The Wall Street Journal
SEPTEMBER 18, 2009, 8:11 P.M. ET
FEER(9/4) Books: Identity & Masculinity In A Uyghur Community
(From THE FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW)
Reviewed by Paul Mozur
Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur
Community in Xinjiang China
by Jay Dautcher
Harvard University Asia Center,
350 pages, $39.95
A Uighur man shows up late for a night out with friends. His buddies, who have already begun drinking, "fine" him three shots of liquor for his tardiness. Understandably careless by the third shot, the man spills a small amount of liquor onto the table. "That's another fine," his friends cry. Several shots later, the man emerges from the bar sloshed and bumps into a Chinese cop. The police man stops the man and tells him he's disturbing the peace. "I'm going to have to fine you," he says, to which the man responds, "Aww, shut up and pour!"
Not surprisingly, Han Chinese and the political situation in Xinjiang are the butt of many a Uighur wisecrack. In the face of mass Han immigration and policies that often block upward mobility, Uighur jokes provide one of few release valves for enmity against the Han that has simmered since the People's Liberation Army landed in Urumqi in 1949.
Unfortunately, as funny as the jokes are, they can never provide enough of a release to avoid ugly incidents like early July's riots in Urumqi that left around 200 people dead and hundreds more injured. In examining at the violence, the minutiae of Uighur culture are as important as any policy analysis in pinpointing how conflict between the two cultures erupts. As Jay Dautcher shows, soccer leagues, jokes and drinking sessions are all related to the tensions in Xinjiang that so tragically sparked this summer's violence.
In this highly readable repackaged Harvard University doctoral thesis, Mr. Dautcher, a free-lance writer and academic, strives to provide a "thick description of Uighur culture." The book, which pulls from Mr. Dautcher's experiences in the Xinjiang-Kazakhstan border city of Yining from 1995-96, refreshingly opts to describe more than it analyzes. While other excellent treatments of Uighur culture, such as James Millward's "Eurasian Crossroads" and Justin Rudelson's "Oasis Identities," have focused on history and ethnonationalism respectively, Mr. Dautcher seeks to evoke Uighur culture as precisely as possible in the time and place he experienced it. A humanizing picture of the ethnic minority and the day-to-day conflicts between Uighurs and Han emerges as the reader is confronted with numerous first-hand sources and anecdotes.
Most instructive is Mr. Dautcher's account of the meshrep, a loose term used to describe prayer meetings in which men discuss Islamic practice, deliberate on important community matters, such as collecting funds to support philanthropic endeavors, and apply ritualized punishments to members for bad behavior. By the time Mr. Dautcher arrived in Yining in 1995, the meshrep had been outlawed, but the charitable endeavors of clandestine meshreps still caused friction between Uighurs and the Chinese government that would erupt into conflict. Thousands of Yining's Uighurs took to the streets on Feb. 5, 1997 in an uprising that led to the mobilization of more than 200,000 military personnel and left more than 100 people dead by some estimates.
Before this uprising, meshrep groups attempted to organize a 16-team youth soccer league in August 1995. Each team would represent one of the mehelle, or neighborhoods, around Yining. Amidst the marketplace buzzing in anticipation of a tournament that would kick off the league, the government rescinded the use of school facilities it had earlier granted and parked tanks on the fields residents had worked hard to spruce up. When hundreds of Uighur men marched two days later in silent protest of the "military exercises," paramilitary squads occupied intersections and snipers took up positions on roofs.
The value of Mr. Dautcher's ethnography extends beyond its illustrations of Han-Uighur tensions in the region. His portrayal of the meshrep dovetails with its nonreligious counterpart the olturash -- a drinking session during which Uighur men taunt each other, crack jokes, listen to music or poetry, and "fine" each other arbitrarily. The liquor of choice for such sessions, fiery baijiu, ensures an olturash is as likely to end in a fight as saccharine proclamations of love or confused inebriation. In Mr. Dautcher's warm telling of his Uighur drinking stories, it becomes clear that Uighur masculinity encompasses humor, cultural appreciation, intelligence and hotheaded stubbornness alike.
While it is useful to hear Mr. Dautcher's every observation and occasional analysis of what he sees, he sometimes becomes too detailed. He "reads" the Uighur tendency to hit pool balls too hard and pokes fun at losers for lacking courage as follows: "The player wields his symbolic penis, trying to penetrate a passive receptacle that awaits him, and to do it with a force sufficient to break that receptacle, in order to gain victory over his opponent and demonstrate his masculinity." It is difficult to go along with this pseudo-Freudian poppycock, not just because his analysis is overwrought, but because men making jokes about their testicles during a pool game is as likely to be observed in fraternity houses in Alabama as in the markets of Yining. Contrary to Mr. Dautcher's belief, this says little about masculinity within Uighur culture.
Variations among different oases and changes in Xinjiang that have taken place over the past 13 years since Mr. Dautcher completed the research for his book demand a more in-depth and up-to-date treatment of the region, but this is unlikely to emerge in the coming years due to visa restrictions for academics. Mr. Dautcher's book, though a success, is only a small step toward a coherent picture of Uighur culture. Still, "Down a Narrow Road" helps to establish a foundation for understanding that might yet blossom into international awareness and activism similar to that enjoyed by the Tibetan movement in past years.
The sad reality, however, is that even such activism would be unlikely to bring about change. It may be a long time before the Uighurs can live without fear of oppression. Perhaps this is why Mr. Dautcher's heavy use of Uighur jokes is somewhat reassuring; it's good to know the Uighurs can laugh in the meantime.
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Mr. Mozur is a free-lance writer based in Taipei.
