2015/04, Serial No. 30
This article examines the two dominant paradigms shaping over a century of scholarship on Naxi Dongba manuscripts (pictographic religious and folk texts recognized by UNESCO as Memory of the World documents in 2003): the "historicist orientation" and the "literary orientation." These paradigms intersect yet also diverge. The historicist approach, rooted in history, ethnology, and anthropology, treats Dongba texts as "living fossils" of primitive religion within a social-evolutionist framework—viewed by early Western missionaries and scholars as exotic "other-culture" specimens, and later, in socialist China, as evidence of class-struggle stages from primitive to feudal society. The literary orientation instead frames Dongba texts as "folk literature" or "oral literature," de-ritualizing and de-sacralizing them into "popular literature" serving contemporary needs. The author argues both paradigms often substituted ideological assumptions for scientific rigor during collection, translation, and compilation, and calls for critical reassessment to establish a more scientifically sound methodology, offering lessons applicable to other ethnic minority classical text preservation efforts in China.
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