Uyghur performers and scholars in northwest China are in the process of inventing an organization of culture based on international models. The political situation of the Uyghur minority within China and their quest for international stature has stimulated conceptualizing their performing arts in terms of a set of cognitive schemas that have spread throughout the world as part of the logic of colonialism and the nation-state. These cognitive schemas give shape to collective identities through the techniques of cultural collection, inventory, rationalization and dissemination. The dynamic practices of social life in space and time, the creation of situational identities, and the improvisation and performance of culture are transformed by these techniques into discrete, bounded, named and institutionalized objects, and represented within the social imaginary through genealogical and historical narratives, maps and ethno-political territories, and recordings, transcriptions, archives, and edited canons of performing arts.
Through discourse analysis of field work interviews with performing artists and shapers of Uyghur public culture and of local media representations my paper reveals the metaphors that link these different schemas for creating and manipulating the contained, continuous and pure objects which give a unified and fixed cultural content to Uyghur ethnic identity. I show how this set of cognitive schemas correlates with the territorial and political logic of the Chinese nation-state, yet counters its threats to the local construction of ethnic unity, territorial autochthony, and the purity, uniqueness and legitimacy of Uyghur culture.
© Nathan Light 1996
revised 3/8/2001.