The people’s value : discovering the social value of three revitalized ancestral halls in Shunde, China

Abstract

Located in the city of Foshan, Guangdong Province, China, Shunde is a characteristic area of Cantonese Cultural Zone with rich tangible and intangible cultural resources. Among all the heritages, Shunde is especially famous with its abundance of ancestral halls that mainly built in in Qing dynasty to the Republic of China (1912-1949). With policies encouraging revitalization, many ancestral halls had been adaptively re-used and put into public services. Effective in new functions, these ancestral halls are still worshiped by the locals as ritual and cultural symbols. This dissertation is a study on those revitalized ancestral halls on the basis of their multiple social values. The main focus of the dissertation is social value, especially on the transform and development of social values due to revitalization, and how the transform of social value affects and is reflected in the practice of revitalization. Three ancestral halls that are revitalized into three different services will be used as cases in this study. So far, studies have been taken to ancestral halls linking built heritage and its significance to clan culture in rural China. In this context, those ancestral halls, as built heritages, that had been studied retained the identity as ancestral halls as before. Unfortunately, clan culture had been largely weakened in the last 50 years, leading to broad disablement of ancestral halls. Some researchers have tried to bring the ancestral halls into the contemporary context and study the reconstruction of clans, yet little attention was paid to the transformation of ancestral halls. To fill this gap, this study plans to focus specifically on those ancestral halls that had been revitalized and examine their multiple levels of social value as a result of their revitalization with new uses.