Guest Editor’s Introduction: Chinese Folklore Studies: Toward Disciplinary Maturity

Abstract

The historiography of Chinese folklore studies commonly traces the advent of the discipline to the Folksong Studies Movement (Geyaoxue yundong 歌谣学运动; (hereafter, FSM) of the May Fourth era (1910s to 1920s)1 (Chao 1942; 1943; Honko 1986; Hung 1985; Tuohy 1991). In his critical study of this movement, Wolfram Eberhard highlighted the underlying forces of nationalism and cultural awakening that rendered early Chinese folklore studies a discipline of “political science” (Eberhard 1970, 2). If we look to the connection between nationalism and the rise of folklore in Germany, Finland, Greece, and Turkey, we notice that this politicized disciplinary inception is hardly unique to China, or as Eminov described, it is rather another episode of “the nationalism-folklore syndrome” (EMinov 1978, 174). In China, this deeply political nature has lasted well beyond the birth of the discipline, continuing throughout much of the twentieth century to shape the contours of folklore research. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chinese folklore studies had adopted a more self-reflective recomposition of its disciplinary orientation and practices. Folklorists have returned to grassroots communities while critically engaging China’s cultural policies and movements with their research. They also actively engage with disciplinary concerns and perspectives on a global scale. The articles in this special issue will introduce a few of these trends and developments by presenting recent work from the current generation of China-based folklorists.