What is folk custom?

This question seems simple, but it is not. At first, people thought that folk custom was an ancient and backward life custom, and gradually found that this connotation was not enough to cover all the contents of folk custom, so the concept of folk custom continued to develop.

Folklore may not be familiar to all of you here. Usually we think that folk customs are traditional folk customs, such as how to spend the New Year and how to make rice cakes. In fact, this is only a small part of folk custom. From the disciplinary nature and modern point of view, the content of folk customs is much broader and more closely related to life.

In the eyes of young people, folklore is a thing of the past and a misunderstanding. Folklore includes past, present and future. So how should we know folk customs? Let me introduce you from three questions.

The popular folk customs in China are folk customs at first, such as four seasons and eight festivals: Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Tomb-Sweeping Day, Dragon Boat Festival, Double Ninth Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, and weddings and funerals. Another concept is to regard folk customs as folk literature, such as legends, myths and ballads. There is another kind that regards folk customs as the remnants of ancient culture today, such as ancestor worship. It is generally believed that folklore is a discipline and refers to a kind of cultural wisdom of people concerned. So, where do we stand when we talk about folk customs today? Today, I am talking about folklore from the perspective of folklore, which is different from the usual concept.

Folk customs are not ancient.

When it comes to folk customs, many people think that they only exist in rural areas, but they are not. People in the city also have folk customs, and so do college students. For example, taking lucky money is folklore. Therefore, folk customs are shared by most people.

I remember when I was just studying folklore in Beijing in the early 1980s, Professor Fei Xiaotong gave us a lesson. Teacher Fei is a student of Marlin Noszky, a famous British scholar, who specializes in anthropology and folklore. When he gave us a class, he brought many English dictionaries into the classroom and said to us, "What does folk custom mean? The folks are rustic country people. " At that time, China's understanding of folk customs remained in the traditional concept-folk customs were the past. From the early 20th century to the 1980s, China's understanding of folklore was traditional, but it was far from international recognition. International folklore has already developed greatly.

There are three main development directions:

1. Villagers and residents develop towards the people.

The remnants of culture are developing in an epoch-making way.

3. History and modern history are developing towards futurology.

There is a saying among the people: "Great customs are also elegant." Folklore contains many "elegant" things, not only the past and present disciplines, but also the future disciplines.

The word "folk custom" we use today seems to be a Chinese character created by the Chinese nation, which was later exported and then sold back. These two words are actually Japanese. Our word "folklore" is translated into English as "folklore". In fact, these three words were translated by the Japanese.

We have to face up to the reality that in the transitional period of the 20th century, many characters used now are processed in Japan and then reused, such as "literary theory", "cadres", "chemistry" and "physics". So the connotation of our "folk custom" has been translated twice, first from English to Japanese, and then from Japanese to Chinese. Because there are many Chinese characters in Japanese, we read them directly into Chinese. So there is great confusion in concept and great changes in content.

Folk custom is a kind of life.

What is folk custom? Folk custom is a kind of "life phase". What is "phase" is a Buddhist term, and Buddhism has its own unique judgment on things. For example, what is fire, fire is flame phase and water is mobile phase; What is folk custom? Folk custom is a kind of life, a kind of inherited life. No words or people require us to do this, but we will unconsciously carry out this lifestyle.

People are familiar with traditional folk customs, such as the Spring Festival, how to spend the Spring Festival and how to spend New Year's Eve. I did a program on CCTV the other day. Someone asked me, "Why do we have little taste of Chinese New Year now, but foreigners' Christmas and Valentine's Day are very lively?"? "I said that in fact, our taste of the year turned out to be very strong. In the 1950s, when I was seven or eight years old, I began to be busy with my grandmother's affairs half a month before the Chinese New Year. I can't rest until the fifteenth day of the first month, and I have something to do all day for almost a month. According to traditional customs, there are nearly 60 things to be done before and after: cleaning, offering sacrifices to stoves, offering sacrifices to ancestors, etc. For example, on New Year's Day, you can't sweep the floor or throw garbage (implying that you can't throw money outside). There are very strict rules. Especially in ancestor worship, my sisters were all driven out, and only my grandmother and I stayed in the house to worship our ancestors. There is no written stipulation about what we must do, which is a stylized and popular norm.

Folk customs are not only concentrated on festivals, but also popular unwritten lifestyles. As far as housing is concerned, we can't feel it in the city, but if we go to the countryside, the house will have a special style: for example, there are houses in the south of the Yangtze River-there are houses around, and they used to be rich people. The family is better, the house structure is more complicated, and the floor-to-floor changes greatly-three in, five out and seven in. The Shen Guild Hall in Zhouzhuang is seven entrances, and the suburbs of Shanghai are generally seven entrances. As soon as you enter, the direction faces south, and there is a wing on the left and right. Why is this? After my research, I found that the reason is what we call feng shui, "left green dragon, right white tiger", and the middle is the most suitable place for us to live. Why can't we or should we avoid opening the door to the north? This is a kind of geomantic omen, a kind of life. We live in the northern hemisphere, and the cold wind blowing from the northwest in winter is blocked by the "white tiger"; In spring, the southeast wind blows and there is a lot of rain, so the "Qinglong" can also block it. Then this place in the middle uses the natural cold and rain-proof space, which is our room. This is the earliest concept of Feng Shui. There are not so many superstitions, it depends on how the wind moves and how people choose a good place to live in the middle. This is not what people think. In ancient times, there was no air conditioning, how to prevent cold and how to maintain a suitable temperature? Of course, it depends on the choice of specific environment.

Some people think that Feng Shui is superstition. Of course, many superstitions have been added to the development of Feng Shui, but we have taken it as the mainstream and lost the core part, which has caused great disasters. For example, the weather in Shanghai has become hotter and hotter in recent years. Objectively speaking, global warming is one reason. Think about it carefully, I'm afraid it has something to do with so many buildings we are building now.

One year, I accompanied foreign scholars from China Normal University to Hongqiao Airport. At that time, just after the reform and opening up, I passed by Hongqiao Development Zone and saw many houses with glass curtain walls. A foreigner said to me, "Why build such a house?" I say we should modernize. He added: "Modernization cannot be reflected in the appearance of the house." Later, I learned that the architectural model of this glass curtain wall came from northern Europe, because it is cold in northern Europe and needs lighting. And we are in the subtropical zone, what we need should be heat dissipation.

2 1 century, many of our concepts have to be revised. When we used to go to the countryside, our parents learned from the letter that we had to shed tears when we ate corn, pepper and sorghum in the northeast, thinking it was miscellaneous grains for pigs. Now the concept has changed. To eat green plants such as corn and sorghum, supermarkets sell more expensive than flour!

Folklore and life also include life skills, and various skills are also folklore. According to one document, archaeologists excavated Jian Qin and painted it with a layer of chromium. Experts noticed that this method of chromium plating only appeared in the west in the 1970s. How the Qin people painted it is unknown. The sword of Gou Jian, King of Yue, has been buried underground for more than two thousand years. At the beginning of excavation, people found that the sword had been bent, but when the archaeologist opened it, it magically straightened again. We can imitate the style of this sword now, but we can't reach the craftsmanship at that time.

The development of China's splendid ancient civilization was created by a lot of life skills-folk customs. It's a pity that we didn't sort out these skills from the topic. We ancient people didn't pay attention to this problem either, thinking that being strong is not enough. Especially literati, so I threw these things away at will. In this way, it is indeed a great loss for our country. Today, we need to re-understand folk customs, and we can't stay in the narrow concept that folk customs are customs and habits. The above is the first point, looking at folk customs from the perspective of life.

Folk culture level

Secondly, from the cultural level, folklore is a cultural model. This model is often intangible, oral and immaterial. But it does exist in our life, and we should pay more attention to this intangible folk culture phenomenon. Butterfly lovers, for example, is a beautiful story that everyone is familiar with, and it is a household name in China. In recent years, Butterfly Lovers is trying to declare the world cultural heritage. In fact, this problem started two years ago. But there were many problems from the beginning. A big problem is that people everywhere say that butterfly lovers is their own. For example, Ningbo people think that Liang Shanbo is the county magistrate of Yinxian (now Fenghua County); Shangyu people say that Zhu Yingtai's hometown is in Shangyu; People in Hangzhou also believe that Hangzhou is the place where the hero Song Wan studied ... In fact, it doesn't matter where butterfly lovers is. The key is that butterfly lovers reflects the marriage pattern of China people at a certain stage. Women in ancient Yuedi were strong-willed, and Liang Zhu came into being after the northern culture moved southward in Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, from strong to soft, and developed into Confucianism. Therefore, the culture of "butterfly lovers" actually reflects a new marriage culture mode in the social transformation period, and people's psychology of praying for both sexes and expressing their loyalty to love and their feelings are immortal, which is a typical invisible oral relationship between men and women in China.

In fact, there are many intangible oral patterns, not only at home but also abroad. I have a student studying in Australia and invited a local teacher to have dinner at home. There is a kind of soup that the teacher feels very fresh after drinking it. Asked what it was, he said it was a wild duck. The teacher was shocked and immediately said that it was illegal to catch wild ducks in Australia. The student suddenly realized that he must pay attention next time. Unexpectedly, three days later, the ticket came, and the Animal Insurance Committee fined him 5,000 Australian dollars and took all the money he spent on work-study programs for one and a half years. In China's view, there is something wrong with this teacher, who eats all the ducks and complains? But in Australia, it is normal to do so, and there will be problems if teachers don't report it. This is also a cultural model, and we should pay more attention to it now.

For example, Japan also has its own unique cultural model, such as the cherry blossom complex: when cherry blossoms are about to bloom in Japan, the whole nation will be very excited. In 2000, when I was a professor at the University of the Republic of China in Japan, it happened to be the cherry blossom festival. The weather is very cold, but when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, the cherry trees are crowded with Japanese. The local weather forecast will also report the blooming and withering of cherry blossoms every day. Foreigners don't feel very gorgeous about cherry blossoms, but the Japanese feel that cherry blossoms are very similar to their own lives, and they don't ask for the length of life, but only for the glory of life. Japanese bushido and romance are all related to this. Junichi Watanabe's Paradise Lost has a simple plot: a middle-aged man has an affair with a young woman. Both families have good conditions, but they both want to be together. At first, neither family agreed. Later, they finally divorced. They were free to live together, but they committed suicide during sex. This is a typical Japanese life culture. In their view, life and love lie not in the length, but in whether we can reach the highest point. They feel that when all kinds of difficulties are eliminated, their love is the most brilliant. If they are together, the emotional temperature will definitely drop. It is better to die at the highest point of love, and the best will become eternal. So they regard cherry blossoms as a symbol of life.

Folklore in history

The use of folk customs as a cultural model to manage the country has existed in ancient China. Historians of the Han Dynasty once said: "The distinction between morality and custom is the most important." We should treat customs correctly and control them to serve the rules. Every dynasty had corresponding measures, and the Manchu policy in Qing dynasty-Manchu-Chinese integration policy had a greater effect and influence on modern times. First, advocate filial piety. It turns out that Manchu people have a weak concept of filial piety. The history of the early Qing Dynasty always seems to be concealed, especially about the emperor shunzhi's mother. In fact, I'm afraid the truth of history will not be as tortuous and lingering as scholars write now. Traditionally, his mother should marry his brother-in-law. Manchu is different from Han nationality not only in the concept of marriage, but also in other cultural customs.

In the past, our history textbooks did not pay attention to such a question, that is, how did the Qing regime stabilize later? According to foreign research, Manchu people at that time treated Han people comprehensively with the cultural patterns of Manchu and Han people. They merged two cultural models. For example, in troubled times, loyalty could not be advocated, but filial piety could only be advocated. The emperors in the early Qing Dynasty advocated "filial piety" without exception. People who are familiar with the history of China and literature should know that Shi Biao's "Chen Qingbiao" used "filial piety" as a shield and refused to go out to be an official. Therefore, the cultural mode of "filial piety" has often become a brand for rulers to govern the country in troubled times in China.

Secondly, the rulers of Qing Dynasty adopted the cultural mode of intermarriage with Han people. Just can't rob, want to get married legally. Not only that, Manchu people have to report to their superiors when they marry China women. On the contrary, the Han people don't report marrying Manchu girls, as long as they marry back according to the six rites of the Han people. So the fact is that there were only more than 300,000 Manchu people at that time, while there were nearly 1 100 million Han people. It is a historical fact that Manchu later unified the whole of China. Of course, the rulers of the Qing dynasty also adhered to their own cultural patterns in some aspects, such as hairstyles. Because the Manchu people think that hair is the carrier of communication between heaven and man, they must abide by the habits of Manchu people, and there has been a tragic cultural integration of "leaving hair without hair, leaving hair headless". Therefore, this model, which combined Manchu and Han cultures, ruled China for at least 300 years.

Folklore is formed by repeated accumulation of mass groups, is the same feeling of a nation with the same culture, is the interweaving of unconsciousness and consciousness, rationality and irrationality, and is the prototype and starting point of national ideology and culture. The thinking prototype behind the folk code of conduct has a great influence on human thought and national development. In the past, we didn't study our own folk customs enough. We should consider the national psychological factors and really dig out its inner things. Folklore is the life of a national culture in the final analysis. There are two kinds of human life, one is the DNA of biological life, and the other is the DNA of culture. We must study folk customs more deeply and take into account their differences, especially when we are in the stage of reform, opening up and going international. We should also know what kind of cultural patterns and psychology people have, so that we can further understand the folk customs, understand the nation and ourselves, and better go to the world.

(The above contents are compiled according to Professor Chen's speech at the lecture center of Shanghai Library. )