Research On The Changes Of The Tajik Xiaogong Bahar Festival

Festival is the core reflection of one culture. This article is ethnography of Tajik New Year in China and the fieldwork about this festival has been done at Taxkorgan in Pamirs. Depending on personal experience during the festival time, the author attempts to describe a festival by using a plenty of details and analyze its changes in past few years. All the descriptions were based on basic theories and methods of Anthropology and author's researches.The author did fieldwork in March 2009,2010 and summer vacation in 2010, meanwhile, lots of relevant materials were read. Every time the researches lasted for a whole festival period and the writer tried to participate in all the activities of this festival, such as getting water from frozen river, sowing and so on. To have a better understanding and share their true feelings for this New Year, the author interviewed the local people there, in order to have an entire understanding and explanation for Tajik festival culture, the writer also tried his best to be one of them.In this paper, the author described all the main activities which the local people took during their new year, especially the important agricultural ritual:getting water from frozen river and sowing. The changes of this Tajik festival, which was shown in these activities, will be discussed as well. "Xiao gong bahar" is the New Year in Tajik language, it is also called Nowruz, and it means that New Year is coming. The New Year is Tajik people's traditional grand festival and it is like Chinese New Year. In some related studies, this festival and these main activities were explained separately, but according to writer's research and comprehension, those related rituals and activities are not individual festivals but different parts of this New Year. Instead of explaining them by detaching rituals from this whole festival, the author attempts to discuss those festival elements as entirety, in addition, as Intangible Cultural Heritage, the changes of the festival and its reasons will be discussed in this way as well.On the basis of former studies, the writer focuses on details of this traditional festival, the deep meanings and all the different concepts on it, moreover, it was also an attempt to show the readers a vivid and detailed Tajik New Year. Additionally, the impact of other cultures is becoming more and more irresistible, in this case, this festival as weak culture of minorities with small population, is required immediate inheritance and protection, therefore, the author hopes this study could be a reference for the other researchers when they study the same subject about other minorities in the modernization and globalization background.