Multi-Discursive Ethnography and the Re-Narration of Chinese Heritage: Stories about the Yueju Opera Performance at the Heavenly Queen Palace of Quzhou.

Recognizing the discursive nature of heritage and its crisis of representation, this paper proposes to use what we call "multi-discursive ethnography" as a methodological and writing strategy to renarrate and thereby remake heritage in contemporary China. Multi-discursive ethnography, as its name indicates, is a form of ethnography that encompasses multiple discourses of a subject matter and strives to facilitate dialogue among them. Scholars are required to conduct fieldwork and other research procedures to expose them to varied discourses, and then write up an ethnography by assembling and weaving together those discourses they find useful for representing dialogue and diversity. As a case study, we present a multi-discursive ethnography of the Heavenly Queen Palace (Tianhou Gong 天后宮) in Quzhou(衢州), Zhejiang Province, focusing chiefly on the Yueju opera (越劇) performances that many local people attend. Stories are told there, allowing us to rethink and reconstruct heritage beyond disciplinary knowledge and universalized meaning-making. This multi-discursive ethnography, we argue, problematizes globalized heritage discourses and invites a diverse and dialogical reconceptualization of a local past in the present by foregrounding vernacular voices and deep cultural discourse, especially with regard to li (禮), which is considered to be "the determinate fabric of Chinese culture, and...the language through which the culture is expressed" (Hall and Ames 1998, 269). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]