In one ancient Chinese epic, an abandoned child raised by dragons grows up to save the earth from a global warming by shooting down the extra suns and moons from the sky. Modernization has brought with it a similar threat and this time it’s gunning for folk traditions, too.
Mark Bender, associate professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, gave a lecture Thursday in Hulston Hall on disappearing folk traditions in the southwestern region of China.
His talk was entitled “Butterflies and Dragon-Eagles: Processing Epics from Southwest China” and focused primarily on his efforts to record and preserve ancient folk traditions in more than 50 minority subgroups in China.
Bender spent six years living in China, immersing himself in the culture and familiarizing himself with the vast varieties of oral traditions there. He has since returned to China almost every year.
“Every place you go they speak different dialects, have different customs, different languages,” Bender said. “You can travel around and just experience so many different ways of living.”
Due to modernization and globalization, many Chinese folk traditions are dying away, Bender said. Standard Chinese is replacing local dialects, and younger generations in China are being raised without backgrounds rich in local tradition.
Despite the downward trend in Chinese folk artists, there is still appreciation for the art, both in China and at MU.
“It is verbal art in cultural context,” said John Foley, director for The Center for Studies in Oral Tradition. “When you think of all the oral traditions in the world, they dwarf literature.”
Since the 1950s, the Chinese government has been organizing mass collections of Chinese folk stories and songs. In 2002, it published a collection of 2 million stories, 3 million songs and 7 million proverbs.
Chinese culture is so segmented that, even among those raised in China, some of the ethnic subgroups remain unknown. Li Tang grew up in China, yet found much of Bender’s lecture to be brand new information for her.
“I’m not from those regions, so I’m not familiar with their cultures,” Tang said.
Bender’s work in China has been laborious, but his lecture offered hope for the dwindling future of Chinese oral tradition. On who will carry on the folk stories and songs, Bender cited an anonymous woman he once met in China.
“Don’t worry,” the woman said. “The spirits will find someone.”
The lecture was part of a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the “Lord and Parry Lectures,” a series of lectures that covers oral traditions all around the world, not just those in southwestern China.
“Everywhere except the penguins, everywhere except Antarctica, you find oral traditions,” Foley said.
Bender and his colleagues hope that won’t change any time soon.
