Ildikó Bellér-Hann's Community Matters in Xinjiang 1880–1949: Towards a Historical Anthropology of the Uyghur discusses the condition of Uyghur society in Xinjiang from the late nineteenth century to 1949. This period is significant because it was at the beginning of this time that the Qing dynasty established Xinjiang Province, in a departure from the tradition of indirect rule since the middle of the eighteenth century. It was also the period that shaped the political framework that is directly linked to the present-day situation. While most previous works in this area have dealt with political history, a few short works, such as Gunnar Jarring's Culture Clash of Central Asia (1990), have focused on the cultural and social conditions of this remarkable era.Footnote ¹ However, for the most part, scholars have neglected this period's social and cultural matters, such as how traditional Islamic (Uyghur) society faced the dominant Chinese culture, instead choosing to focus on political history. In a newly released work, Ildikó Bellér-Hann addresses this gap in the literature with a study that looks at the subject from the perspective of “historical anthropology”, using a well-constructed theological framework. Here, I review Bellér-Hann's work from the standpoint of the study of history.

First, Bellér-Hann's study provides detailed and comprehensive descriptions of several topics related to the socio-economic situation and ethnography of the Uyghurs from the late nineteenth century to 1949. A look at the table of contents reveals the author's systematic approach to the life and customs of the Uyghurs, in which she tries to describe and analyse individual topics ranging from socio-economic structures to legal orders, life cycles, religions, and rituals. The descriptions are exhaustive – one could even say encyclopaedic – making them a wonderful practical reference for future studies.

The “encyclopaedic” value of this study relies on two factors: the use of a variety of reference materials, and its “historical anthropology” perspective. In addition to a number of European sources, the author also uses many indigenous sources, the most remarkable of which are the Turki (Chaghatay) manuscripts from the Jarring Collection at the Lund University Library, Sweden.Footnote ² These manuscripts, which are preserved under the provisional catalogue numbers (prov.) 207(I), 207(II), and 212, are collections of essays on the life and customs of Eastern Turkestan, written by the Uyghur intellectuals Muḥammad ʻAlī Dāmollā, Abūl Wahīd Akhūn, and Dr Nūr Luke. Considering her treatment of these manuscripts, one could even consider Bellér-Hann's work a primary source because it exhaustively includes almost all of the contents of these sources as “core texts” describing each “community matter” individually and in substantial detail.

The author constructs her arguments from the perspective of historical anthropology, which allows for the exposition of specific elements in society that are often neglected by historians. Most of the topics on which the author focuses are usually considered too difficult to be dealt with in the conventional methodology of academic history, though historians are aware of the importance of such an anthropological approach. For example, standard historical studies have never fully discussed the fundamental cultural representations of social relations, life-cycles, and rituals that Bellér-Hann describes here. The author's approach uncovers many unknown historical facts that will surely encourage readers to reconsider their historical constructions of this time and region.

In the paragraphs that follow, I look at the specific points of the work that I consider to be the most important. First, the third chapter's descriptions of the structure of Uyghur society and economy are well organized and helpful in understanding the present situation of this region. They reveal the series of dynamic changes that occurred in the province from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, including the growth of agriculture, population increase, the widening of economic activity, and the spread of Western culture. As the author points out, these concrete examples counter the common view that characterizes the pre-Socialist era “as traditional, monolithic, and unchanging”. Furthermore, the author methodologically highlights the relations between a variety of groups (for example, foreigners and locals, inter- and intra-ethnic boundaries), explaining the complicated multiplicity of social boundaries that are formed by the processes of exclusion and inclusion. Other historians have been aware of this multiplicity, but so far they have not sufficiently reflected this awareness in their practical reconstructions of history.Footnote ³

In the fourth chapter, the author discusses the tangled social order that prevailed under legal pluralism. Previous historians have explained how traditional Islamic law and Chinese imperial (later, modern Western) law coexisted in Xinjiang after the installation of the provincial system by the Qing dynasty. This dual legal system, which remained until the time of land reform and the abolishment of Islamic courts in the 1950s, was a strong influence in local Uyghur society. The author argues that, in addition to these two legal traditions, “indigenous notions of law and justice” also played an important role in society. To understand the actual situation of the legal order at that time, the author argues that one must consider not the legal duality, but the legal pluralism that was in effect. In recent years, Chinese and Japanese scholars, including myself, have engaged in socio-economic documentary studies to look at these issues.Footnote ⁴ The legal diversity suggested by the author should be addressed in these new socio-economic research fields as well.

The descriptions of religions and beliefs in the fifth chapter are also particularly valuable for reference. In the discourse of modern Xinjiang history, the inter-religious relationships between Muslims and non-Muslims occupy a large portion of the discussion. Nevertheless, many aspects of the rituals of Islam and other religions in Xinjiang are not well deconstructed. We must recognize that, in terms of religion, most of the existing historical discourses have stood on a very weak knowledge base. The author's descriptive approaches through the use of anthropological methodology present new visions of the lives of Muslims and people with indigenous beliefs. The representations of Islam shown in this work make it clear that indigenous rituals also made up a significant proportion of Muslims' beliefs.

Next, let us take a look at some disadvantages of this work. As I have shown above, the vision that Bellér-Hann presents is undoubtedly significant. However, the book is not free of problems. Most of these are small, and from the standpoint of anthropology easily disregarded, but these issues are of much greater significance to historians, and their presence leaves room for improvement in the work.

First, the author sets her timeline “from the late 19th century to 1949”, as clearly shown in the title. However, since her focus is on the condition of society and “community matters”, 1949 seems like a rather arbitrary date for a turning point, because the year merely marks a time of political change in the upper layers of society. In rural Xinjiang society, the so-called “Peaceful Liberation” led to the dismantlement of traditional social systems through measures such as land reform, the abolishment of the Islamic courts, and the radical transformation of documentary administration, but these events took place over the course of a couple of years in the 1950s. Granted, this study does not focus on issues related to this dismantlement, but 1949 seems like an inadequate end for the author's timeline in light of her focus on social issues.

Second, from a technical point of view, I appreciate the study's encyclopaedic exhaustiveness in its descriptions, as mentioned above. However, regrettably, the book's index is not satisfactory for accessing these small topics and accounts efficiently. At the very least, it would have been helpful if the author had included the terms listed in the glossary in the index as well. This problem does not fundamentally detract from the argument of the study, but it does unfortunately lessen the user-friendliness of this otherwise remarkable work.

In regard to the sources, though the author draws extensively on European and indigenous materials, the use of Chinese and Japanese sources is unfortunately limited. The inclusion of more extensive references would have greatly enriched the book's contents. For example, it is well known that descriptive works on the ethnography of the Xinjiang people, such as the Huijiang zhi 回疆志, were written in the Qing period, and that reports describing the results of the organized survey of the rural society taken during the land-reform process in the 1950s were published in the 1980s. Both of these sources could have been useful to the author's discussion.Footnote ⁵ There is also certain referential value in the series of works by Japanese scholars based on such Chinese materials.

Moreover, in terms of the author's practical procedure for the study, I was unable to dispel the impression that she did not construct her arguments using adequate source criticism (Quellenkritik). As is mentioned above, this study effectively utilizes the indigenous collection of “essays” from Lund, but each description tends to depend almost entirely on the source material itself, with little criticism of the context. It is my understanding that these essays were written, not by each author on their own initiative, but at the request of their infidel clients: Swedish missionaries. There is even a possibility that the clients specified the framework for the essays as well. Therefore, researchers should use the essays with special care, balancing them as much as possible against alternative materials.

Despite my minor criticisms, I strongly believe Bellér-Hann's book is indispensable as a work of academic research on this neglected subject. I expect the book will be referred to for many years to come as must-read text for understanding Xinjiang Uyghur society. One could view this work as an anthropologist's challenge to historians, and for historians such as myself, the challenge is both attractive and exciting. The specific historical images of the Xinjiang communities shown in this work are influential enough to encourage us to rewrite each particular history. From now on, historians will have to respond to the author's challenge in their works. As for anthropology, the author has herself stated that her own next step is to design new field-based research based on the results of this approach from the perspective of historical anthropology.