Paper abstract:

Uyghur weddings underwent significant transformations during the 20th century. Traditionally, weddings were celebrated inside homes and during autumn, a time of harvest and abundant agricultural produce. In contrast, modern Uyghur weddings are celebrated in restaurants and banquet halls and Uyghurs use clock time to synchronize the event. The changes also extend to gift exchanges, post-marital residence and pattern of wealth transfer from parents to children during and after the marriage. This paper argues that although large-scale industrialization in Xinjiang occurred after 1949, these modern features of Uyghur weddings emerged not from state-led industrial and political modernization but rather from the post-1978 market liberalization. After 1978, the state stopped intervening in marriage and family, which restored traditional kinship relations; connected the urban with the rural, and revived cultural practices suppressed by state-led modernity. The state also gradually ceased to be the only provider of employment and housing, and the private sector and real-estate market took over some of the state’s functions. One of the market-led modernization was that in urban areas the danwei communal spaces gradually disintegrated and the organic (spatial) unity of life, work and leisure began to dissolve. The commodification of land and housing disintegrated danwei (单位) communal spaces and dissolved the organic link between life, work and leisure in the urban environment as the new xiaoqu emerged as a communal space separate from the workplace. With the rise of Xiaoqu (小区) communal space created by the real estate sector, for many urban residents, their place of private life and work became gradually separate. As work, life and leisure acquired spatial autonomy, weddings both grew in size and migrated to the privatized market, to entertainment space. With the concomitant commodification of pre-wedding activities in the form of things and services, social function of weddings in creating and reproducing communal relations weakened. Weddings have therefore increasingly taken on an entertainment character, mirroring and contributing to larger society-wide changes brought by market-derived modernization.