Modern Social Science Research

The South China subspecies of prionailurus bengalensis tigrin, which distribute in the depth of Nankun Mountains, where belongs to the stretching branch of Jiulian Mountain, lived in harmony with the Hakka people in central of Guangdong during the history, forming the Nankun Prionailurus bengalensis culture centered around the traditional natural history knowledge. At present, Yonghan has created an IP landscape called ‘Hanbao’ centered on the Nankun prionailurus bengalensis culture at the town centre in the construction of the project of ‘High-Quality Development Project for Hundreds of Counties, Thousands of Towns, and Myriads of Villages’, which has brought certain economic benefits to the local area through ecological tourism. However, due to the excessive ‘sprouting’ of the IP, which violates the tradition of ‘naturalis historia’ in natural history, the dissemination of Nankun Prionailurus bengalensis culture is facing difficulties such as the superficiality of symbols, the weakened ecological significance and the broken identity of local cultural, which make it difficult to truly form a ‘human-animal-environment’ life community narrative. Through the natural history and anthropology materials collected during the fifteen days of fieldwork on the prionailurus bengalensis culture IP in the core area of Yonghan Town and the Nankun Mountains, with the local chronicle literatures, it can find out that the practice of the dissemination of Nankun prionailurus bengalensis culture in Yonghan Town is an ‘invented tradition’ in essence. The root dilemma in the dissemination of Nankun prionailurus bengalensis culture is the gap between the ‘moe culture’ of the media culture and the ‘naturalis historia’ tradition of the natural history studies, which leads to the current situation of the dissemination of the Nankun prionailurus bengalensis culture, is only reflected in the cognitive chain as a shallow visual spectacle, rather than the traditional ‘observation-record-interpretation’ of ‘naturalis historia’ tradition of natural history.

Nankun prionailurus bengalensis culture; The core area of Yonghan Town; “moe culture”; Naturalis historia; “the invention of tradition”