| Research Abstract |
An aim of this research is to establish a bibliographical data base, by applying the computerizing technique, of an enormous quantity of literature on Chinese National Minorities which has been published in China for one and a half decades after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, while another is to grasp the current trend of Chinese ethnographical investigation depending upon the data base. We have to give previous notice that on account of the restriction of time we were not able to help limiting the number of target Minorities to only three: the Miao, the Yao, and the She.
As the first step we developed particular software indispensable for the computer-process of kanji. Next, we tried to search out so exhaustively the literature concerned from several kinds of referential sources, including "The Annual Bibliography of Oriental Studies," (Kyoto : The Research Institute for Humanistic Studies, Kyoto University Press) , "The Collection of Reissued Articles from Chinese Periodic
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als," (Peking : Chinese People's University Press [monthly]) and so forth, that we have succeeded in extracting a total of 1,523 articles from such sources. The items are as follows : 766 for the Miao, 646 for the Yao, and lll for the She. Then we established a preliminary data base after inputting several bibliographical subject matters per article to the host computer. Eventually, we compiled, as the substantial product of this research project, an "Author/Keyword-Indexed Bibliogrphy of the Three Minorities" which makes it easy for the researcher to search for appropriate information about the literature concerned.
Based on a statistical analysis, we may point out following trend of Chinese ethnography 1) Generally speaking, contemporary Chinese ethnographers tend to take deep interest in the folklore, folksongs, myths, and legends of the Minorities. Furthermore, they show rather intense interest in the native languages, scripts, and beliefs, too. 2) On the contrary, they are, it seems, unconcerned with the problem of material culture, including the housing, clothing, food, and so forth. Less
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