Transmission and Protection
This article examines the "survival environment" of the implicit (connotative) information embedded in ethnic minority documentary heritage, using the Naxi Dongba manuscripts as a case study. The author argues that such heritage—rich in political, historical, religious, and cultural content—was traditionally transmitted not through silent individual reading but through ritual chanting, oral explanation, and performance by specially trained custodians, since written symbols (pictographs, syllabic scripts) alone could not convey full meaning. Under modernization, globalization, and the pressure of dominant cultures, this transmission environment faces severe threats: shrinking numbers of tradition-bearers, loss of mother-tongue environments, narrowing and fragmentation of transmission channels, and cultural erosion. Analyzing the root causes of these problems, the paper proposes protective countermeasures focused on cultivating successors, expanding transmission channels, strengthening native-language environments, and excavating deeper cultural meaning to safeguard the living, contextual knowledge systems within minority documentary heritage.
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