Anthropological Reflections on Nanxi village Funeral ceremony Changes
Zhang Yue Zhang Yan
Yunnan University
The Naxi funeral culture is an important part of the naxi culture. Nanxi village as a typical Naxi villages, the funeral ceremony in the long historical process of development formed its own unique form, in particular in 1949 after the liberation , the funeral ceremony undergone drastic changes. By studying the changes of the Nanxi village‘s funeral ceremony, we are trying to show its power and the reasons for the changes, for an in-depth understanding of traditional culture in contemporary society changes to provide an important reference.
Aggiornato il giornale digitale con le foto ed alcuni pensieri sul viaggio in Cina di questa estate.
Beijing, Beihai
Finalmente, dopo 4 anni, sono potuto tornare in Cina.
E ci sono tornato insieme a Claudia!
Ed ho portato Claudia a Tian Tan Gongyuan, ed ho rivisto con lei la mia maestra Liu Jinping.
Un sogno, nel sogno, nel sogno, nel sogno, che si realizza(no).
Così come la possibilità di partecipare ad un congresso mondiale di antropologia ed etnologia, esponendo i miei studi e presentando i miei progetti di ricerca sull’etnia Naxi e la tradizione Dongba…
Grazie quindi alla mia ditta, la Pellicceria Cioni, che prima di tutto mi ha dato un posto di lavoro d’oro, senza il quale non avrei potuto nemmeno sognarmi di affrontare questo viaggio! Assieme ad esso (che non è poco, visti i tempi e visto che altri hanno tranquillamente ignorato la mia professionalità, e continuano a sputare nel piatto dove hanno mangiato) mi ha permesso di rispondere positivamente all’invito del prof. Mu Shihua della Yunnan Daxue, potendo lasciare l’Italia davvero in anticipo rispetto al nostro normale calendario di ferie, partecipando così con un successo che nemmeno lontanamente immaginavo alla conferenza di Kunming.
Grazie al professor Roberto Rosselli del Turco, che mi ha aiutato! E continua ad aiutarmi. Nel mio lavoro d’implementazione di risorse d’Informatica Umanistica applicate allo studio ed alla diffusione della tradizione Dongba e della cultura Naxi, e nel mio percorso universitario, davvero difficile mentre si lavora! Grazie di nuovo alla ditta che mi permette di farlo, ed alla mia famiglia che mi sostiene in tutto e per tutto.
Grazie al mi’ fratello Francesco, che mi ha sempre ispirato allo studio, all’approfondimento critico ed intelligente delle cose e dei fenomeni, che ha di nuovo ispirato una parte dei miei studi così come durante la tesi in Egittologia del 2004. Grazie di avermi fatto conoscere e spiegato le teorie di Anna Wierzbicka e di Cliff Gottard, che sono davvero preziose – un core – per quello che mi è venuto in mente di fare.
Shui Shufa zai Beihai
Grazie alla mia famiglia. Esempio di dedizione, di lavoro, di lealtà. Forse anche principale motivo per il quale scrivo questa pagina di ringraziamenti, che non è solo senso di gratitudine cristiana, ma è anche farsi scrittura della mia violenta pulsione di scavare.
Un bel confine netto.
Tra me. E altre persone: uomini e donne con 2 braccia e 2 gambe come me, come “gli altri” perennemente criticati ed additati, altri uomini, altre donne, altri maestri, altre associazioni.
Premettendo che: ” Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless? ” dico con decisione: non voglio essere in quei vagoni. In quel treno di dementi. Tra chi riceve e spreca. Tra chi ricevendo sfrutta. Sprecando, e non dice nemmeno grazie a chi, per l’ennesima volta, concede fiducia, progetti, futuro suo e di chi ama, infine soldi.
E gioisce dei dolori altrui.
Identità.
Malgrado i poveri risultati di tutto [the poor results of all ], malgrado gli anni vuoti ed inutili degli altri, con gli altri a me attorcigliati [the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined ]
Tu sei qui–la vita esiste. E l’identità; il potente spettacolo – per alcuni uno show di pagliacci – continua.
Questo è il verso con cui contribuisco.
Walt Whitman – beardedroman.com
Grazie a Jiejie Francesca Freeman, che ha saputo consigliarmi, e continuamente mi aiuta con un supporto morale, motivazionale, culturale, da vera sorella maggiore insomma, in molti dei miei campi: studio, pittura, Wushu, vita insomma! Speriamo che dopo più di un anno di attesa e miliardi di promesse al vento, il suo libro sui Moso possa finalmente uscire dall’incub-atrice dell’editing ed essere pubblicato.
Grazie infine, ma in realtà in cima a tutti, a Claudia.
Che è bellissima, che è la mia compagna.
Che mi sopporta da anni e che se Dio vole ho sempre al mio fianco.
Per la quale spero di essere ciò che vuole e di cui ha bisogno, così come lei per me è, in spontaneità, in natura, in bontà.
Chi può essere così stolto e vigliacco da gioire che 2 persone si lascino?
Non a caso.
Il progetto più importante proposto a Kunming si chiama proprio CL.A.U.D.I.A., ed uno dei suoi sviluppi DO.M.EN.I.…
Ricostruzione di alcune delle pagine del primo volume (gku chung) del manoscritto Lu Bar Lu Za Sa [invitare a discendere i demoni del suicidio] appartenente alla tradizione manoscritta pittografica Dongba, dei Naxi di Lijiang.
Ho realizzato il lavoro di ricostruzione basandomi sullo studio di Joseph Francis Charles Rock, in BEFEO – Bulletin de l’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient XXIX, 1939.
I start to publish my draft notes for the acts of Kunming 2009 congress on the Kunming 2009 section of conferences dedicated space. The work is long, and requires a lot of time which I haven’t, but step by step I’m going to publish the material I prepared, as Mu Shihua laoshi required me.
For any information or question, please feel free to contact me by writing at: afettoxiulong[at]gmail.com
The 16th World Congress – The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences – Panel: New Horizons in Naxi Study
I partecipated at the panel `New Horizons in Naxi Study` during the 16th World Congress – The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Kunming (official website: https://www.icaes2008.org/defaultDo.jsp) with 2 tributes which I’ll soon post as pdf on Xiulong.it resuming my 2 research projects:
Many new ideas, expecially for improve my study focused on Dongba tradition and Naxi people culture and history grow up from the congress! I’m also very happy to have met Eric D. Mortensen, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies – Departement Chair of Religious Studies – Guilford College: we spoke after the pics taiking at the end of congress and what we said was very very good and usefull for me…hope to see soon!
Many thanks to Qinglian Zhao for the precious helpoing douring the last day of congress translating so smart and perfect from my bad English into perfect Chinese: next time I’ll speak in Chinese! So impressive to see Alexis Michaud speaking perfectly in Chinese and 2 Naxi dialects…wow! A sample to be followed!
Many many thanks to Mu Shi Hua laoshi, but expecially to Cherry to let me be in Kunming and to let me and Claudia visit her splendid home in Wu Yi Jie!
At today still in feichang piaoliang Lijiang gu cheng… when I’ll back in Italy will write about!
This short draft is taken from CL.A.U.D.I.A.’s intro page and it is focused about a peculiar approach to semantic annotation of Dongba manuscripts by NSM primes as mark-up tagger.
The NSM theory known as “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” has been developed by A. Wierzbicka and, later, by C. Goddard and other scholars.
The “basic idea is that we should try to describe complex meanings in terms of simpler ones. For example, to state the meaning of a semantically complex word we should try to give a paraphrase composed of words which are simpler and easier to understand than the original. This method of semantic description is called reductive paraphrase. It prevents us from getting tangled up in circular and obscure definitions, problems which bedevil conventional dictionaries and other approaches to linguistic semantics. No technical terms, neologisms, logical symbols, or abbreviations are allowed in a reductive paraphrase – only plain words from ordinary natural language.” (NSM Semantics in Brief: http://www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/semantics-in-brief.php → 2009, June 28th )
By reductive paraphrase is thus possible to proceed as method for meaning analysis, which conduces to every language’s “semantic core”, “ a language-like structure, with a lexicon of indefinable expressions (“semantic primes”) and a grammar […] governing how the lexical elements can be combined ”: in other words a “mini-language” as expressive powerful as full natural language.
Semantic complex concepts thus could be explained by reductive paraphrase method, for instance a pair of samples from Wierzbicka 1996: 251-253; Goddard 1988):
Semantic emotion terminology: feeling invidious
X felt invidious =
X felt something bad
because X thought like this about someone else:
something good happened to this person
it didn’t happened to me
this is bad
I want things like this happen to me
Causative verb break, as Person-X broke Y (ex.: Pete broke the window)
X broke Y =
X did something to Y
because of this, something happened to Y at this time
because of this, after this Y wasn’t one thing any more
Anna Wierzbicka aiming always to reduce the terms of the explications to the smallest and most versatile set by experimentation: she thus identified a core of 60 semantic primes (Goddard & Wierzbicka, “Meaning and Universal Grammar”, Eds 2002)
Semantic primes like I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING, THIS, HAPPEN, MOVE, etc.., identifying simples and intuitively intelligible meanings, are essential for numerous other words meaning explicating and non-circular grammatical constructions.
According to Wierzbicka, English core at today consists in:
Substantives: I, YOU, SOMEONE, PEOPLE, SOMETHING/THING, BODY
Relational substantives: KIND, PART
Determiners: THIS, THE SAME, OTHER/ELSE
Quantifiers: ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH/MANY
Evaluators: GOOD, BAD
Descriptors: BIG, SMALL
Mental predicates: THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR
Such primes are could well been implemented as Xml well-formed tree, constructing a NSM ontology skeleton, as exemplified below:
Implementation of NSM Semantic Mark-up for Dongba pictographs thus consists in:
annotations of English translation of CL.A.U.D.I.A. stored Dongba pictographs by NSM English semantic core marking-upFor instance: pictograph Ea1 will be semantically marked-up as
Such sample represents a very basic approach to Dongba pictographs NSM mark-up I am working over.
NSM studies have been carried out in a wide range of a languages, including English, Russian, French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Ewe, Malay, Japanese, East Cree, Chinese, Mbula, Yankunytjatjara, Arrernte, and Maori, among others.
Considering Naxi language and Dongba pictograph writing system as close and strictly linked – but independent phenomena, my aim is to study by NSM approach Naxi and Dongba for:
identification of Naxi metalanguage semantic core
identification of Dongba meta-pictographs semantic core
confronts and among Naxi and Dongba cores for patterns and relationship identification and analysis
Do.M.En.I. means Dongba Manuscript Encoding Initiative. It’s a CL.A.U.D.I.A. parallel project, originating and taking form by Dongba pictograph manuscript tradition and digital humanities study.
Do.M.En.I. is focused about implementing an on-line encoded corpus of Dongba manuscripts as a World Wide enjoyable resource for Dongba manuscript and Naxi pictograph literature, according to W3C standards for text and corpora encoding.
World Wide web technology at today should be seen as the wider library to be consulted for information retrieval and documents browsing, especially in Academic world for exchanging of material and up-to-date information which run faster then every paper-publication or review.
Many digital humanities application is dedicated to texts browsing and documents retrieving, and cover large range of kind of information: from daily newspapers to linguistic annotated corpora or more specialized archives. Plenty of digital texts and their extreme heterogeneity pushed W3C consortium (among other world wide question) to define some base guidelines for digital encoding of text and corpora digital encoding. at today W3C recommends TEI guidelines for digital texts encoding and CES for corpora encoding.
Do.M.En.I., project of diffusion and acculturation about Dongba pictograph manuscript tradition and Naxi people culture, follows and accords to W3C standards recommendations because it’s the best way to open such cultural and artistic treasures to academic world and all members of human kind. Do.M.En.I. thus operates in retrieving of just-available on-line resources re-organizing them in a CES according corpus, proceeding to single manuscripts encoding according to TEI recommendations.
At today two are the only available on-line resources for Naxi pictograph manuscripts tradition, both displaying some tens of digital reproduction of manuscripts pages:
they have heterogeneous standards for digital reproduction of manuscripts, moreover both corpora is just stops to “0 level” of text encoding. (Lenci et al., 2005: 57) , for Dongba pictograph text reproduction of manuscripts pages, sequences of images without any deeper structural, meta-structural, linguistic, syntactic and semantic annotation.
Do.M.En.I. projects if focused in building a complete (and open for up-to-dating initiatives) resources as annotated corpus of Dongba manuscripts, and this plays for:
safeguard and conservation of Dongba manuscripts and Naxi pictograph literature
diffusing and enjoying Dongba tradition and Naxi pictograph literature
convergence and unification of just-existing online resources
implementation of new resources according to W3C standards
study of Dongba pictograph writing system
study of Naxi language
Do.M.En.I. targets are finally summarizable in 2 main scores:
defining and building a codify schema for encoding Dongba pictograph manuscripts according to TEI standard
implementing a World Wide Corpus of encoded Dongba manuscripts according to CES standard
This is a draft 1.0 release of CL.A.U.D.I.A., achronim for ComputationaLAnd Updatable Dongbas Interactive Archives, as Human Techonolgies application focused about Dongba pictographic writing system of Naxi people of Southwest China, implemented and uploaded on Web for an onfly demo douring Kunming’s 16th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (29 – 31 July).
I wish to underline importance of Updatable features of such system – which I feel is needed – because of continous evolution of myself and academic scores in studying Dongba nad Geba writing systems and Naxi culture.
I am implementing such resource under PHP <–> MySql couple, that’s because I feel MySql as the best database instrument for building digitals archives and structured databases as Dongba pictographs corpus, and PHP as the dearest and the flexiblest instrument available at today to generate intelligent and dynamic queries targeting Dongba pictographic writing system significants corpus stored in MySql database; some hidden fields of database should work as Ontology for hierarchy relationship between family, subfamily and single pictographs.
Index plates consist in a tree of family and sub-family of pictographs stored and gathered by ICONOGRAPHIC features. Please visit previously dedicated page for correct usage. Each plates of pictographs are implemented as index archives of pictograph, labelled by capital keyletter for Family and minus keyletter for sub-Family of pictographs, then each elements has its own identification number, as in Gardiner appendix Hyeroglyphiv dictionary in it’s landmark work “Egyptian Grammar”. Such indexing realize a precious resource for future complete pictograph dictionary, and CL.A.U.D.I.A. is just its computational implementation.
CL.A.U.D.I.A.’s Dongba dictionary is implemented with 3 main resources. At first a fast free-keywords search-engine realized to lounch interrogation query on pictograph databse. Please, note that EACH QUERY WILL GENERATE 2 MAIN FILEDS OF DATA RETRIEVING: on the top a DIRECT MATCHING SCORE, with the output of the whole pictograph directly matched in its traduction to the keyword of research; down an INDIRECT MATCHING SCORE, constituted by the group of pictographs retrieved because of theyr indirect matching – but existing relation – with the keywords of the query lounched. Such Information Retrival System is yet implementing.
Claudia’s Dongba dictio also presents initials syllables system as tags. Please visit English <–> Donga cidian dedicated intro page to better understand power and limitation of CL.A.U.D.I.A. 1.0.
La Fonetica, parola che deriva dal Greco φωνή phōnē – suono, voce, è quella parte della linguistica e della glottologia che studia la produzione dei FONI, ossia i suoni linguistici, la loro percezione, e le loro caratteristiche.
In particolare la fonetica analizza il funzionamento e la struttura dell’apparato fonatorio – gli organi che realizzano la fonazione – la produzione dei suoni linguistici, studiando inoltre le caratteristiche di questiultimi linguistici ed i contesti in cui vengono articolati, i contesti della comunicazione audio-verbale.
All’interno di questo immenso insieme di argomenti di studio si sono distinti due estremi opposti di modalità di articolazione dei foni, detti ipoarticolato ed ipoarticolato: nella comunicazione audio-verbale, ad esempio, un professionista della voce (attore, annunciatore) viene registrato mentre pronuncia, isolato in una cabina di registrazione suoni, sillabe, parole e frasi che egli legge o che gli viene chiesto di pronunciare, una condizione artificiale che consiste nella riproduzione dell’atto comunicativo, operazione in cui il destinatario non è un interlocutore bensì un fonetista, una modalità dell’atto del parlare che viene chiama parlato iperarticolato di laboratorio.
Il suo opposto è detto il parlato ipoarticolato informale spontaneo, come nel caso in cui un soggetto si rivolge ad un amico in modo concitato e gli parla in fretta, mangiandosi parole o accennandole appena, un caso in cui la conversazione avviene in ambiente naturale, eventualmente disturbato da altre voci o rumori, una condizione nella quale si svolge la maggioranza degli atti comunicativi.
Durante lo studio dell’atto dello scrivere, all’interno della tradizione manoscritta pittografica Dongba, ho avvertito alcune somiglianze interessanti con il concetto di parlato ipoarticolato, e dunque ho scritto alcuni appunti…
Ea1 will be semantically marked-up as
This is a draft 1.0 release of 