On the 'Folklore Culturism' of Prof. Zhong Jingwen

‘Folklore Culturism', put forward by Prof. Zhong Jingwen in 1991, has an important significance. It can be viewed as a creative notion forming in the developmental process of his academic ideas in his last twenty years. The reasons that the ‘Folklore Culturism' comes about are composed of both the need to complement the shortage of disciplinary consciousness in the study area of folklore itself and that to bridge the gap between the study of traditional Chinese culture and that of folklore. It is his research in the two fields that helps Prof. Zhong advance a new interdiscipline. The ‘Folklore Culturism' is instructive not only in the study of folklore itself, but also in that of ‘folklore culturism', and even in the research of ethnical culture. As to the construction of folklore discipline, however, the concept of ‘folklore culturism' has an important significance in the methodology of cultural science.