Uyghur Watcher
21-04-08, 01:12
http://darren-jenn.blogspot.com/2008/04/eliyas-tries-on-doppa-while-his.html
INTRODUCING
"Being a Central Asian Uyghur in Northwest China"
http://bp2.blogger.com/_6KaoUq9DZtc/SAxP2Vj7MgI/AAAAAAAAAME/wlzGOvttUU4/s1600-h/webeliyas.jpg
Eliyas tries on a doppa while his "girlfriend" points and laughs.
Walking through a poplar-lined suburb of Kashgar, the cultural center of Altishar (the “seven cities” of old Eastern Turkistan as they are known in Uyghur), my friend Eliyas motioned for us to stop and turn our backs to the men whose waists and wool lined felt hats were wrapped in white clothes. The body-sized wood box they carried and the wailing and sobbing of women in the home the men had just left told a story of death, ritual, and community: a story which was to be shown respect and honor by averting one’s gaze. The Qur’anic prayers the men chanted and the respect Eliyas showed for Uyghur orthopraxy indicates how deeply Islam and its Sufi interpretation is embedded in the Uyghur mode of being. Eliyas after all is a future government official, fluent in Shanghai-accented Chinese and functional in Eminem-influenced English, his parents are teachers for the Chinese Communist Party, ostensibly atheists, who support the Chinese re-invention of their homeland. Yet though Eliyas does not attend the famous Id Kah mosque only a few twisting blocks from his home on Friday, he is nevertheless reluctant to eat at Chinese restaurants which are not musulmanche (halal) and he fairly tiptoes around the tombs of the Khojas (Sufi saints and their descendents) we visited nearby. For all his desire for modernity, his “hip-hop” style baggy clothes, his regard for veiled women as backward, Eliyas resists the Chinese way of life by showing deference to Uyghur ideas of proper orthopraxy and moral behavior. While the tombs of the Khojas are regarded as tourist destinations for Chinese and other non-Uyghurs – who must pay a 50 yuan entrance fee and be cautioned not to take photos of the graves, for Eliyas they are much more: they are sites of deep spiritual and social identity across time-space. Though, as an extremely privileged Uyghur student sent to an elite Chinese high school in Shanghai Eliyas was forced to eat a wide variety of cuisines – most of them not qing jin (halal) – Eliyas still privileges Uyghur mutton-based staples such as laghmen and polo. Though his hip-hop identity prohibits him from performing Uyghur dances and songs himself – Eliyas is quite proud of not-quite-legal girlfriend – an accomplished Uyghur dancer, and he never fails to mention that his mother plays the dutar and is an actress in Uyghur films which illustrate canonical Sufi poetry. Eliyas then as a minkaohan (a Uyghur tested in Chinese) complicit in the Chinese imperial project – is despite his overt intentions a resister to Chinese hegemony. Furthermore although he is clearly situated outside the mosque – he nevertheless participates in Uyghur religious or ritual practice. Although he and his family represent the Chinese extreme of Uyghur identity their lived experience in many ways fails to conform with Chinese popular culture and way of life. Despite their problematic acceptance of Chinese authority over their educational system and Chinese rule of law (at least relative to more nationalist oriented Uyghurs) Eliyas and his family are indicative of the way in which Uyghur society is shot through with deep-seated sources of resistance to Chinese assimilation.
As Homi Bhabha has speculated the identity of people within the modern state system is often constructed through a sort of double narrative of people as simultaneously “pedagogical objects” of official discourse (be it statist, or, in another way, religious) and on the other hand people as “performative subjects” who work out for themselves the content of their lived experience. This process of negotiating the official and the personal, the hegemonic and the particular, is always variegated by a multiplicity of cultural elements, dependent on socio-economic positionality, and regulated by specific lived experience. Yet as in the Uyghur case the absence of, in turns, desire and accessibility for either “authentic” civil society or candid religious discourse causes the observer to turn towards the performative subject as the deep source of who in the world Uyghurs are and imagine themselves to be.
This sort of analysis moves beyond the easy assumption that Uyghur identity is solely dependent on its opposition to Chinese encroachment towards the deep cultural and socio-religious means by which the Uyghur self is enacted though constant re-presentation . . . .
INTRODUCING
"Being a Central Asian Uyghur in Northwest China"
http://bp2.blogger.com/_6KaoUq9DZtc/SAxP2Vj7MgI/AAAAAAAAAME/wlzGOvttUU4/s1600-h/webeliyas.jpg
Eliyas tries on a doppa while his "girlfriend" points and laughs.
Walking through a poplar-lined suburb of Kashgar, the cultural center of Altishar (the “seven cities” of old Eastern Turkistan as they are known in Uyghur), my friend Eliyas motioned for us to stop and turn our backs to the men whose waists and wool lined felt hats were wrapped in white clothes. The body-sized wood box they carried and the wailing and sobbing of women in the home the men had just left told a story of death, ritual, and community: a story which was to be shown respect and honor by averting one’s gaze. The Qur’anic prayers the men chanted and the respect Eliyas showed for Uyghur orthopraxy indicates how deeply Islam and its Sufi interpretation is embedded in the Uyghur mode of being. Eliyas after all is a future government official, fluent in Shanghai-accented Chinese and functional in Eminem-influenced English, his parents are teachers for the Chinese Communist Party, ostensibly atheists, who support the Chinese re-invention of their homeland. Yet though Eliyas does not attend the famous Id Kah mosque only a few twisting blocks from his home on Friday, he is nevertheless reluctant to eat at Chinese restaurants which are not musulmanche (halal) and he fairly tiptoes around the tombs of the Khojas (Sufi saints and their descendents) we visited nearby. For all his desire for modernity, his “hip-hop” style baggy clothes, his regard for veiled women as backward, Eliyas resists the Chinese way of life by showing deference to Uyghur ideas of proper orthopraxy and moral behavior. While the tombs of the Khojas are regarded as tourist destinations for Chinese and other non-Uyghurs – who must pay a 50 yuan entrance fee and be cautioned not to take photos of the graves, for Eliyas they are much more: they are sites of deep spiritual and social identity across time-space. Though, as an extremely privileged Uyghur student sent to an elite Chinese high school in Shanghai Eliyas was forced to eat a wide variety of cuisines – most of them not qing jin (halal) – Eliyas still privileges Uyghur mutton-based staples such as laghmen and polo. Though his hip-hop identity prohibits him from performing Uyghur dances and songs himself – Eliyas is quite proud of not-quite-legal girlfriend – an accomplished Uyghur dancer, and he never fails to mention that his mother plays the dutar and is an actress in Uyghur films which illustrate canonical Sufi poetry. Eliyas then as a minkaohan (a Uyghur tested in Chinese) complicit in the Chinese imperial project – is despite his overt intentions a resister to Chinese hegemony. Furthermore although he is clearly situated outside the mosque – he nevertheless participates in Uyghur religious or ritual practice. Although he and his family represent the Chinese extreme of Uyghur identity their lived experience in many ways fails to conform with Chinese popular culture and way of life. Despite their problematic acceptance of Chinese authority over their educational system and Chinese rule of law (at least relative to more nationalist oriented Uyghurs) Eliyas and his family are indicative of the way in which Uyghur society is shot through with deep-seated sources of resistance to Chinese assimilation.
As Homi Bhabha has speculated the identity of people within the modern state system is often constructed through a sort of double narrative of people as simultaneously “pedagogical objects” of official discourse (be it statist, or, in another way, religious) and on the other hand people as “performative subjects” who work out for themselves the content of their lived experience. This process of negotiating the official and the personal, the hegemonic and the particular, is always variegated by a multiplicity of cultural elements, dependent on socio-economic positionality, and regulated by specific lived experience. Yet as in the Uyghur case the absence of, in turns, desire and accessibility for either “authentic” civil society or candid religious discourse causes the observer to turn towards the performative subject as the deep source of who in the world Uyghurs are and imagine themselves to be.
This sort of analysis moves beyond the easy assumption that Uyghur identity is solely dependent on its opposition to Chinese encroachment towards the deep cultural and socio-religious means by which the Uyghur self is enacted though constant re-presentation . . . .