A Contrastive Study Of Cultural Value Orientation Between Chinese And Western Mythology

Myth embodies the characteristics of the mental activities and modes of thinking of the early ancestors.This initial spiritual culture and thinking system directly affect the development and growth of the nation.Today’s politics,economy,culture,and history are all affected by the initial spiritual culture and thinking system.Greece was the birthplace of Western culture,and China was the cradle of oriental culture.Their myths deeply influenced Eastern and Western culture.Chinese ancient mythologies rarely become the analyzed and compared research object in Western society because there was lack of complete and comprehensive translation.In China,there were many researches about Chinese mythology and comparative studies between Chinese and Western mythology.However,most of the researches were about single specific mythology or single perspective of research,and most of contrastive studies did not have theoretical foundations.Based on these,this dissertation makes a contrastive study of Chinese and Western myths under the guidance of Kluckhohn’s value orientation aiming at providing a new perspective and theoretical foundation for further contrastive studies of western and Chinese mythologies.This dissertation also contributes to promoting China and the West to better carry out various academic activities that aim at communication,respect,and building a human multiple culture and further understanding and inheriting mythologies.Based on a large amount of texts,the author summaries the differences between Chinese and western mythologies according to Kluckhohn’s five value orientations and find out the different forming reasons of the differences from different perspectives.This dissertation uses text analysis and contrastive analysis as research methods.All the research materials and example sentences come from Schwab’s Gods and Heroes and Yuan Ke’s Chinese Mythology Dictionary.The dissertation finds out the main different characteristics between Greek and Chinese mythologies in value orientation are Greek mythology has characteristics of good human nature,mastery,past,being,and individualism,but Chinese mythology has characteristics of evil human nature,submissive,future,doing and collaterality.Thedifferent geographical locations and national cultural background are the important forming reasons of these differences.