FROM MYTHIC COGNITION TO AESTHETIC FORM: A STUDY OF DONGBA PAINTING

Abstract

Dongba paintings are not simply “folk” decorations but operative ritual images in the Naxi Dongba religion, used to guide action, instruction, and shared memory in ceremonial settings. Although their histories and media forms have been described, the concrete pathway through which mythic cognition organizes visual language and sustains ritual efficacy has not been articulated with sufficient analytical clarity. This study therefore aims to explain how mythic cognition shapes Dongba pictorial representation and to identify the recurrent visual traits that make these images workable in ritual practice, while offering a compact analytic that can support heritage communication and design-oriented interpretation. Using an aesthetic-anthropology approach, we examine a controlled corpus across five media categories—pictographs, wooden/plank paintings, cardboard/bamboo-pen works, scrolls, and scripture-page paintings—and interpret them in relation to three recurring ritual contexts (purification, funerary guidance, and agricultural invocation). Analysis is conducted with a shared codebook (form reduction; symmetry/axis; movement cues; compositional scaffolds; and color–material accents), supported by an intercoder check to stabilize category boundaries. Five traits recur across media and rites: ritual-driven non-intentional production, nature–human interpenetration, calibrated exaggeration that indexes hierarchy and potency, iconic concreteness that prioritizes legibility, and durable stylization formed through long-term ritual transmission. From these traits, the article derives a three-part design grammar—legibility rules, operativity rules, and sequencing rules—that accounts for how Dongba images remain readable and actionable across formats. Conceptually, the study treats mythic cognition as an operative driver linking visual form to ritual work, interpretable through symbolic-form analysis (Cassirer), mythic participation (Lévy-Bruhl), and structural relations in myth (Lévi-Strauss). This framing supports more context-sensitive safeguarding—especially the procedural coupling of medium, function, and layout—and offers practical guidance for exhibition, bilingual interpretation, and community co-design under shared constraints of readability and respect for sacral content.