TY - JOUR KW - Intangible cultural heritage KW - Kam Big Song KW - Socio-Cultural Change KW - tradition AU - Catherine Ingram AB - Kam big songs, comprising a major musical genre sung for centuries in Kam villages in southwestern China, have now been sung in staged performances for over sixty years. Concurrent performance of big song in both village and staged formats has produced different features and paths of development for each, as well as complex interdependence between the two formats. Kam big song singing thus presents a valuable insight into the way that tradition and divergence from tradition might be understood in the twenty-first century. In this article, I outline some of the most significant aspects of villagers big song singing over the last sixty years. I demonstrate the difficulties in both locating the concept of tradition within contemporary big song singing and analytically situating the divergence of big song singing into different performance formats. I thereby illustrate key concerns, potential elucidations, and the complexity of the analytical task in understanding the contemporary trajectory of tradition . DO - 10.1080/14442213.2012.732601 M1 - 5 N2 - Kam big songs, comprising a major musical genre sung for centuries in Kam villages in southwestern China, have now been sung in staged performances for over sixty years. Concurrent performance of big song in both village and staged formats has produced different features and paths of development for each, as well as complex interdependence between the two formats. Kam big song singing thus presents a valuable insight into the way that tradition and divergence from tradition might be understood in the twenty-first century. In this article, I outline some of the most significant aspects of villagers big song singing over the last sixty years. I demonstrate the difficulties in both locating the concept of tradition within contemporary big song singing and analytically situating the divergence of big song singing into different performance formats. I thereby illustrate key concerns, potential elucidations, and the complexity of the analytical task in understanding the contemporary trajectory of tradition . SP - 434 EP - 453 TI - Tradition and Divergence in Southwestern China: Kam Big Song Singing in the Village and on Stage UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84868276844&doi=10.1080%2f14442213.2012.732601&partnerID=40&md5=d3fc7d019a8f40c798516e099d812843 VL - 13 SN - 14442213 (ISSN) ER -