Young people rehearse a dance in traditional Chinese costumes in Hong Kong Photo: Yang Lanlan/CSST

JI’NAN—A seminar on the theme of “Review and Prospect of the Disciplinary Construction of Folklore and Folk Literature” was recently held in Ji’nan, Shandong Province.

Disciplinary adjustment

This January, the newly released official introduction of graduate educational disciplines and basic degree requirements (trial version) made specific adjustments to the disciplinary classifications of folklore and folk literature. Although folklore and folk literature belong to different primary disciplines—folklore under “Sociology” and folk literature under “Chinese Language and Literature”—they are closely interconnected. This relationship dates back to 1918, when Peking University launched a campaign to collect folksongs and ballads, marking the common inception of folklore and folk literature in the history of modern Chinese academics and disciplinary establishment. Over more than a century, the two have developed a symbiotic relationship in terms of research objects, teams, and methods.

Maintaining the secondary discipline status of folk literature within Chinese language and literature has improved the literary disciplinary system. This move has fully considered the profound connection between literature and social reality, explained Wang Xuedian, director of the Advanced Institute for Confucian Studies at Shandong University (SDU).

Chao Gejin, a Member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, reviewed the development context of Chinese folk literature and affirmed the historical and practical significance of the adjustments made to the disciplinary catalog. From a practical standpoint, in an era of rapid development of “intangible cultural heritage,” folk literature contributes with its unique theories and methodologies, and it also influences how the public perceives their own creations and culture. In terms of theoretical aspirations, folk literature ranks among the research fields most likely to highlight Chinese characteristics and style in the international discourse system.

Contribution to national community

In 1939, Gu Jiegang published an article titled “The Chinese Nation is One,” aiming at countering the imperialist plot to divide the country. In 1989, Fei Xiaotong raised the concept of “pluralistic unity” for the first time in his work “The Pattern of the Pluralistic Unity of the Chinese Nation.” A decade later, Zhong Jingwen put forward the important academic proposition of “folklore of a multi-ethnic nation” at the fourth congress of China Folklore Society. Today, the baton of contributing intellectual wisdom to the community of the Chinese nation has been handed over to contemporary folklorists. Lin Jifu, a professor from the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Minzu University of China, echoed the importance of not only appreciating the uniqueness of folklore but also recognizing the integrality and people-centeredness of folk culture, which has been shaped by historical and ongoing exchanges among the diverse ethnic groups within the Chinese nation. 

According to Mi Haiping, a professor from the College of Chinese Language and Literature at Qinghai Normal University, A Chronicle of Qinghai Folklore compiled by local scholars embodies the diverse ethnic and folk cultural forms in the Qinghai region, exemplifying the localized manifestation of the common culture of the Chinese nation.

In the view of Xiao Fang, a professor from the School of Sociology at Beijing Normal University (BNU), the applied research outcomes of folklore have been chiefly distributed in the realms of daily life, social governance, the folk economy, folk resources and the environment for sustainable development, and folk cultural inheritance, exceeding even theoretical research papers in quantity. At present, research of this nature needs to enrich theoretical connotations therein and avoid being reduced to “vulgarized application.”

Theoretical innovation

The evolution of our era has raised the academic demand for an increased theoretical awareness and continuous efforts from successive generations of scholars. Sun Zhengguo, a professor from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Central China Normal University, observed that in the past two decades, the discipline of folk literature has independently explored several significant academic methodologies, including the Life Tree Theory of Folktale Morphology, the Interaction Theory of Rituals and Customs, Folklore Genealogy Theory, Cultural Poetics, Holistic Poetics, and Tale Poetics, demonstrating the discipline’s capability for autonomous innovation. In the near future, as Chinese Poetics Theory and other methods of this discipline mature, exploring new theoretical approaches will be an essential task of disciplinary construction.

Based on the divisional traits of modern disciplines, Zhang Shisun, a distinguished professor from SDU, proposed that folklore studies, folk art studies, and folk literature should be oriented towards “field,” aiming to understand the inherent folk logic, artistic logic, and life logic in a practical and ontological way. 

Chinese folklore based on investigations into small and large communities is characterized as being aligned with the present, engaged with the realities of life, and evolving with the times, endowing communities with “hometown” identities and a sense of “selfhood,” added Yue Yongyi, a professor from the School of Sociology and Population Studies at Renmin University of China. This blurs the artificial boundaries of emic and etic, insider and outsider, researcher and research object, tradition and modernity, city and country, and the refined and the common.

Folk literature is characterized by literariness and culture unified under the essence of people-centeredness, necessitating its inseparability from folklore studies and the need for joint construction, noted Duan Youwen, a professor from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at Shanxi University.

Echoing this sentiment, Kang Li, a professor from the School of Chinese Language and Literature at BNU, called on the academic community to foster shared values, advancing from alternative theories and transitional theories to the initiation of grand theories.

The conference was co-hosted by the Advanced Institute for Confucian Studies and the Collaborative Innovation Center of Confucian Civilization under SDU.

Edited by YANG LANLAN