Contesting the Yellow Dragon: Religion and Ethnicity at China's Margins

FAIN: RZ-50163-04

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3815)
Donald Sinclair Sutton (Project Director: November 2003 to September 2006)

A study of the relationship between religious pilgrimage and ethnic identity at the sacred site of Huanglong in northwestern Sichuan on the Sino-Tibetan border.

The project is for Donald Sutton and Xiaofei Kang to coauthor an historical and contemporary study of folk religion, ethnic relations, and the role of the state in the remote margins of west China, at a moment of rapid change. Our focus is a pilgrimage site called Huanglong, Yellow Dragon, where people have come annually for at least five centuries and which a decade ago was named a UNESCO world heritage site. Preliminary research in July 2003 reveals a long-term process of ethnically-grounded contestation affecting the interpretation, use, decay and refurbishment of the way-stations where pilgrims pause during their progress through the site. Increasingly tourists visit, superimposing their own interpretations and affecting the pilgrims' experience. We see the Huanglong pilgrim center, perhaps like others, as a place where people can be seen to create and reshape cultural meaning, and redefine competitively their own social position and relations with others. This is true not only of the Tibetans, Qiang, the Han Chinese and other pilgrims, but also of Chinese middle-class urban tourists, who better grasp their modernity-and their privileged ethnic status-by visiting China's less altered, more primitive regions. The book will also include study of the state, which has long played a role in ethnic relations and religion, and now through its local agents struggles to bring modernity (capitalism, tourism, environmental management) to China's ethnically mixed interior. Focusing on Huanglong's mid-July festival and the wider contexts in Songpan county, and returning respectively to Pittsburgh and Beijing for the winter of 2004-2005, we expect within 14 months to research and draft most of our book.

Associated Products

Purity and Pollution: From Pilgrimage Center to World Heritage Park (Book Section)
Title: Purity and Pollution: From Pilgrimage Center to World Heritage Park
Author: Xiao-fei Kang
Abstract: A study of Huanglong in northern Sichuan, analyzing the ideology of environmentalism and tourism in Chinese official policy, and contrast it with local religious ideas and practices
Year: 2008
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press
Book Title: (Im)permanence in Art and Cultural History

Recasting Religion and Ethnicity: Tourism and Socialism in Northern Sichuan, 1992-2005 (Book Section)
Title: Recasting Religion and Ethnicity: Tourism and Socialism in Northern Sichuan, 1992-2005
Author: Xiaofei Kang
Author: Donald S. Sutton
Editor: Thomas DuBois
Abstract: The impact of tourism and state religious policy on local religion and ethnic relations in the Huanglong and neighboring areas
Year: 2009
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Book Title: Casting Faiths: The Construction of Religion in East and Southeast Asia

Faiths on Display: Religious Revival and Tourism in China (Book)
Title: Faiths on Display: Religious Revival and Tourism in China
Author: Sutton, Donald Sinclair
Year: 2010
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=9781442205086
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781442205086

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