(Selected from (Carol Bliss’ Dissertation”The Capacity of Folk Song:To Reveal Complexities in Mosuo Culture”)
As I delved more deeply into the existing research, I realized that my proposed literature review was inadequately conceived and was not likely to yield the specific information I would need about changes affecting Mosuo education and culture. I spoke with my advisor about alternative methods. He and I agreed that my original interviewing strategy of asking direct questions about the songs and what they taught would be far less interesting than looking at the constituent parts of songs and looking at what the songs themselves revealed.
Following an Interest
Over the course of my research, I spoke with international scholars, chased obscure leads through the Internet, searched libraries, found obscure Chinese texts, and peered into Mosuo dabas pictograms. My search crossed three continents as I requested and received dissertations, texts, unfinished research notes, tracked down authors and followed every thread that might lead to information about Mosuo songs.
I interviewed students and music teachers, sat in classrooms taking notes on Chinese preschoolers as they learned American songs, observed American children learning Chinese folk songs, explored the possibilities of sending researchers into the field to remote villages around Lugu Lake armed with tape recorders. I sought solutions to my central research question involving global electronic technology and voice translation software. I encouraged my research assistant to learn videography.
I sent and received hundreds of emails on the subject of Mosuo songs and culture to Australia, to China, and to Madison, Wisconsin. I sent a willing colleague across town on a cold November day to search the Library of Congress Naxi manuscript collection. I began to learn some of the historical and anthropological distinctions between Naxi and Mosuo people. I prevailed upon research assistant Weng, now enrolled in graduate studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson, to make scores of phone calls to professors, scholars, and universities in China. One of our first solid leads was a photographer in Kunming, China who had spent several years in remote villages, documenting Mosuo rituals and traditions.
After several attempts and much cross-continental sleuthing, Weng and I found the contact for Lamu, the Mosuo scholar in Yunnan who collected these elusive folk songs. Over the course of several months, Weng attempted to reach Lamu. She finally requested and received a package from Lamu containing many of the Mosuo songs that he and his researchers had collected over the course of a ten-year period. In between Wengs five classes, two jobs, and associated research in media and womens studies, she found the time to translate 16 songs from Mandarin into English.
I studied Chinese characters, learned about translation problems, and was invited to participate in a conference on the difficulties of translation and literature in Chinese/American cultural interactions in conjunction with fellow graduate education students, and the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens. I learned about the history of translated texts and some of the challenges of redaction.
Through the help and prior research of Australian anthropologist Mathieu, I was able to find four Mosuo folk songs that had been translated into English. Over the course of my search for folk songs, I tracked many false leads. Weng and I found both a DVD and a CD of Mosuo folk songs but were disappointed to learn that these contained the adapted, fake songs created and marketed for tourists. Weng translated parts of a biography written in Mandarin by Mosuo folksinger Namu who had lived for a time in San Francisco.
During this same time frame Weng and I furiously applied for research grants to continue our next proposed series of site visits. I scoured the Internet and libraries to find funding and sources for graduate students working on Asian research, humanities projects, research involving folk art, and/or media research. Weng and I were in daily contact by email for more than a year, discussing strategies and possibilities for further research. Weng flew from Arizona to Claremont, read my dissertation proposal, as we sat together revising our methods. We seized upon and discarded countless suggestions for contacts, informants, and research methods in the remote villages of Yunnan Province.
Ultimately, I wrote three grant proposals to the Spencer Foundation, Avery China Adventures, and the Asian American Council. Weng quickly learned the art of proposal writing for American foundations and wrote a proposal to do a video documentary on Mosuo folk songs in media studies. I met with Chay Yew, director of the Asian Theater Workshop at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles hoping to gain insight into the connection between emotion and audience and in cross-cultural performance and communication. I met with my advisor, desperately, repeatedly.
I wrote a feature article for the Flame, the magazine of Claremont Graduate University on folk songs and the Mosuo women. I gave several formal and informal presentations to groups of people at gatherings, receptions, and universities including Claremont Graduate University. I painted pastoral scenes of the landscapes, hoping for intuitive inspiration. I enrolled in a beginning Chinese class at Citrus College.
Weng changed her masters program emphasis from Womens Studies to Media Studies so that she could become proficient in videography. She began to learn video camera techniques and media theory in preparation for the second stage of the field research we longed to do. She created two short films involving themes of culture and Chinese women, working late into the night to master complex technical editing techniques. I enrolled in a course in documentary video making at KPCC in Pasadena, California where I quickly discovered that my computer editing skills were woefully inadequate. Our goal was to return to Lugu Lake in the summer of 2004 and to develop a video documentary that would fully capture the sights, sounds, singing, melodies, and rich sense of shared community that we had discovered.
In the interim I continued my academic research, developing a dissertation proposal focusing on the power of folk song, community, and identity in the Mosuo culture. I studied the theories of emotion, semiotics, and learning. I wanted to understand all that lay behind this tradition of Mosuo folk song how it began, why it was so compelling, its truth, its beauty, how it had been practiced through time, the rituals surrounding it, the teachings embedded in these songs, and how they helped to connect people to such a unique and rich tradition.
My university is a doctoral-extensive, graduate-only institution, pioneering the concept of transdiciplinarity, defined as knowledge beyond disciplines. I began the process of trying to capture the profound and compelling nature of these folk songs in an academic context. I followed the lines of inquiry in academic research, touching on theories from many disciplines. These areas of inquiry ranged from anthropology, education, enthnography, musicology, cultural studies, womens studies, literature, mythology, religion, and the sacred arts.
In an attempt to understand the compelling nature of the phenomenon of the power of Mosuo folk songs, I explored the scholarship of Bruno Bettelheim (enchantment), Joseph Campbell (mythology), Wolfram Eberhard (Chinese folk tales), Marshall McLuhan (communication), Jane Yolen (folk stories), and many others. I attended countless lectures on Asian culture, Chinese folk song, and Chinese music. I met with women who had produced documentaries about music and community. I interrogated the producer of Amandala!, a film about freedom songs in South Africa, read the work of Chatwain, a historian who had researched the beliefs about and importance of song among Australian Aborigines. I reviewed films about Chinese music, listened to CDs from China, and talked to musicians, teachers, and producers about musical forms of expression and emotion. I spoke with musicologists about music traditions, melody and emotion. I explored the connections between black gospel music and community identity. I listened to hymns and conducted informal interviews about emotion and music with local choir directors. I spoke with ordinary people in faith-based communities about the connections they felt for music they had known since their childhood. I considered the power of hymns.
I waded through hundreds of web pages that touched on theories of education and emotion, learned about the evolution of government policies toward and attitudes about Chinas minority peoples. I began to steep myself in as much knowledge as possible about the minority peoples of Yunnan — the culture, history, habits, and values of these people. Lastly, I analyzed the text of the folk songs we had so laboriously acquired, searching for clues that might be revealed between the lines. I counted metaphors, analyzed word choices, correlated nouns, adjectives and vocal parts associated with gender, circled action verbs, and analyzed verses in an attempt to discern the significance of form and structure in Mosuo folk songs.
What appears in these pages is the result of my attempt to capture what is perhaps unknowable solely through academic research strategies. Though I have touched on many aspects of culture, education, communication, and song, a central question remains. Why are these folk songs so beautiful and what is their truth? Why is it that those unfamiliar songs sung in a foreign language, experienced for only a short time, originating in a culture thousands of miles away have caused both this American researcher and my Han Chinese research assistant to devote such a vast amount of time, resources and energy in the search for these universal truths revealed in song?
This study combines findings from the dissertation research of anthropologists Walsh and Mathieu, conversations with Mosuo folk song expert Lamu, and Blumenfields Fulbright research on Mosuo education in the face of modernity. It contains the theoretical scholarship of experts in communication, mythology, folklore, storytelling, and education such as Bettelheim, Campbell, Yolen, Ong, and Geertz. Because it is a story about heart, emotion, and change, it also contains interviews with teachers and students.
