By Chao Gejin

Background

Let me start by a brief introduction to Institute of Ethnic Literature (IEL) and its practices in international cooperation in recent decades.

The IEL was established in 1979 in Beijing. It is affiliated to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Its fundamental spectrum of research task ranges over following aspects: 1) The ancient and contemporary ethnic groups' literature, written and oral; 2) Theoretical concerns on issues of literary evolution; 3) Literary relations among various ethnic groups, comparative approaches; 4) Expressive cultures in combination with verbal art; 5) Literary criticism; 6) Collecting, recording, transcribing, translating and publishing written and oral literary works.

The IEL has been engaging in providing scientific reflections and analysis on the ethnic literature in China. For approaching this essential goal, the institute has brought together scholars with different ethnic background within China. With the collective efforts, the institute continues to publish ethnic literature periodical called Studies of Ethnic Literature, a textualizing/translating series on Tibetan epic King Gesar, and three research series, respectively dealing with 1) Chinese and international problems in epic studies; 2) literary history of Ethnic Groups; and 3) literary relations among ethnic groups.

Having faced the new era of globalization and localization, democratization and pluralization, IEL realizes that it is necessary to map out the future of our research work towards new perspectives in international co-operations. In responding to this awareness widely raised, IEL decided to promote its scholarship by strengthening basic researches, and in doing so to build up a systematic discourse that will orchestrate different ethnic-related studies in varied fields of social science. Since many disciplines have been involved in ethnic literature studies, such as Tibetan Studies, Mongolian Studies, Turkic Studies, Manchu Studies, Nakhi Studies, Yi Studies, Miao (Hmong) Studies, and so on--- they in some sense become internationalized disciplines. So far the institute has established academic linkages to institutions and scholars in many countries throughout the world.

In this cross-disciplinary context, the expertise of ethnic literature is an indispensable asset that can address issues of cultural production, equity, and inclusion in international cooperations in social sciences.

Multiform Practices

The Institute of Ethnic Literature has, for 22 years since its first inception, contributed much to the study of ethnic cultures in China through studying and researching the basics of social sciences, especially in areas of literature, folklore, anthropology, ethnology, history, culture, religion, and ideology. It has facilitated international and national academic interactions and cooperations, trained researchers, scholars, and students, published results of researches and other scholarly works, and made available necessary data and materials for researches and studies for all social scientists.

The following multiform practices we have accomplished in international co-operations:
1) Bilateral research cooperation-to conduct research work, to compose monographs together, to share same notions of certain academic interests and questions.
2) Joint publishing program-to edit and publish research results. Having shared the common interest and orientation to promote Sino-U.S. discourses in oral traditions, we launched a bilateral project at the very first step to introduce recent Northern American scholarship to Chinese readers, as well as to present Chinese researches on ethnic verbal art to English readers. In 2000, seven English papers recommended by Professor Foley were translated and published in Studies of Ethnic Literature, a quarterly journal founded in 1983, sponsored by the IEL to encourage study of oral and written literature of ethnic groups in China. As the counterpart issue, a 400-page-issue of Chinese ethnic oral tradition would come out very soon in the States. All the authors are from our institute, and the great majority comes from minority ethnic groups.
3) Joint field study-in the past decade or more, we have made a number of field trips to remote places in China, making joint investigations on literature, folklore, and culture in ethnic regions along with scholars from Japan, D.P.R. Korea, South Korea, Mongolia, the United States, Germany, Finland, Hungary, Russia, the Netherlands, and etc.
4) Training project-such as exchange of visiting scholars, participate in international training program like FFSS, Harvard-Yenching programs and the like.
5) International discourse--- by sponsoring bilateral and multilateral seminar, workshop and so on. Taking epic studies as an example, we have sponsored two international workshops on epic studies in Beijing in the past two years, inviting scholars from Europe and North America to join us, discussing both theoretical and practical questions.
6) Joint exhibition--- by organizing thematic exhibition on ethnic cultures, our scholars act as key curators participating in the whole process of exhibiting their native cultures in other countries, for instance, Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China, which successfully happened in the States in 2000.

With retrospections of such practices as above, I think, the keyword "international co-operation," invokes two concerns that lie at the heart of current IEL scholarship and its future development. The first is methodological, pointing to new ways of establishing efficient cooperations and enacting positive partnerships, moving toward a cross-disciplinary practice that highlights new models of cooperation over colonization, and engaged dialogue over monologue. The second is epistemological, referencing our understandings of the nature of knowledge, challenging us to reflect on different worlds of knowing and the ways that they're granted legitimacy. Together, these issues invite us to rethink not only our roles as creators, receivers, presenters, and partners in the production of culture and knowledge, but also some principal issues remains in our field.

Problematic Situation

We are fully aware that the international exchange play important role in pursuing our own scholarship. In particular, the international experience helps us in many ways to take following problems we've been encountering into well considerations:

1) At present, mechanisms for international exchange are often unconnected to each other, though the Internet makes large possibilities for researchers to contact each other. To open up the channels to know each other's research work, we found that so far most of our information about our foreign colleagues' works came to us by chance, rather than by regular information exchange. We obtain relevant information via traditional ways like bulletin and other periodical publications. The situation definitely restrains intercommunications within different academic communities.

2) Lack of funding. Financial issue always bottlenecked implementing international cooperations. Here goes a specific case: since China's proclamation for pushing forward 'Develop the West' campaign in the late 1990s, there has been a potentially cultural conflict taking place in western regions where inhabiting more than 30 ethnic groups. One aspect of the cultural conflicts is the deconstruction, decline, and disappearance of a wide variety of ethnic verbal arts, including epic, myth, epos, legend, folktale, ballad, lament, sacred song, proverbs, as well as many kinds of indigenous genres. Most of ethnic groups that have been struggling to maintain their own languages and oral traditions as their identity have experienced the greatest crush on cultural assimilation and traditional preservation in an environment of rapid modernization. We became aware of the emergency to call for international attentions to set up funds protecting endangered ethnic verbal art in China in responding to the claim for preserving and revitalizing world oral/intangible/non-material heritages by Unesco. Financial support would be greatly beneficial to the critical situation in China's west.

3) So far the international cooperation have mostly depended on personal initiatives on all sides involved, rather than institutionalized program. There is a strong interest among social scientists and humanitists working on relevant fields to overcome the current configurations of coincidental rather than planned participation. In China, one general result was that international contacts so far have mostly depended on personal initiatives on all sides involved. In cases where cooperation was "ordered from above" by academic or political institutions and organizations, participants often felt burdened by time-consuming procedures that, in their eyes, reduced efficiency.

4) Differences of cultures and academic traditions lead to some tangled problems in joint projects. For instance, in introducing each other's research results, we found it takes longer time than we expected to solve problems in editing monographs and translations. Confusion and misreading often repeatedly emerged from behind definitions of terms and words, or related to conceptions and perceptions. Within the academy, the conceptual stock-in-trade of folklorists--including such central ideas as "tradition," "culture," "text", "context", and "authenticity"--has recently been subjected to intense critical scrutiny. Folklorists are active participants in these debates, but are often insufficiently acknowledged by practitioners in related fields such as literary, cultural, ethnic, American, and women's studies. While folklore has contributed to these areas of study, and even helped give rise to some of them, they now threaten to eclipse our field. Finally, many administrators do not recognize the critical role of folklore theory and practice to the academy as a whole, and to the interdisciplinary exchange of cultural and humanistic inquiry.

5) The health of our discipline depends on appropriate education and training for young individuals who wish to function as professional scholars. We must recognize, however, the serious threat to the training of the young in institutions of higher learning in China. Rapid shifts in the structure of universities have weakened or dismantled some graduate programs, reducing their status, faculty positions, and funding. For instance, one of the results is a diminishing of the authority of folklore in the configurations of higher education, as well as an obstruction to the discipline's ability to produce the next generation of scholars. In CASS, several studying-abroad programs for young scholars already exist, but the mechanisms largely depend on the financial situation. At the same time, our graduate students barely gained grants to participate in international conferences, not mention to act a role in international cooperative projects. Not like in the U.S., the major research universities are financially well equipped to sponsor young scholars. Moreover, the AFS offers reduced admission fees for young scholars and funds special events (receptions, panels etc.) for graduate students at AFS annual meetings.

6) Collaboration in cooperation: Conflicts over the definition, ownership, and legitimization of knowledge all point to the need for new modes of cooperative partnering, where research and practice emerge as fully shared endeavors. Collaboration becomes the keyword here, pressing toward a model of shared voices, shared authority, and shared goals. Collaboration, of course, can take many forms. It can unfold with those who are our consultants; with those for whom we're asked to serve as consultants; with colleagues in other disciplines; with public, private, and community-based organizations; with others within our own discipline (for example, between academic and public folklorists). Models for such partnerships already exist. Artists, folklorists, and public agencies work together to protect natural resources vital to those artists' livelihood. Traditional healers, folklorists, and health workers negotiate public health policies. Schoolteachers work with folklorists and musicians to re-center curricula around local aesthetics. Folklorists and archaeologists explore the lifeways of past peoples. The key lies in collaborating from positions of equality, while struggling to recognize the biases and presumptions that have historically undermined such sharing.

New Perspectives

After this general overview of problems confront our colleagues, I'd like to turn to discussion about some solutions toward news perspective in modeling international co-operations and partnership in the development of ethnic-related social science research in China.

1) From bilateral to multilateral co-operations: While international cooperative research is frequently conducted on a bilateral basis, multilateral exchange still needs to be intensified; there is an increasing awareness of the possibilities and chances of multilateral research cooperation, which respectively, has already reached a mature stage. The next logical step is to supplement (and to further stimulate) such research activities by multilateral research cooperation. The need for multilateral cooperation is especially important for cross-national regions/ethnic groups with little attention and limited resources.
For instance, the striking fact about the epics along the Silk Roads, both the Desert Route and the Maritime Route, is that there are so many of them still alive, often almost unknown and undocumented, and certainly in danger of extinction. To approach this 'road of intercultural dialogue', we have to range out an extensive investigations mapping over the diverse epic traditions transmitted in various countries and ethnic groups, such as Mongolian epic, Tibetan epic, Turkish epic, Caucasian epic, Nordic epics (both Finnish-Karelian and Finno-Ugrian), Slavic oral epics, Kudaman epic in the Palawan Highlands in the Philippines, Indian epic, China northern/southern epics and so on so forth. Say the least, The Caucasian Nart epic has many owners - Adyghs, Ossetes, Chechens, Balkars, Ingushs and some peoples of Dagestan and Georgia. This scope of interest is too wide to be sufficiently covered by bilateral cooperations; it is absolutely necessary to require a multilateral effort, in particular as the areas where oral epic poetry still flourishes belong to the economically less privileged parts of the world. [The idea of launching studies on the epics to be found along the Silk Roads was born in France and Finland almost simultaneously in 1989-90, later gained supports from Unesco. However, it just simply organized an international workshop in 1993, hence still needs to further multilateral research with a large-scale.]

2) From individual to institutionalized co-operations: To my knowledge, in the United States, academic research is characterized by pluralism and decentralization. Researchers of Japanese Studies are mostly organized along disciplinary lines within their respective faculties. Universities usually establish cross-disciplinary Asia Centers or Japan Centers rather than area studies departments. The first Japan Center in the U.S. was established 50 years ago at The University of Michigan but now most quality universities have some kind of Japanese studies program. Research projects are most often organized by individual scholars and draw on a wide variety of financial sources, and most book publication is similarly uncoordinated and individualistic.
Scholars agreed that the most crucial factor for successful international research cooperation is personal interest in a project which, as a driving force, ensures the necessary commitment for the actual work related with building up and maintaining such contacts and networks.

One way to create new research contacts is through institutionalized cooperation, for example through an exchange of visiting scholars. However, such cooperation is often restricted through requirements from funding bodies. The German Academic Exchange (DAAD), for example, offers exchange programs for scholars, but requires that these exchanges must be based on formal partnerships between the participating institutions. Such restrictions might impede exchange activities of smaller institutions, which do not have sufficient human and other resources to administer such institutionalized long-term partnerships. Several universities already exchange scholars and students on a regular basis. For example, Sheffield University has grants for visiting students, and at Munich University there is a one-sided staff exchange with scholars from Kyushu University coming to Munich. Despite such limits, scholars expressed their hope that these exchange programs will be expanded beyond the current bilateral scope and will become starting points for multilateral scholarly exchange and research projects.

3) Paying more attention to periphery developing countries: We should seek participation by some periphery, developing countries historically underrepresented in our disciplines. Let me take Vietnam as a case concerned with how to expand international co-operation: due to some historical conditions, we didn't make contact with Vietnamese Academy of humanities until this summer, and found there is a potential dynamic to carry out a long-term comparative studies between China southern epic traditions and Vietnamese epic legacy, thus broadening the comparative focus will, however, provide valuable insights for all research communities. Therefore, it will increase mutual understanding of existing structures in social science research on Vietnam. In the long run, such perspective can provide a basis for integrated research cooperation with those developing countries we ignored for years.

4) Making good use of the Internet: To address issues of the digital future, the IEL has entered into cooperative agreements with the Network Center of CASS and is looking toward the most effective way to disseminate the work of its staff members. Now we are also trying to improve international exchange by expanding our website in English version, make our programs, intention of international research cooperation, our pressing needs and common interests better known internationally.
a) to establish a network of scholars working on oral traditions in China; to initiate an exchange of information on activities and projects; and to organize conferences and symposia, as well as festivals with singers and field trips.
b) to set up a "meta-website" offering links to ethnic-related sites and information about funding possibilities.
c) to enhance the visibility of west-east researchers, English abstracts of journal articles and monographs will be published on the IEL website.
d) to pursue the further plan to organize an international online workshop or BBS for ethnic-related social scientists preferably before 2003 September.

5) Special support for young scholars: As Mao Zedong said: "The young generation is just like the rising sun at 8~ 9 o'clock in the morning." IEL is committed to the support of graduate programs in ethnic literature studies and to positioning international cooperation as a critical 'classroom' for the young generation in the new millennium. It is a strategizing way to build bridges between generations across disciplines and departments, thereby strengthening not only the position of ethnic-related studies, but the academy at large. One line of support is to enable young scholars to participate in major (international) workshops and conferences, the second line is to foster networks through graduate student seminars or workshops etc. The IEL Academic Council will manage to fund annual 2-3 day workshop or seminars for Ph.D. candidates from different fields, or to offers opportunities to enable students to participate in international activities. Graduate student workshops are helpful for young scholars since they help to establish networks and provide a forum for discussing dissertation research. Some young scholars in our field proposed to consider opening the BBS online to enhance international exchange between young scholars.

6) China is a particularly appropriate site for discussing collaboration in international cooperations: The authoritative voices of native communities have encouraged a history of partnering, yielding joint projects in a host of disciplines. We will be encouraging educators, cultural preservationists, oral historians, arts administrators, community scholars, and other partners in collaborative ventures to attend the meeting, and to offer their perspectives on the conference theme. By so doing, we hope to encourage conversations that extend well beyond the standard scholar-to-audience format. Given that many of the issues being addressed in China ethnic cultural programs parallel those in other countries, for example, the living epic traditions should be particularly relevant to international scholars of verbal art. As Prof. Foley indicates:

This is precisely the place where colleagues in China, with its great richness of living oral traditions among minority populations, can assume leadership. Chinese colleagues are in a position to do what no one else in the world can do: to experience, record, and study oral traditions of remarkable diversity on an unmatched scale. If in the coming years the Oral Theory can be tested across the enormous variety of traditions found in multi-ethnic China, the scholarly world will benefit significantly.
------ Dr. John Mils Foley, Professor of oral tradition and Homeric epic.
University of Missouri, Columbia, USA

7) To advocate claims for compiling a reference book with internationalized standard for defining a basic set of words and terms we use everyday, we think with them, we rest our scholarship on them, we teach with them. In doing so to overcome some obstacles in international discourses. We have had good example set forth by AFS, a special issue of Journal of American Folklore entitled Common Grounds: Keywords for the Study of expressive Culture.
After examining the situation of social science research on ethnic-related disciplines in the respective countries and discussing the current state of international research networks, we do feel it is a key stage to open new ways to promote international cooperation.

A Practicable Strategy of the IEL

A positive response to these challenges can result in a more firm foundation for international cooperation. As decisive factors for success (or failure) of international cooperation, our colleagues identified:
sufficient funding
a suitable core topic
personal commitment and related activities
Institutional governance and management

As an action step, I here propose a strategic plan regarding how international research cooperation can be intensified in the future:

IEL has been steadily expanding areas of interest and research activities that beyond literature. The institute already has set up two research centers to disseminate information and researches on Shamanic culture and ethnic women literature in China, besides an important nationwide society of Ethnic literature.

In a next substantive plan for approaching our near future goals to promote verbal art, IEL intends to build a Center for oral traditions by bringing together the already existing research institutions on different fields of social science. Its objectives aim at:

a) To encourage governments, regional organizations and local communities to set up partnerships in order to identify, preserve and promote oral traditions.
b) To situate field studies of the oral and intangible heritage of ethnic groups framing to an long-term, in-depth international cooperation.
c) To stimulate participation of individuals, groups, institutions and communities involved in the management, preservation, protection and promotion of the oral heritage.

Centering on the Institute, different institutions affiliated with universities, colleges and other organizations in and out of China will be more than welcome to be in our partnership. On our current agenda, such as Center for Folklore Culture of Central University of Nationalities, Center for Folk Culture of Beijing Normal University, Center for Studies of Oral Traditions of University of Missouri, and Institute of Humanities of the Ohio State University would come to an agreement to founding a multilateral partnership in near future.

The Center will systemize and orchestrate different researches carried out by those separate institutes. In doing so, we hope to widen the scope and deepen the content of researches and studies in oral tradition studies; researchers and students of oral traditions can actively and substantially exchange and share information and ideas in fields of study represented by the involved institutions, carry out long-term and in-depth research projects co-operated by two or more of the involved institutions, train and inform themselves in different directions of oral traditions with a complete data base system. To substantiate and better develop the important role of the Center, we are currently reconstructing IEL website in making a data base system, providing multi-media archiving services for scholars and student of related disciplines, publishing journals and research results at regular basis, establishing a network system of research centers, and facilitating international cooperation in oral tradition studies and researches.

The center will also emphasize partnership and collaboration in the production of knowledge, between insider and outsider, between the Native and scholar, between here and there. Our organizers are encouraged to include community scholars, tradition bearers, and colleagues from other disciplines as equal participants. Through such mutual engagement, we will create new ways of working with communities studied by folklorists and extend intersections with related disciplines.

Along this direction, we will embrace scholars and students examine oral traditions from various perspectives. Obviously, no single institution could adequately cover the extensive range of traditional expressive arts observed in the diverse cultures of a country as huge and complex as China, anyhow, some important genres like epic, myth, sacred songs, incantation epos concerning Tibetan, Mongolian, Kirghiz, Manchu, Nahxi, Yi, Miao, and Dong peoples are extensively explored by my colleagues. We are aware that these efforts revealed, in some sense, a general situation of diversity, multiformity, and complexity of oral traditions in China. We are also aware, without a doubt, that the present scholarship merely provides a close-up picture, illuminating Chinese current scholarship discussing oral traditions of ethnic groups in China.

We are confident that the international scholarship in oral tradition has a promising future, one impetus is: the worldwide interests in Oral Tradition studies, has been keen on broadening our vision to other culture, and sharpening our sense to rebuild the rules of verbal art. We hope this undertaking plan will work out and reach into a new stage of our discipline toward dialogue and exchange with others who seek to better understand the expressive culture of human beings, in particular, through the discourses in exploring into the roots of expressive cultures of human beings.

Last but not least, let me take this good opportunity to invite all those institutions and colleagues devoting to exploring verbal art and expressive cultures to join us.

Thank you all!

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