[Gao Xiaokang] Intangible cultural heritage and new "root-seeking" literature

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An important change in the concept of literature in China in the 1980s was the introduction of the literary concept of "human literature" or "human nature." The proposal of this literary concept was indeed of shocking significance in the cultural background at that time.

However, subsequent literary practice often confused people about the meaning of loud slogans such as "Literature is the study of humans" and "Literature should express human nature." The "human nature" expressed from "scar literature" has gradually transformed and differentiated into two poles: one pole has moved towards physical carnival and endless pursuit of material desires in the process of secularization, while the other pole has moved towards absurdity and loneliness in rebellion against tradition.

The Enlightenment concept of human nature has encountered challenges, and people have to re-examine what the "person" and "nature" that literature wants to express are all about.

British sociologist Anthony Giddens proposed a concept of "self-identity" when studying the personality and lifestyle characteristics of contemporary or "highly modern" societies.

(1) Compared with traditional cultural identity,"self-identity" is a concept that reflects modernity.

Giddens believes that the basic characteristics of modernity are the separation of time and space and the "disembedding" of social institutions: "Social relations are 'lifted out' from local scenes and made 'reconnected' in infinite time and space." (2) As a result of withdrawal, individuals are separated from their dependence on specific individual time, space and cultural traditions, and are thrown into more abstract and broader social relations, and "self-identification" is constructed through re-cognition, reflection and selection.

Spiritual structure.

Simply put, self-identification is the consciousness of individuals as subjects in modern society.

It can also be explained with a more literary word, which means "individual liberation." Whether it was the New Culture Movement in the early 20th century or the New Enlightenment in the 1980s, the core concepts of "human" and "human nature" advocated are all related to the concept of "individual liberation" and are both what Giddens called "self-identification".

The product.

The awakening of the individual self has been a feature of modernity since the Enlightenment in the 18th century.

As the social foundation of self-identification, the development trend of separation of time and space and the disengagement of social relations reached the highest form-globalization in the late 20th century.

In the era of enlightenment of rationalism, self-awakening and world harmony (a classical concept of "globalization") were regarded as the ideals of the development of world civilization.

However, with the arrival of modern society, this utopia is increasingly showing signs of crisis: local time-space relations and cultural traditions have been cut off, social relations have been withdrawn to the height of globalization, and the publicity of individuality has also been lost.

When culture relies on it, globalization has moved towards cultural homogenization, and personality liberation has also become the indulgence of desire and the isolation of personality.

The crisis faced by personality and human nature forces contemporary literature to re-understand the cultural meaning of human nature.

In fact, doubts and criticisms of modern society have begun since the beginning of the 20th century.

German scholar Spengler proposed in his book "The Fall of the West" that the symbol of the development of Western civilization to modern times is the rise of the metropolis in the late 19th century.

The prosperity of the metropolis is the last stage of Western civilization and a sign that civilization enters winter and declines.

A century has passed since the book was published to today.

The metropolis has not disappeared, nor has modern civilization been destroyed.

Spengler's predictions do not seem to be true, but his value lies in his critical examination of modern urban civilization.

After him, American scholar Lewis Mumford conducted a more systematic and critical study of the modern civilization marked by megacities.

Their critical attitude towards the city reflects what Giddens calls the skeptical spirit of modernity, which is a mental state of self-identification in which individuals withdraw and reflect on their specific time and space environment.

However, this spirit of suspicion and criticism is not aimed at tradition, but at the "highly modern" urban culture, thus exposing the inherent contradiction of modern personality: self-identification that withdraws from tradition has become suspicion of the mechanism of withdrawal.

Criticism of modern urban civilization is not just the attitude of a few elites.

Since the emergence of the so-called "post-industrial society" in the mid-20th century, people's attitudes towards modern urban society have become increasingly contradictory: they want to enjoy the fashionable consumer life of a metropolis, but also doubt the survival significance and value of this lifestyle.

Modern people have long been far away from the time and space of their ancestral home, clans, customs and beliefs, but have not found themselves.

Institutional reflection and independent choice separate individuals from tradition, but incorporate them into the whirlpool of mass media, symbols, expert systems and consumer fashion.

American scholar David Riesman called the new personality type produced by contemporary metropolitan consumer society in the United States the "others-led" personality.(3) This means that contemporary people's autonomy from tradition has actually become a drift under the influence of mass media.

The result of advocating individuality leads to homogenization, a paradox that highlights the crisis of self-identification.

This is the personality contradiction and anxiety of people in a "highly modern" society.

Contemporary people have to give up the imagination of "self-identification" about human nature and re-examine and find their own identity.

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In the 2006 "Chinese Literature Media Award" held by Guangdong Nanfang Newspaper Group, there are two winners worthy of attention: one is Lei Pingyang, the poet of the year, and the other is Han Shaogong, the writer of the year.

What the two winners have in common is that they both consider themselves farmers.

Han Shaogong bought a field and farmhouse in a mountain somewhere in Hunan, and he really planted land there.

Of course, he received his official salary and royalties and drove a car to Changsha to shop.

He was different from farmers who really made a living by farming or working, so he called himself an "amateur farmer." Lei Pingyang, on the other hand, did not live in seclusion in the countryside, but considered himself an out-and-out farmer.

Because his parents and relatives still live in the countryside, he feels that his roots are still in the rural land, and he will instinctively worry about the crops in the fields and life at home when the weather changes.

The selection of these two "farmers" for the annual awards should be regarded as a symbol, indicating an interest in today's literary world.

The significance of this pointing is not just that they are "farmers".

In the history of contemporary literature in China, it seems that there has never been a shortage of rural and peasant local literature-Zhao Shuli, Sun Li, Liu Qing, Haoran, Jia Pingwa, Mo Yan...

Until the 1990s, the "working literature" describing the lives of migrant workers who left rural areas was all standard local literature.

Compared with them, Han Shaogong and Lei Pingyang are not really local writers.

Their works are not local literature that characterizes rural life.

So what are they?

Some people satirize Han Shaogong on the Internet, saying that he is a "pseudo-hermit" who "enjoys the wealth of the court and the romance of the forest." (4) Said that he shouldn't have behaved well after getting cheap, satirizing the city and its people.

It may be unfair to say that Han Shaogong is a "pseudo-hermit".

He has been shouting "seeking roots" since the 1980s, and at that time, he was certainly far from qualified to be a hermit.

At that time, he and a group of writers and artists who advocated "seeking roots" felt that they had lost their "roots"? At first, it was the suppression of orthodox ideology and the confusion caused by Western modernist values.

The anxiety of this generation can be seen in Liu Sora's "You Have No Choice".

Then they were more or less inspired by Latin American magical realism, allowing these "root-seekers" to find the "roots" of their existence from their own imagination of the wildness and expression of the subconscious.

From then to today, the "root-seeking" movement has developed for 20 years, and the objects it is looking for have been wandering and changing.

For writers such as Han Shaogong and Lei Pingyang, the "roots" they seek have gradually shifted from self-imagination and illusion to the real world, which is the rural world connected to their own cultural inheritance.

They are not hermits, but city and modernity resisters based on local culture.

People have seen many movements against urban civilization and modernity.

But what are the characteristics of resistance after 2000? Han Shaogong once said in an interview with Southern Weekend: "We cannot lead to heaven.

It is still possible to lead to a less bad society among all kinds of imperfect societies.

If we can't be saints and achieve a less bad life among all the less great lives, it's still possible." This low-key tone shows that this generation of resisters no longer believe in the utopian fantasies of romantics, but only believe in local culture that can be touched and felt.

Lei Pingyang wrote in a poem: "Mother, just last night, I saw you/sitting in front of the old-fashioned TV/with my head tilted, sleeping/looking like my nine-month-old son/I pray that this is a reincarnation, allowing me to raise you up with a lifetime of love and hardship..." What we can feel from here is the yearning for the eternal cycle and the endless traditional sense of belonging.

The new "root-seeking" movement no longer pursues the imaginary lost Garden of Eden, but just wants to seize the fading strands of cultural inheritance.

After the failure of self-identification of modernity, the way for people to regain their sense of belonging is to return to identification with tradition.

But this is not the kind of orthodox classical culture that has been destroyed by the modern revolution, but the cultural group identity that is hidden in the daily life of the people and hidden deep in people's hearts.

Lei Pingyang's poem "Relatives" begins with a few surprising confessions:

I only love Yunnan, where I live, because other provinces

I don't love either; I only love Zhaotong City in Yunnan

Because I don't love other cities; I only love the Tucheng and Rural Areas of Zhaotong City

Because I don't love other townships...

My love is narrow and paranoid, like honey on the tip of a needle

This increasingly narrow "love" seems to contradict the education we receive about "love".

But this is precisely the fundamental feature of cultural identity.

The original meaning of the concept of "identification" is the identification of identity.

In other words,"identification" does not seek similarities but differences-to find and discover one's own identity characteristics that distinguish one from others, and through this identification of identity characteristics, find the cultural community to which one belongs.

What Lei Pingyang's poems express is this sense of ethnic identity identified and differentiated through regional cultural differences.

We all believe that true love should be selfless and broad, but we rarely realize that without the most basic sense of identity, that broad love may be empty.

Without love for relatives, friends, neighbors, and love for one's birthplace and place of residence, the emotional bonds that maintain a cultural community will no longer exist, and the continuation and development of a culture will face a crisis.

This is not alarmist, but the fate of many weak cultures in the process of Western cultural expansion since the Renaissance.

To protect a culture is to protect the identity of this culture.

This is an international cultural movement.

The concept of "intangible cultural heritage protection" put forward by UNESCO is the name for this cultural revival movement.

The definition and significance of intangible cultural heritage in the Convention for the Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage are expressed as follows:

"Intangible cultural heritage" refers to the various practices, performances, forms of expression, knowledge and skills, as well as the associated tools, objects, crafts and cultural venues that are regarded as their cultural heritage by groups, groups and sometimes individuals.

Various groups and groups continue to innovate this intangible cultural heritage passed down from generation to generation as their environment, interaction with nature, and historical conditions change, while giving themselves a sense of identity and history, thereby promoting cultural diversity and human creativity.

It is clearly stated here that the significance of protecting various cultural inheritance is to enable contemporary people to regain their sense of identity and history, thereby promoting human cultural diversity and creativity.

Compared with the Convention promulgated by UNESCO, we can feel that the new "root-seeking" trend of thought based on the inheritance of local culture has become part of the international cultural and ecological rejuvenation movement today.

Its significance is not only a torture of the basis of personal existence, but also a future planning attempt to promote the development of human culture in the direction of a diverse ecology.

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During the Cultural Revolution, temples and temples were destroyed

Some pious monks, turning Buddha statues

Place among the ruins: Faith

hasn't changed because of the ruins.

--Lei Pingyang's "River"

These poems are about pious monks.

But it is worth noting that deep in the hearts of ordinary people, there seems to be a kind of piety for their own cultural genes.

In China, the struggle to break tradition and pursue modernity has begun at least since the beginning of the 20th century, and reached its climax in the process of reform, opening up and accelerated urbanization in the 1980s; modernity and advancement have become the most basic values and goals.

What is technologically advanced and emerging in developed countries is good, and vice versa is bad.

This concept has a universal impact: wearing suits, eating Western food, dancing ballroom dancing, and watching Hollywood movies are all signs of identity.

Even McDonald's, KFC and Nestle instant coffee were regarded as symbols of advanced and elegant by urbanites at that time.

But after the mid-1990s, the situation changed.

The cultural crisis caused by modernization and globalization has led to the impact of values based on modernity.

People's cultural concepts and orientations have quietly changed.

In the 1980s, coffee was used as a high-end drink in many urban restaurants, and even instant coffee was a gift and bribe choice.

Drinking tea is regarded as having no taste, and there have even been reports of a restaurant letting customers wash their hands with Longjing tea.

After the 1990s, the situation gradually changed: the status of Chinese food in catering surpassed that of Western food, the value of famous tea far surpassed that of coffee, McDonald's has basically become a fun for children and a convenience food for adults, and instant coffee has become a low-end drink...

This reversal in China's preferences and evaluations of food and drinks is difficult to say how significant it is in itself.

But these represent a return to cultural identity tendencies.

Chinese food and tea drinking are part of China's cultural customs.

In fact, not only these, many traditional customs that have almost disappeared in the past few decades are gradually reappearing.

What is particularly intriguing is that some customs, such as folk beliefs, taboos, symbols, etc., have been severely criticized and banned since at least the 1950s, but have resurfaced decades later.

This situation seems a bit puzzling: Where did those things come from that long disappeared?

To understand where these long-disappeared folk cultures came from, we must first understand where they "disappeared" to.

When talking about the relationship between modern experience and non-modern experience, Giddens used a concept called "Sequence of experience." This concept means that modernity is separated from traditional social experience through separation of time and space, disengagement mechanisms and reflection.

To constitute such a social experience means to "preserve" experiences that do not conform to this social order, such as disease, death, fear, unknowable, etc., and eliminate them from the consciousness of experience.

Most folk customs, especially folk beliefs, were preserved and sealed through criticism of "feudal superstitions" and the "four oldies".

Using scientific explanations to eliminate the mystery of traditional folk customs, especially folk beliefs and taboos, seems to be a process of "disenchantment".It's like unveiling the secret of magic.

Once the truth comes out, magic loses its "magic" power.

Scientific disenchantment will once and for all eliminate the mystery in the traditional culture of rural people.

However, in fact, this is just "preservation" and different from elimination, because it is only hidden from people's attention or awareness of the world.

People use science to explain the nonexistence of ghosts, gods and souls.

This only proves that ghosts, gods and souls are not experiences of known material attributes, and does not eliminate people's fear and imagination of the unknown world.

Therefore, ghosts, gods and souls were not eliminated, but were excluded from the world of science, that is, they were "sealed".

Lei Pingyang's poem "Pious monks place Buddha statues among the ruins and broken walls" seems to be regarded as a metaphor for "preserving" folk cultural traditions.

"Preservation and enclosure" is different from annihilation."Faith has not changed because of the ruins." It has just been covered up.

Doubts about modernity led to the re-opening of the experience of "preservation and sealing".

This is the need for contemporary people to extricate themselves from the dilemma of modernity.

Since the 1990s, the famous saying of the German existentialist philosopher Heidegger,"Live poetically", has become more and more known to ordinary people, and even real estate developers use this saying in their real estate advertisements.

This sentence is Heidegger's quote from Holderlin: "Full of work, yet poetically,/inhabits this land." What is important is Heidegger's interpretation of the poem: "'Poetically dwelling 'means being in the present of the gods, shaken by the closeness of the essence of things...

The creation of existence is maintained by the hints of the gods.

At the same time, poetic words are only an explanation of the 'voice of the nation'.

So Holderlin named die Sagen, in which a nation remembers its belonging to the whole being..."

Heidegger should be regarded as an obscure symbol to ordinary people.

However, although his term of "living poetically" is not a household name, it is also one of the famous quotes repeatedly quoted by people from many different cultural levels.

From his interpretation of Holderlin, we can realize that "poetically dwelling" is actually an opposition to modern society's withdrawal of individuals from local and ancient folk cultural traditions ("national voices"), a return to the preserved world of gods.

As an empirical example of "poetically dwelling", Heidegger in "The Origin of the Works of Art" depicts the experience evoked by Van Gogh's paintings of the old shoes of a peasant woman in a vivid style that is far from his usual obscure writing style:

In these hard and heavy worn farmers 'shoes, there is the tenacity and slowness of walking across the endless and ever-monotonous ridges in the steep cold wind.

Wet and fertile soil is adhered to the leather of the shoe.

As dusk falls, these pairs of soles walk along the field path.

In these shoes, the silent call of the earth is echoed, showing the earth's tranquil gift to mature grains, and symbolizing the earth's hazy winter darkness in the deserted fields of winter leisure.

...

This instrument puts the peasant woman into the silent call of the earth.

With its reliability, the peasant woman grasps her world.

The world and the earth exist for her, for everything that accompanies her way of being, but only in the instrument.

From Van Gogh's paintings, we re-recognize the shoes of the peasant woman, and from this recognition we return to the integrated experience of shoes, the peasant woman and the earth.

This is the true meaning of "poetically dwelling" in Heidegger's mind, the experience of connecting man, God, and earth.

Heidegger wrote thousands of brilliant words in his life, but the one most known among contemporary China is the sentence "dwell poetically." This is related to the spiritual needs of contemporary China people.

If we compare the memories and descriptions of rural areas, farmers and rural life in the local works of Han Shaogong, Lei Pingyang and others in recent years with Heidegger's description of the old shoes of peasant women, it is easy to see some similar meanings.

This is recognition and awe of the relationship between local culture and nature.

The new "root-seeking" in China's contemporary literature to return to the countryside is neither Tao Yuanming's reclusive image nor Marquesian grotes-like dream, but the re-opening of the divinity in the local cultural tradition.

This kind of root-seeking is not a lonely pilgrimage, but a discovery and development of the spiritual needs of contemporary people.

For contemporary people, the revival of local culture as intangible cultural heritage is a sign of re-reconciliation with the earth, gods and folk cultural traditions after the crisis of modernity's self-identity.

Notes:

(1) Giddens: Modernity and Self-Identity, Beijing: Sanlian Bookstore, 1998 edition, p.

2.

(2) Giddens: Modernity and Self-Identity, p.

19.

(3) Riesman: Lonely Crowd, Liaoning People's Publishing House, 1989, p.

17.

(4)"The Pseudo-Hermit" Han Shaogong and His "Mountain South and Water North"",