Chinese Culture Of Yi Ethnic Studies

China, a large country with long history and multi-nationalities, is a big family, in which Yi Nationality is an old but honorable member. Since ancient times, the ancestor of Yi Nationality, together with other nationalities, has made great contribution in building the whole nation. Yi Nationality created plenty of unique and colorful national cultures, which are the great achievements of Yi's intelligence and diligence, the public property of the nation and the important part of the splendid Chinese national culture.As for Yi culture, different science has different views and ways of studying. Ethnology which focuses on nations and their cultures, is a special kind of science to study culture, and should be considered as a key science to understand culture well. So this thesis, based on the ethnological culture theory, studies the meaning and culture of Yi Nationality, from the aspect of material culture, institutional culture and spiritual culture. The thesis consists of five parts and the content of each is as the following: Part 1 shows the origin and development of Yi Nationality scattered widely in southwest of China with a long history and great influence. As for its origin, after decades of years studying, people concluded that ancient Qiang people who came from northwest, traveled to the south and then lived near both sides of Jin Sha River and the central areas of Yunnan, mixed with the original tribes who were mainly Pu people, and then developed to a nationality from then on.Part 2 is about the features of material culture of Yi Nationality. As it is known, the features of a national culture such as clothes, food, living, transportation and tools for production, are decided by this nation's environment and ways of living. Looking back to the history, Yi's way of living went through three phrases, first primitive gathering and haunting, then nomadic pasturage, and finally farming and agriculture. The material culture, including tools, clothes, food, living, and transportation, also passed through their own developing and changing process, shows unique and local features.Part 3 tells about the features of institutional culture of Yi Nationality. According to the ethnological theory, human being must associate with each other in order to participate in all kinds of production activities by some social relationships or entities such as groups, organizations, classes and ranks. Human's activities are so sophisticated and changeable, but when we look out carefully, we will find that all these social activities are going orderly by some rules. We call these groups, organizations, classes, rules, and etc. the content of the institutional culture. Based on the history developing process, Yi's ancestor's early social institutions went through three phrases that were Ai-Pu, Ni-Nengand Xi-Mu-Zhe written in old books. Communal marriage out of the group, pairing marriage and monogyny respectively present the feature of each phrase. The slavery of Yi Nationality exist at least in B.C.200, from late 10 century, Yi Nationality of all parts of China began to enter into feudalism but that in Liang Shan Mountain of Sichuan. The slavery in Liang Shan Mountain has been kept well since the early 1950' because of the special geographical environment and historical factors. The important part of the cultural features of Yi's feudalism is chiefdom on behalf of the feudal lord. In addition, Yi's family institution is researched in this part.Part 4 studies the features of spiritual culture of Yi Nationality. According to the ethnology, spiritual culture is the products created by human's spiritual activities, which includes philosophy, ethics, morality, law, science, literature, arts, customs, conventions and religious beliefs. Yi's spiritual culture is extraordinarily marvelous.Yi letter is invented very early and a lot of books written in Yi letters and words areso abundant and most of which are literatures. These variety literatures, together withthose verbal arts, are the essential elements to dig out Yi's excellent historical...