Yi People's wisdom

The name of China's national intangible cultural heritage: Yi Kezhi

Applicant: Meigu County, Sichuan Province

Item No.: 562

Project No.: I-75

Time of publication: 2008 (second batch)

Category: Folk Literature

Region: Sichuan Province

Type: new item

Applicant: Meigu County, Sichuan Province

Protection unit: Meigu County Cultural Center

Brief introduction to Yi Kezhi

Applicant: Meigu County, Sichuan Province

Yi People's oral argumentation of Kezhi is a kind of poetic oral literature presented by the debaters of the host and the guest at weddings, funerals, festivals and other assembly places. It is the most abundant content, the most flexible form, the most knowledgeable, interesting, entertaining and competitive form of Yi People's folk language art. According to the literature, as early as the Qin and Han Dynasties, the Yi People's song field system of Kezhi debate had been formed.

The performance form of Kezhi argument is that the debaters of Party A and Party B talk and sing poems or Fu, refute each other, talk about the past and discuss the present, and the winner is often "poor in a hundred words, trapped in the debate". The debate of Kezhi has been handed down in Liangshan Yi area of Sichuan Province, especially in Meigu county. The content of Kezhi debate is very rich, involving literature and art, historical philosophy, astronomy and geography, ethics and morality, agronomy and medicine, customs and etiquette and other knowledge. Its speech is mainly composed of five and seven characters, and its expressive methods are flexible and diverse. Fu, Bi and Xing are often used. The common rhetorical devices include metaphor, parallelism, extravagance, repetition, thimble, adhesion and exaggeration.

Kezhi argumentation is the concentrated embodiment of Yi traditional cultural knowledge, which is of great value to the study of Yi social and cultural history, ideological history, music history, aesthetic history, art history and argumentation history. With the development of social economy and the impact of foreign culture, great changes have taken place in Yi People's views on marriage and values.