Visible order and compressed life: institutional heritage governance and the spatial-cultural disjuncture in a Dong minority village in Guizhou, China

This study examines how institutional heritage governance reshapes everyday cultural practices in Dali Village, a Dong minority settlement in rural China. Drawing on field observations, semi-structured interviews, and documentary analysis, it identifies the mechanisms of spatial and cultural disjuncture produced by state-led interventions. The findings reveal that governance operates through three intersecting mechanisms: symbolic preservation, visual-aesthetic regulation, and tourism-driven reconfiguration. Together, these processes drive a structural bifurcation of the heritage landscape, where an institutional layer of ‘visible heritage’ is consolidated through aesthetic rectification while the ‘lived heritage’ of residents is compressed into marginal spaces and times. Specifically, these interventions stabilise physical structures while hollowing out their functional ecologies, creating a dual heritage system in which public-facing forms satisfy administrative legibility while a quieter layer of heritage persists through domestic routines and kin-based negotiation. The study concludes that heritage governance must move beyond outward order by supporting the relational conditions that sustain cultural reproduction, necessitating more adaptive, participatory approaches to local decision-making.

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