Research on the Epic Poet of "Manas"

Author: Adili Jumatudai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: The Epic of Manas is one of the largest and longest epic works among the numerous epics known in the world today. Epic texts recorded from famous Manas bards in the 20th century alone exceed hundreds of thousands of lines. It has long been passed down orally among the Kazakh people, continuously evolving and varying through the repeated performances of generations of epic singers—Manas bards. This evolution and variation undoubtedly occur within traditional constraints, in specific contexts and through the live interaction between the audience and the singer. The singing, creation, reception, dissemination, and text production of oral epic are all completed simultaneously, representing different aspects of the same event and process. This paper conducts a detailed investigation into this living oral epic tradition and its carrier—the Manas bardic singing activities. Through in-depth interviews and follow-up research on representative key figures, it explores and summarizes the patterns of singing and dissemination of the Epic of Manas in the information age, which still maintains its vibrant oral transmission characteristics. From the perspectives of ethnology, orality studies, and ethnopoetics, this paper aims to provide a new discussion space and reference point for the study of large-scale oral epic works in China, while also responding to the global wave of oral poetics research. The innovation of this paper primarily lies in its effort to break away from the academic convention of solely focusing on epic recorded texts and interpreting epics through them. Instead, it embeds oral epic within the living performance context, treats epic singing as part of folk activities, and examines oral epic singing as a comprehensive art form from the perspective of the interactive relationship between singers and audiences in the performance scene, as well as from the viewpoint of their joint participation in text creation. In other words, it places oral epic back into its original soil of survival and development, and examines the generation and strategies of oral epic texts from multiple and three-dimensional angles through the "performance-based creation" of singers. For the study of the Epic of Manas, this approach should possess certain cutting-edge and innovative qualities.