Originally in this paper, I was going to discuss both native and foreign discourses about Uyghur history but I have written and spoken much on Uyghur ideas before, and it seems more important to address something closer to home, the problem of orientalist views attitudes towards Central Asia and Uyghurs. Despite their sensitivity to orientalist or colonial discourse when working in South Asia and East Asia, many scholars still treat Central Asia as a kind of void that has to be filled in through pursuit of their own ethnocentric interests rather than through understanding local culture and history on its own terms.
I will not detail the many examples of Russian and Chinese ideas about bringing European enlightenment to the benighted Muslims they colonized in Central Asia, nor the dismissive attitudes of Persianists towards Turko-Mongols as destroyers of Iranian culture, or even the resistance Western scholars show to the Uyghur ethnonym itself. Instead I will discuss some examples of the articulation between public and academic discourses about Eurasian ethnic history, and suggest some of the ways Eurocentrism or even Indo-European chauvinism have led to a scholarly and public media obsession with racial identity in northwest China. My goal is to demonstrate the ways that beneath objective scholarly inquiry can be found some remarkably racialized ideas.
The recent enthusiastic quest for Celtic and other Western Indo-European people and cultural influences in northwest China strongly echoes earlier European fascination with the dissemination of supposedly "Aryan" culture and ethics in India and Europe. But more generally the explosion of interest in the attempt to make big history--evidence for cultural and genetic connections between "West" and "East"--gives me an opportunity to discuss how scholarly work gets distorted by racial myths and assumptions about essentialized identities. As I will show, such stories fascinate because they offer Europeans simple ways to include people in far off Central Asia within familiar historical, cultural, and "racial" narratives and identities.
The Mysterious Mummies of China
The desolate wastes of the Takla Makan Desert, at the heart
of central Asia, are haunted by an ancient mystery. It was
here, long ago, that East and West--two of the greatest
civilizations on earth--made imperceptible contact. And
here the faint traces of ancient life have long pressed a
deep and vexing enigma. Did the civilization of ancient
China arise in isolation? Or was there an unremembered link
with the cultures of the West?
Thus begins the NOVA/WGBH documentary The Mysterious Mummies of
China. This film purports to prove that that the people who
developed the oasis civilizations of northwest China were an
"ethnically European people" who were related to Celts and
Germans, and who "breached China's fabled isolation 1000 years
earlier than previously thought." But it does this by sleight of
hand, through insinuation and conflation and denial of the
richness of the cultural and historical facts.
This film is not alone in turning the recent interest in the Caucasoid mummies of Xinjiang into fodder for the media. Academic studies, newspaper reports and popular magazines have all recounted some of the theories being developed and tested, but few have made clear the complexity of the issues. Instead these accounts have sought simple equations between Xinjiang Caucasoids and Europeans. They demonstrate a profound attraction for aestheticizing, objectifying and orientalizing these corpses, their culture, and the culture of the modern peoples who live where these corpses are found.
When Victor Mair writes in an academic journal that a Xinjiang corpse resembles a "winsome Welsh or Irish lady" or a "burly Bohemian burgher" and wear "jaunty caps" it may appear as merely an evocative description meant to catch the reader's interest. But when throughout the popular descriptions of these corpses, archeologists and laypeople are found expressing love for red-haired female corpses, aesthetic commentary seems to be a code for racialized objectification. In a National Geographic report, a Han Chinese archeologist shares her tent with a corpse now widely known as "the beauty of Loulan" by both Han and Uyghurs (National Geographic, Mar. 1996, p. 51). In the NOVA documentary, another Han archeologist describes how he held a female corpse in his arms, and was startled to realize he "was holding the most beautiful woman on earth" and "if she were alive today . . . [he] would certainly make her [his] wife."
Erotic objectification is part of the process of removing these corpses from their own context of meaning and making them meaningful in the present, part of the stories we want to tell about ourselves. Further, as a media representation, it appears that the American audience is being encouraged to consume images of Europeoid corpses as objects of desire by non-Europeans. European-identified Americans can enjoy their supposed ancestors as objects of the desire of racial others.
In addition to aestheticization and eroticization of these corpses another kind of objectifying imagery is used to subordinate modern people to this narrative of European racial history. The tendency for non-Western "natives" to be represented as caught in the past, dependent on tradition, without creativity or even history has been critiqued by Eric Wolf and Johannes Fabian, among others.
The NOVA documentary portrays the Tokharian Caucasoid corpses as agents: they bring history to Xinjiang from the West by founding its oasis cities. On the other hand, the modern-day Uyghurs who live in these oases are outside history. The narrator says "These islands of green are still home to farmers who have little contact with the outside world, and use tools and methods that have barely changed over the centuries. Could their way of life harbor its own living relics, fragments of an ancient time preserved like the mummies themselves?" The film follows the researchers to a village where they want to investigate nutrition and disease. They go into a home and examine local people and find them healthy. But more important to the film are the locals' donkey cart, carved bowls, and curved bread which look like those found in the graves. The narrator declares that "the ways of the living echo those of the past."
On film, Victor Mair says, "In some ways, when you go into the modern village of Wupu, you feel like you're entering into the ancient period in which you--when you look at the artifacts, you feel like you're recapitulating that. There are so many similarities." By declaring that the living Uyghur inhabitants of the oases are changeless and without history, and by completely excluding Uyghurs from an active role in the film, this film reduces Uyghurs to remnants, outside the present, trapped in another time (see Johannes Fabian, The Time of the Other). The Uyghurs are useful as a means to study the past, but can be otherwise ignored. This is the ultimate colonization of history: the history of the "great civilizations" of West and East are given center stage, while the Uyghurs are marginalized as objects of study who serve that greater mission.
Mair concludes that people in the Tarim "with blond hair, with light eyes, very fair skin" are "the vestiges of the ancient peoples. They now believe that they are Uyghurs, or Tajiks or some other group. But in my estimation, these are just carrying on the old Tocharian influence." His quest for big history, for the big picture, seems to give Mair the authority to declare that these people do not know who they really are, and the right to draw a straight line through historical complexities and unknowns from one light complexion to another.
By denying people their history it becomes much simpler to tell stories about them, and to use them in one's own story. Where there are no clear links scholars should resist their desire for a clear story. But instead, these scholars make historical links directly from people in Europe to those in Xinjiang. In Elizabeth Barber and Irene Good's discussions of the plaid woolen twill fabrics worn by the corpses, they would like to link these corpses to the Celts. Their analytical methods are brilliant, but once they get to the edge of the archeological evidence for plaid twill and the weighted looms on which it might be made, they still try to link Hallstatt (ca. 1000 B.C.), Celtic and Tokharian peoples.
To make the connection, they deny the local meaning and history of objects, and declare: "the Celts are still making plaid twills and wearing the kind of tam-o'-shanters found in the Hallstatt mines" (Barber, 1995: 348, her emphasis). In the film this becomes
Of all the finds here, the woolen textiles are the most
impressive. Woven into twill and tartan patterns, these are
among the oldest fine woolen clothes ever discovered. . . .
Strikingly similar to Celtic tartans from Northwest Europe,
the patterns in the weave are like ancient DNA, waiting to
be decoded. . . . Scientific reconstruction of the heads of
the mummies produces a face that strongly resembles ancient
Celts and Saxons.
In addition to subtly linking cultural and genetic codes, the
film here implies that people from northwest Europe brought the
technique of making plaid twills to the Tarim. But there are
better explanations for a shared tradition. The most likely is
that both Celts and Tokharians--if that is who these corpses are-
-learned this technique when they lived around the Black Sea, a
point equidistant from northwestern Europe and the Tarim Basin.
While the question of twill is simply a correlation of technologies, another leitmotif used to link Europe and the Tarim corpses travels from article to film to news report: the tall, pointed hat found on the corpse of a supposed shaman is identified with the hats of European witches. But to claim that not only the form but the semantic content of such an item of clothing could be preserved across thousands of miles and more than a millenium is to go straight from culture history to fantastic master narrative.
Don't get me wrong. I admire Victor Mair's other work, and share his belief that "East and West have never been separated" (1995: 303). I find the issues raised by these corpses fascinating and Elizabeth Barber and Irene Good's research an excellent presentation of the many unanswered questions. Nonetheless, their research is driven by a desire to find close links between Celts and Tokharians. And this desire and all its subtle manifestations and biases have to be questioned. I have already pointed out Victor Mair's use of aesthetic judgment to make corpses appealing. The woman with the conical hat is "magnificently" and "splendidly" attired. The "aristocratic" Tokharians in a Buddhist cave painting have their hair "neatly" parted. In the NOVA documentary, the "most impressive" find in the graves is the woolen twill, which is also the most European of the finds.
The project of finding connections turns subtly into a question of judgment and hierarchy: these Indo-Europeans were physically beautiful and might be the first to make such fine clothing. Their technological innovations helped civilize other Eurasians. If the racial subtext is not obvious on reading these articles or seeing the film, only a little rewriting makes it emerge, as can be seen in Mark Deavin's article Aryans: Culture Bearers to China which appears in the magazine National Vanguard (#117, March-April 1997) and also here with images. Deavin argues that in the Upper Paleolithic, "Whites . . . lived not only in Europe, but also in a band stretching across northern Asia to the Pacific." Quoting heavily from articles by Mair, Barber, and Good, he describes the "European corpses" found in the Tarim Basin region of western China. These "mummies give evidence of a Nordic people with an advanced culture, splendidly attired in colorful robes, trousers, boots, stockings, coats, and hats." Deavin goes on to say "the latest mummy finds in the Tarim Basin . . . have helped to reopen the debate about the role which Europeans played in the origins of civilization in China, with some archeologists again beginning to argue that Europeans might have been responsible for introducing into China such basic items as the wheel and the first metal objects." The Tokharians were Aryans, and in the cave paintings they can be seen to be "aristocratic Europeans, with red or blond hair parted neatly in the middle, long noses, blue or green eyes set in narrow faces, and tall bodies."
Just as in the film, Deakin argues that the corpses show that "European penetration of China" dates to at least 2000 B.C. "when the whole of Eurasia became culturally and technologically interconnected by migrating Europeans." He goes on to attribute the unification of China and the steppe empires of the Xiongnu, Turks, and Mongols to Scythian techniques of mounted archery. He concludes, "This theory of Mongoloid imitation is also reflected in the many words of Indo-European origin in the earliest known layers of Sinitic languages. These include words for "horse," "track," "cart," "wheel," and "cow" and suggest further that it was Europeans who brought these things into China."
Further, he says, "Textile samples from the late second millennium B.C. found in the Tarim Basin graves also provide evidence of the diffusion of European technological sophistication to China."
"Likewise, the Tarim Basin Europeans displayed a definite penchant for spiral solar symbols . . . [which] suggests that they were Nordics who were and always have been worshippers of the sun and sky, and more generally of Nature."
I maintain that Deakin can so readily summarize the studies he draws upon and integrate them into his racist ideology because there is an implicit racial narrative in this discussion of Indo- European culture as some kind of shared racial possession, a marker of superior essence. The constant reference to body type as evidence of Indo-European identity arises from racial assumptions about culture. Body type has nothing to do with culture, or language, or excellence, unless one makes racialized assumptions. Mair argues he is trying to show the links of East and West, but he does it by keeping them racially separate. In contrast, the graves are full of racially indistinct corpses. It is a mixed society, but the implicit assumption is that the valuable cultural skills came with Caucasoids from the West.
The racist polarization comes out in criticisms of Chinese researchers in both the NOVA film and a National Geographic article. In the film, the narrator describes a decapitated corpse dug up by the foreign researchers: "It seems the Chinese had planted a headless body here, to avoid the risk of unearthing a European-type face." The implication is clear: the good Western researchers are being impeded by duplicitous Chinese. Thomas Allen makes a similar insinuation in his National Geographic article. He tells of finding a piece of pottery at Niya that had the fingerprint of the potter. He shows it to Wang Binghua, "Xinjiang's leading archeologist," and asks for permission to bring it back to the United States for examination by a forensic anthropologist. Wang Binghua is said to have asked "Would he be able to tell if the potter was a white man?" When Allen says he does not know Wang "nodded and put the sherd in his pocket." Eric Smith of the Associated Press reports on this event as evidence of Chinese political concerns about these corpses. Ellen O'Brien of the Philadelphia Enquirer goes further, writing
Thomas B. Allen describes a Chinese government official
pocketing a shard of pottery that contained a
thumbprint--and never mentioning the piece again--after
Allen indicated that an American forensic anthropologist
might be able to determine from the print "if the potter was
a white man."
In addition to the narrative of racial conflict implicit in these
lines, we also see that the hidden narrative of Chinese
bureaucracy is so strong that both Smith and O'Brien turn Wang
the leading archeologist into Wang the meddling official.
CONCLUSION
My conclusions are simple.
The first set consists of reminders about how to distinguish physical and cultural dimensions of human life: When using physiognomy and genetic material in tracing identity, remember that phenotype and genotype are not the same. Recognize that phylogenetic relationships are not necessarily correlated with culture or history. Culture does not respect lines of descent. A tradition is not more authentic if learned from a blood relative. Technology can be transmitted even without a shared language. Many people in many societies are bilingual. People are not superior or inferior according to their technology. Groups of people do not own technological innovations. Many people in a group will not even understand a technology practiced by people they see everyday. Individuals innovate and teach one another selectively. Occasionally a group will adopt certain cultural forms as identity markers, but such as group may well be bilingual or multicultural in other ways. One cannot simply exclude people from a group because they look different. Groups are mixed. The range of genetic variation in almost any group is large.
My second set of conclusions relates to scholarly responsibility: If one is involved in a publication or media production one should consider its implicit ideological messages. Reporters should be guided away from the assumptions that make stories easy to write. Force media storytellers to recognize the unknown as interesting, not simply leap over it. Media that reinforces stereotypes rather than educating should be criticized. Scholars should insist on equal time and prominence for rebuttals as that given to the original story. Scholars and media both have to be held responsible for the messages they send, the myths they reinforce.
© Nathan Light 1999
revised 3/8/2001.