Seaver Milnor

University of Washington

The Naxi Dongba pictographic script is strikingly different from Chinese characters in the complexity of graphs. To draw an analogy with ancient Egyptian, even the traditional Chinese characters still in use in Hong Kong and Taiwan are like a simplified ‘hieratic’ or ‘demotic’ script when compared with hieroglyphic Dongba texts. In terms of the environment for their genesis, Chinese and Dongba pictographs could also not be more different. Whereas Chinese writing was a new invention ex nihilo, Dongba pictographs developed in the presence of other scripts, including an alphabetic one. Nonetheless, the central thesis of this paper is that the inventors of the Dongba script followed the same process for creating graphs as has been well established for Hanzi. William Boltz’s The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System (1994) forms the theoretical framework for how writing systems develop. Data demonstrating the structural graphic similarities is drawn from Naxi xiangxing wenzi pu 納西象形文字譜by Fang Guoyu and He Zhiwu (1995).

Pictographs—drawings of “things”—are the first graphs to appear in a fledgling script. Paranomasia, also known as the Rebus Principle, allows one to write words for abstract concepts by using the graphs for homophonous or nearly homophonous words—at this point true writing, rather than inchoate proto-writing, is possible. Disambiguation occurs when various semantic classifiers are added to a phonetic component to distinguish words with similar pronunciations; these xingsheng 形聲or xiesheng 諧聲 graphs comprise the vast majority of modern Chinese characters and an important category of the liushu 六書 of Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (ca. 100). From this point, Chinese and the Naxi Dongba script diverge because the former was needed for pragmatic daily use and simplified over the centuries whereas the latter maintained its complexity, I argue, for aesthetic purposes because its use was limited to ritual texts.

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Dr. Michael Prosser

Applied Linguistics Department, Valencia Polytechnic University

Monolingual minority language communities can undergo complete language shift from the minority language to the official nationwide language in a very short time. For example over 100 years ago many Western European minorities could only speak their mother tongues, having no knowledge of the official state languages. In these areas today, due to pressure from the official state languages, virtually all speakers of minority languages are also competent in the state languages. Moreover, language shift is widespread to such an extent that a large proportion of members of the minority communities no longer speak the languages of their forefathers. Because of this it is of key importance that long-term measures be taken to protect minority languages (at the same time as promoting majority state languages) before minority language communities are completely competent in the majority language.

Although a large proportion of Naxi are still not competent in Mandarin, many Naxi in the town of Lijiang have already stopped talking to their children in Naxi. In other words, Naxi-Han language shift has already commenced. Many ordinary Naxi who wish to get on in the world are likely to imitate this urbanised Naxi elite in abandoning their mother tongue, which does not create an ideal atmosphere for the promotion of the Naxi script. Although the Naxi script has been in existence for some decades, the number of Naxi who have studied it has been extremely small and there are probably many ordinary Naxi who do not even realise that they have a romanised script.

This writer is of the opinion that if the population of rural Lijiang, the urbanised Naxi elite and the concerned authorities all urgently took action, they would still be in time to establish balanced Naxi-Han bilingualism and ensure the future of the Naxi language and script. This paper, using examples from outside China, explores some possible measures and strategies which could be taken to protect and promote the Naxi language and script. Such measures should encourage the Naxi elite and local Han residents to study, use and support both spoken and written Naxi and should also stimulate widespread bottom-up activity among all sections of the public. It is of key importance to involve the whole population of Lijiang, at the same time publicising everywhere the advantages of balanced bilingualism and bilingual education and to transform the extremely few experimental Naxi classes that exist at present into generalised (affecting the whole of Lijiang), long-term, normal, balanced bilingualism.

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胡 莹 云南大学公共管理学院

Hu ying Yunnan University

Ethnic Naxi owns long history and colorful nationality`s culture,Dongba language—–the unique pictograph has been created in the process of their society development. Dongba writings and materials became countless Dongba historical archives when the time goes by.These Dongba historical archives are valuable and plentiful.

This thesis discussed the valuable worth of Dongba historical archives from the born of Dongba historical archives,framework and characteristic,and I brought up a scientific way of how to arrange Dongba historical archives.Besides,I put forward a set of way of utilization and excavation for Dongba historical archives current situation in order to realize the information share among Dongba historical archives.

In addition,I talked about the digital reform of Dongba historical archives under the huge development of modern technology,so it is very urgent for us to built a modern information system of Dongba historical archives.We should try our best to promote people’s consciousness about excavating,using Dongba historical archives and spreading Dongba culture.It is possible to offer better and more services to the development of Lijiang`s economy.

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Hongyuan He, Shaoying He

This article focuses on the protection and inheritance of Naxi village culture during the tourism development process. There is a close relationship between the protection and inheritance of traditional ethnic culture and the development of tourism and other industries in ethnic areas. Both sides can benefit from each other by rightly handling their relationship. The effects of tourism on socio-culture have long been discussed by anthropologists and ethnologists since 1960s. People have become increasingly realized that tourism, positively or negatively, is bringing the local people some changes in the aspects of economy, society and culture.

The traditional culture area of Naxi ethnic group in Yuhu village, Baisha Township, known as one of the first batch of non-material culture heritages in Yunnan province, has its vitality actually exit in its local people, where the spirits and emotion integrated. Naxi village culture is just like a flower blossoming gradually, attracting attention from innumerable persons. However, the conservation and inheritance of it is fragile.

This article chooses Yuhu village as the site of fieldwork, investigates and analyzes the current state of Naxi ethnic village culture in the process of tourism development, and explores the solution to culture protection by the theory of culture conflict and cultural change. The full text altogether is divided into five parts:

Ⅰ. Introduction

This part mainly introduces the geographical conditions, the natural environment and the social situations in Yuhu village, which provide rich resources for the development of tourism in Yuhu village.

Ⅱ. The process of tourism development and the condition of economic development in Yuhu village.

Ⅲ. The effect of tourism development on Naxi ethnic village culture in Yuhu village. < NT>

This part, by investigating, will describe the tourism development and the current condition of village culture change.

Ⅳ.  Tourism development is combined with the conservation and inheritance of village culture in Yuhu village.

This part will point out that tourism has both positive and negative effects. Tourism has brought cultural conflict and change to some extent. A new cultural ecology can be formed only by organically fusing tourism development and the protection and inheritance of village culture.

Ⅴ. Conclusion .As an American scholar, Fox, puts it, tourism is a fire, so not only it could help you cook your food but also burn down your house AN>. According to the investigation of what has been mentioned above, the author come to the conclusion that in the process of modernizatio every one in every village is inevitably involved in and they also cause the conflict changes of culture. Tourism offers Naxi village an opportunity to gain economic interests. What’s more, it makes the value of ethnic culture rise. However, inevitably, the tourism also causes the edging of culture under the pressure of strong culture. The villagers are in a dilemma. The way of getting out of the dilemma is to protect and inherit the culture through active conscious culture behavior and to set up a new ecological system of village culture on the basis of actively absorbing and combining the modern culture.

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光映炯 云南大学 Guang yingjiong Yunnan University

Vigorously develop tourism on the folk art brought about by the impact is enormous, Dongba Art from the “folk art” into the “tourist art”, the tourism environment have triggered the contemporary folk art of variation. Folk art’s heritage and dissemination from the family to the public and its function from God and the pursuit of self-entertainment become fashionable of experience and economic interests, or even the expression of cultural connotation it also condensed into a symbol of cultural symbols, and these changes Dongba are in the post-modern art in the context of modern encountered by the results, and has shown a mass culture characteristics.

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