The dilemma between innovation and authenticity in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage: Community agency in preserving Suzhou pingtan

In safeguarding an intangible cultural heritage (ICH), the community is often considered passive and only part of the policy implementation system. While acknowledging the lack of a connection with contemporary audiences in many examples of ICH, such as pingtan (评弹), authenticity-seeking is still a widely accepted goal in safeguarding ICH. But from an authenticity-seeking perspective, attempts to create innovative pingtan are often the target of criticism. This article observes that amid the competing narratives of pursuing authenticity and embracing innovative experimentation, preservation of and innovation in pingtan have developed to disentangle pingtan from a unified conceptualization. Conflicts about preservation and innovation are the enabling forces that allow diverse cultural ideas to be communicated, leading to interactions and experimentation that defy easy definition. Analysis of the contradictions behind an insistence on an authentic form of pingtan suggests that authenticity-seeking is more about cultural anxieties over the changing identity of a city, with pingtan as a tool for such negotiations. This article calls for a more nuanced understanding of community agency in safeguarding ICH. Innovative practices to safeguard ICH may also challenge the concept of community, resulting in fluid, developmental, and mutually sustaining interactions.