The Soaring Soul: Personal Observations on Bird Totem Worship Customs of the Dong Ethnic Group in Southeast Guizhou China

Based on three years of sustained personal observations and extensive on-site interviews, this study is the first to investigate the bird totem worship customs of the Dong ethnic minority in southeast Guizhou, China. The Dong-inhabited regions of southeast Guizhou possess a long-standing tradition of bird totem worship, which has permeated every aspect of local people’s daily life, serving as a living museum where ancient bird totem worship continues to thrive in the present day. Through investigation and research, we can clearly perceive that bird totem worship here is no longer merely evidence of primitive thinking as previously discussed in academic circles, nor is it an endangered intangible cultural heritage. Instead, it represents emotional resonance with a more modern spirit and open-ended identity construction. Faced with the era of the internet and new media, they have broken free from the constraints of totem concepts and taboos, instead embracing creative totem will, totem activities, totem behaviors, and intelligent totems, thereby endowing totems with new belief content and forms of expression. They have transcended the preconceived concepts and fixed thinking about totems in academic discourse, making it an important vehicle for maintaining community relations, strengthening ethnic solidarity, inheriting ethnic culture, and continuing local civilization. Through the contemporary reconstruction of collective behavior, the traffic empowerment of internet short videos, and complex functional transformations, they have constructed a brand-new totem value system in the context of the internet and new media era, organizing a multi-dimensional, comprehensive social ecological view and civilizational value system. It is precisely through this continuous evolution, expansion, and activation in response to changing times that totems have acquired sustained vitality and creativity, providing a vivid case study for the contemporary transformation and creative development of ancient totemic beliefs. This is also the significant importance of field investigation—it enables us to gain entirely new value cognition and different theoretical perspectives from the living site of totem practices.