Tibetan herders race on yaks at the Wangguo Festival, a Tibetan festival of the peasants to celebrate the good harvests. (File)

 

With the expansion of field research in recent years, the scope of folkloristics has broadened from simple literary analysis to an examination of folklore as a study of society and man. More focus has been put on the study of daily social life rather than unique customs. These developments have some scholars saying that folkloristics in China is moving from the realm of the humanities to social sciences, stirring up a heated discussion about the true nature of the discipline.

 

Folkloristics in the West originated with the collection of folklore literature, said Yin Hubin, a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Literature under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Judging from the tradition of folkloristics all over the world, folklore research generally prioritizes the literary merit and historical value of documents, he continued.

 

In fact, Chinese folkloristics has long been seen as a humanities discipline. Gao Bingzhong, a sociology professor at Peking University, once wrote that Chinese folkloristics underwent rapid development in the 1920s spurred by the publication of journals on folklore arts and songs. During that time, the primary characteristic of folklore research was its application of humanities theories.

 

“It isn’t a coincidence that the Ge Yao periodical became the first publication specialized in Chinese folkloristics,” Gao wrote. “It has a bearing on the fact that folkloristics is classified under humanities.”

 

Yin said most scholars in the field of modern Chinese folkloristics studied literature, history or ethnology, so their research focus was also on folklore as literature.

 

Wu Xiaoqun, a professor of literature at Henan University, said that compared to folkloristics within the context of the social sciences, literary studies of folklore has evolved into an independent discipline. It is intended to demonstrate the artistic creativity of the people through exploring the characteristics and aesthetics of oral folk literature.

 

Zheng Tuyou, a professor from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University, said that folklore arts are part of folk heritage at its origins, so they are closely related, but they are also very different in nature.Generally speaking, folklore customs are believed to fall within the purview of social sciences, while folk literature and arts are considered branches of the humanities, Zheng said.

 

“The fuzzy distinction has caused a lot of trouble in research, so for the sake of disciplinary development, they should be divided into two independent subjects,” Zheng suggested.

 

Yin said folk literature and arts are still at the core of Chinese folkloristics. He added that a large number of research achievements appear in various specialized fields, such as mythology, epics, stories, oral tradition studies, while theory and methodology in folk literature are maturing.

 

Wu said, in recent years, some folklorists have applied anthropological and sociological theories and methods to study the social science aspect of folklore research while stressing the difference between folkloristics and anthropology as well as the dominant position of folkloristics.

 

Current folkloristics within the context of the social sciences faces a dilemma. Scholars are calling for a dominant position for folkloristics but fail to offer useful suggestions in terms of attributes, purposes and standards, Wu said.

 

Yin said folkloristics is trending toward multidisciplinary integration as China is a country with rich cultural and historical traditions.

 

“The next important concern of Chinese folklorists is to study Chinese folkloristics from a global perspective, in terms of regional culture as well as local tradition, so that it can step forwards on the back of the nation’s cultural heritage,” said Yin.

 

In the wave of globalization, many extraordinary innovations have been discovered among different nationalities, so one direction of future folklore research is to explore people’s unique cultural conceptions and creations in order to summarize the epistemological significance, Wu said.

 

“In this sense, folkloristics is a study of both humanities and social sciences, which also represents the future development of the discipline,” Wu said.

 

Zheng suggested that folkloristics should put an emphasis on disciplinary construction and further indentify study subjects. It should also refine and supplement past experiences and research methods to form a Chinese folkloristics school.

 

 

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 671, Nov.19, 2014      

The Chinese link is: http://sscp.cssn.cn/xkpd/xszx/gn/201411/t20141119_1405446.html

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by Yang Xue

Revised by Justin Ward