The Myths And Legends Of Qiang People—From The Perspective Of Ethnic Identity And Historical Memory

Myths and legends are once considered as real oral narratives, those told the audience the root issues such as the origin of world, nature and human, who those people are and where are they come from. As historical memory, myths and legends have the function of encouraging the ethnic group cohesiveness, forming and keeping the ethnic identity. This thesis analyzes single myth text by the myth types of origin,flood, culture heroes and proposal with challenge, and also tries to compare with other ethnic groups’ myths to determine that Qiang people’s myth is a self-contained simple interpretation system, and finds the same or similar myth motif and motif functional sequence. Thus, we can conclude that modern Qiang people’s myths main source of ethnic group symbol and historical memory under the background that they sharing more similarity than individuality between the Southwestern ethnic groups. Because of discrepancy of the different texts between the surrounding ethnic groups, the Qiang people’s myth can maintain the ethnic group boundary and ethnic identity. The Qiang people’s legends, especially the history legends which contain the true or imagine historical memory that we can find function of constructing the identity of Qiang group and nationality via the intention and mentality behind them.