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- Convenor:
-
Gülnar Eziz
Send message to Convenor
- Chair:
-
Gülnar Eziz
- Discussant:
-
James Pickett
(University of Pittsburgh)
- Format:
- Panel
- Theme:
- Anthropology & Archaeology
- Location:
- William Pitt Union (WPU): room 527
- Sessions:
- Thursday 19 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York
Abstract:
This panel offers a multifaceted exploration of the society and culture of Altisheher (southern Xinjiang) during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of especially intense and rapid change. The panel focuses on analyzing new and under-appreciated sources written in the Chaghatay language. Examination of these texts, and introducing them to the broader scholarly community, will help shape new perspectives on this dynamic period, characterized by imperialism and resistance, the irruption of modernizing ideologies and the re-establishment of contact with the wider Islamic world. Believing that inhabitants of Altisheher have too often been treated as subaltern subjects of empire lacking agency, the panel papers’ focus on sources written by Altisheheri from a wide variety of social backgrounds aims to redress this imbalance.
The panel is intentionally multi-disciplinary, embracing historical, anthropological, literary, and linguistic approaches. The four papers are linked by their use of hitherto neglected sources written in Late Chaghatay to examine Altisheheri society. The authors share the goal of using them to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of how individuals and communities in Altisheher negotiated this era of change. By analyzing the complex interplay of external and internal factors, such as Islamic and Chinese law and the evolution of language and terminology used to describe women’s work, the papers reveal how Altisheher's socio-cultural dynamics transformed during this era, while highlighting the diversity and complexity of Altisheheri society.
The primary themes of the papers are gender, religion, law and literature. Two of the papers consider gender relations in Altisheher during this period, examining them from the perspectives of industrialization and modernization as well as Islamic female sainthood. Cultural exchange influenced by Chinese rule and corresponding social conflict are discussed in two papers focusing on the introduction of “Chinese” gambling practices and “Chinese” jurisprudence to Altishahr. The continuing relevance of Islamo-Persianate literary traditions, especially as vehicles for expressing opposition to imperialism together albeit dealing with the novel social and political circumstances of the modern era, are also explored in each of the papers. The panel should thus interest not just historians of Xinjiang, but also those interested in Islam and gender in comparative perspective, as well as modernity and imperialism in Central Asia.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 19 October, 2023, -Paper abstract:
Modernization has created greater career and employment opportunities for many women around the world. However, a careful reading of some Chaghatay manuscripts, foreign travelers accounts of Altisheher women’s work reveals that the range of activities of modern Uyghur women has narrowed down, which finds its expression in a terminological differentiation of domestic work and wage labor. As many travelers to Tarim basin have observed, the Altisheher women had greater presence in the public sphere, and the marketplace mostly due to their wider range of activities. The Altisheher cities were seats of international commerce and sites where imported goods, handicraft products and farming surpluses were exchanged. However, despite a great functional differentiation in society, there was no terminological separation between men and women’s work; women’s work at home and their income generating activities. The word ish ‘work’ subsumed most of the work done by men and women. In contrast, modern Uyghur language strictly differentiates not only between öy ishi ‘household chore’ and xizmet ‘wage-labor,’ but also between öy ayali ‘housewives’ and ma’aschi ayal ‘wage-earning women.’ This paper argues that this change was a result of industrialization. After the 1980s, Industrial production replaced many economically productive activities traditionally done by women, such as sewing, tailoring, selling vegetables and dairy products. As a result, modern rural Uyghur women are less active in the marketplace, and their activities are mostly confined within the household. Due to this reduction, modern Uyghur women’s activities acquired a separate terminology, öy ishi ‘household chore.’
Paper abstract:
This article examines the role played by gambling in the articulation of communal identity amongst Turki-speakers (“Uyghurs”) in late-Qing and early Republican Altishahr (southern Xinjiang), focusing on a text from Yarkand titled “The Gambler’s story.” Portraying gambling as a fundamentally alien practice used by “Khitay” (Chinese) to exploit and undermine communal solidarity, the text defines its audience community in opposition to two more clearly demarcated and threatening communities: Khitay, and local gamblers, both of whom it seeks to exclude. The text thus indicates that Turki-speaking inhabitants of Altishahr in the late Qing and early Republic sought to enforce communal discipline by ethnicizing deviant behavior (ironically mirroring orientalizing discourses employed by Qing officials and European observers). Such an approach, while simplifying a more complex reality, helped lay a basis for subsequent Uyghur nationalism by sharpening communal boundaries and excluding behavior harmful to perceived common economic interests.
Paper abstract:
In recent decades, the function and position of female saints (awliya) and sufis within the Islamic mystical tradition has attracted increasing scholarly notice. To date however, comparatively little attention has been directed to such traditions within Altisheher and other parts of Central Asia. The tazkira (memoir) of one such saint from Yarkand, Yut Bibi, provides a case study of how devotees of female saints negotiated the potentially transgressive nature of female sainthood in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Altisheher. The tazkira depicts Yut Bibi as an unmarried woman, of royal Qarakhanid and Hashemite ancestry, who leads pilgrimages to Mecca, feeds multitudes both with halva and milk from her own breast, acts as a surrogate mother, and manifests miracles at her grave after her death. Comparing the tazkira’s treatment of Yut Bibi with female saint’s lives drawn from elsewhere in the Islamic world, this paper argues that female sainthood in Altisheher shares many features with female sainthood elsewhere in the Islamic world. These include an attempt to combine recent royal and prophetic ancestry alongside a view of female sanctity as principally embedded in the saint’s body as a source of food and nourishment. Nonetheless, in contrast to several other regions in the Islamic world, female saints in Altisheher could be more easily embodied in their society’s normative social order, including alignment with the mainstream clergy (Ulamā) and an absence of association with madness, due to comparatively lower degrees of female physical and social confinement in Altisheher. Separately, the paper will also consider potential pre-Islamic Turkic and Buddhist influences on the tazkira. Finally, a close textual comparison of different nineteenth-century manuscript traditions for the text enables us to draw several broader conclusions about the transmission and development of tazkira during this period.
Paper abstract:
In the field of Central Asian history, we have seen a shift of focus from a theoretical analysis of issues such as identity and political history to a textual analysis of locally produced sources. Following this trend, I will analyze Molla Bilal ibn-Molla Yüsüp’s work Ghazàt-i dar mulk-i Chín (The Holy War in the Kingdom of China) and examine the ‘dastan’ and history writing tradition among the Altisheheri Uyghurs in the late 19th and early 20th century. Molla Bilal composed his prosimetric work to record the stories of the rebellions that engulfed the Ili valley from 1864 to 1871. Contemporary Uyghur scholars have categorized Molla Bilal’s and other similar works as tarakihi dastanlar (historical dastans). In this paper, I contextualize Molla Bila’s work in both the ‘dastan’ and the history writing tradition of Uyghurs during this period to examine the literary conventions that surrounded the work. In addition, I also investigate the performance and social function of ‘dastans’, and specifically the ‘historical dastans’, to shed light on the social and political dynamic during this crucial period.