INTERPRETATION AND ACTIVATION PATHS OF ANCESTRAL HALL EDUCATIONAL CUSTOMS IN BIJIANG
Keywords:
Lingnan ancestral halls, Clan education memory, Educational customs, Local identity, Activation paths, Bijiang of ShundeAbstract
Traditional Lingnan ancestral halls serve not only as physical vessels for clan rituals and lineage cohesion, but also as core educational fields that nurture rural educational traditions and local cultural identity.Taking the ancestral hall clusters and their associated educational customs in the historic village of Bijiang as a research object, this paper adopts the perspectives of field theory and embodied cognition to systematically analyze the formation mechanisms of historical memories surrounding clan and charity schooling. It extracts the cultural values and symbolic expressions embedded in educational customs such as the Enlightenment Ceremony, clan rules and admonitions, and elder-respecting scholarship awards. The findings demonstrate that Bijiang ancestral hall educational customs achieve the intergenerational transmission of clan memory and the continuous shaping of a sense of place through the triple intertwining of physical space, ritual behavior, and bodily memory. Facing the challenges of rural spatial reshaping and community structure deconstruction in contemporary society, this paper proposes living activation paths encompassing spatial micro-renovation, ritual behavior re-structuring, and contemporary community governance embedding. This study aims to provide an embodied paradigm and theoretical support for the transmission of traditional village culture, the improvement of human settlement quality, and rural cultural revitalization in the Lingnan region.References
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