Victor Mair’s and Mark Bender’s anthology is a long-overdue addition to the corpus of teaching materials for the study of Chinese folklore. As the editors note in their preface, instructing students about Chinese folk culture has long been a difficult task due, in part, to the lack of accessible yet ethnographically-sophisticated English language sourcebooks. While a number of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century compilations put together by European collectors such as N.B. Dennys and E.T.C. Werner remain available in popular print, and the scholarly works of the mid-twentieth-century folklorist Wolfram Eberhard remain available in university libraries, few English language anthologies have been produced since the “performative turn” of the 1970s, and even fewer go beyond simply presenting flat translations of context-less text. Furthermore, the texts in many English language anthologies have been drawn only from the genres that are most easily identifiable to the Western reader, such as legend or folktale.
In this regard, The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Culture fills an important gap in the existing scholarship. In its more than 600 pages, the volume’s editors present a wide range of genres, not all of which correspond to Western generic sensibilities. Thus, while some of those genres will be familiar to students, others such as Tibetan flirting words or wooden fish songs will be new terrain. However, Mair and Bender provide a clear road map for the introductory student by organizing the genres presented in the volume into more familiar overarching categories such as folk stories and spoken traditions, folk songs, folk ritual, epic, and folk drama. Each overarching section has a brief introduction in which the editors not only explain to students the history of that group of traditions in Chinese culture, but also, at times, provide a brief overview of the study of similar traditions in the West. In their introduction to the section on epic traditions, for instance, Mair and Bender briefly contrast the poetic features of ancient Greek epics with those of Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko’s expanded contemporary definition (213). They then segue into a discussion of how that expanded definition has opened up the study of epic in non-Western cultures, most particularly in China.
In addition to their overviews at the beginning of each major section of the volume, Mair and Bender also provide brief headnotes to each selection in the volume. These headnotes typically attempt to situate the selection within the tradition of which it is a part, but also to provide historical and contextual information about the performer from which it was recorded. While these notes are generally not in-depth enough to make a fully developed performance analysis possible, they at least provide readers with some contextual information. Perhaps more importantly, however, the headnotes continually reinforce to novice students the notion that the texts being presented in the volume are not static, universal texts, but rather single, performed versions that are part of a larger dynamic tradition.
Finally, the general introduction to the volume also provides a nice, broad overview of Chinese traditional cultures, Chinese folklore scholarship, and, more generally, folklore theory. Mair and Bender are particularly interested in the theories of oral literature and epic developed by John Miles Foley and Lauri Honko, as these theories give them a well-defined framework to discuss the complicated and often interdependent relationship between oral tradition and popular literature in Chinese culture. In this vein, they begin by making a distinction between what they refer to as “oral performances,” “oral-connected texts,” and “tradition-oriented texts” (7). While “oral performance” encompasses the face-to-face modes of expression often studied by folklorists, the editors, following Honko, define “tradition-oriented texts” as those works that “simulate or mimic a particular oral-performance tradition or that draw on existing versions of stories or songs to create written works” (9). While they argue that these sources are valuable texts in the study of Chinese vernacular culture, Mair and Bender are careful to note that, as literary productions intended for domestic consumption in the People’s Republic of China, these texts were often heavily edited by government censors to remove “feudal,” “unhealthy,” or “superstitious” content (10). In between these two modes, the editors place their final category of “oral-connected texts.” This category includes “works [that] seem to have been written especially for literate audiences, but [for which] there is evidence that some were adapted for use by professional storytellers, in a circular, interpenetrating dynamic between oral performance and writing”(9). Throughout the work, Mair and Bender refer back to this distinction in order to situate each of the texts they present somewhere on this blurry spectrum of oral and literary production. This clear yet nuanced discussion of the interdependence of orality and literacy in traditional expression is characteristic of the editors’ approach in this volume: they distill complicated theoretical issues into easily digestible yet suggestive discussions that will be of great value to introductory readers.
While, overall, I found this volume to be a sophisticated and engaging introduction to Chinese folk culture, there are a few points that should be considered by those who consider this textbook for classroom use. First, with the exception of the occasional interspersion of pinyin, the volume does not include any Chinese languages or scripts. This is, of course, by design, since many of the texts were directly translated from their original language by the editors or various contributors to the volume. But it is important to note that those looking for a volume that includes texts in Mandarin, Cantonese, or any of the numerous other languages of the Chinese minority cultures will be disappointed. Second, while the editors’ introduction and notes do rely heavily on important works of folklore scholarship, such as those by Honko and Foley, there are some gaps in their presentation of folklore scholarship throughout the volume. For instance, in their admittedly solid overview of the history of Chinese folklore scholarship, they make no reference to Chang-tai Hung’s seminal work Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918-1937, a book that would certainly be profitable for students interested in the historical and political dimensions of Chinese folklore scholarship to consider. Finally, there are occasional minor typographical or factual errors. For instance, in their discussion of the roots of folk narrative scholarship, they incorrectly state that the Grimm brothers began publishing collections of stories in the 1840s (13). In fact, the first edition of Kinder- und Haus-Märchen was published in 1812, although some of the follow-up editions were published in the 1840s. Hopefully, these relatively minor issues will be corrected when this important and sorely-needed work is deservedly published in later editions.
Works Cited
Hung, Chang-tai. 1985. Going to the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Folk Literature, 1918-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
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[Review length: 1118 words • Review posted on November 14, 2012]