The first regular meeting this year took place at the conference room of Humanities Center, NCCU, at 2-5 p.m. on 10 Jan., 2015. Besides, professor Tzu-kai Liu was invited to the meeting to address the keynote speech on the topic “The Public Space and the Modernity Discourse of Festivalization: the Discourse of Space Development and Culture Re-production of Cangyuan Va Autonomous County, Yunnan Province, China”. The outline of the speech was attached below.

Outline of the Speech

Title: The Public Space and the Modernity Discourse of Festivalization: the Discourse of Space Development and Culture Re-production of Cangyuan Va Autonomous County, Yunnan Province, China

Speaker: Tzu-kai Liu (Adjunct Assistant Professor of Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University/Adjunct Assistant Professor of Master Program of Anthropology, Department of Southeastern Asian Studies, National Chi Nan University)

Outiline: In recent years the developmental discourse of the rural village modernization of China has deeply influenced the process of the land development and the culture re-production on the ethnic-minority areas in China. In order to improve the economically poor situation of local society since 2004 the government of Cangyuan Va Autonomous County has actively reformed their administrative region by means of imitating the developmental mode of the second-tier cities of China. Moreover, it promotes a series of national tourist activities with the core concept “world hometown of race Va”. Take the real cases for instance. The rituals and activities associated with buffalo are held annually in the county. In addition, the government preserves the conventional civil buildings as the key tourist attractions. The above measures are done to construct a boundary town with both tradition and modernity. Furthermore, the speaker analyzed how the local government built the county and made it become the modern and civilized border city by the two contradicted discourses of modernity during the process of the public spatial reconstruction. Additionally, it’s also important how the government formed the national features worth consuming and retrospecting. What’s more, professor Liu further elaborated how the local dwellers interpreted the development of their living public space and how they reacted the public spatial reconstruction and the re-production of the traditional culture of the official version.

Keywords: Publicness (公共性), Spatial Reconstruction (空間再造), Appropriation (挪用性) and Discourse of Modernity (現代化論述)