Elijah Braden Ash

In preliminary fieldwork, I have found that the Chinese state has begun to embrace bangzi qiang, dialect-based varieties of traditional theater that are widespread in North China. Simultaneously, many highly skilled performers have themselves begun to take on bureaucratic roles in the party-state. This is puzzling because the Chinese state has long taken bangzi qiang as antithetical to national development. Furthermore, many listeners, who enjoyed the sound of bangzi qiang prior to its political rehabilitation, do not concern themselves with the nationalist elements of bangzi qiang performance. Describing bangzi qiang as essentially a state project masks the reasons for its visceral appeal. What are the ideological, aesthetic, gendered, affective, and political reasons that bangzi qiang is taken up within and outside of the state? I will explore this question by examining the everyday listening practices and social media usage of bangzi qiang audiences, the bureaucracy’s role in promoting this art form, and the coalescence of various institutions and social groups around bangzi qiang. By exploring bangzi qiang as diffuse across media platforms, this project will improve anthropological understanding of unsympathetic political sensibilities and interaction between conflicting ideological and sensorial orientations.