ABSTRACT
This chapter is a preliminary attempt to situate Uyghur ritual practice between Central Asia and China over the last hundred years.1 The present political climate in Xinjiang encourages a scholarly focus on the cultural incompatibility between the Uyghurs and the Chinese. This tendency, which considers the Uyghurs as the bearers of a self-contained, distinct culture vis-à-vis the Han Chinese has been encouraged by Chinese ethnic policies and reinforced by Xinjiang’s position within China as an internal colony (Gladney, 1998, 2004);2 the Chinese ‘civilising mission’ only makes sense as long as such distinctions are maintained (Harrell, 1994). Research cannot free itself from political constraints: much of the scholarly analysis of the Uyghurs focuses on Chinese-Uyghur relations, sometimes presented as a study of identity, and rarely touches upon tendencies for peaceful interaction and accommodations between these groups,3 while cultural links to Central Asia have been tacitly assumed rather than systematically investigated.4 This chapter attempts to redress the balance.
