法國漢學家葛蘭言在其代表作《古代中國的節日與歌謠》中,將《詩經》與節日關聯起來,看到農業節日與農民生活的密切聯系,是他理解《詩經》的突破口,也成為他研究中國古代社會史的基礎。在不斷比對詩歌與《夏小正》《月令》等官方歷法過程中,葛蘭言發現了中國最古老文學中所隱含的古代物候歷法,進而嘗試解釋這種農事歷后來如何轉變為官方歷法,并且思考這種轉變背后的政治歷史原因。葛蘭言之所以能夠從古代文獻中得此嶄新的發現,應當得益于他的西方近代學術背景,尤其是19世紀末20世紀初新興的古典人類學、宗教學理論以及涂爾干的社會學時空說。

Marcel Granet related Shijing(Book of Songs)with festivals in his masterpiece Fêtes et chansons de la Chine ancienne.He observed the close relation between agricultural festivals and farmers’lives,which was the breakthrough of his interpretation of the Shijingand the basis of his study on the social history of ancient China.By continual comparison between poems and official calendars like the Xia Xiaozheng,the Yue Ling,Marcel Granet discovered ancient phenology implied in the most ancient literature of China.Then he tried to explain how agricultural calendars had been transformed to official calendars and thought about political historical factors behind this transformation.It was his West modern academic background,especially those emerged in late 19th and early 20th,like classical anthropology,theory of religion and the sociological space-time theory of Durkheim that enabled him to get new discovery from ancient literature.