Abstract:

As the material carrier of native land, architectural heritage not only presents productive, living and ecological values in history, but also reflects changes of local people in mentality order and reproduces the character of symbolic communication of things due to its modernity practice, which reshapes material values and identities with the evolution of practice field. Diaojiaolou-the traditional stilted buildings, as a site of daily life practices for Chinese ethnic minorities, are mainly located in the Wuling mountain area, which contain local meanings on multiple levels, including material, institutional and spiritual significance. This paper constructed a dialectical framework of "time-space-place" from the perspective of "things", to dynamically investigate the interaction between homeland heritage and cultural subjects as well as the transformation of social order in the Wuling mountain area: (1) the presence of "things" represents the historical response to folk preservation and generation inheritance, carrying home culture and local memory; (2) The declining and disembedding of "things" implies the game and integration of macro power and individual behavior under the penetration of modernity, as well as the deconstruction, negotiation and reconstruction of local subjectivity; (3) The appearance of "things" suggests that the home is placed in a regional cultural value system at a deeper level, which shows up the spatial value of ethnic architecture, thus participating in the tourism context as a form of cultural capital. Furthermore, the paper tried to explore the reconstruction of the order of material, social and human ecological spaces of homeland heritage from a local perspective: (1) Spatial empowerment: landscape genes renew space value in the aspect of production; (2) Order reconstruction: social motivation activates space value in the aspect of life; (3) Local knowledge: multiple subjects nurture space value in the ecological aspect. Through the localization of "things", this study explores how "things", which have been hidden in the folk, attract multiple subjects to create a "field of memory" along with the modernization of ethnic areas, in order to achieve the order transformation from the daily "home" to the "place", thus exploring new paths for the survival of homeland heritage and the creation of "poetic dwelling"in China's ethnic areas, as well as promoting rural revitalization.

Key words: homeland heritage, social life of things, place reconstruction, ethnic village, Wuling mountain area