Community Still Matters: Uyghur Culture and Society in Central Asian Context

The edited volume Community Still Matters: Uyghur Culture and Society in Central Asian Context is dedicated to Prof. Ildikó Bellér-Hann, one of the foundational scholars in the field of Uyghur studies. As one of the few foreign researchers to have conducted long-term fieldwork among Uyghur communities from the 1980s to 2016, her fieldwork experience and publications motivated and encouraged almost all younger scholars in the field; few have not found themselves drawing on her work and insights.The title of this volume recalls the most famous of Bellér-Hann's published works, Community Matters in Xinjiang, 1880–1949. In that volume she had drawn attention to "identifying ties which bind people to each other, and in the ideas which underwrite, shape and inform social interaction both in ritual and mundane contexts."1 That effort led her to produce scholarship combining history, anthropology, ethnography, and the study of Uyghur literature, covering topics ranging from the economic and social life of rural communities, to women in Uyghur society and their status, and to rituals and customs in rural areas.Community Still Matters reflects that breadth of scope and interdisciplinarity. It brings together twenty essays by foreign and Uyghur scholars whose disciplines range from anthropology and history to literature and political science. While the focus of Western academia on Xinjiang and Uyghurs in recent years has been on the political situation and the ethnic conflict between Han and Uyghurs in the region, these essays follow Bellér-Hann's example of exploring the ties that "underwrite" communities and their interactions.The volume starts with Hermann Kreutzmann's essay on a forgotten and marginalized nonimperial actor from the early twentieth century named Safdar Ali Khan, whose story sheds light on the geographical importance of the principality of Hunza and its historical relationship with Kashgar. It is followed by David Brophy's biographical account of another understudied historical figure, Abdülaziz Kolcali, an intellectual of Salar ethnicity from Ghulja (Ili) who studied in Istanbul and became a firm defender of the Ottoman caliphate's religious and political legitimacy up until the 1930s. For any study of the ties between Xinjiang, China, and Turkey, this essay will provide important historical background.In his account of the Qoray Rebellion in October 1958, Eset Sulaiman combines oral history with ethnography based on his fieldwork in Qumul in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He illustrates how certain elements of history have been hidden or removed by the Chinese state and only remain as oral recollections. Eric Schluessel describes the prehistory of Anarkhan, a Uyghur woman of uncertain historicity made famous in China by a 1962 "anti-feudalism" film and a later television series. He shows how interactions between orality, manuscript culture, and politics can, through unofficial outlets of memory and history, illuminate what is otherwise obscure. Abdushukur Muhammet also combines oral history with archival materials in his narrative account of the hidden history of the family members of Khoja Niyaz Haji, leader of the first Eastern Turkestan Republic, after his death in 1941.Ildikó Gyöngyvér Sárközi's chapter explores the memories of Grandpa Guo, a Sibe man from Chapchal Sibe Autonomous County, and, through his recollections, the history of Sibe groups in Xinjiang since 1949. It shows the importance of local historical knowledge in enabling critical readings of state discourse, in this case concerning national identity. Using archival sources, Ablet Kamalov's account of the migration history and social life of a Uyghur woman, Mariyam Paltusheva, shows how an individual biography can provide a broader picture of social and political changes within and between frontier regions.Two chapters in this volume follow Bellér-Hann's example in drawing on the archives and accounts of missionaries in Xinjiang as a source of scholarship. Fredrik Fällman traces the history of Lovisa Engvall, known as the Old Khanim of Kuch (the Old Lady of Kucha), a female Swedish missionary who lived in Kucha. It also provides insight into the work and experience of female missionaries in the Uyghur homeland at the beginning of the twentieth century. Zulhayat Ötkür's essay, written in Uyghur, uses accounts by missionaries and travelers to present her view of the social status of women in Uyghur society in the twentieth century and of the changing attitudes of contemporary Uyghur women toward traditional beliefs.The study of gender is developed in two important chapters by Jun Sugawara and Aysima Mirsultan based on the study of manuscripts collected from the region. The first discusses "'community matters' through the study of personal communication" (92)—in this case a love letter written to a Uyghur woman in Kashgar in 1912 or 1913—while the second explores the rights of women with regard to child custody following divorce in the first half of the twentieth century. Joanne Smith Finley continues the exploration of gender in her case study of Uyghur women who work as "hostess girls" in Ürümchi, providing company for Han males in karaoke bars—not generally a form of sex work but nevertheless a sensitive and rarely discussed part of Uyghur society—and notes "how the act of hostessing was politicized in ethnic terms by Uyghur observers, particularly men, as they strove to protect (male) national honour by condemning (female) national shame" (192).Three essays examine community rituals and organization. Rune Steenberg compares Bellér-Hann's account of Uyghur marriage in the 1980s and 1990s with his own fieldwork in the 2010s, providing important knowledge about the changes that have taken place in Uyghur marriage customs under different political conditions. Rachel Harris and Zulfiyam Karimova show how social organization rituals, such as women's chay (tea) gatherings in Kazakhstan, play a role in providing community organization and transmitting Uyghur cultural identity in the diaspora. Jeanine Dağyeli's chapter demonstrates how Central Asian craft guilds exercised the power of public punishment within their communities. It is an important illustration of the shift in the management of local organizations, morality, and even trade from the community to the state since the mid-twentieth century.Ingeborg Baldauf's contribution discusses two crucial episodes in the lives of the people of northern Afghanistan—birth and death—while Patrick Hällzon, László Károly, and Ingvar Svanberg describe healing and other practices involving dogs, wolves, foxes and other animals in early twentieth-century East Turkestan.Turning to the study of literature, Claus V. Pedersen shows how Persian literature has evolved since the turn of the twenty-first century from a literature dominated by "political commitment" to a form that is more international and accessible. In his essay, Joshua Freeman demonstrates how personal networks and hometown loyalties played an important part in the posthumous recognition of the Uyghur poet Lutpulla Mutellip as a major figure in Uyghur literature. Freeman also shows how Mutellip's role was reinterpreted by Uyghur nationalists in the reform era.In the final chapter, Martin Lavička shows how Chinese governmental white papers on Xinjiang spell out the only interpretations of Xinjiang's history and culture that Beijing is willing to tolerate and at the same time reveal China's most crucial concerns and anxieties.The volume would have benefited from indications as to whether certain terms found in the text, such as the aforementioned "hostess girls" (sanpei xiaojie), are translated from Uyghur, Chinese, Afghan, Persian or another language, and from an English-language abstract of Ötkür's essay. But this will not decrease the value of this collection to the field of Uyghur studies. It should be required reading for people who work in that field, with many sections suitable for graduate teaching. With its interdisciplinary and cross-regional approach, the volume vividly demonstrates the importance of deep immersion in community knowledge, fieldwork, and literary study, as exemplified by the work of Ildikó Bellér-Hann.