Heritage safeguarding as a method: ethnic cultural reconstruction in China

Grounded in long-term ethnographic research with the Chinese ethnic Qiang people, this article advances heritage safeguarding as a method to interrogate the evolving role of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) in post-disaster cultural reconstruction. Safeguarding is not reducible to the transmission of ICH items, nor is it a neutral instrument of preservation. Instead, it unfolds as a multi-layered, multi-subject practice: at once a state policy framework, an economic development scheme, a social renovation experiment, a community’s recovery pillar, and after all, a lived cultural horizon. Case studies of Qiang New Year and Embroidery after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, and the Wa’er’ezu Festival during the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrate how safeguarding sustains ritual continuity and cultural resilience while entangling communities in projects of nation-building, tourism, and political legitimation. Methodologically, safeguarding as a method foregrounds grounded inquiry into the cultural contexts, social-ecological relations, and historical sensitivities that shape ICH’s present and future. It highlights how pluralised participation – by governments, practitioners, scholars, communities, and private actors – renders heritage a contested site where authenticity, standardisation, and economic imperatives collide. Safeguarding is shown not merely as survival, but as a collaborative force of transformation, reframing heritage as both a terrain of negotiation and a method of critical inquiry.