A museum in rural China: Ethnographic glimpses of local people visiting experiences

Venue: Baines Wing SR 2.37

Join us for the latest in in our Centre Research Seminar Series, with speaker Dr. Katiana Le Mentec, Visiting Scholar/Postdoctoral Fellow, European Centre for Cultural Exploration (University of York)

Yunyang (Chongqing Municipality) is a mountainous and rural county which was deeply affected by the rise of water upstream of the Three Gorges Dam in China. From 1992 to 2000, the county seat was reconstructed in its entirety thirty kilometres upstream to avoid a complete submersion. The composite local population of the city constitutes the main visitors of the first museum ever built in this county. Inaugurated in 2012 and managed by the Bureau of Culture, the museum was a part of a large urban planning program including heritage parks, garden and squares, achievements of a new local party secretary. The site displays ancient history through items excavated by the Three Gorges Dam heritage protection program, but also recent local events like the Chinese Revolution and the consequences of the Three Gorges Dam in Yunyang.

After shortly recalling the creation process of the museum and its exhibition program, the presentation will focus on the local people’s practices of the site: what do people think about the museum? In what social context do they come? What are the hot spots of the exhibition and what kind of interaction do they stimulate? The data on visitor experiences was collected during a one month ethnographic fieldwork developed during June/July 2014, including observations, participating visits, interviews and casual conversations.

Katiana Le Mentec is an ethnologist with a PhD from Paris West Nanterre University, 2011. She began research upstream of the Three Gorges Dam in 2004. Katiana’s main fieldwork was undertaken in the Yunyang County at the time the landscape, urban network and people were deeply affected by the rise of water. Her analysis focused on the social perceptions of the Dam, and its ecological, economic and social consequences. The goal was to understand processes developed by local people and government to deal with the territorial changes and the forced migration, through their use of legends, heroes, worship, miracles, poems, festivals, narratives and elements of the past. From 2011, Katiana studied the regional wave of museums creation and compared their displays regarding the Three Gorges Dam forced migration.

For more information, email the Centre at ccsmghinfo@leeds.ac.uk

See here for the full list of seminars in this series.