Ann Arbor, April 20, 1996

HISTORY AND THE IMAGINARY INSTITUTION OF IDENTITY: THE UYGHUR CASE

In northwest China, members of the Uyghur Turkic minority have created a complex discursive space in which they contest cultural identities based in European, Chinese, Central Asian and autochthonous paradigms and cultural materials. Indigenous literary and oral historical narratives are combined with international and Chinese scholarship to explain their cultural origins and relations. With their modern culture and identity ignored or belittled by Europeans and Chinese alike, the Uyghurs in turn ignore these opinions and construct their own narratives of participation in European, Muslim, Turkic and Chinese cultural history. In order to create a distinctive identity within the context of the Chinese politics of culture they deploy discourses of Eurasian cultural connections. They believe themselves to be descendants of the Huns, and thus claim a history of vast conquest within Eurasia, not to mention an intimate kinship to modern Hungarians. Recently, the discovery of a red-haired, fair-skinned corpse in northwest China has further reinforced the sense of early connections to Europe.

But a nomadic past as Huns is not their only claim to fame. While their participation in the urban religious and literary culture of Central Asian Muslim Turkic peoples is the most evident aspect of their history, Uyghurs rarely seek allies directly across the Chinese borders. Their goal is larger: as the direct heirs to the Uyghurs of the eighth century who are the founders of civilized Turkic culture in Eurasia, they also lay claim to originating all that distinguishes them from nomadic peoples. Hence they deny the Iranian origins of oasis culture in the Tarim and Jungarian Basins, and project a Uyghur presence back to the earliest archeological finds there. In particular, Uyghur cultural origin narratives attribute themselves a founding role in establishing the comforts and recreations of oasis life, especially food, music and dance. Further, they recognize the Tarim Basin as the origin of much of world culture, and propose narratives explaining the transmission of music and other arts from their homeland through the Middle East into Europe.

In my paper, I will explore how these intellectual cultural origin narratives have become popularized among Uyghurs in northwest China, and how they relate to the imaginary institution of a shared ethnic public culture within China. My fieldwork on Uyghur music and oral literature in the urban setting of Urumchi offers many examples of the articulation between scholarly, popular and mass media narratives of cultural origins, and the related cultural revival projects of the past decade that seek to rescue and publicize traditions that were suppressed during the Cultural Revolution. I will show how these cultural constructions shape Uyghur ethnic identity, and how they are used in daily life in the multi-ethnic city of Urumchi as well as more generally in the sphere of Chinese public culture.

© Nathan Light 1996

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revised 3/8/2001.