Folk Culture And The Interaction Of Etiquette And Customs In The Novel Qingqiang Of Jia Pingwa

As one of the most influential writers in contemporary literature,Jia Pingwa’s writing on folk culture embodies the logic of life and ethical values of ordinary people.The novel Qinqiang focuses on the daily life of the people in the ancient town of Deihua in Danfeng County,Shangluo,southern Shaanxi,using the rise and fall of the intangible cultural heritage of Qinqiang as a narrative thread,and the daily folk life of the people in Qingfeng Street as a narrative content to show the spirituality of the local people during a period of social change.Through the perspective of "ritual and custom interaction",the intertextual relationship between the real folk and the folk in the novel is examined in order to gain insight into the influence of folk culture on the writer’s literary creation and the reconstruction of local folk culture by Jia Pingwa’s personal narrative as a folklore elite.This work clarifies the concept of folk culture from the perspective of folk literature and folklore studies and distinguishes it from the concept of "folk culture" in the writers’ literary studies,arguing that folk culture is a historical concept that does not exist in opposition to official culture.Jia Pingwa,as a folklore elite,has a practical role to play in leading specific local folklore matters.The interaction between rites and customs,as the carrier and inner operating mechanism of folk culture,is manifested in the text of the novel Qinqiang on three levels: material,social and spiritual,while the interests of the subject determine,to a certain extent,the trajectory of the state’s rites and folk customs.In the intertextual construction of the novel’s text and the real folk,the folk culture in the novel’s text is restored to the folk culture presented in the field survey of the ancient town of Deihua in southern Shaanxi,and is corroborated on the levels of character archetypes,Qinqiang cultural symbols,and the landscape of the ancient town of Deihua,to clarify the ethnographic characteristics of the novel Qinqiang,and to attempt to use the paradigm of literary ethnography to bridge the study of writerly literature and folk culture.Behind Jia Pingwa’s writing on the two themes of "historical memory of villages" and "rural construction in the new era" in his hometown,there is an implicit sense of nostalgia and anxiety about the imbalance of the vernacular ethic under the impact of modernization.Jia Pingwa’s experience and sensitive nerve endings over the years have created a strong sense of risk,which has led him to focus on the construction of the countryside during the modernisation process.As a folklore elite his writing on folk culture is not the end of the vernacular narrative,but rather the writer’s active exploration of the path to rural construction in the new era.From Liang Shuming’s rural construction in the early days to Jia Pingwa’s concern for the countryside in the new era,it is clear that rituals and customs have an important influence in the construction of rural ethics.Exploring the interaction between folk culture and ritual and custom in the novel Qinqiang tries to provide a contribution to the construction of the countryside in China today.