A Ritual View Of Communication Of The Party For Tujia Girls In Enshi

Minority festivals were once endowed with profound connotations on time and culture and played an important role in linking the life of minority groups. However, with the changes in the social structure, minority festivals, which are rooted in traditional society, gradually loose their actual functions to the current life, depart from minority people's production and life little by little, and eventually wither away. After the reform and opening up, under the pressure of economic development and with the the stimulation of consumer culture and the non-heritage census carried out throughout the nation, minority regional government, another main body apart from ethnic minority citizens, has realized the importance of minority festivals as a kind of cultural resource and started to build minority festivals by market logic "officially".In the "official" building process, as the market-orientation requires minority festivals should "deliver the most information to the most people at the fastest speed", government tends to deliver minority festivals through the transmission view of communication, that is to say "communication is a process during which a message can be disseminated and released in order to gain control over distance and human."This paper takes the party for Tujia girls in Enshi as an example. In order to make the minority festivals play a better role of "setting up a stage for culture and singing for the economy", municipal government in Enshi introduced this festival, which used to be deeply hidden in mountains with a small audience, to city in 1995, and built it as a "culture card", representing the city's minority culture in 2007.In the process of popularizing the "culture card", the municipal government used many ways to promote the external dissemination of relative information, ranging from holding a opening ceremony and news conferences, to integrating media resources, opening a official website, and organizing tourism promotion, etc. It has greatly increased the public awareness of the party for Tujia girls in Enshi, as well as brought about some economic benefits.However, while the festival reached the public from a small audience and converted from cultural advantages to economic ones, there was no full recognition and acceptance among local people. Compared with the great importance the government attached to it and the great efforts to build it, citizens' involvement in the festival was not active.What has led to the problems in the communication of minority festivals "officially" ? In the ritual view of communication, it derived from the transmission view of communication adopted by the government. The transmission view of communication, regards communication as "sending a message", "transmitting" and "delivering information to others", which puts too much emphasis on speed and efficiency in the transfer of information about minority festivals in space, so as to weaken the effect of minority festivals to link different minority ethnic groups.In the business-oriented communication of minority festivals, the goals of the government, local people and tourists are different. They share minority festivals in form, but don't have a common understanding of them. As a sociologist said, they just had consistent ideas.Therefore, when examining the problems of the communication of minority festivals, this paper is in no hurry to propose measures to solve them, but analyzes commonly existing problems in our current practice of minority festivals communication.The paper uses ritual view of communication to analyze the significance of minority festivals for contemporary ethnic minority populations and the regional government, starting from the role minority festivals play in people's lives and the status of different groups in the minority festival.It's hope that in the future communication of the minority festival, we will not blindly reject government's domination and addition of commercial elements, but find out a common aspiration that can connect different groups in the process of building minority festivals.Whether the common aspiration is about national culture or national economy, as long as it can be shared, ethnic festivals communication will go beyond the scope of information transmission to take on an ritual communication, and re-render it as a "sacred ceremony" metaphor.