Adults and adolescents who listen to them can project their own romantic passions into the characters’ portrayed feelings and invest their own motivations in the actors’ mutual involvements. By the time explanation, moralizing, and philosophizing are introduced—the weighty parts of the story—listeners will have empathized to such a degree with the lovers that their fate will be of the utmost concern. Listeners will therefore be psychologically pliable and thus intensely responsive to the lessons the story imparts. Pedagogy and psychology are working hand in hand here. Paradoxically, by being made into an instrument of instruction, love gains a greater importance in these tales than if it were merely the controlling theme of a light romance.

The significance of love for individuals as well as for Dai culture was vividly brought home to me when I visited the Yunnan Nationalities Villages outside Kunming in January 1997. This exposition affords virtually every ethnic group in the province the opportunity to display the motifs that define its culture. As I passed through the Dai exhibit, my eye was caught by a sign that read: “Dai Clan Amorous Feelings Exhibition.” In considering motifs that truly represented themselves and their culture, the Dai had selected love.

David Hicks, professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook has carried out field research in the East Indies and China. He has written and translated six books on anthropology and is working on a book on religion.