哈尼神话中的原始历史时间观

The Primitive Sense of Historical Time Reflected in Hani Mythology

神话包含着人类最早的历史思维,而在这种历史思维中又包含着人类最早的时间观念。作为人类最初的历史时间观念,它并未引起学界足够的重视。通过考察哈尼神话,进而考察哈尼先民因生存需要而保存的记忆可知,他们在建构神话式的叙事时,遇到了神的永恒时间与人的短暂时间之间的冲突。为了解决这一悖论,促使他们进行对时间流的思考。在思考中,他们发现人的生命与自然万物一样具有周期性,于是将自然时间与人的生存时间结合在一起,建构出人类最早的历史时间观念。它表现出三个特征:一是时间与空间的统一;二是联系性与因果性的叙事逻辑;三是连续性与断裂性的统一。由此可见,原始的与现代的历史时间观之间并非泾渭分明,在前述三个特征上是相同的,不同的是现代的观念在时间与空间上更加精确化与客观化。

Mythology contains the earliest thinking of history in human society,and the latter also contains the earliest sense of time.Yet scholars have not paid enough attention to the historical sense of time in early human society.In analyzing Hani mythology,this paper has found that,to preserve memories for the sake of survival,the early ancestors of the Hani people must confront the paradox between gods’eternal time and human beings’ephemeral time in constructing their mythological narrative of events.To reconcile this tension,they had explored the nature of time flow.In this process,they discovered that human being shared the same periodic state of life cycle as the natural world did.So they constructed the notion of historical time by combining the natural time and the human time.The notion presents three features which are the unity of time and space,the narrative logic of connectivity and causality,and the integration of succession and rupture.As such,the notion of historical time has not changed too much since the primitive society except for the fact that modern society has set up standardized and objective ways to measure time and space.