouses, still owned by outside entrepreneurs. Some Na houses developed strong networks with Tibetan, Pumi, Naxi and sometimes Na guides from Lijiang and started a dinner hosting business while others started building hotels for their business. These guides brought more tourists from Lijiang to the houses until a contract was signed between Lijiang travel agencies and the village houses. The arrangement ran from 2009 to 2013, until the travel agencies found another, cheaper agreement in another village.

23Compared to Xiaoluoshui, Lijiazui community life was, as usual, punctuated by many events. Villagers gathered for festivities held to celebrate local events such as the end of a house construction, the Lunar New Year or even a gutch ceremony (figs 3-5). Only a few tourists ventured into the area, including the very curious anthropologist that I was, often reduced to this position at first because of the surrounding tourist context, and followed the same patterns of sharing practices. They expressed and reproduced the values associated with this form of ethics of subsistence. Like the “gift” described by Marcel Mauss as a “total social fact” (1923-1924), festivities give insight into a broader set of ideas and local realities, be they economic, social, or cultural. The dances performed in Xiaoluoshui for the tourists did not follow the same pattern, although I will demonstrate some Na-led cultural reinvention. Although villagers performed dances on ceremonies and rituals to celebrate coming of age or weddings, the festivities were always organised for tourists.

24The increasing tourist activity in Xiaoluoshui Village, however, has led the villagers to hire Na from the surrounding villages and the hinterland to meet the demand for tourist hospitality. Some of them came from Lijiazui Village. Young girls were quite favoured for these jobs because they enabled to support the popular representations surrounding the Mosuo (Na), that of a “country of daughters” (Ch. nü’er guo 女儿国). With the growing importance that dances have gained in the tourist landscape, many young Na have also learned “the value of their singing and dancing skills” and often leave their villages for other tourist destinations (Blumenfield 2003, p. 492). In Xiaoluoshui, the hiring of young girls to dance in place of villagers too busy running their small home-based hospitality businesses has radically changed the moral economy underlying the dances. From a communal social bond to a performance linked to tourist demand and the market economy valued as heritage, dances are at the heart of sociocultural change. Young women’s mobility and sometimes men’s give a first insight on the new values underscoring the valorisation of this cultural practice. But let us first examine the dances as performed in the village of Lijiazui following a protection ritual for a house and the comments of the villagers from this village and from Xiaoluoshui Village.

Dancing ties

Rites, lyrics and rhythms

Dancers chorus:

• 21 Narua transcription rules are still not normalised and a huge language discrepancy between villages (...)

Co bbi bihin ceehin niq; Meco lebbi ta meyi; Leco aendua ji sso yi; Aha bbala meddami; O, co bbi sei; Co bbi sei la gguaq bbi sei; Leco yo, leggua yo21.

• 22 See the interlinear gloss in the Appendix for a complete annotation of the transcript.

[We] say [we] have come to dance; [if you] don’t dance, you can’t go home; [we will] dance till the rooster crows; Aha bala madami [traditional song chorus]; Oh, let’s go dance; Let’s go dance and let’s go sing; Come and dance, come and sing.
(Song recorded in Lijiazui, January 2012)22

28Dances are corporal techniques, or more precisely movement techniques made of a specific form, gestures and styles and necessarily referring to a particular way of being together (Mauss 1950). Among the Na, they are usually held in the houses’ courtyards, where the villagers circulate in a semicircle. Dancers hold each other by interlacing their arms to form a chain. Heads, shoulders, and torsos do not move. Interlocking steps and rolling arms are the basis of the choreography’s aesthetic. Bodies are thus tightened one against the other. The right arm is along the body, under the left arm of the previous dancer and so on. The clacking steps give rhythm to the dance. Dances are structured in alternating sung and instrumental sequences. When the flutist weakens intensity, the dancers take up the song and pursue more intensive movements to motivate and wait for him, the flutist, to catch his breath. During long dances, another man can take the flutist’s place, and the dancers can have difficulties to follow as the pace accelerates. At this moment, because of the fast pace, arms are frequently unlinked, and some dancing variations are introduced. One can hold someone else by the shoulder (right hand on the right shoulder), which brings the dancers to a faster tempo. Women often escape then, because of their difficulty to follow a faster pace while maintaining what they consider as graceful motions. The dance usually ends with rude but comical steps that make the assembly laugh. Step sequencing is not easy to maintain when the entire chain of dancers moves. Each is free to withdraw from the half-circle or to reintegrate it as they want.

30Festivities are always much more than entertainment, as evidenced by the 2018 issue “Éclats de fête” of the French-edited Socio-anthropologie journal coordinated by Edith Lallement. Na dances actually provide insight into a broader set of social behaviours concerning gender relations and the political, economic, aesthetic, and symbolic dimensions of life.

Actions and feedback

31As the evening progressed, young women were also moving forward in the dance circle. They could then entwine their arms with their beloved boys. Although they are visible here (fig. 4), these movements illustrate a more compartmentalised daily life. Between 2012 and 2014, I observed that youths had little opportunity to see each other except during agricultural work, usually mobilising the help of relatives from another house. The main moments they could gather without the disapproval of house members were those during the main village life events (e.g., funerals, Lunar New Year, gutch ceremonies, etc.). In any case, dances were always a special timeframe where Na people could transgress bodily habits. Young people attracted to each other could flirt. The physical proximity of the young women and men and the hands’ grabbing were obvious signs of emotional closeness. The comments that the girls made about the love affairs in the village during their meetings were consistent with these observations. Festivities are in this sense a libidinal space where intimate encounters can be observed and are therefore a prelude for starting a nocturnal visit relationship.

32At nightfall, Na men go to their partner’s room. However, initiating a visiting relationship starts with an encounter, which my interlocutors attribute to such moments. During various conversations about intimate relationships, young women as well as young men told me about examples of courtship games: stealing anything from a woman that she does not take back meaning a mutual consent, standing close together as in dances, etc. But despite the transgressions of the daily body habitus, this libidinal space remains discrete. The space-time of the festivities only gives the opportunity to deploy the social norms. Gatherings such as the dances are indeed the continuity of a social organisation for which the visiting system is considered as the “pivot of Mosuo culture” (Shih 2000, p. 701). Shih argues that from the characteristics of matrilineal ideology this sexual institution maintains the matrilocal residential setting and thus what he calls household harmony (Shih 2000, p. 704). Men who circulate to visit women are simply maintaining the social norms that guarantee the matrilineal principle.

33An analogy between dances and society can even help to understand the special “quality of action” of the former and consequently the relational patterns of the latter (Houseman 2006). The very effectiveness of dances as rites lies in their capacity to rehearse and reactivate with authority the organised, social, and symbolic space (Houseman 2002). Their spatial deployment presents this homogeneity of atmosphere and action, rendering them like the relational framework through which community values are enacted by villagers. By dancing, Na villagers are (re-)creating a special quality of relatedness between villagers and the hosting house, or rather between the village houses. Sweets and alcohol offered to dancers, and gifts offered by dancers’ houses during the ritual day, seal their place into the village.

34Every time I observed and participated in dances in Lijiazui, I was struck by how much they provide a snapshot of reciprocity patterns governing relationships between houses considered as a collective person. Interactions between villagers and house members remind and generate sharing values, gifts as well as return obligations and mutual aid. Their efficiency is such that the dances fully participate, as a continuous moment of ceremonies and rituals, to permanently create and recreate social bonds. In this sense, the dances mirror the Na subsistence ethic. The social imaginary of the Na takes shape through exchange practices that will continue with other events throughout the existence of the house. In this sense, the festivities are like an institution, animated by a moral economy of sharing and mutual aid practices. That is to say that the dances are generators of socio-political elements. They are structuring and are structured by the dominant realities that weigh on the villages. These social issues are also carriers of subjectivity, such as the cultural behaviours expected and understood by all villagers. Their actions as individuals, houses and village communities are part of a social whole that could be understood as their tradition.

35My trips back and forth between the two villages between 2012 and 2014 allowed my interlocutors to comment on what they considered culture and tradition (conversing in Chinese) is while asking me questions about the practices I was observing. Na folks who are experiencing new livelihood opportunities tied to tourism, often refer in their own language to Lijiazui dances as traditional (Nru. deelo). One informant from the lakeside village told me one day in July 2012: “If you go to Lijiazui, you will see our traditions. There are no tourists there”. This sentence reflects the daily use of the term to comment on changes they are experiencing, but also refers to a kind of nostalgia they feel. Comments on Lugu Lake cultural life transformations were also common at Lijiazui. One Lijiazui daba told me in January 2013: “You should come back for the New Year, because here we dance real dances. It is not like in your village by the lake. There they dance for the tourists”. At that time, they only used the term “tradition” to compare the dances of the two villages – I was asking them in Mandarin. They readily punctuated their answers about practices that could be considered traditional with sentences like “that’s how we did it”. But when I asked them in Na language to “teach me the tradition” (Nru. deelo taesoq), the word conveyed other meanings and among them the most important: to know the Na tradition is to have good manners, to behave correctly.

36An especially striking contrast could, however, be observed in the early 2010s between rituals and songs as practised by villagers among themselves in the village of Lijiazui and the performances staged for tourists on the shores of Lugu Lake. Despite a slightly distinctive style, the Lugu Lake dances are not meaningless. Tradition has even gradually become a term used to present the dances to tourists.

Taking hold of cultural encounter

Dancing for tourists

37From 2011 to 2013 in Xiaoluoshui, Yang house courtyard hosted hundreds of tourists every evening. Villagers had agreed on this place, much more suitable for performing dances than the basketball court of the school. Whatever the weather conditions, the courtyard was never empty, and the program was always the same. I had the opportunity to observe and participate in these festivities as repeatedly as the Na did during my various stays in the village. Every evening after helping my host with the reception and service of tourists, we would go to Yang’s house. Ama, the grandmother of the house, only went there for special occasions, and with other women of her age. She attended the festivities only for the Lunar New Year’s (Nru. kushe) festivities, when thirteen-year-olds celebrate their coming-of-age ceremony. During this traditional family time, tourists are more numerous to travel to Lugu Lake and the festivities do not stop anymore in Xiaoluoshui. The same goes for the gutch ceremonies (like weddings) that used to take place far from the tourist areas, but now some Na bring in tourists to participate.

38Whatever the festivities were, two men scrupulously recorded the number of entrances to the big door of Yang’s house every evening. For a fee of 10 to 20 RMB (about 1 or 2 euros at that time) they paid, tourists would dance, sing, and take pictures with the locals, especially women. The Na women were dressed in colourful and sparkling habits, and their heads were adorned with a colossal and brilliant headdress (fig. 7). Na women often overly made up their “dark” complexion with a white foundation, red lipstick, and false eyelashes to imitate the Chinese criteria of beauty that the tourists expected. The two men also had to count the Na villagers present for the dance. Each house had to send a representative to the dance, and also had to take turns lighting the fire around which they took place. The inhabitants collectively agreed with the village chief on these rules. If people failed to comply, they were not compensated. Many women were busy welcoming tourists to their houses and hired Na women from other villages to replace them. Whether it is in a tourist place or not, villagers are the representatives of their house.

39While waiting for the progressive arrival of the tourists, people were welcomed to the sound of large speakers playing Na music sung in Chinese. Then, a man from the village in the role of the speaker would begin to explain the course of the evening. Under his direction, the flutist and the dancers would dance the same dances as in Lijiazui, except that they were significantly different with regards to gestures. In fact, dancers have modified some sequences to mobilise more spectacularly the upper body, torso, and arms (fig. 6). Bodies were more often able to break away. Holding other dancers’ shoulders was more frequent than intertwining arms. Wide arm movements ended with ornamental hand gestures resembling the slow and graceful gestures of traditional Chinese operas. This new choreographic arrangement met various expectations of Na dancers. Most of them, however, specified that they had levelled these modifications on Naxi dances in Lijiang. Some Na who worked in the city as guides in the middle of the 2000s suggested imitating the new gestures of these dances because of the astonishing tourist success. However, one of the village dance leaders, a young man around 25-years old, often leading the dance, told me in 2009 that these new gestures were largely influenced by his sister’s suggestions. She experienced some success in singing and dancing when she was a member of a Mosuo women’s trio that recorded some CDs. According to him, this way of dancing attracted more tourists because it was more adapted to their aesthetic criteria.

From exotic to erotic representations

41Women and men dancers were usually in their twenties, but if a house had no choice its dancer may be older. Younger people generally did not participate, except for the annual events of village life like Lunar New Year’s Day. However, they waited longer than their thirteenth birthday to take part in parties. Na dancers, especially women, were often solicited by tourists to take pictures with them. However, women also attracted unwanted attention. The erotic and exotic representations were always at the core of interactions with tourists. For instance, during evening performances, male guests usually insistently asked Na women if they practise the visiting system and whether they could take advantage of it. In reaction to such unwanted interactions, women had taken to insulting them in Narua, using an equivalent term to the English slang to shut someone up (Nru. makrajua), while harbouring a beaming smile…

42Because the tourists paid the entrance to the festivities, the dancers feel like they had to make good impression: resorting to their own language, which the tourists would not understand, was a way for the female dancers to react to what they perceived as (sexual) harassment, thereby displaying their agency. Some tourists would also try to scratch their hands to flirt: scratching (Nru. ghuaeghuae) hands metaphorically means to flirt with someone. Even if some Na told me this used to be a discreet flirting practice, it rather seems to be a story told to tease the tourists’ curiosity on Na erotica. In fact, Na women did not really “flirt” anymore with Na men in this manner. They were mainly flirting through cell phones. I also mentioned above that grabbing hands (not scratching) during dances was a sign of emotional closeness. But as these examples show, Na dances, and especially male tourists’ interactions with female dancers, were imbued with fantasies about Na sexual practices.

43Mosuo commodification of cultural identity is part of a complex representational space endowed with the aura of a country of women/daughters (Ch. nü’er guo), with reference to the historical female queendom (Ch. nü guo 女国) recorded in the Tang dynasty annals (Walsh 2005, pp. 464-465). This name, “country of daughters”, from the Chinese records, appeared in the 2000s as a brand of the Lugu Lake area to attract tourists (Walsh 2005). The tourism industry has actually greatly benefited from the 16^th century popular fantasy novel of Wu Cheng’en, The Journey to the West (Xi you ji 西游记, Wu 1977-1983), to broadcast nationwide hypothetical links between the ancient women’s queendom and the country of daughters (Walsh 2005). The same goes for the Gyalrong ethnic group, a subgroup belonging to the Tibetan minority nationality, studied by the indigenous scholar Jinba Tenzin, where a fantasy of matriarchy is instrumentalised to attract tourists (Tenzin 2013). To complete that picture, idyllic love was valued as a cultural trait through the work of the indigenous scholar Lamu Gatusa on Na folk stories, songs, and poetry as well as Bai Hua 白樺’s famous novel written in 1988, The Remote Country of Women (Bai 1994). The former has nurtured a romantic picture of men practising the long-distance trading expeditions to the point that they “reenter the imaginary of the Mosuo as adventurers and seducers” (Walsh 2005, p. 466), while the latter features an impossible love between a Han and a Mosuo woman.

44Of particular interest, and regardless of its sociological meaning, was the Na visiting system. A suggestive iconography often portrays many minority nationalities across China as feminine, wearing colourful costumes, dancing, singing, and picking fruit (Gladney 1994; Schein 1997; Frangville 2007; Allès 2011, p. 247). These representations have notably allowed for the expression of sexual issues that would have been deemed non-moral if characters had been Han, as Vanessa Frangville has argued regarding postsocialist cinema (2007). Tourist fantasies therefore often portray the Na women as being “Freely available for sex, to whom present lovers have no future commitments, or of a land where women rule” (Walsh 2005, p. 450). The Na, aware of the tourist projections, sometimes played at titillating the tourists according to these erotic representations, without responding to their fantasies (Walsh 2005).

Tourist tricks and new aspirations

45Songs and dances are so powerful and effective in today’s China that minority nationalities use these simplifications of cultural identities for their own purposes, thus showing that Na people are not passive subjects. Eager to transform their economic and social conditions and reverse the stigma of “backward” and “primitive” associated with their Mosuo cultural identity, many consent in performing tactically what tourists are looking for. They indeed act as a “mimesis”, a notion suggested in the Sherpa case to explain a performed virtual identity for Europeans (Adams 1996; Walsh 2005). Keenly aware of what they pretend to be for tourist consumption, Na people instrumentalise festivities to negotiate their ethnic identity and their social positions. Onstage, Na people use conventional patterns of speech – i.e., folk songs, anthropological and official discourse – for tourists that are mainly urban Han to fit their expectations about Na’s alterity. According to Scott’s understanding of the subaltern mentality, “the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate” are public transcripts (1992, p. 2). For instance, during the singing joust the Na people were mobilising songs praising Mao and praising national unity.

47All the villagers often repeated to me that the tricks of tourism should not come to the ears of tourists. Whether it is the scarves they sell pretending to have woven them themselves, the stories they tell about the lack of fathers or husbands, the visiting system according to the dominant metanarratives or the onstage identity they perform during festivities, tourists must believe in the cultural and social specificities of the always friendly smiling Mosuo (Na). However, as Zhuoma Latcuo, a young woman in her thirties in 2013 told me, Na people were numerous to feel tired of this showcase. Compared to the Lijiazui dances often described as traditional, they are aware, like Zhuoma Latcuo, that dances are now only for tourists and of the changing values and meaning of dances. However, they presented the Na dances as traditional to the tourists.

48Tourism has become a new livelihood opportunity that improves the villagers’ living conditions. Many often told me that one of the advantages of tourism is that they can go to school, access hospitals, electricity, and water facilities. Some young Na people, eighteen-year-old men have left the villages to work in China’s theme parks and to take advantage of their dancing talents. Zhaxi, for example, left Xiaoluoshui for the Shenzhen theme park “to see the face of the world” (Ch. jian shimian 见世面). Others may be hired at Lige Village cultural centre, located on the Yunnan shore of Lugu Lake, to perform a modern dance show. Sometimes dancers come from other regional minority nationalities. Here Mosuo (Na) culture is displayed according to ICH main elements and with many romantic clichés around the purity of Lugu Lake and Na love, and customary practices represented in a folkloric way, etc. Younger people are indeed often enthusiastic to dance and use their dancing skills to earn money. For this generation, dance, however, has less of a sense of community ties and more of individual achievement.

49At the village level, if the houses still worked together, each one would send a person to dance, which ensured attractive festivities, or bring logs for the fire. However, each house managed its own success. Their guides’ networks are quite different. Some could accommodate up to 10 groups of eight, nine or ten tourists per night, while others none. A competition between the houses to attract tourists existed. Some of the houses have not hesitated to sell off the prices to attract the regular guides of other houses. Like the concurrence between houses, dances are dis-embedded from traditional cultural logic of reciprocity. Hence, a new moral economy frames the sociocultural life of Xiaoluoshui Village. As cultural practices are enhanced at the national level, the values surrounding social behaviour are now linked to the market economy.

50Across China, not only dances, but also songs, have become the most effective means of presenting different ethnic cultural traditions of a unified multinational state (Mueggler 2002), as observed at the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. However, the valorisation of the traditional culture of minority nationalities raises questions about the very local meaning that national minorities may give to their cultural practices as well as to the very words of tradition and culture.

Cultural expressions under the spotlight

Meaning gaps: about cultural tradition

51Dances performed at Lugu Lake are presented according to a “pseudo-culturalist” angle (Grillot 2001, p. 71; Lavoie 1986). This is to say, locals draw their repertoire of actions and representations into the minzu (ethnic) cultural and “traditional” database. This process known as folklorisation is a “the processes of selection of the most visual cultural particularities of minorities to make their ‘promotion’” and that leads to homogenise cultural markers so to appear immutable for commodification of the local culture (Grillot 2001, p. 71; Lavoie 1986). With heritagisation processes, folklore became everywhere around the world the prerogative of official cultural identity. The latter have the particularity, as Babadzan asserts, of establishing “a relationship to culture that is uniquely modern, without equivalent in traditional societies” (Babadzan 2001, p. 5).

52If exoticisation and eroticisation processes sold Mosuo culture and gendered practices as a local renewable resource of sorts (Walsh 2005), heritagisation processes promoted their “primitive” custom as cultural tradition. Chinese tourists were bound to see in these characteristics the unique cultural identity of the Na. However, the dances, presented as a cultural tradition, have been associated with the idea of immutability, which carries romantic or ethnocentric prejudices. The online presentation of these dances illustrates these presentations. Named and recorded as jiacuo for the ICH, the etymology of the word dance is presented as follows: “jia” which would mean “beautiful” (Ch. meihao 美好), and “cuo” 搓which would mean “dance” in Mandarin. However, a linguistic approach indicates that jiacuo simply means “to dance” (Michaud 2018, p. 34), as the translation of the lyrics above also shows. Highlighting these differences shows how far the institutional necessities of heritagisation are from the meaning that the Na give to dances. In other words, while dances are meant to structure the social world as well as reflect it for the Na, they are presented as ICH very appropriately for the romantic and aesthetic (beautiful) consumption of the tourist experience (Zhu 2018).

54Between 2007 and 2014, I often naively asked people of different ages from the two villages about their culture in Chinese. Many just answered that they have no culture. As a synonym of civilisation (Ch. wenming 文明), wenhua (culture) expresses a moral hierarchy, a valuation and judgment between what is wenming or wenhua and what is not. Both are conveying a meaning of civilised and educated. Besides the cross-cultural challenge for a young anthropologist such as myself, I understood with their answers that they have well incorporated this hierarchy, consistent with how they are considered on the social evolutionary scale of ethnic classification. A daba specialist even told me, as a practitioner mindful of the official line, that local religious rituals are superstitions (Ch. mixin 迷信), a term especially used in Mao’s times to level people towards socialist goals.

55Young people of Lijiazui sometimes told me that they have no culture because they consider themselves to have “vulgar or low qualities” (Ch. suzhi bi/di 素质鄙/低). That was their argument to explain to me why they wanted to leave the village in order to work as dancers or elsewhere in tourism areas and urban cities. The term sushi, which conveys the meanings of education, has indeed spread among the Na. Those who were looking for job opportunities but did not reside in the Lugu Lake area said that they needed to level up their qualities to the tourism market: business skills, ability to get by, speaking well, etc. Having “qualities” can be perceived as a synonym for “culture” in their explanations, in the sense of “being educated” but also in the sense of self-development joining economic goals and entrepreneurship (Anagnost 2004; Kipnis 2007). After all, to experience living and working in tourist areas or urban cities is an opportunity to become “more modern and civilised”, according to the historical development narrative.

56In Lijiazui, where 13 daba were still practising in 2013, while there were none in Lugu Lake, the younger generation was still training to become daba. But in Xiaoluoshui, they are caught with the tourist market and lacked interest to follow the teaching, as the young Zhaxi told me. Dancing skills were much more attractive to them. Valued in the market as “culture”, much more than daba practices, which, according to the official discourse, are supposed to be linked to dances, the dances represent a new modern opportunity to level up their “qualities” and their social conditions.

57With this new scope, “culture” within the expression of ICH was understood by my interlocutors in a minimal way. The Na people were nevertheless more numerous to use the ICH rhetoric since heritage inflation. On social networks, young Na and entrepreneurs now often post about local “culture” and “heritage” with the hashtag #feyi to reap the benefits of tourism. In 2021 for instance, to promote his restaurant, the owner posted an online a message that said that local dumplings were Mosuo’s ICH, like dances, when dumplings are not a local culinary speciality at all…

What about transmission?

58As Blumenfield noticed for weaving tradition in Walabi Village, ICH could represent a source of pride and local empowerment (2018). Despite official protection efforts, the market’s vagaries can sometimes perpetuate inequalities (see also Blumenfield 2018, pp. 175, 183). She earlier noticed some resilience in preserving Na culture (especially weaving) but explains how much “Indigenous knowledge among locals has been influenced by several major changes in recent years” (2003, p. 493). This is what happened in Xiaoluoshui, despite the efforts of villagers to thwart the commercial practices of guides and agencies. The competition between the houses showed a deviation from the established system of reciprocity (Milan 2021) and a change in social organisation (Milan 2019).

60Dances cannot be performed without their federating context and the villagers as a whole, whether in tourist situations or not. Transmission patterns are passed from one generation to the next. Information passes from individual to individual by social collective learning mechanisms such as imitations, teaching, or language. I mentioned how young people turning thirteen learn the steps by informally following the lead of their elders during the first dance they can join. The means of transmission are oral and the ritual contexts, the places, and times when tradition is “communicated”, are therefore intimate parts of transmission, as are the village and family-based transmission patterns. In other words, dances-transmission patterns also mirror the importance of social ties. One might thus ask again: how could one “bearer” transmit a practice learned collectively? As Robert Shepherd argues, heritage policies can also conflict with cultural and social values (2009). The Na dances case is therefore also questioning if the prestige and advantages linked to this new category of transmitter are not, in the end, an integral part of the commodification of the traditional ethnic traditional culture?

61Since young people from Lijiazui relocated to tourist areas to earn money for their house, they learned simultaneously how dances can be transformed into skills for developing tourism in their villages. I discovered on social networks that since 2017, the villagers of Lijiazui have developed similar services to those in Xiaoluoshui. Now they perform dances for tourists too and welcome them to their typical houses. The heritagisation of a cultural expression that has become a tourist attraction calls for new ways of transmitting customs, skills, etc. The people of Lijiazui Village have learned a lot from their counterparts in Lugu Lake, including that the latter’s participation in tourism has transformed their social conditions. As the villagers began to perform dances suitable for tourism exploitation, many older women who did not speak Chinese seemed wary. One thing is certain, in this village, conflicts like those observed at Lugu Lake with previous practices are emerging.

Conclusion

62Throughout the article, I demonstrate that the very words of UNESCO to value ICH, i.e., culture and tradition, are rather vague notions. The case of the Na dances, for example, gives three ways of understanding what tradition is. On the one hand, in Chinese, “tradition” (chuantong) is a word that is used as a tool for heritage narratives that the state has been quick to instrumentalise. The term “tradition” in fact makes it possible to play with words and to produce new narratives about the past to build national unity. Cultural practices, once depreciated during the Cultural Revolution, are thus valued. Tradition is, however, in the Na language, a word that merges with the vague idea of culture and describes the way they have (always) done things, and even a synonym for sociocultural savoir-faire. With the expansion of ICH narratives, tradition, as a Chinese word, has become a synonym for culture that is particularly well suited to the UNESCO device. The Na, on the other hand, do not have a word for culture in Na language. They understand the word culture in Chinese as something similar to the ladder of civilisation they have to climb.

63Since heritage fever certifies and beautifies cultural practices for commercial purposes, a new kind of cultural reproduction is at stake. The modes of transmission inherent in cultural practices are animated by new objectives stemming from this imposed framework, without being exempted from the conceptual universe of the Na. The Na people actually use the festivities to communicate about themselves. They have thus become a public arena for contesting, while instrumentalising, the cultural representations that conform to the evolutionary discourse. The Na people also negotiate their ethnic identity to carve out a place for themselves in the modernist agenda of the state. The Mosuo (Na) cultural identity, represented in dances, has become both a source of pride and a source of improved living conditions.

64This new framework, however, is unable to maintain the social efficacy or cultural meanings of the Na dances. Using the framework of moral economy, this paper shows the opposing logic of commodification and the reciprocity pattern. Heritage, as a strategy for maintaining tourism, has clearly impacted the values and norms of Na dances. The Na are hence subject to an interactional framework between the state and minority nationalities of the same order as the civilising and modernizing project. Heritage narratives and tourism are governance strategies that aim, through cultural diversity, to develop the social and economic qualities of minority nationalities so that they contribute to the GDP.