In this article, three Guangdong’s ancestral temples are taken as case studies to explore strategies for cultural heritage conservation. Heritage conservation is very important not only for our missing of past, but in order that our own cultural identity can be formed today. In China, different stakeholders hold various views on heritage protection and conflicts often take place. Particularly, many folk religion’s cultural heritages face a dangerous scenario and could even be damaged or destroyed for a variety of “reason”. This article tries to re-examine fundamental values and assessment criteria for cultural heritage conservation. The authenticity is a core concept involved with those of issues. Based on the views of culture place, the author puts forward the concept of “emic culture authenticity” as a hinge to explore authentic culture ecology of heritage and its model, to facilitate the cultural heritage conservation and reuse by the strategies of classification and adaptation.
Since Reform and Opening-up in China, Guangdong has been at the frontier of the national economic development. Especially the Pearl River Delta region, in accordance with per capita JDP, has entered the level of middle-income countries [
In response with the needs of “strategic cultural province” for Guangdong, this article takes three Guangdong’s ancestral temples as case studies, to explore related theories and practical strategies for architectural/culture heritage conservation and reuse. In today conservation can no longer be based on the object’s intrinsic quality; it must be founded on our ability to recognize its social, aesthetic, historic, religious values etc., upon which our own cultural identity can be built [
Architectural/Cultural heritage has drawn increasing attention in recent years in Guangdong, but there are problems like division of disciplines, scattered academic views, etc. For cultural heritage conservation, main issues should be solved immediately are: 1) how to integrate heritage’s material preservation with protection of intangible cultural heritage in an organic and sustainable way; and 2) how to reconcile different focus/interests of different stakeholders in heritage conservation process. Below passages will further explore these issues by examples of Three Guangdong’s Ancestral Temples.
Three Guangdong’s ancestral temples are very representative heritages of Guangdong province. The Yuecheng’s Dragon Mother Temple is located in Yue cheng town beside the Xijiang River in county Deqing, Guangdong. Dragon is a water god, so all dragon-mother temples are nearby river; among all those temples, the Yuecheng’s Dragon Mother Temple as progenitor is the most grandeur and spectacular one [
As an original culture rooted in long history and tradition, the kernel of dragon-mother worship is a nature/totem worship of dragon combined with worship of Great Mother [
commodification is whether right and sustainable?
Dragon Mother Temple is still mainly a place for the folk religion. Now the temple faced tourism exploitation and strong government’s involvement, which have been diluting the “original taste and flavor” of this indigenous culture. The commodification is, for the most part, beyond the control of the locals which often stay marginalized. As an authentic culture heritage and a religious site under using, the Dragon Mother Temple carries a living folk religious service as its main function. Even in a view of “evolutionary adaptation”, tourism development or other exploitation also must be based on the foundation of its cultural authenticity otherwise we cannot expect it will be sustainable.
Foshan was Located in the downstream of the Xijiang River basin. Foshan with its economic power in late feudal periods was very famous for its tradition of ritual and sacrifice, and the Foshan North Lord Temple is the most important religious place, as shown in
Because of its advantage in aspects of architectural aesthetics, historical memory, cultural taste and place making, in North Lord Temple’s historic district, a renewal project Lingnan Tiandi has been developing. This renovation project tries to answer the question how to do with industry transformation, urban transformation and environment reconstruction, and exploring scientific development pattern, which is attracting wide range attention and creating appeal of the city, as shown in
culture authenticity.
Guangzhou and Foshan are adjacent to each other in the center of the Pearl River Delta. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Guangzhou and Foshan together form a dual center, connecting the Pearl River Delta with several southeast provinces and overseas region, creating a great economic network at home and abroad. Because Guangzhou’s special geographical location, from ancient to modern times, the Guangzhou’s most outstanding cultural traits are fusion the native culture and Central China culture with overseas culture, which provides a base for produced a mixed cultural phenomenon of Guangzhou Chen Clan Academy.
The Guangzhou Chen Clan Academy also called as Chen Clan Ancestral Temple, as shown in
The three Guangdong’s ancestral temples are not only three isolated architectures, but also represent the history and the development of a series of correlated cultural landscape in Cantonese geographical area.
How to explore the aim and the value of cultural heritage conservation from a
much more fundamental level, seeking universal and profound concepts and evaluation standard for heritage that become crucial. Those issues cannot be apart from discussion of a concept “authenticity”.
The concept of authenticity in historic preservation in terms of modern sense originated from that the enlightenment of the eighteenth century brought new historical consciousness for Europe. With the accumulation of historical research and protection practice, the concept of historic building conservation becomes diverse and complex. In 1964 the Venice Charter (The International Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites) laid the foundation of meaning about authenticity in the fields of international heritage protection in modern time. In 1994 the Nara Document on Authenticity is certain that the “authenticity” is a basic concept for definition, assessment and monitoring of cultural heritage. Due to the diversity of world culture and cultural heritage, it is realized that the evaluation of their authenticity cannot be put into fixed standard, and the concept and application of authenticity should root in heritage respective cultural context.
Authenticity is not only as a conventional topic for cultural heritage conservation that focusing on object-related authenticity, but a wide use concept. Since MacCannell (1973, 1976) introduced the concept of authenticity to sociological studies of tourist motivations and experiences, the subject has become a topic for tourism study. Based on tourism studies, the three different approaches―objec- tivism, constructivism, and postmodernism―are reviewed and analyzed by Wang and the limits of the conventional concept of authenticity (object-related authenticity) are also exposed. It is suggested that existential authenticity is an alternative source in tourism, regardless of whether the toured objects are authentic [
Some researchers try to bridge the conceptual gaps between varied notions. As Jillian M. Rickly-Boyd (2012) argued that the dichotomy is problematic because it obscures the way that toured sites/objects and social discourses often exist in dialogue with experiences of existential authenticity [
The discussions/theories need to say giving tremendous revelation and inspiration. But none of these theories is entailing univocal answers and a fully- fledged “paradigm”. To deal with a complex situation based on the existing theory related to “authenticity”, This research developed a model to integrate those concepts; it put forward a concept of “emic authenticity” as a corner stone to build a architecture of authentic culture ecology to handle those issues, which based on a fundamental thoughts which is that starting from the rationale of anyone stakeholder’s view don't have the rationality represented as the whole, however they can logically be constituted as parts of the whole system of cultural ecology of authentic culture related with cultural heritage conservation and use. According to this line of thoughts, the concepts “emic” and “etic” put forward by linguist Kenneth Pike, late used by Marvin Harris’ in culture theory [
Here gives the Diamond Model of authentic cultural ecology as shown in
cording to this view cultural/heritage authenticity or that of its value after all is evaluated by subjective/existential experience. Etic authenticity means an experience of outside community not as local with emic position to participate the activity related to the heritage, mainly thorough social-constructed manner to achieve evaluation, authentication and appreciation toward heritage. Emic authenticity contrast with that of etic one is originated from the heritage as a culture place correlated with “natural context” and “real life” of local community. The Diamond Model of authentic cultural ecology can unlock a conceptual mess and obfuscation among the antecedents, indicators and consequences of authenticity. The logical and structural model can be used for their definition interoperability between concepts.
Emic culture authenticity is complex issues, and its accurate quantification is difficult. In this research it put forward the Degree of Emic position (DEm) as most important parameter to indicate the basic aspect of emic culture authenticity. DEm is composed by two figures: one (DEm-p) is the percentage of people’s number with emic position in certain culture activity related to the heritage; another (DEm-t) is the percentage of the time of full engagement by people with emic position and deep sentiment in that of culture activity. In this paper, the Emic Culture Authenticity Index (EmCAI) is defined as equal to DEm-p multiply by DEm-t and modified by coefficientα:
Here, modified by coefficient α means other complementary parameters related with emic culture authenticity such as the original of heritage rooted in long history/tradition, the compared importance of the heritage site in emic community, the compared annual frequency of cultural events taken place in the heritage site, and so on. Increasing the times of observations/statistics can increase the accuracy of the index, averaging all those indexes, so:
The α can be calculated by measure of weighted factors “α1, α2, …αi”, so:
Here, the wi is the weighted value of αi. But in this initial stage of research, we simply adopt the Dragon Mother Temple as benchmark (α = 1) to compare with two other temples, directly giving a comprehensive value (α = 0.9) to the North Lord Temple, and another one (α = 0.5) to the Chan Clan Academy. The indexes of three Guangdong ancestral temples as shown in
Here, the “rule of golden ratio” is used to evaluation. The meaning of the golden ratio is that it is a sensitive figure of majority or minority, and a sensitive proportion concerning subject position or object status and their compared power inflecting by each other. When EmCAI is above 0.618, which indicates the emic culture authenticity is substantial and solid, and outside world has little influence on the culture related to the heritage. If the EmCAI is below 0.382, which means the culture is losing authenticity or taking place of variation/alienation. When the EmCAI figure is between 0.618 and 0.382, the culture authenticity is in a sensitive and transitive stage. In nowadays we emphasize that the value of culture heritage mostly lie in its involving with contemporary life through intertexture and mutual narration between emic and etic position, so the CAI between 0.5 and 0.618 is encouraged by this research that indicate a heritage not only maintaining its culture authenticity, also having a vigorous life, that is to say, the culture heritage not only plays a role in mechanically integration of solid
Worship god | Origin time | Transformation | Scale (sq.m) | Similar temples | DEm-p | DEm-t | α | EmCAI | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Dragon Mother Temple | Dragon Mother | Qin Dynasty (200 BC) | No (but architecture re-built in 1907) | 36600; 6400 | thousands | 0.9 | 0.75 | 1 | 0.585 |
North Lord Temple | North Lord | Song Dynasty (1078-1085) | Before 1451 (Ming Dynasty) called as Flying Dragon Temple | 16200; 2700 | thousands | 0.25 | 0.6 | 0.9 | 0.135 |
Chen Clan Academy | Clan ancestor | Qing Dynasty (1888-1894) | 1915-1957: become various modern schools 1957: become Guangdong Folk Art Museum | 13000; 3800 | hundreds | 0 | 0 | 0.5 | 0 |
Notes: 1) Scale including two figures: the former refer to whole temple’s area, the later refer main architecture’s floor area. 2) Similar temples refer to the number of temples in which worshiping same god or having similar religious significance in Guangdong Province.
traditional community, but organically integration with contemporary life and helping construction of new cultural identity.
The emic authenticity of cultural heritage is deeply involved with heritage conservation sustainability, which means that heritage meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs development [
From
With regard to the Foshan North Lord Temple, as
With regard to the Chen Clan Academy, the EmCAI is zero, the emic/tradi- tional culture of that temple is death, so it just as a museum having its functions for culture/education’s exhibition and tourism development. The Chen Clan Academy, as one of the “Guangzhou New-century Top Eight Spots”, named as “Enduring Splendor of Chen Clan Academy”, being a famous city brand to producing some spillover effects for surrounding areas and even for whole Guangzhou.
All three Guangdong ancestral temples were built or rebuilt in the later Qing Dynasty, so compared with the value of heritage’s architecture, the more important things in terms of temple’s cultural heritages are their roles in maintaining and creating living culture, place making, and city etherealization.
The main theory contribution of this paper is putting forward a Diamond Model of authentic cultural ecology for logically clear up those concepts related to “authenticity”. EmCAI is used to tackle with the issues of heritage’s authentic culture, to classify heritage as different types with differentiated sociological significance in today to employ adaptive and sustainable strategies for their conservation and exploitation.
For cultural heritage of three Guangdong ancestral temples and Guangdong constructing “strategic cultural province”, the important things are that this study demonstrates how Chinese cities are shaped by the practices of global consumerism, and the local neoliberal logic of entrepreneurialism behind the rhetoric of “cultural approach”. It should be alarm that the short-term effects of economic benefits may be destroy the long-term cultural memory and affect the culture safety resulted by losing cultural gene and disappearing cultural species. Sustainable renewal is the proper management of use and change in and around historic places and spaces, so as to respect and enhance their value to society. Cultural sector based in the community who has more local experiential knowledge, emotional attachment and historical narratives/memories are indispensable elements for emic culture authenticity, place making and heritage sustainable reuse.
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Wen, Y.F. (2017) Compared Study of Authentic Culture on Three Guangdong Ancestral Temples. World Journal of Engineering and Technology, 5, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.4236/wjet.2017.53B001