[PAST EVENT] Anthropology Brown Bag: "The Ha Festival of Cross-Border Jing Communities in Southwest China"

February 8, 2023
12pm - 1pm
Location
Washington Hall, Room 101
241 Jamestown Rd
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location
portrait, woman, traditional dress, dance

Chenyuan Ma is a PhD candidate in Ethnic Minority Arts at Minzu University of China and a visiting scholar in the Anthropology Department at William & Mary. She earned her BA and MA in Dance Studies from Beijing Dance Academy. Her main research areas are ethnic dance and dance anthropology. She has published a book entitled Field Research Notes on Ethnic Chinese Dances: Jing People, co-edited several volumes, and published nine research articles on Chinese ethnic dance and dance criticism.

Her talk is about the revival of dance practices in an ethnic minority religious festival known as the Ha Festival in Sino-Vietnamese cross-border Jing Communities in southwest China. There is a close relationship between the Ha Festival dance culture, Vietnamese worship, and Chinese traditional culture. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the dances in the Ha Festival have experienced a series of fluctuating processes from interruption to reconstruction. After the festival was rated as China’s intangible cultural heritage in 2006 by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism, more attention has been paid to the dances. This talk draws on field research conducted in Guangxi in 2013 and 2015 and focuses on the current situation of Ha Festival Dance and its value and function in contemporary society. Please email [[rawilliams01]] for Zoom link.