Tamara Muriel Bulicic Auspont

This research examines how Chinese lion dance in Chile, practiced entirely by non-Chinese performers, reconfigures tradition through embodied movement and sound. Challenging descent-based models of cultural transmission, I approach lion dance as a sensory and social practice through which Chilean performers cultivate ties to Chinese and Malaysian lineages across continents. Using multi-sited ethnography combining intensive apprenticeship through what I call an embodied method of “becoming the lion”—a process of learning through physical transformation and rhythmic attunement—with collaborative approaches and ongoing digital exchanges with troupes in Chile, the study traces how training, percussion-led entrainment, and public performance generate belonging beyond conventional diasporic frames. I argue that authenticity here is enacted through disciplined practice and intersensory attunement rather than heritage, situating Chile as a third-space vantage on global Chineseness. The project contributes to anthropological debates on embodiment, sound, and transnational circulation by theorizing embodied lineage transmission as a post-diasporic mode of affiliation, and by showing how sonic infrastructures (drum, cymbals, gong) organize collective feeling and recognition. More broadly, it offers a Latin American perspective on cultural exchange in the Global South, foregrounding how bodily experience and sound mediate cultural authorship and continuity.