Research on the Path of Intangible Cultural Heritage Empowering Rural Revitalization: A Case Study of Zhanjiang Human Dragon Dance

Abstract

The comprehensive advancement of the rural revitalization strategy has provided a historic opportunity for the living inheritance of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), and also raised a theoretical inquiry into how ICH can effectively empower rural development. Taking Zhanjiang Human Dragon Dance as the research object, this paper explores the path of ICH empowering rural revitalization from the theoretical perspective of Marxist view of culture and Chinese thoughts on rural construction. The study finds that Human Dragon Dance, as an important carrier of Lingnan culture, contains multiple potentials of collective memory cohesion, cultural subjectivity construction and social capital reproduction. However, in the process of modernization, it is confronted with structural dilemmas such as the compression of cultural ecological space, the rupture of inheritance mechanism, insufficient industrial transformation capacity and weakened cultural governance function. This paper proposes that ICH empowering rural revitalization should transcend the instrumental thinking of “resource utilization”, establish the practical logic of “value co-creation”, and realize the deep coupling of ICH protection and rural revitalization through reconstructing value cognition system, innovating talent development scheme, optimizing cultural ecosystem, activating industrial development momentum and embedding primary-level governance structure, so as to ultimately serve the overall goal of the modernization of agriculture and rural areas.