Ritualistic Folk Customs And Chinese Ethnic Literature Research

There have been ample studies and research on folk rituals and folk-customs by various means and from different perspectives in the fields of anthropology and folk-custom science, which have yielded fruitful results. Basing itself on the above studies and drawing upon theories and methodology of the related fields, my dissertation attempts to conduct integrated studies between folk rituals and folk-customs, which are termed "ritualistic folk customs". There have existed numerous cases of ritualistic folk customs in the Chinese ethnic literature, which have been neglected by previous studies, and in view of the above situation, my dissertation intends to approach Chinese ethnic literature from the perspective of ritualistic folk customs and explore its literary uniqueness. The problems the dissertation attempts to address and solve are as follows:What role are ritualistic folk customs playing in Chinese ethnic literature? Why do the ethnic writers show so much preference to them? The literary uniqueness of Chinese ethic literature is undoubtedly a very complicated subject, which entails extensive and profound studies from a lot of researchers. The dissertation serves as one part of that grand project.The studies are conducted through detailed text analysis of literary works of Tujia ethnic minority, based on a fundamental division between the story level and discourse level in narratology. To be more specific, the characterization, meaning, aesthetic value are dealt with in the story level. The ritualistic customs are significant to characterization in that, on one hand, the character traits can be embodied through ritualistic customs, thereby it becomes one important way of characterization; on the other hand, the archetypal characters in the ritualistic folk customs will find their way into the text together with those customs, which give clues for writers to express their ethnic spirit and for readers to understand the text. Besides human characters, ritualistic folk customs are also closely related to animal characters in Chinese ethnic literature, which often carry certain meanings or a particular theme in the literary works, and therefore the ritualistic folk customs with animal characters tend to deepen the meaning and theme in the literary works.The ritualistic folk customs may also enter the text through roles, settings and incidents and they not only provide information and partake in story development, but, more importantly, bridge the oral literature and written literature. Ritualistic folk customs have historical significance as well as serve as embodiment of the ethnic beliefs and conflicts in values. In terms of the aesthetic value, ritualistic folk customs can reflect the rural aesthetic taste and style, which highlights natural beauty, ecological beauty, the beauty of human nature and the Dionysian spirit and so on.On the discourse level of literary works, ritualistic folk customs are closely related to narrative focalization, narrative structure and space forms. Focalization mainly refers to the perspective of understanding stories. The relationship between rituals and focalization is that internal focalization and external focalization often embody the internal or external point of view of national culture. The internal focalization is employed to present the ethnic culture to the other cultures.The multiple focalization can juxtapose various feelings in various places, and therefore it achieves the effect of composite reading. The narrative structure is the overall structure of the relationship between different elements and components. There are many kinds of narrative structures in the minority novels, the narrative structures related to ritualistic folk customs are:linear structure, scene structure, cross structure, ring structure, focus structure, gray line structure, comparative and structure. As illustrated in spatial narrative theory, space is a very important narrative skill in literary works. In Chinese ethnic literature, space is presented in some unique forms such as parallel narration, ritual juxtaposition, mental space juxtaposition, mixing of sacred space, mental space and story space. Through the perspective of spatial narrative, some unique features can be found in ethnic literature works; and meanwhile they pose new challenges to the existing spacial narrative theory.In the last part of the dissertation, a straightforward conclusion is made, that is, rituals are very important for ethnic writers to express their ethnic identity. Roughly speaking, there are three attitudes of ethnic writers, namely, complimentary attitude, reflective attitude and critical attitude. The works that adopt a complimentary attitude will describe folk rituals in a positive way and show the writer’s pride in his ethnic culture; Those that adopt reflective attitude will describe the positive folk rituals, but meanwhile have the awareness of weaknesses and absurdness of ethnic rituals. Those that adopt a critical attitude will focus their attention on the damage and hurt incurred upon human beings and humanity by backward customs in their works. The writers’ attitude towards folk rituals are corelated with their attitude to the corresponding culture, but even so, we cannot distinguish the writers by their attitude, as it varies with time, text and rituals. As a matter of fact, most writers do not stick to one attitude in their works and instead, three attitudes coexist in their works. Finally, At the same time, there has been a very close relationship between folk rituals and Chinese ethnic literature. Finally, the dissertation also explores the literary theory and methodology concerning Chinese ethnic literature, and highlights the research methods of multidisciplinary, multi-perspective, and multi-level.