ence: my personal experience gained from “travels” around the world and cultural knowledge derived from social anthropology and other scientific studies. Fei Xiaotong delineates two kinds of cultures: one foreign, i.e., outsider, and one native, i.e., grass roots. Both cultures might provide a helpful frame of reference for understanding one’s own culture.Our research primarily targets the popular grass roots culture of the minorities and farmers living in Western China. Hopefully through this kind of investigation, we can better understand the current situation prevailing among Western China’s people; at the same time, we could gain a deeper understanding of China’s culture and society as a whole.
We came to the Suojia villages of GuizhouProvince in the summer of 2005. Most of the villages’ able-bodied men were working elsewhere, so almost all the people we came into contact with were women, children, and the elderly.
We learned that the villagers protected by the Suojia Ecology Museum belong to a branch of the Qing Miao minority group called by the locals “the Long-Horn Miao” who live among the 12 walled villages in the six special regions of Zhijing County (织金县) and total about four thousand people. With no written language of their own, they pass down orally everything in their culture and history from generation to generation. Their long history of isolation means that their culture has been almost completely preserved and protected from the outside world. Theirs is a very rich intangible cultural heritage which accounts for the establishment of the EcologyMuseum.
The SuojiaEcologyMuseum is without borders; it consists of all 12 of the Long-Horn Miao’s walled villages. Its goal is to preserve the cultural heritage in its natural environment, including that of local residents, who carry on this traditional culture. Working to preserve this current lifestyle without any changes whatsoever enables outsiders to observe the traditional lives that no longer exist elsewhere. Such preservation is the objective of the “Original Ecological” cultural tradition.
Before the establishment of the EcologyMuseum, almost all the girls living there did not attend school. Women could neither read, nor speak Mandarin. Before the 1960s, the villagers, both men and women, were illiterate and unable to do basic mathematics. Instead, villagers used rope knots and carving on bamboo to record events. Even today, the elderly still use the twelve signs of the Chinese Zodiac to record important events, but they know neither the Lunar nor the Solar Calendar.
In the post-1960s era, the government established farming communities which required a record-keeping system in the form of work points – a requirement that forced the local people to start learning numbers. A Yi minority young man, who was a middle school graduate, came here to teach and established the first school that taught Chinese la