Working in collaboration with members of three villages Yi Mayou, Bai Qifeng and Miao Xiaoshuijin, the research team develops specific cooperative strategies for each village according to their own unique cultural heritage settings. The project is designed to rest upon balanced interdependence between the communities and their members and between communities and various categories of external supporters, including the “virtual”. Its step of transforming culture bearers into the culture-creators, -sustainers and -curators—protagonists for their own digital materials is crucial.
The project focuses on three villages in Yunnan, China, allowing the acquisition of a deeply contextualized understandings of three contrasting cultural heritage settings and development of carefully shaped solutions to the challenges detected. Similar situations of cultural imperialism, the vanishing of indigenous culture, and the disempowering of the underprivileged in managing their own culture, occur worldwide. Scholarship will be undertaken to document each of these stages, so that best practices can be shared. The new research framework will thus be transferable to a broad cross-section of endangered cultural heritages among minority communities in larger contemporary states who are adapting to rapid digitalisation globally.
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