Negative geographies of craft‐making in heritagisation: Dai women's paper‐cutting in southwestern rural China

This article examines the negative geographies that rural female Dai paper‐cutters encounter in and beyond their craft‐making lives. By providing their alternative stories, it aims to diversify the utopian landscape of craft‐making in current academia. Multiple relational and non‐relational, embodied and political negatives emerge from paper‐cutters' body–world relationships. We situate such negatives and their geographies within the act of craft‐making to identify how these negatives develop and how to interact with them. First, craft‐making is an essentially embodied practice – involving repetitive corporeal movements, personal mental creativities and prolonged working – that occurs while learning, developing and utilising the skill. Such negatives can be released in craft makers' spiritual lives. Furthermore, the ‘heritagisation’ of Dai paper‐cutting has imposed more responsibilities and burdens on female craft makers, creating unequal social networks of makers, their families, other villagers and local governments. Such negatives are rooted and embedded in the politics of heritage. We reconsider negative perspectives on the geographies of making to call for more ‘careful’ attention to the concerns of disadvantaged women and their bodies through an analysis of craft makers' negative embodied experiences and the political dilemmas of heritage. Opening space for negatives in geographies of craft‐making can also advance understanding of the multiplicitous character of negatives more generally.