3 - Exploring the Process and Politics of Everyday Knowledge Transfer: A Case Study of the Translocal Production of Guangchang Wu

Abstract

The paper explores the transfer of everyday knowledge across place in contemporary China through the study of Guangchan wu (plaza dance). During the past decades, the knowledge of Guangchan wu, such as leisure norms and behaviors, is transferred from one place to another in China and beyond. It is the most popular Chinese public leisure widely practiced by people in rural and urban areas. In this paper, we draw on the study of the diffusion of northern aerobics from the Chinese mainland to a coastal city Sanya in southern China. We understand mobile everyday knowledge as an ongoing process, examines its dynamism by scrutinizing its complex and unstable routes, shaped by multiple agents and power relations. The transfer of northern aerobics undergoes continuous changes in its trajectories and is influenced by the discourse of professionalism, everyday leisure practices of three major recreationists and their unequal interactions. This paper offers further insight into the dynamism and politics of knowledge diffusion in everyday life.

Keywords: everyday knowledge; Guangchan wu; the politics of knowledge diffusion; Sanya