When I began studying the Uyghurs of Central Asia and China in the early 1990s, I was consistently discouraged by the lack of contemporary ethnographic studies of this group. Although some anthropologists were starting to publish books and articles on the Uyghur people, most studies then lacked ethnographic data, the rich descriptive accounts of everyday life in communities drawn from “participant observation.”
There were several reasons for the paucity of data. First, both China and Central Asia had only recently opened to the world, and Western researchers had only begun to conduct ethnographic research for the first time since the 1930s. Second, there were virtually no baseline ethnographic studies of Uyghurs informed by American and European schools of anthropology on which new research could build. Furthermore, while participant observation became possible in the former Soviet states of Central Asia by 1992, the Chinese state remained sensitive to the idea of allowing foreigners to live among local populations, especially in more rural environments and particularly among restless minorities such as the Uyghurs.
Given these constraints on research, the largely political nature of existing Western literature on the Uyghurs, and the evident tensions between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in China, most studies published by social scientists in the United States and Europe during the 1990s focused on issues of ethnicity, nationalism, and state–minority relations. In essence, the politics of identity became what Arjun Appadurai calls a “gate-keeping concept” for the study of the Uyghurs—a concept that dominates the anthropological discourse on a given people and limits the production of diverse ethnographic knowledge about them.
Two recently published books, however, may mark a paradigm shift in the ethnographic study of the Uyghur people by taking a decidedly different view of this “gate-keeping” concept of Uyghur identity politics. These two monographs, by Ildiko Beller-Hann and Jay Dautcher, respectively, also provide a healthy serving of the “ethnographic data” about Uyghur daily life that most previous studies have lacked. As such, they will be important reference books for a new generation of anthropologists hoping to study the Uyghur people, and they will help inform the direction of future research.
While both books acknowledge the dominance of a discourse of identity politics in the study of the Uyghur people to date, neither work shuns the question of identity entirely. Instead, they stress the primacy of social practices in local communities for the production of identity, thus problematizing simple assertions about Uyghur nationalism. Although my own work has provided a similar perspective on the nexus of social activities in Uyghur communities with group identity in the context of neighboring Kazakhstan, the work of Beller-Hann and Dautcher may be the first to make this assertion about the vast majority of Uyghurs, who live in the northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. While both scholars' primary thesis is that community affairs are critical to understanding what it means to be a Uyghur, the data they use to make their separate cases differ substantially.
Beller-Hann's Community Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–1949 bills itself as a “historical anthropology of the Uyghur” and draws extensively from a wide spectrum of historical sources ranging from the travelogues of European travelers, diplomats, and missionaries to the recorded folklore of Uyghurs themselves. In this sense, her book is reminiscent of a certain genre of Soviet ethnography that utilized similar sources to reconstruct the lives of Soviet ethnic groups as experienced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Soviet ethnographers likely favored such research in order to avoid the political quagmire of discussing postrevolutionary culture (and hence being forced to comment on the relative success or failure of Soviet social engineering policies). While Beller-Hann is not hindered by these political concerns, she similarly frames her study as being about Uyghur life in Xinjiang prior to the Chinese revolution, which, in her words, “represented a watershed in the sense that, for the first time, a strong centralizing state began a dramatic, unprecedented intrusion into the daily lives of local people” (p. 424). In doing so, she runs the risk of reinforcing the official Chinese state narrative about Uyghur culture as being divided into “traditional” and “modern” manifestations separated neatly by the 1949 commencement of Communist rule in Xinjiang. To her credit, however, the author acknowledges this potential critique and suggests that the impact of “modernism” on the Uyghurs began before 1949 and that many “traditional” practices continue to exist in the region today, some sixty years after the revolution (p. 56).
The author covers numerous aspects of Uyghur daily life ranging from the social and economic organization of society to religious observances. The early chapters, while consolidating critical information about the sociopolitical, economic, and ethnic relations in Xinjiang, do not offer many perspectives on these subjects that are not already covered in the existing works of social historians. Instead, it is the book's last two chapters (which compose half of the book) on “life cycle” and “religion” that offer us the most penetrating insights and new perspectives on the lives of Uyghurs in their local milieu. In these two chapters, the author demonstrates a mastery of her sources and brings the voices of Uyghurs to the forefront of the text through the use of indigenous manuscripts and recorded folklore. The result is a wealth of ethnographic data on Uyghur social practices, which clearly demonstrates the power of local communities as creative and self-regulating actors in the region's history.
Despite her disavowal of chronicling a static “Uyghur culture,” the author often replicates the authoritative “ethnographic present” style of writing typical of many American and European anthropological texts from the first half of the twentieth century. This may be unavoidable given the task that Beller-Hann wished to accomplish, and, while future studies may challenge some of her authoritative interpretations of the past activities of Uyghur communities, the book offers a much-needed comprehensive historical study of Uyghur cultural activities that is informed by Western anthropological theory. It is a unique work in both scope and focus, and it will be an important starting point for any future anthropological studies of the Uyghurs.
While similar in his survey of Uyghur cultural practices in the context of local communities, Dautcher takes a decidedly different approach in Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang China. Dautcher's study is not historical in focus and is almost entirely based on his own fieldwork in the Xinjiang city of Kuldja during the 1990s. Although he does not explicitly proclaim such, Dautcher was extremely fortunate to have been able to conduct his fieldwork when and where he did. Few American or European scholars have been able to immerse themselves in a Uyghur community inside China without local, usually Han, “handlers,” who pose an obvious obstacle to participant observation. Dautcher, however, was able to do so, and the result is a richly descriptive text unlike any other recent publications on the Uyghurs of China. Apparently, the combination of the political climate at the time, which greatly worsened in Xinjiang immediately after he did his work, and the author's own tenacity allowed him to achieve this access. Certainly today, as the Chinese government has cut off all Internet communication and most phone contact between Xinjiang and the outside world in response to the events of this past summer, such access would be virtually impossible to obtain for a Western researcher.
If Dautcher was fortunate to have the field access he did, we are equally privileged to share this experience through his well-written and enjoyable manuscript, which is also rich with data on Uyghur daily life. Because his book is a fieldwork-based ethnography, Dautcher employs a modest amount of self-reflexivity as he uses extensive passages from field notes that acknowledge his own somewhat awkward position in the community he is studying.
He also acknowledges his gendered position in this community and focuses on the construction of masculinity among its men, to whom he had more access given Uyghurs' largely sex-segregated social life. While not engaging much in theoretical discussions related to gender studies, Dautcher provides rich descriptions of male interactions. In doing so, he paints a picture of a community of men who are constantly engaged in competition for prestige by aggressively seeking to dominate each other. While providing more description than analysis of this competition, Dautcher's insights on Uyghur masculinity should serve as a basis for further research into gendered roles in Uyghur society.
Like Beller-Hann, Dautcher also provides a wide range of information on Uyghur social activities, rituals, and community celebrations more generally. In reading the two books together, it is particularly interesting to note how many of the rituals of child rearing, religious activities, and community celebrations existing before the revolution have been maintained into the 1990s. Unlike Beller-Hann, however, Dautcher is able to paint a more intimate picture of what it is like to actually live in a local Uyghur community, and he does so masterfully in a text that continually highlights both the “sacred” and “profane” of community activities. While Beller-Hann provides us with much information about the reciprocity of ritual obligations, for example, Dautcher's narrative brings this to life by including stories of real people with whom the reader becomes acquainted along the way.
Many anthropologists and scholars of gender studies will find themselves wanting more theoretical engagement by Dautcher, who is a trained folklorist and independent scholar. That being said, the author's avoidance of theoretical comparisons allows him perhaps to paint a more evocative and candid picture of life in a local Uyghur neighborhood, which will serve as a valuable resource for scholars in the present politically restrictive climate.
Overall, I anticipate that these two books will be critical to future ethnographic inquiries into the lives of the Uyghur people. Because both studies are more focused on conveying much-needed “ethnographic data” about Uyghur life than on engaging current social theory debates, they may be of less interest to readers who do not study the Uyghurs or Central Asia. In the fields of Uyghur studies and Central Asian studies more generally, however, both of these books are highly recommended, and I anticipate that their influence on future research will be substantial. For anthropological studies of the Uyghurs in particular, these books may not dismantle the “gate-keeping concept” of Uyghur identity politics entirely, but they should certainly shift that concept from the arena of ethnic politics into the realm of local Uyghur communities where identity is constructed, maintained, and reproduced through the practice of daily life.
