Yi Kezhi
01 · Historical Records
The Kezhi debate has been current in the Liangshan Yi area of Sichuan to the present day and is most completely preserved in Meigu county.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Yi oral debate Kezhi is a verse oral literature performed on the spot by the debaters of host and guest at gatherings such as weddings, funerals and festivals, and is the most content-rich, most flexible in form and most intellectual, interesting, entertaining and competitive expression of Yi folk language art. According to documentary records the Kezhi debate song-ground system was already formed as early as the Qin and Han dynasties. The form of the Kezhi debate is that the debaters of the two sides chant poems or rhapsodies, refuting each other and discussing the past and the present, the winner often exhausting the words of a hundred schools and silencing the debate of the crowd. Its content is very rich, touching literature and art, history and philosophy, astronomy and geography, ethics, agronomy and medicine and custom and ritual. Its diction is chiefly in five- and seven-character lines, its means of expression flexible and varied, using much fu, bi and xing, its common rhetorical devices including metaphor, parallelism, elaboration, repetition, anadiplosis, zeugma and exaggeration.
Wedding Debate
One of the common gathering occasions of Kezhi debate.
Funeral Debate
One of the common gathering occasions of Kezhi debate.
The Fu, Bi and Xing Devices
The flexible and varied means of expression of Kezhi debate.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Kezhi debate takes the Liangshan Yi area of Sichuan as its main area of circulation and is most completely preserved in Meigu county; the debate takes place at gatherings such as weddings, funerals and festivals, performed on the spot by the debaters of host and guest.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
Kezhi debate is the concentrated embodiment of the traditional cultural knowledge of the Yi and has important value for studying the history of Yi social culture, thought, music, aesthetics, art and debate. With today's socio-economic development and the impact of foreign culture the marriage views and values of the Yi people have changed greatly, and the tradition of Yi Kezhi debate is rapidly dying out and urgently needs protection.
05 · Associated Representative Bearers
Representative bearers recorded under this item, organized by national nomination batch:
- Hailaireji 03-0800
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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