This article first outlines the long history of folklore collection in China, and then describes the disciplinary development in the 20th century. In Section 3, it presents the current situation in terms of disciplinary infrastructure, development, contribution, and challenge, with a focus on the recent practice of safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. These accounts are largely based on the views of the Chinese folklorists. In the final section, this article discusses the issues of cultural continuity, integration, and self-healing mechanisms in Chinese culture by putting Chinese folkloristics in a historical and world perspective. This paper suggests that, to understand Chinese folklore and culture, one must be aware of the most basic differences between Chinese fundamental beliefs and values and those of the West, and that Chinese folklore and folkloristics present new challenges to the current paradigms put forward in the post-colonial, post-modern, and imperial ideologies.
Having conceptually accepted Asian Americans as being groups integral to the "folk groups" in American history, culture, and society, and thus their folklores being integral to American public life and folkloristics, we now need to study these distinctive folklores with relevant theories and methods. By looking at the folklore practices of the diverse Chinese American group, this article proposes some perspectives and concepts, with an emphasis on folkloric identity, in the hope that they will be useful in analyzing and interpreting diasporic folklore and identity in general.
Focusing on the "Moon Man" (or matchmaker) in the tale "Predestined Wife" (ATU 930A) in Chinese examples, this article applies the historic-geographic method in a broad cultural context by exploring how the Moon Man figure in the tale has been transmitted and transformed over the past two millennia and is still alive in oral tradition, and how elements in tales rise and fall because of their relations to the fundamental values in the culture. This author argues that any key element in an "imported" tale must have familiar characteristics enabling it to adapt to the local audience and take root and, in turn, strengthen hidden beliefs and values, and that the transformation or migration of tales is the precursor of cultural integration that continues in our everyday practices.
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