ed by the Miao minority group in the Suogia (梭嘎) region of Guizhou Province. The village is comprised of four walled villages : Longga (陇戛)、Gaoxing (高兴)、Xiao Beiba (小坝田) and Bukong (补空). During 2007 Chinese Lunar New Year Celebration, the author conducted a series of interviews with and studies of migrant workers from Longga (陇戛) and Gaoxing (高兴) who returned home for the celebrations.
There is a compelling reason why the author chose to undertake research in these two villages: eleven years ago, the governments of Norway and China jointly developed the first ecological museum in Asia, which was named “The Ecology Museum of Suojia Liuzhi Guizhou China”. This museum resulted from both cooperation between the two governments and cooperation in research between the two nations’ scholars. In 2005, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Ecology Museum, Guizhou hosted an international conference on ecological museums attended by more than 100 scholars from 15 countries and regions. The founder of the ecology museum concept, the Frenchman Hugo Davilan (戴维兰) said, “The ecology museum has a story with a long history. In modern times, this story is taking place in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Rim. In these areas, many such ecological museums co-exist with the local village residents. This new type of museum has made a tremendous contribution toward preventing the decline of indigenous cultures. In fact, these museums are able sustain the multi-faceted cultures and contribute to the continuous development of village social life.” These words express the hopeful support of a scholar. However, how would such ideas, based on the European experience, be transformed into reality in an extremely remote and isolated Miao village in China? What would affect the local people’s culture and way of life after the establishment of SuojiaEcologyMuseum? In addition, after such a transformation in those villages, would their traditional culture, that is, the intangible aspects of the culture, be preserved?
With this thinking in mind, our eight-person task group came to Suojia in GuizhouProvince and spent the next three and a half months based at the Documentation Centre of the EcologyMuseum. We hoped that through close contact and long-term research, we could learn useful information about current research concerning intangible cultural heritage protection in the area. At the same time, our objective was to complete the task first undertaken by Fei Xiaotong of the Chinese Department of Culture in the 2001 research project entitled “The protection, development and utilization of the human resources in China’s western areas.”
Fei Xiaotong (费孝通) once said, “A native anthropologist’ job, in fact, is not carried out on just one single frame of reference. For instance, in the field of my research, there are two kinds of cultures used as my frames of refer