Recognition Of The Image Of Women In The The Yunnan Minorities Epic Songs

Epics and ballads of the ethnic minorities in Yunnan contain a lot of precious information related to females, which open a valuable window for us to survey their varieties of existences. If we define the identification of female as the construction of females'identities, then the identification of female images actually includes two aspects:one is the female images'identifications recognized by the social groups and the cultural systems, and another one is the females'understanding and confirmation about themselves under the influence of social cultural ideology. In fact, the two aspects influence each other and interactively construct. Moreover, epics and ballads of the ethnic minorities in Yunnan provide a constructional framework to compare the collective-identification with self-identification of female images.As authoritative oral classics, the epics, ancient ballads and narrative poems are accumulated with a long history in Yunnan minorities, in this paper they are mainly classified as a kind of others'and collective "forward looking" expression which is opposite to the female individual, and the ballads song by minorities females themselves are classified as the expressions of the females'self-identification. Though the two aspects influence each other with ambiguous boundaries, they have their own dominant factors and emphases. The oral models including genesis epics, the ancient genesis ballads and narrative poems bring together the social groups'aesthetic imagination about the female body images, behavior forms and characters' temperament and so on. The female body images are regarded as a set of descriptive and normative ideographic symbols restricted by the society ideology. The molding of the female behaviors and characters'temperament show their conforming to the cultural norms of male chauvinism. The process of the identity construction of female images from bodies and behaviors to characters'temperament is a gradually unified process of the identification from physiological gender to social gender. In this process, we can see the great influence on the construction of identification of female images by the male-centered social ideology. At the same time, the Yunnan minorities'ballads contain a great quantity of female self-identification expressions of which the major narrators are females and the main content is about female experience. In the love songs, females show strong identification of dignity, self-request for love and honor and ties of friendship; in the wedding songs, females show the cognition of their own irreplaceable value of social productivity, self-identification crisis in the identity transition and their final obedience to the male-dominated value. At last, in other labor songs, life songs and children's songs, etc., the contents about the females mainly make their belief to production skills and complaints about anguish life after marriage prominent, and show the levels of self-value of survival. The females'singing shows the mutual influence between "ideal types" and "true experience" of their self-identification, and reflects a sense of self-awareness and subjectivity to a certain extent.The comparison of female images in the genesis epics and narrative poems with the ballads sung by the female themselves shows their similarities and diversities. Among them, gender roles are more prone to gain the consistency between the otherness identification and the female self-identification, and there are a lot of difference between the two kinds of self-identification of the behavior forms and the body images. The "complete mirroring" identity construction method, which has some kind of stability, orderliness and aesthetic quality, is applied into the typical and idealized female images in epics and narrative ballads, and the construction of self-images relies more on daily fragmented expressions of feelings, which possesses individualized arbitrariness and disorderliness, and which has enriched the typical female images to a certain extent. The female's subjectivity forming is a process that self-perception gradually turns into complete mirror images and conflicts with the mirror images at the same time. The "complete mirroring" identification and the "fragmented feeling expressing" identification influence each other and continuously reconstruct the current self-identification of female images.The last part discusses the basic levels of the identification of female images, difficulties in self-identification and the solutions, and ethnic aesthetic qualities contained in gender identification in Yunnan ethnic minorities'epics and ballads. The otherness-identification and self-identification of female images have the similarity in the life experience of females as "human being" and "species", while the life experience of an "individual" shows more multi-part colors. The gender identification of females actually contains three levels including humanity, species quality and individual self, but the three levels are mixed together and inextricably involved. These also indicate that the self-identification of female images can not be divorced from the influence of ethnic aesthetic culture, and self-identity construction can not be divorced from the construction of otherness-identity. Thus, self-identification by the means of resistance will become the part of the identification positionality of the male-dominated cultural ideology, and the way to break the problem is to dialectically accept the "self-otherness", draw the nutrients of gender identification from the ethnic aesthetic culture, and to make the gender identification involved in the ethnic aesthetic identification. The original narrations of the ethnic aesthetic identification related to genders in Yunnan minorities' epics and ballads to a large extent stick up for the self-existence value of Yunnan minority female images, and are the aesthetic base of the self-identification of the Yunnan ethnic minority female images which are capable to be widely accepted by our society.