Revisiting Shaoshan folk songs: indigenous perspectives and cultural practices

Abstract

While Shaoshan folk songs are celebrated as cultural heritage, their classification and preservation have been dominated by external academic and institutional frameworks that often override Indigenous communities’ own definitions of value and practice. This study interrogates this power dynamic by adopting an Indigenous and practice-based perspective, aiming to reframe how we understand Chinese folk music categorisation and heritage preservation. Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with three representative inheritors of Shaoshan folk songs, this study explored how local communities define, perform, and transmit these songs, highlighting how their classification systems encode historical memory, social values, and ritual knowledge. The findings demonstrate that Shaoshan folk songs not only are expressive forms of emotion and identity but also serve as vehicles for ethical instruction, cosmological beliefs, and community resilience. By centring on Indigenous knowledge systems, the study provides a critique of state-centric and institutional ICH frameworks and proposes more culturally grounded approaches to heritage safeguarding. In doing so, it contributes to contemporary debates in ethnomusicology, heritage studies, and anthropology about the epistemic tensions between local cultural practice and official heritage discourse.