Documenting Living Oral Traditions: China’s Institute of Ethnic Literature as Case Study

Qubumo Bamo is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Literature (IEL) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), and she serves as Executive Director of the IEL Oral Traditions Research Center. She was born in the Great Cold Mountain region of Sichuan, China, as one of the Nuosu, a subgroup of the Yi people. She is the co-author (with Stevan Harrell and Ma Erzi) of Mountain Patterns: The Survival of Nuosu Culture in China (2000), among numerous other publications. Her forthcoming book, Verbal Dueling and Epic Performance, is based on a target field study carried out in her hometown. Bamo also acts as the deputy president of the China Folklore Society, as well as an architect and webmaster of the China Ethnic Literature Network and the China Folklore Network.

Gejin Chao (Chogjin in Mongolian) serves as the director of the Institute of Ethnic Literature (IEL) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, as the president of the China Ethnic Literature Society (CELS, since 2004), and as the president of the China Folklore Society (since 2010), among other major offices. He was born in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. He received his PhD in Folklore from Beijing Normal University. A literary critic focusing on modern Chinese literature as well as a folklorist working mainly on oral tradition (epic poetry in particular), he is the author of Kouchuan Shishi Shixue: Ranpile Jiangge’er Chengshi Jufa Yanjiu (2000; Oral Poetics of Oral Epic: Formulaic Diction of Arimpil’s Janggar Singing), and Qiannian Juechang Yingxiongge: Weilate Menggu Shishi Chuantong Tianye Sanji (2004; The Heroic Songs of the Past: Fieldnotes on the Oirat Mongolian Epic Tradition), and his essays and papers have appeared in a wide spectrum of journals in China and beyond.

John D. Niles is the Frederic G. Cassidy Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his publications, many of which deal with the earliest English literature, is Homo Narrans: The Poetics and Anthropology of Oral Literature (1999), a work that integrates research into medieval literature with research into contemporary singing and storytelling traditions, especially in Scotland. He has recently edited a special issue of Western Folklore titled “From Word to Print—and Beyond” (2013), on the problematic process whereby the words of oral performance are transmuted into readable texts.