Hua'er songs (a folksong genre sung by six ethnic groups primarily in the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai), hua'er festivals, and the Chinese scholarship on both are examined as a case study to explore the processes, symbols and relationships involved in the imagination and phrasing of a Chinese tradition in the People's Republic of China. In this dissertation, Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities is expanded and reformulated as a process called the imagination of traditions. This approach departs from other definitions of tradition, including Eric Hobsbawm's notion of invented traditions, because it treats tradition not as a set of items or a preserved past but rather as a flexible image arrived at through a process of creating and communicating meaning. Hua'er is viewed as a multivocal symbol to explain how and why hua'er songs are considered to be local products, an expression of the spirit of the Great Northwest, and an integral and valuable part of the Chinese cultural heritage. Musical performance and the media by which hua'er and knowledge about hua'er are disseminated are examined in the wider context of music, scholarship, and policy in the PRC to explain the processes by which hua'er becomes part of the Chinese tradition, the basis upon which that tradition is imagined, and the manner in which it is expressed and enacted.
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