Between Tablet and Plexiglas: Reconfiguring Kinship and Heritage in the Yu Ancestral Hall

This article examines the contemporary transformation of Ancestral Halls through a case study of the Yu Ancestral Hall in Kaiping, Guangdong. While existing scholarship has tended to interpret such institutions either as remnants of lineage organization or as objects of heritage preservation, this study argues that Ancestral Halls are better understood as adaptive institutions that selectively incorporate exhibitionary and archival practices within lineage-based systems of authority. Drawing on eighteen semi-structured interviews (2018–2020), alongside spatial, visual, and material analysis of the Yu Clan Heritage Gallery, the article conceptualizes this process as a form of “museumization” that is partial, negotiated, and genealogically mediated. Empirically, the article demonstrates how practices of curation, donor patronage, spatial reordering, and digitization reshape the hall into a site where kinship, heritage, and symbolic hierarchy intersect. These processes do not displace genealogical authority but reorganize it through new forms of visibility, commemoration, and belonging. The hall simultaneously functions as a ritual space, heritage site, pedagogical institution, and transnational nexus, aligning lineage narratives with broader projects of cultural governance and historical representation. By situating ancestral halls at the intersection of lineage studies, Chinese heritage politics, and critical museum theory, the article challenges the assumed universality of museum-based frameworks and demonstrates how non-Western heritage forms actively reconfigure exhibitionary practices through indigenous logics of kinship, morality, and transnational affiliation.