A Folklore Study On Mongolian Women's Headdresse

The most important significance of headdress lies in pattern and material.We conduct research on headdress itself to further study the symbolic meaning of the headdress and the people who endow headdress meaning rather than studying the object itself.Studying the significance of headdress is similar to how to understand a certain text.The author of this paper conducted field investigation on headdress of Mongolian women.Based on the field investigation,the author referred to many folklore materials,foreign documents and historical materials of the Ancient times and so many picture materials and sorted out others’ research result of Mongolian clothes and folklore.By applying related theory and methods of folklore and art,the author conducted research on headdress from the perspectives of visual arts which takes headdress as a kind of decorative art and material culture that regards headdress as a kind of daily necessity,trying to provide a more explicit and clear explanation about headdress.Objects have relation to person and other classification and they cannot be separated because objects can be used to stabilize and standardize people’s hearts.Objects can be used to demonstrate the owner’s right and make self-image concrete.Also,objects represents the growth and continuousness of a person and the tie linking the owner and other people.The author studied headdress by observing the relationship between persons who are related to headdress and the relation network of objects and then analyzed the social relation by studying the pattern of different headdress.The author concluded that the headdress itself and the social relationship are of the same significance.This paper is divided into seven parts including the preface and conclusion,and the body part can be divided into five parts.The first chapter is about changes of Mongolian women’s headdress from Mongolian khanate(1206-1635)to Qing Dynasty(1644-1912).History of headdress consist of three different phases,directional decoration,co-existence of directional decoration and circular decoration and co-existence of pendant decoration and circular decoration.The author elaborated structural changes,material updates,development of craft and skill and customs and traditions related to headdress and concluded that in the historical progress,objects which act as the memory device,play an irreplaceable and indispensable role.In the second chapter,classification method which combines cultural region and headdress pattern is used to divide Mongolian women’s headdress pattern into four different parts according to different patterns including the following shapes crown,hairpin,horn and pendant.In this way,different types and shapes of Mongolian women’s headdress are described in details.The author selected headdress of women who are from Erdos tribe,Khorchin tribe,Barag tribe and Chahar tribe as the object of study and analyzed the reasons for similarity and difference of headdress which have the same pattern.The third part is about analysis of folklore connotation of material,image and color of Mongolian women’s headdress and the author aimed to make detailed analysis of the art and skill of headdress.As for materials,the author focused on finding out the reasons why coral,turquoise,gold and silver were often used on headdress.Graphic pattern and texture of headdress were classified to understand and analyze the symbolic significance.Color mood and comparative analysis of color and area were applied to comprehend and analyze the folklore meaning of headdress from the perspective of color science.In the fourth part,headdress craft is divided into two parts,silver jewelry craft and embroidery craft.The whole process of making headdress from raw material to complete product is described by detailed description of headdress craft and different embedded methods and then the author found the function of emotion of craft and body memory.And the author studied the process of craft learning,discussing agent paternalistic master-apprentice relationship of silver jewelry craft learning and intergenerational inheritance of female relatives in embroidery craft learning.Investigation on different gender of craftsman of these two crafts helped the author to further study gender factors in social division of labor and concluded the root cause of difference between male and female in terms of social division of labor.In the fifth chapter,the author discussed about folklore function of headdress from the following aspects: symbol of role change,media of family memory,marks of identity and transition from tradition to modern.Headdress witnesses the important moment of individual identity transfer,records the family history and marks the ethnic group and individual’s identity.In the transformation process from traditional society to modern society,headdress reappear in daily life of Mongolian women with its new pattern.Wearing headdress,acting as the living habit and the behavior which is dominated by social rules,now is used as the sign to demonstrate the relationship between human and circumstance in culture.