Jade Carving Craft And Folk Life

Folk craft is a special culture modality. It is matter shape and figure carrier of China folk culture. It is not only the production of folk culture, but also the content and composition of folk culture. Its value conception, belief conception and aesthetic conception have important influence upon producing, developing and inheriting of folk culture and become a culture rule.This paper takes jade carving in XiuYan Manchu Autonomy County of Liaoning Province as the individual case for study. Using the ways of literature and on-the-spot investigation and the visual angle of folklore, it tries to analyse the deep relation between the jade carving and folk life according to cultural ecological environment, people 's ideas about jade, custom of exploiting jade and folk life and jade caving and folk life. At the end it discusses the questions of protecting and developing the jade caving in XiuYan.The body part consists of exordium, four chapters and conclusion.The exordium mainly introduces the study background, the current research situation of this issue and research methods this paper used.Chapter One mainly introduces the general condition of XiuYan. It describes the cultural ecological environment of XiuYan according to natural environment, cultural environment and history. The purpose of this part is discussing the relation between natural ecological environmentand cultural ecological environment.Chapter Two discusses people's idea about jade in XiuYan. It analyses people's folk idea of jade according to people's collective memory of jade and subjects of jade carving. It can get three ideas. The first one is jade is the soul of virtue, kindness and moral integrity. The second one is jade is of great worth. The third one is jade culture cannot be divided from folk life. Chapter Three discusses the custom of exploiting jade and folk life. It describes the ballad, tale and sacrifice in relation to exploiting jade and makes exploiting jade have relation with life and belief.Chapter Four discusses the relation between jade carving and folk life. People regard the jade carving as a common thing in XiuYan, which can show the fact that jade culture has become deep-rooted ideas in the heart of people and jade carving cannot be divided from folk life. This part concretely analyses the relation between jade carving and life detail according to jade making, jade selling and jade inheriting.The conclusion part makes a summary and gets two final conclusions. The first is the development of jade carving cannot be separated from folk life. Jade carving will lose the base, power and culture space of performance without folk life. The second is many people pay attention to the jade carving in XiuYan because it is one of Intangible Cultural Heritage List. But we should pay more attention to thequestion that we not only can protect the jade carving but also can make jade carving develop quickly and harmoniously.