Television And The Life Of Yi People In China

The dissertation is a study of relationship between Television and Caobazi, a Yi village with 14 families (a total population of 60 persons) in the mountainous area and beside the famous Er'tan Dam in southwest China. In recent years this village has been declining and more and more families are moving away. As to those who stay, some are hesitating about moving or not, some are bothering for their youth's not wanting to stay at homeland.There must be countless villages like Caobazi in China. With the process of modernization approaching the village, villagers have to face a new world, a new way of life and survival, a new future, and it is TV that spread all of these to their home. Watching TV becomes a part of daily life like eating and sleeping. It's safe to say that TV has incorporated into the fabric of their daily lives profoundly and intimately. The life and people of Caobazi can not be showed and interpreted if overlooking the role of TV and its incorporating into Caobazi which began on 15 Oct,1998.The study chooses Caobazi as a fieldwork and mainly research object, because it's an excellent sample and a headstream to study the relationship between Television and Yi peoples. And I found the process of TV incorporating into Caobazi is a ritual of passage which Caobazi and her people have to pass, like the girls of Caobazi have to pass the ritual of initiation in order to form the view of ritual andthe way of ethnography and inquisition. The ritual marks, orientates and interprets those changes which make Yi in a dilemma between pre-TV life and TV life, pre-modern life and modern life, Yi and Han, the Yi's time-space and global time-space brought by TV. The ritual plays a crucial role in calling all people to share beliefs, join together to create and maintain an orderly, meaningful culture world. So communication is not only a transmission of information to Caobazi but a ritual to concord and conform TV and the related changes with Caobazi community. In rituals peoples are adopting their minds and behaviors to new environment. They put TV in their own social structure and system of local culture and knowledge, and make TV an understandable, acceptable and consumable thing. They adopt their personal relationship, schedule of life, the sense of time and space, the belief about gender, the environment of communication to TV and the related changes. All of these adaptations have influenced and changed the model of Caobazi and her people to organize and make their life in order. That is to say the ritual of passing TV endows Caobazi and her people new ideas about the relationship between the would, the universe and themselves, and put Caobazi and her people in a new place: a colorful and global world. Even if Caobazi is a still locality, she is talking to the world in her "language" and in her unique way.The study explores a new way— ritual analytic model to unravel and explain the relationship between TV and life, and creates a theory of a community or an ethnic group passing the ritual of mass communication.Second, the study covers two subjects—mass communication and anthropology, while integrates two methods—ethnographic and inquiry. It not only interprets TV and TV culture, also presents a Caobazi community and changes of local culture and knowledge.Lots of first hand data gathered in the fieldwork are coming from close investigation and talks with Cacbazi's people, so it could promise the authenticity and validity of conclusions.