Institutionalizing Folk Literature: Anthologies, Journals, and Disciplinary Boundaries in Mainland China

A prominent study of the founding journals of Chinese folkloristics after 1949 argued that Zhong Jingwen’s definition of folk literature as the “oral creation of the laboring people” served both to establish political legitimacy and to exclude traditional Chinese opera (xiqu 戏曲) and professional storytelling (shuochang 说唱) from the discipline. Because that argument rested primarily on inaugural editorials, prefaces, and debates published in journals, it leaves open whether the same boundary-making operated through other forms of disciplinary production. This article addresses that question by shifting the corpus from journals to anthologies and adding a brief comparison with Taiwan, where the mainland’s political context did not directly apply. Examining the mainland’s Three Collections (Santao jicheng 三套集成) of folk stories, folk songs, and proverbs (1984–2009), the Ten Collections of Ethnic and Folk Literature and Arts (Shi tao minzu minjian wenyi jicheng zhishu 十套民族民间文艺集成志书; hereafter Ten Collections) project of which they formed a part, and, more briefly, Taiwan’s traditions of folklore anthologies alongside the Journal of Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore (Minsu quyi 民俗曲艺, founded in 1980), this article argues that anthologies preserved disciplinary boundaries more durably than journals, while different components of the same national projects relaxed those boundaries at different rates. These findings situate Chinese folkloristics within a broader historical pattern of drawing and redrawing disciplinary boundaries, in which expansive inquiry gives way to consolidation and exclusion, followed by renewed negotiation of the field’s scope, with the pace and durability of these shifts shaped by the institutional forms through which knowledge is organized and transmitted.