A Study on the Formation Path of Cultural Identity among Elderly Sojourners in Yunnan

Abstract

With the rise of the sojourn-based elderly care model, Yunnan, leveraging its ethnic cultural resources and highland geographical environment, has become a significant gathering place for elderly sojourners. However, the participation of elderly sojourners in ethnic culture largely remains at the level of sightseeing and experiential engagement, making it difficult to achieve a profound transformation from external symbolic exposure to internal cultural identification. The root cause lies in the absence of an effective adaptation mechanism between the meaning transmission of cultural symbols and the cognitive characteristics and need structures of elderly learners. Grounded in the theories of cultural gerontology and semiotics, this study proposes, at the symbolic foundation level, a three-layered analytical framework for ethnic cultural symbols-comprising the material layer, the meaning layer, and the regeneration layer-along with a transformation pathway of "decoding-reconstruction." At the need-adaptation level, it constructs a three-dimensional need framework encompassing "health tolerance, cultural cognitive preference, and digital skill level," thereby elucidating the dynamic generation mechanism of personalized learning pathways. At the carrier design level, it puts forward a triadic collaborative design paradigm of "authenticity, multimodality, and emotionalization" for age-friendly micro-learning products. The theoretical framework constructed in this study provides a new perspective for understanding the formation mechanism of cultural identity among elderly sojourners and lays a theoretical foundation for the educational transformation of ethnic cultural resources.