Ambivalent threads of repair: transmitting, translating and transforming Yao embroidery at an ethnic boarding school in China

This article draws out the spaces and practices through which embodied knowledge of Yao embroidery is being transmitted – and transformed – in a Yao ethnic minority boarding school in south China. Yao embroidery is an indigenous folk craft traditionally passed down the female line of the Yao ethnic group. Whilst cultural geographers have turned to explore the continuation of craft practices in an affirmative register, we want to sound a more ambivalent, critical note of caution in approaching these conveyances. Social and economic shifts in China have disrupted intergenerational transmission and fractured customary cultures through mass internal migration and the disintegration of rural social structures. Since 2008, a Yao boarding school in Guangdong province has introduced embroidery classes, gradually formalising a curriculum that pushes back against these forces. In doing so, however, the school is not simply preserving the practice but also reshaping it – imparting new relations and functions, including commodification and codification into state-led institutions concerned with cultivating ideal citizen-subjects. Without appealing to celebratory narratives or idealised repair, we reflect on the transmission of craft practices at the intersection of loss and transformation.