By Josef Gregory
Mahoney
IN Poya Village in Funing County, on the southern border of Yunnan Province, just a few kilometers north of China’s border with Viet Nam, two “successors” remain, both of the Zhuang minority—the last true singers of the “Poya songbook.”
“Mountain songs” like the Poya have long been popular in Yunnan. Whether sung by one or more, they’re a form of dialogue, typically between a man and woman, covering the pleasures and hardships of rural life, including the vicissitudes of love, longing and desire.
Reviving a legacy : But there are three things remarkable about the Poya. First, it only became known to a wider audience in 2006, when were still 20 singers alive who could sing the songs by heart. Now recognized formally as intangible cultural heritage (ICH), only two remain.
Second, while the lyrics belong to an oral tradition, researchers were shocked to find the Poya used a previously unknown form of proto-writing to reference the songs in local culture.
Third, while the 81 songs cover a wide range of topics, they are freely improvised with any melody or pitch to match the singer’s mood, and therein lies much of the art, but consist of 21 distinct tones. (Imagine the challenge of mastering the four tones of standard Chinese and then multiply it five times!)
China today is in the midst of a long-term, multi-year project to catalog and preserve ICH. Such efforts are happening worldwide, and many national and international organizations, like UNESCO, are supporting these kinds of efforts.
In China, this work overlaps with broader initiatives aimed at preserving, recovering and sometimes reimagining traditional Chinese cultural practices and values. On the one hand, the basic aims are clear: Preserve and recover if possible before forever lost.
On the other hand, there is also a desire to tap into heretofore neglected cultural resources, including lessons from the past that might help address contemporary challenges and, for better and worse, to commodify and capture with intellectual property rights when possible.
Furthermore, per the communiqué of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China Central Committee in October, Chinese leaders have called for further developing China’s cultural sector in order to promote better social etiquette and civility and to strengthen soft power in ways that reinforce the development of a modern socialist country.
All of these objectives are at work in the Funing County seat, where a touring group has been assembled and taught the Poya songs, and that has now traveled extensively domestically and internationally, with inevitable trade-offs.
The original versions were generally sung solo, or among women while working, with no special dress or performance. But a touring group requires costumes and choreographed dances. But the biggest difference is that the touring group only sings some of the songs—the more salacious are omitted—but more strikingly, those that remain have been reworked and limited to 10 tones.
Ten is still a remarkable number, and the spectacle is lovely, but even to the untrained ear, the incredible subtlety of the original versions is diminished.
One can describe the calming effect of rolling waves on a peaceful beach, or the same in the choral interludes of Bach’s Mass in B-minor, both correctives for the exhausted industrial spirit, and the same is true when those women sing in the village.
Of course, one must master and market what one can, and the traditional versions are both too difficult to learn and, aside from their inverse relationship, have little to do directly with the modernity the group’s singers hope to purchase through their cultural labors.
A way of thinking: Two very influential theorists of culture in modern times, the anthropologists Ward H. Goodenough and Clifford Geertz, argue that culture is quite different from what we often perceive it to be. According to Goodenough, “Culture is not a material phenomenon; it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions.
It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them.”
– The Daily Mail-
Beijing Review news exchange item
