China Social Science Review

No.4, 2023

Theoretical Innovation in Mythological Approach to Explore Civilization: Cultural Textual Theory

(Abstract)

Ye Shuxian

The subject orientation of mythology in the past 30 years has undergone a transformation from simple literary research to cultural and ideological traceability research, and has developed a set of mythological paradigms in the study of the origin of Chinese civilization. Firstly, the triple evidence method and the quadruple evidence method were adopted, then through the integration of anthropology and archaeology represented by the third and fourth evidence methods, the local cultural theory marked by cultural textual theory has been constructed. Cultural textual theory advocates the view of dynamic generation to view cultural phenomena, taking the material symbols and image symbols driven by the mythological concept of prehistoric society as metacoding, and the generation of pictographic Chinese characters as the secondary coding, so as to realize the overall cultural concept of linking prehistory and civilization in cognition.