Abstract

The Huashan Festival and Miao New Year celebrations operate as more than vehicles for ethnic identity or ritual transmission. They also function as contested public arenas of social interaction in which gender norms are continually interpreted, negotiated, and reconfigured through performative and organisational practices. In this context, “cultural continuity” does not refer to the static preservation of tradition. Instead, it describes the active and often complex ways that communities sustain the legitimacy of core values within shifting spatial and temporal contexts marked by migration, media circulation, and institutional change. This involves processes of memory selection, ritual reorganisation, and institutional adaptation that are inseparable from underlying struggles over power and symbolic authority.

Drawing on frameworks of ritual social reproduction and gendered agency, this research synthesises ethnographic data, archival material, and oral histories from Hmong/Miao communities in Southwest China, the highlands of, Northern Thailand, and the United States across multiple generational cohorts. The study examines how transnational mobility and mediatization reshape narrative authority within and beyond festival spaces. By analysing the distribution of discursive power, the valuation of aesthetic labour, and the governance of festival organisations as historically contingent processes, the research challenges the assumption that structural continuity inevitably overrides transformative agency. Instead, it shows that, despite an overarching patriarchal context, the combined forces of mass education, migration, and digital media have enabled women to move from roles as passive “visible performers” to positions as active “governance participants” with genuine interpretive authority in decision-making, representation, and norm-setting. This transformation, however, follows different trajectories across diaspora, urban, and rural settings due to uneven access to resources and institutional platforms.

As a result, the belief that inclusivity necessarily weakens tradition appears conceptually flawed within prevailing cultural preservation discourses. The findings demonstrate that, under appropriate institutional and economic conditions, widening participation and empowering narrative actors can strengthen cultural resilience and intergenerational cohesion rather than dilute ritual meaning. To ground this claim in practice, this study proposes specific governance indicators, including the gender composition of speakers and judging panels, as well as the application of community codes of conduct formulated through participatory consultation. These indicators are not offered as definitive conclusions, but as verifiable and transparent tools for evaluating the evolving dynamics of cultural practice over time and across contexts.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.