Adaptation And Evolution: Cultural Inheritance Of Nonliterate Peoples

Since nonliterate peoples occupy the majority among all human creatures, that we distinguish literate peoples and nonliterate peoples only highlights whether they have characters or not. However, as far as cultural inheritance is concerned, they have much in common.i.Colloquial language is obviously the basic way of cultural inheritance, and folk songs represent its cream. The folk songs of Bouyei people differently show their village pattern, living environment, the seasons, living mode and origin (Chapter 2) .ii.Practice memory is a kind of cultural memory, which is about what people have been cultivated through communication with each other, life, behaviors or some ceremony practices. "Songning"Ceremony of the Bouyei people not only plays the role of cultural inheritance, but performs the characteristics of the practice memory from the following: basing on the present, reconstructing the past and predicting the future (Chapter 3) .iii.Once objectified, things can be endowed with cultural meanings such as value, logos and thought. Bouyei people favor glutinous rice, which completely reflects their rice cultures. That they regard chicken as the means of "delivery" is of great importance in life ceremony,.Moreover each item on bronze drum concentrates some cultural meanings. Therefore, objectified symbols is irreplaceable in cultural inheritance of nonliterate peoples (Chapter 4) .The above mediums can be discussed from the perspective of nature , while the followings can be regarded as the adaptive strategies to meet the social development.iv.While encountering literate peoples, nonliterate peoples inevitably face such situations as being written by others, borrow,transformation, acculturation as well as integration; meanwhile, they also display "indigenous"strengths. As for the Chinese characters borrowed by the Bouyei people, we can see it from the works on the "Zhong" (仲家) by Han intellectuals during the Ming and Qing dynasties to the Republican Period. At the same time, Bouyei people have changed Han people's believes into their own family gods, and recorded Mo Sutra by Chinese characters to reflect their believes and philosophies. Subsequently, word borrowing is a noticeable means to inherit nonliterate cultures (Chapter 5) .v.From the case of compact disks made by Bouyei people, we can see nonliterate people are creatively practicing the "revitalization of tradition", even "innovation of tradition" or "making of tradition". The appearance and development of Bouyei disks helps "Langshao" culture and traditional songs and dances spread, and also make good use of camera to record their daily life, main ceremonies and festivals from emic perspective. This kind of "Disk Culture" promotes us to reflect on the influence of the cases of Anthropology. Moreover, many reflections will be raised on what is Visual Anthropology and what is media and so on.. (Chapter 6) .vi.Network supplies human beings with brand new presentation windows. Such integrated hypertexts as Internet texts, pictures and sound facilitate nonliterate peoples to inherit their cultures. Fieldwork on network becomes a problem of methodology because of the changing of research objects. The design of net names directly embody fictitious identification. Furthermore, character-making on the internet reflects the "civilization" application of nonliterate peoples. Based on the research and review of the internet, the descriptions and views on internet culture are achieved. According to this effect, it is obvious that network partly bears the role of cultural inheritance for nonliterate peoples (Chapter 7) .Various mediums of cultural inheritance have constantly been generated during the evolution of human cultures, which are interlaced and overlapped, and supplemented each other. They play their own roles to enrich cultural inheritance instead of replacing one another.