The death road and the soul calling in Zilu-jing, or Sutra of indicating route, of the Yi in China : A study on the discourse of ancestral migration route with special reference to its relations with ethnic identity making

The Yi people in China conduct a magnificent funeral for the dead in which the Bi-mo, or the priest, recites Zilu-jing. Throughthis supra they see off the soul back along the believed ancestral migration route to Zizipow, their place of origin. The teaching ofZilu-jing is essentially to guide the souls of the dead, but at the same time it induces the spirits of the living people attending thefuneral too to escort the souls of the dead to their place of origin, where the spirits of the living people part from the souls of thedead and then are brought back to their place of living Through this experience the people of the Yi vividly learn their ethnicmigration history by retrieving their ancestors migration route recalled in Zilu-jin.All the versions of Zilu-jing handed down invarious places refer to Zizipow, Apudumu the Founder, and the ethnic migration route of the six ancestors.It means that the con-tents of Zilu-jing constitute a very significant part in making the ethnic identity of the Yi, though they have been dispersed to dateand thus formed no durable unified government

Nitrogen chemical structure in DNA and related molecules by X-ray absorption spectroscopy

The electronic environment of nitrogen in nucleic acid bases, nucleotides, polynucleotides and DNA has been studied, for the first time using X-Ray Absorption Near-Edge Spectroscopy (XANES). Generally, the spectra of these complex molecules consist of low energy bands corresponding to ls ~rr* transitions and high energy bands corresponding to ls ~tr* transition, as illustrated using several nitrogen model compounds. The ls--,~-* transitions show particular sensitivity to the chemical environment of the nitrogen. Oxygen substitution on ring carbon atoms generally results in a significant blue shift of the lowest Is ~ ~* bands while halogen substitution results in a small blue shift. These observations illustrate the significance of the disturbance of the aromatic ring system produced by exocyclic carbonyl groups. Direct substitution on the nitrogen frequently results in significant spectral perturbations. Differences between the spectra of the polynucleotides and the sums of spectra of the individual nucleotides point to the effects of hydrogen-bonding in complementary double-helix structures. The XANES spectrum of a DNA sample with a known ratio of the polynucleotides is equivalent to the weighted sum of the spectra of individual polynucleotides, indicating that the difference in base stacking interactions produces negligible spectral effects. The variability of nitrogen K-edge spectra in these samples and in protein may be useful for chemically specific imaging using X-ray microscopes