From Ritual to Spectacle: Nomadic Wedding Dances and the Politics of Cultural Transformation in China

Manfang Lyu; Hongjia Guo

doi:10.62177/chst.v2i2.382

Authors

Manfang Lyu Tianjin College of Media and Arts
Hongjia Guo Tianjin Art Vocational College

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62177/chst.v2i2.382

Keywords:

Intangible Heritage, Ethnic Performance, Semiotic Labor, Ritual Aestheticization, Cultural Politics in China

Abstract

This article offers a critical analysis of Mongolian and Kazakh wedding dances in contemporary China, treating these ritual performances not as vestiges of folk culture but as choreographed sites of semiotic labor, identity negotiation, and cultural regulation. Drawing on ethnographic case studies, movement analysis, and critical cultural theory, the study traces how kinship-centered ceremonies have been transformed into performative spectacles under the pressures of state-led heritage discourse, tourism economies, and visual nationalism.
Through a comparative reading of Ordos and Kazakh choreographies, the paper reveals how ritual sequences encode distinct logics of gender, kinship, and authority, while being repackaged for external legibility. Rather than expressing cultural continuity, these dances increasingly serve as instruments of aesthetic governance—legible, marketable, and politically managed. Concepts such as the aesthetic contract of recognition, ritual opacity, and choreographic authorship are mobilized to interrogate the shifting boundaries between embodied belief and curated display.
Engaging frameworks by Hall, Habermas, and de Certeau, the study shows that the modernization of wedding dance renders it both more visible and more vulnerable—visible to the nation, but estranged from community meaning. The article contributes to ongoing debates in performance studies, heritage politics, and affect theory by advocating for a more reflexive, community-centered approach to intangible cultural heritage—one that honors not only what can be shown, but what must be lived, misremembered, and remade.

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