Interpretation Of Visual Anthropology Of Bai Ku Yao's Silk Culture In Guizhou On The Basis Of Fieldwork

As the carrier of Visual Anthropology, which is new, marginal and crossed, anthropology film is known to us for its record of traditional culture and function of storage at an early age. In the 1950s, our country filmed a lot about the minority in a large scale, and these are considered as the beginning of visual anthropology in China. In order to protect these precious films, the government of that time sent a mass of television workers and anthropologists to work together regardless of arduous conditions. However, with the development of anthropology films and its mass output, its unique characteristic---to show the public many kinds of symbols and cultural relations at the same time, just like a kind of media, is greatly valued. It is the characteristic that makes anthropology films not only can save the disappearing cultures by the means of recording, but also deeply describes the films themselves to give the public cultural thoughts.On the basis of this thought, in March,2010, following the fieldwork group on the silk culture of Guizhou Bai Ku Yao of Southwest Research Center of Education and Psychology to the Bai Ku Yao settlements in Libo County, Guizhou Province, the author of this paper spent almost one month there studying and shooting. We find that cultivating mulberries and feeding silkworm is not in the need of satisfying the material life or for economic exchanges. Besides, different from the common "stripping cocoon and getting snag", the people of Bai Ku Yao will put the silkworms which are to spit silk on a flat board to get a piece of flat silk. We can say that flat silk is a typical symbol showing the anthropological significance in silk culture of Bao Ku Yao.Its appearance endows the local culture with unique characteristic. Based on the cognition from the early field research, the author of this paper attempt to disclose the anthropological information by perspecting the cultural system covering three aspects, namely material, system and spirit, constructed in the films by "re-field research" on the image text, and decode a series of symbol related to culture in this image text, than reveal the cultural value of these films in depth dimension.