To share or not to share: contested heritage in Inner Mongolia, China —A case of overtone singing (khoomei)

Abstract

This paper follows the recent definition of heritage as a socio-political construct to examine the politics of intangible cultural heritage in Inner Mongolia, China. It focuses on how the UNESCO system in concert with the PRC’s cultural agenda led to the successful but controversial registration of Mongolian overtone singing (khoomei) to the UNESCO intangible heritage list as a significant tradition of the Mongolian ethnic group in China in 2009. As one of China’s major strategic frontiers and one of its five ethnic minority autonomous regions, Inner Mongolia is under-represented in the literature. Inner Mongolia and Mongolia are also a crucial context in which to study the politics of transnational cultural heritage. Empirically, this paper documents unique and valuable local voices in Inner Mongolia speaking about the registration of khoomei through semi-structured face-to-face interviews in Mongolian and Chinese and an analysis of academic and non-academic published work in Chinese. Theoretically, this paper critically examines the influence of transnational heritage registration, initiated and endorsed by UNESCO heritage programs and the PRC’s cultural agenda, on sub-national heritage-making in Inner Mongolia.

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