Changes in the Cultural Connotation of the Wa Wooden Drum Dance

Abstract

In Wa wooden drum dance, the human body is a special carrier of Wa’s culture. Over the years, the value originally carried in the dance has changed fundamentally, as Wa’s culture evolved. For thousands of years, the ethnic traditional worship ritual dance integrated the Wa notions of religion and worship of gods. Wa huntsmen would go out in groups and manage to bring a captive back to the village, and offer a human head as sacrifice for the wooden drum. They believed that only in this way, the drumbeats were vested with divinity and the mountain gods they honored with the ritual can bless a bumper harvest and ensure the peace and tranquility of the village for the coming year. When the wooden drum is played, people gather around the drum and dance, praying to the gods for protection.

The revival of the dance was driven by the government and the cultural elite, just like the sentence to it was about 80 years ago. Though it served the purpose of introducing the wooden drum dance to the outside world as a local symbol and an explicit form of state presence, as well as to promote the local tourism, cultural attributes and social functions of wooden drum are different from those of the original religious wooden drum rituals.