Text, Ethnicity and Narratives: The pingmin shibadong, as a Kind of Ethnography

Text, Ethnicity and Narratives: The pingmin shibadong, as a Kind of Ethnography

作者：Zhang Xianqing

来源：《民族学刊》 2024年第1期

JOURNAL OF ETHNOLOGY, VOL. 10, NO.1, 65-71, 2024 (CN51-1731/C, in Chinese)

DOI:10.3969/j.issn.1674-9391.2024.01.08Abstract:The pingmin shibadong

(Pacifying the 18 Caves of Fujian ) is a novel written in the zhang?hui style (a type of traditional Chinese novel with captions for each chapter) popular since the Qing Dynasty in Fujian, Taiwan and among Southeast Asian Fujian?Chinese society. The novel pretends to be the story of Yang Wenguang?s march to Fujian in the Song dynasty, but it is actually the history of Chen Yuanguang?s pacifying the

“chaotic barbarians”(ethnic minorities) in Fujian during the Tang dynasty. This novel is an important ethnographic text for understanding the interaction between ethnic groups in southeastern China. Therefore, since the Republican Period, many scholars have paid attention to this aspect, and among them, Lin Yutang, Ye Guoqing and Li Yiyuan are typical representatives. If the research of Lin Yutang and Ye Guoqing on the pingmin shiba dong was carried out within the academic context of the school of “ critical analysis of ancient history ”(gushi bian) in the 1920s and 1930s, then Li Yiyuan was undoubtedly the first person who studied the novel from the perspective of anthropology. Based on sorting out the academic history of the pingmin shiba dong, this paper analyzes the academic contribution of Li

Yiyuan?s research on the pingmin shiba dong in the field of “the anthropology of southeastern China”. On this basis, this paper discusses the important

ethnographic data value of the pingmin shiba dong in promoting the related issues of southeast anthropology.

1. A “legendary” journey: starting from “a critical analysis of ancient history”

In the academic history of modern China, the school of critical analysis of ancient history that rose in the 1920s was of great significance in determining the academic turn of Chinese humanities and social sciences. This academic heritage is also of great significance for the academic research in the southeastern region of China. It can be said that it was from this moment that the “southeast research” in the academic history of China truly entered a modern period. In the autumn of 1926, Gu Jiegang, who was famous in academic circles because he proposed that ancient Chinese history was “formed in an accumulative way”, and published a series of works related to the “critical analysis of ancient history”, came to Xiamen from Beijing to serve as a professor at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Culture of Xiamen University. The pingmin shibadong, a very popular oral literature in Fujian at that time, was soon brought into the perspective of the school of “critical analysis on ancient history” which had moved south from Beijing.

In 1927, Lin Yutang published an article titled Monuments Recorded in “the pingmin shibadong ” in the second issue of Xiamen University Weekly . The article was later published in the 34th issue of Folklore in 1928.Lin Yutang?s

contribution to this essay was to put the legend of the pingmin shibadong into the context of modern academic study for the first time. It can be said that Lin

started the “critical analysis of ancient history” school?s use legends to study the ancient history of Fujian, and put forward several topics worthy of further study. Unfortunately, Lin Yutang?s research on the pingmin shibadong came to an abrupt end after the dissolution of the Academy of Tranditional Chinese Culture of Xiamen University. After that, his student Ye Guoqing did systematic research on the pingmin shibadong. In 1931, he completed his postgraduate thesis, “Studies on the pingmin shibadong ”, at Yenching University. In 1935, Ye?s thesis was published in the Journal of Xiamen University. The objective of Ye Guoqing?s research was to discuss the source of the pingmin shibadong story from the

perspective of interaction between literature and history. It is the most in?depth study of the pingmin shibadong from the perspective of legend and history. Ye?s theory and methodology followed the theory of history “as a process of the

accumulation of layers” advocated by his teacher Gu Jiegang.As such, they were almost the same in their specific path of research, focusing on the relationship between legends and historical facts, and analyzing the evolution of legends. This is also how Lin Yutang first began to study the pingmin shibadong. It can be said that in going from Lin Yutang to Ye Guoqing, we can see that their studies on the pingmin shibadong are inseparable from the tradition of the school of critical analysis of ancient history in modern academic history. From the perspective of academic history, one prominent influence of this school on the study of the pingmin shibadong was to bring the folk tales originally disseminated in Fujian into a modern academic perspective, and regard them as important materials for the discussion of legends and historical facts, texts and narratives, immigrant groups, the development of local history, and other issues. However, the issue of national history, as the core of the pingmin shibadong, was not further explored, and this change of the objective of this research was only realized after the intervention of the anthropologist Li Yiyuan.

2.Li Yiyuan and Ethnological Studies of the pingmin shibadong

If the school of critical analysis of ancient history initiated an interaction between a literary and historical perspective for the study of the pingmin shibadong, and incorporated legends into the field of ancient history for investigation, then, it is Li Yiyuan, an anthropologist from southern Fujian province, who brought the pingmin shibadong into the world of anthropology more than half a century later. In 1994, Li Yiyuan published An Ethnological Study on the Zhang?hui Novel the “pingmin shibadong” in the 76th issue of the Journal of Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, and, for the first time, he explicitly discussed ethnic interaction in southeast China from the perspective of

anthropology. Later, this article was included in his collection of writings, which offers the most in?depth study of the relationship between the pingmin shibadong and the history of southeast ethnicity from the perspective of anthropology. As an anthropologist, Li Yiyuan was keenly aware that the pingmin shibadong contains abundant ethnological materials about southeast China. This is another research

topic that he thinks can be rediscovered, in addition to the legends and historical facts about which Lin Yutang, Ye Guoqing and other scholars from the school of “critical analysis of ancient history” were concerned. In terms of research content, compared with the research of Lin Yutang and Ye Guoqing, Li Yiyuan?s contribution is mainly reflected in two aspects. First, from the perspective of an anthropologist, he perceived the ethnic historical data in the romance of the

pingmin shibadong, and further confirmed that the “fan”(or番), which appeared in the book as the opposite of “Song”(or宋), is the contemporary She (or畲)ethnic group. The She is an ethnic minority who are denseley concentrated in the

southeastern region. They are closely intertwined with the historical development of Fujian, and, are also closely linked with the origin of the “yue” people(or越), an ancient ethnic group in the southeast. Secondly, another important

contribution of Li Yiyuan?s article is to analyze the data about totems in the pingmin shibadong from the perspective of totemic theory and the evolution of the totemic system of the early southeast ethnic groups reflected in the text for the first time. Like many popular literary texts since the Ming and Qing dynasties, the pingmin shibadong contains a lot of information about the relationships between humans and animals. The book especially mentions that the people from different “caves” usually have a specific relationship with animals. Li Yiyuan believes

that the presence of these animals in the text is not the random fabrication of the composers of oral literature, but that they have a profound ethnic cultural significance.

3. “The Perilous Frontier” : the pingmin shibadong and the narrative culture in the anthropology of the southeastern frontier

In the pingmin shibadong, the author of the novel used the “mouths” of the king and ministers of the Song dynasty to say that Fujian was “very strange”. This conveys the impressions that the people, i.e. the orthodox people in the

Central Plains during the Song dynasty, had of the culture of the fan (番or ethnic minorities) in southern Fujian, who were rebellious and capricious. This impression was based on their sense of cultural superiority. Although this is only a novel, unofficial historian?s metaphor, it, from one side, reflects that southeastern Fujian was a “Perilous Frontier ” similar to that described by Thomas J. Barfield with regard to the nature of the China?s border world before mediaeval times. Because the dynasties of the Central Plains took agricultural civilization as their core in history, they regarded the nomads in the frontier areas as

“barbarians” who threatened civilization in the face of world of the grassland nomads. The images they had of the nomads were both dismissively strange, yet full of power and aggressiveness(Barfield,1989).There are similarities with the

descriptions of the southeastern frontier region found in the pingmin shibadong and the above descriptions of the grasslands nomadic world. These non?Han ethnic groups, under the command of a “king” with a charismatic personality, mainly

lived in “cave mansions”, practiced shifting cultivation, wore different costumes and often had different physical characteristics. Li Yiyuan noticed the peculiar image of “black face and red beard” prevalent among the “Fan generals” depicted in the book, and pointed out the relationship between this kind of body “metaphor” and the cultural boundaries and distinctions between the “Han” and

“Fan”.(Li,2002). Similarly, there were many strange or miraculous people in the