**5. Conclusions**

Originally, *Yalu wang* was a type of oral performance, a central element of the ritual practices at Miao funeral rites. From an emic point of view, the *dongb langf* have divine powers to direct the deceased to the lost home of their progenitors. The content of *Yalu wang* includes Yalu's role in Miao warfare, their exodus, and the lineage of his offspring. As a cultural artifact, it creates a liminality at funeral scenes that juxtaposes the past and the present, which in turn recreates and reinforces the collective memory through a form of performativity participated in by all. In sum, the *Yalu wang* funerary rituals serve as a means to maintain ethnic identity and unite the local community. This functionalist framework is built on the Miao's *wugu* belief that the interactions between the living and ancestral spirits can be properly mediated and controlled by the witchcraft of *dongb langf*. These two dimensions speak to two layers of the Miao's cognition of the external world, and are both confirmed in the front stage and back stage narratives of *dongb langf*.

After it was officially "discovered" in 2009, *Yalu wang* has been woven into the nexus of diverse and sometimes contradictory discourses articulated by various forces that vie for its cultural resources. Even the term "*Yalu wang*" itself is a new cultural construct. While state observation—and prohibition—of the performance of *jangz ghad* rituals has been a reality since the 1950s, Yu Weiren's appropriation of the ritual has cleansed it of all elements of sorcery and has redefined it as a straightforward heroic epic. This process is merely one more example of the state-driven epic collection project that has been in train for the past six decades. *Yalu wang* is therefore endorsed in the official discourse as a gap-filling discovery that has rewritten a historical narrative that previously posited that the Miao have no epic of origins. As we have seen, in 2011, *Yalu wang* entered the "List of National Intangible Cultural Heritage", which secured financial support for its protection and promotion at the state level. While the state uses *Yalu wang* as a demonstration of its own cultural confidence, the local governmen<sup>t</sup> of Ziyun cherry-picks its cultural elements as a tourist attraction to obtain economic benefits or to present Guizhou's "ethnic culture" in national pageants. The fact that some (Han Chinese) artists believe their contemporary performance is more Miao than traditional Miao performances is an example of a desire to seize elements from ethnic cultures in order to develop a commercialized creative industry.

While on the surface all these actions are said to preserve, protect, and promote *Yalu wang*, in fact they threaten to hollow out *Yalu wang* from its core cultural context, since few if any of these activities and programs directly mention *Yalu wang*'s function at funeral rites. Either way, the reinvented *Yalu wang* has lost its meaning in the local community for the Miao, becoming fragments bereft of cultural context. The fate of *Yalu wang* is representative of the paradoxical status quo of all ethnic cultures in a rapidly globalizing and commodifying China (and we may add elsewhere too). As modernization, urbanization, and secularization ultimately lead to a kind of cultural homogeneity, almost all these ethnic cultural practices, as with *Yalu wang*, face the plight of erosion, dilution, or even elimination. "Intangible cultural heritage" affords them a means of survival, ye<sup>t</sup> at the cost of being divorced from their cultural contexts. This shift from local knowledge to national/universal culture in fact severs its ties to the ethnic group that gave birth to it.

**Author Contributions:** Validation, H.H.; data curation, X.G.; writing—original draft preparation, C.G.; writing—review and editing, C.G.; funding acquisition, C.G. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research was funded by the National Social Sciences Foundation of China, gran<sup>t</sup> number 21CB171.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.
