A Two-Way Empirical Study of Body Movement and the Formation of Writing
This 2013 China Sport Science article reports a sport-anthropology field study of the relationship between the Naxi people's ritual "Dongba Dance" (Dongba tiao) and the formation of the Dongba pictographic script. Using dual-camera recording and frame-capture analysis, the researchers pursued a "two-way" empirical method: matching filmed typical Dongba Dance movements to corresponding pictographs in Dongba dance-notation texts (wupu), and conversely asking Dongba priests to perform the movements corresponding to selected Dongba characters. Fieldwork centered on the 85-year-old Dongba master He Zhiben in Baidi Village, Yunnan, who demonstrated dances and wrote Dongba characters for comparison, given the urgency of salvage research as the priesthood ages and traditional practice changes. The paper argues verb-characters especially were created through bodily mediation, with the human body used as reference for directional and action terms, and situates Dongba, Daba, and Shaba scripts alongside oracle-bone and Ba-Shu pictographic writing as related products of southwestern shamanistic culture. The provided text is cut off mid-sentence near the end of section 3.1.
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