부산대학교 도서관

Clothes have not only a practical use for protecting human body but also a magical meaning. Cultural anthropologists have assumed that the origin of clothing was ligature and its purpose is to bind flippable soul from the master's body to the flesh. Because clothes directly rub against human skin, they are regarded to hold the master's features. This phenomenon can be confirmed with the homeopathic magic. On that account, the minority race in southwestern China has used clothes when having one's fortune told or laying departed souls(ghosts). Since Baikuyaos has lived an isolated lives only by themselves due to the historical reason, their clothes haven't been influenced much in clothing by the external civilization. There has been, historically, only one kind of clothing, which has the history and culture of Baikuyaos. They have considered clothes as things presented to them by God, so they still think the clothes sacred and worship them as God's clothing. Clothes are made in a holy season, kept clean, and not given to others. Clothes have two major functions; symbolic and repulsive function. Some kinds of historical symbols on clothes mean the symbolic function, and other symbolic signs related with a sword, clothes of fowls' features, and fowls are associated with the repulsive function. In the Baikuyao's society, fowls have been regarded as the ‘Solar Bird’ because people believed they called out the sun in the beginning of the world. They were also used as devination forecasting God's will, a cosmo-tree(a rod used by a shaman) presented by God, ceremony to lay ghosts, and guide for the souls of the dead. Without any developed medical science, souls were easily left from their bodies, which people thought was caused by ghosts. At the time of darkness from two to three o'clock in the morning, people thought they might have often seen ghosts and needed to call the sun out in order to kick them out. Accordingly, they made trousers in white which is the color of the sun and clothes in fowls' shapes with its printing in order to prevent harms from ghosts. That's why fowls are the solar birds. It happened in the New Stone Age that fowls considered as the solar birds were used as a repulsive function. We can find its clues and proofs in the culture of Dawenkou, Hemudu, and Liangzhu in China.