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Marxism holds that the internal essence of culture lies in the inherent identity of culture and man, and in the spiritual essence of man and that there would be no culture without man and man’s spirit. From the perspective of the source of culture, it is man’s transcendence over nature. From the point of view of the process of its evolution, it is the sum of all human social relationships. Culture has the characteristics of man’s sociality and is shared by an entire cultural community. The essential complexity of culture is the logical expression of human thinking, and the logic reflection of cultural practice. Cultural practice, i.e., human practice, is influenced and constrained not only by external practice, but also by the consciousness of man himself. Such two-way internal and external effects determine the particular law and logic of culture itself in its development, i.e., the dialectical unity between decisiveness and selectivity, and between nationality and cosmopolitanness, in the development of culture; the dialectical unity between the consistency of basic trends in terms of the law of cultural development and the diversity of choices of paths; and the dialectical unity between diversity and unity concerning paths for the development of culture.

This article discusses the value system, research paradigm of transformation and development, concepts and routes of modernization of academic libraries, as well as our attitudes to the transformation of academic libraries modernization in the context of the new era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Myth and legend—a kind of oral culture—are not only considered part of religious beliefs and rituals but are also connected to social memory and ethnic history. This article reviews Academician Yih-Yuan Li’s studies of myth and legend in different academic periods from the 1950s to the 1990s. The objective of the article is to underscore the ways in which Li developed interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks and research methods to analyze the versatile contexts of myth and legend as supernatural beliefs. This article begins with the review of his ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan’s Austronesian groups, and discusses his cross-cultural comparative perspectives in this research. It also examines his interdisciplinary approach in the 1960s to study the value systems of myth and legend by taking views and concepts from the disciplines of both psychology and anthropology, as well as his application of structural anthropological theory in the study of “legend and ritual” in the 1980- 90s. Through selecting Li’s representative works and doing close textual analyses of them, this article suggests that cross-cultural comparative study and interdisciplinary perspectives were important academic thoughts demonstrated explicitly in Li’s work. His research on myth and legend, I further argue, was the initial step in his academic career where he adopted psychological theories in doing anthropological research. In the trajectory of his career, the subjects of his research shifted from Taiwan’s Austronesian peoples to Han societies. More broadly, such change exemplifies the transformations of the research topics in the discipline of Anthropology in Taiwan over time, starting from Austronesian study to Han study to the study of overseas Chinese societies. Within this background, this article specifically reviews and discusses three different stages of Li’s research: “Myth/legend as ethnic history and social memory,” “Myth/legend as value system,” and “Myth/legend as structural rule of the human mind.” What is shown in his research is the connection of meanings of the past and the present as well as the intersection of the sacred and the secular. Also, his research shows the changes in anthropological approaches to the study of oral culture, as well as the methods and theoretical frameworks he used under the political, social and cultural transformations of oral culture. Tracing the academic contexts within which Li developed his thoughts and methods, this article shows some of the important ways in which his work inspired Taiwan Anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Socialist core value system takes root in the Chinese traditional culture solid. Exploring its traditional cultural foundation plays a significant role in appreciating the rich connotation of Socialist core value system, consolidating Marxist leading position, keeping on the Socialist road with Chinese characteristics and constructing Socialist harmonious society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]