庆祝民族文学研究所成立三十周年贺信（国际）
July 10, 2010
To Director Dr. Chao Gejin and the Researchers, Colleagues, and Students of the IEL:
I would like to congratulate you heartily on three decades of incomparably important work on the minority oral traditions of China. Today is a truly special day, both an occasion to mark your contributions and accomplishments, but also an opportunity to look forward to many more decades of inspiring and innovative research.
Considering the vast number of traditions thriving throughout China, the existence of your institute provides a priceless service to everyone working on international oral traditions, whether those traditions be Asian, European, ancient, or modern. To speak personally, I have admired your scholars and publications for more than a decade, and today I enjoy the pleasure of reflecting on the IEL with the memory of our wide-ranging scholarly exchanges from last year still fresh in my mind.
During my time lecturing at the IEL, I witnessed the intelligence of your students firsthand and benefitted enormously from the probing questions put to me by your researchers and students. I also became acquainted with the IEL’s mission to record, preserve, and study the hundreds of living traditions still living amongst the minority groups you represent. It is no exaggeration to say, I assure you—as we move into the second decade of the 21st century—that there is no institution on earth better positioned to revolutionize and remake the study of oral tradition than the IEL.
It is also important to reflect on your achievements, and to savor them. Thirty years is a significant elapse of time for an academic institution, especially one devoted to oral epic, oral lyric, and other living genres. Please allow yourselves a moment to reflect upon all of the work that the IEL has accomplished thus far, and to honor the work accomplished by the scholars who came before you. Just as with the great old epic singers, so too do we, as scholars, belong to a tradition, a scholarly tradition, and we too stand on the shoulders of those who paved the way before us, who helped to make possible our successes. Today is a time to remember them, too.
In the years ahead, may each of you be a scholar and a pioneer, and may each of you bring your own interests and talents to bear on the rich traditions of the minorities of China. It is your opportunity now to fulfill the promise of the Institute and to lead the world in oral tradition research. The threefold plan articulated in the Institute’s mission statement, and your proven faithfulness to recording and archiving, are powerful tools for accomplishing your goals; I look forward to watching as you harness your methods and bring all of your human talents to bear on the material that you collect and study.
In closing, let me say that I very much look forward to your 50th anniversary, and hope that we will celebrate it too, at a time when two more decades of collaborations, exchanges, and mutual contributions will be behind us. The future is bright, as they say, and for the IEL, I would say that the future has never been brighter.
Congratulations!
With scholarly admiration and personal affection,
Aaron Tate
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