History of Selling Wives

Author: Ye Liya
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-01-01
Features: The history of Chinese folk culture is the richest and most distinctive part of the history of traditional Chinese culture. Because it is close to the real lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary people, it possesses the nature of the roots of traditional Chinese culture. However, for many years, the subject consciousness of academic research in our country has not fully awakened, and there has been little attention paid to the folk cultural accumulation rooted in this national cultural foundation. Instead, there has been a tendency to focus excessively on the "upper" elite culture in history while often despising the "primitive and barbaric" folk culture of the "lower" strata, as if there were no "culture" in the rich humanistic layers accumulated in the "lower" strata. In fact, it is precisely these folk phenomena that mark the cultural roots of the people across generations that profoundly reflect some of the essential and undeniable aspects of ancient Chinese civilization. The book "History of Polygamy in China" written by Ms. Ye Liya is an excellent monograph that examines one aspect of the deep essence of ancient Chinese civilization through the ancient custom of polygamy. The author of "History of Polygamy in China," with a unique historical subject consciousness of the fate of Chinese women as a female folklorist, sharply captures the ancient and heavy folk topic of polygamy and conducts thorough and cross-cutting analysis and discussion, thereby revealing the essence of traditional folk culture reflected in Chinese marriage customs, female folk culture, or gender folk culture. This provides a powerful basis for the Chinese people to step into the new century and build a new modern civilization with vivid historical and cultural reflection.