Reenacting the Land of Rites and Etiquette

Abstract

“Reenacting the Land of Rites and Etiquette” develops a close ethnographic analysis of three primary Han Clothing Movement media: ethnic clothing, ritual, and photography. Each is deployed to overcome the challenges described in the preceding chapters and thereby stabilize the Great Han imaginary in the material world. Tracing the application of these three media in movement activities, each medium is found to enact growing abstraction from participants’ living environments towards the fleeting realization of their ideal images. Eternal Han tradition thus ironically finds its most stable embodiment via the most modern of technologies: the cell-phone camera, which combines the materiality of clothing with the framing capabilities of the ritual space. Participants digitally capture their ideal moments of self-representation, with all contradictory elements safely edited away, for time immemorial, under the legitimizing rubric of tradition.