While
I am by training a social scientist, I know I interpreted what I was
looking for. I cannot speak for those who went before me. What I
found is of great interest to me, and hopefully stimulating to others.
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| Lake Lugo outside door of Na temple |
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| I confess I saw a clue in Gao Feng's Naxi Genesis to how people with no word for father or husband, like the Na, became people writing state records of male heads of household, like the Naxi.
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| Naxi sex education? |
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when He Ti, whom Professor Guo had sent to translate between Gao Feng
and me, told me, "Mr. Gao says that is how Naxi people learned how to
reproduce" pointing to the drawing numbered 47 in the book, Bat hid under the turquoise rafter and Dog behind the door, I
thought, "Aha, that links to my interpretation about Jacob's discovery
of the technology of reproductivity in the Hebrew Genesis tale. (see p 9 of this paper)
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| when weren't women allowed to stride over men |
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As artist, one may do what one is not permitted to do as scientist: embrace the divine intervention of poetic editions and deletions in the transmission of the Naxi origin myth from one teller to transcriber to translater to interpreter. me. Then one may define a myth as a poetic hypothesis, an acceptable concept to oneself as scientist.
I hope someone who hears Hu's
presentation of this paper will be stimulated to more systematic
scientific investigation of the poetic hypothesis deduced from Gao
Feng's artistic presentation of the Naxi myth and Professor Cai Hua's
anthropological research on the Na. See mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/author/default.asp?aid=5037
For the present, please just allow me to suggest that the Naxi and the Na (known to many as the Muso
people) once shared a matri-local, matri-lineal pre literate,
subsistence culture in which as Cai noted, there was no word for
husband or father; and that Worship Heaven is the poetic
hypothesis passed on -- with significant editions and deletions -- to
us, about the Naxi migration away from their heavenly [romanticized
subsistence] home with the Na, and and their evolution or assimilation
into a class society; which resolved proto-class conflict between matri
clans by patrilineage, laws (enforcing patrimony), and writing (for
the record, biological or not)
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