On The Oral Formula Of Hongfeng Gelao Songs Of Sacrificial Ritual Recitation

As an old ethnic group,Gelao people inhabit in the Southwest part of China,who has the reputation of “Site Owner”.Attaching great importance to sacrificial rituals and deities,Gelao people believe in deities and ancestors,and they venerate them to receive bliss.As a result,they have developed their unique ethnic sacrificial culture.These sacrificial cultures are transmitted and inherited through oral tradition from generation to generation.Unfortunately,nowadays Gelao language is facing extinction as the number of people who can speak this language is decreasing drastically.As an important part of Gelao traditional culture,the ancient sacrificial rites are thus in danger of dying out.Therefore,it is very urgent and significant to protect and study Gelao songs of sacrificial ritual recitation.Previous researches on sacrificial rites mainly focus on sociology,culture,anthropology and ecological ethnology,but little attention is given to their language structures and features.As one of the main forms of oral tradition,these sacrificial rites must have their unique structural patterns,inheritance mechanism and social functions.Based on first-hand data collected from our own fieldwork and the oral formulaic theory,this paper attempts to do research on four typical pieces of Gelao songs of sacrificial ritual recitation,namely,Worshipping the God of the Fortune,Worshipping the God of the Mountain,Visiting Tomb and Full Year Sacrificial Ritual,providing systematic analyses first on their structure patterns,mainly including macrostructure,parallelism,repetition and parallel repetition,then on their transmission mechanism and social functions.The aim of doing so is to figure out the interaction between their forms and functions,hoping to provide an important case study for oral tradition.Study reveals that,Hongfeng Gelao songs of sacrificial ritual recitation dis play the structure of “initiation–process–end”.From the view of macrostructure pattern,different types have different structures.Namely,the structures of routi ne sacrificial recitation are “invitation–description–orison–libation”,and the struct ures of festival sacrificial recitation are “invitation–description-persuasion–orison–libation”,and the structures of funeral sacrificial recitation are “invitation–eval uation–description-persuasion–orison–libation”.From the view of microstructure,Hongfeng Gelao songs of sacrificial ritual recitation utilize abundant parallel str uctures and repetitions.All these structure patterns,parallel structures and repet itions are formulaic structures,and they form such a fine formulaic system so as to help chanters to remember oral texts or improvise on site.As a form of oral literature,the effective inheritance of these songs of sacrificial ritual recit ation has various functions as memory,psychological compensation,cultural tra nsmission,social education and interpersonal communication.