The Uyghurs of Xinjiang, China, are often framed in radical terms focusing on their potential opposition to the dictates and interests of the Chinese state, whether in regard to the complicated repatriation of “enemy combatants” from Guantanamo Bay, as potential spoilers of nationalistic fervor on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, or as the antagonists to the People’s Republic’s endless modernization campaigns and its machinations to raze anything smacking of Central Asianness in the fabled caravan cities of northwest China. In contrast to these more politicized collective identities, Jay Dautcher in his book, Down a Narrow Road: Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang, China, offers a Geertz-inspired thick description of life in a Uyghur mehelle, or neighborhood, in Yining, a town near the Kazakh border. Dautcher rightly eschews popular ethnic or ethno-nationalist portrayals of Uyghur identity and instead investigates Uyghur conceptions of social life through an analysis of everyday expression from the ground up, oftentimes folkloric in nature.
Dautcher at first orients the reader to life in the Uyghur mehelle via events centered in the öy, the traditional Central Asian home, gendered territory for sure, but not male. Here the subtitle of the book, Identity and Masculinity in a Uyghur Community in Xinjiang, China, is only half right; for his book is all about identity and only more or less about masculinity. Dautcher accomplishes his goal early on through a discussion of place and space. He continues by gradually expanding the unit of analysis to include the greater mehelle, its suburban periphery, and later, more generally, the symbolic relationship of Uyghur space at large to government de-settlement policies, specifically in relation to shrines and official mapmaking. His argument is that notions of space and place cemented in the mehelle foster attitudes of belonging, a kind of chthonic identity that is central to being Uyghur.
In the second part of the work, Dautcher further conceptualizes Uyghur identity through examining key events in the Uyghur lifecycle, e.g., child rearing and its associated rituals, courtship, marriage celebrations, etc. Dautcher argues that these occasions help in a process of identity enculturation and are vitally important to understanding Uyghur identity in that conceptualizations of gender in adulthood are connected to notions of gender developed during childhood and adolescence. It is here that folklore comes to the fore in personal narratives associated with different lifecycle events, children’s “play” in the lanes of the mehelle, and male nicknaming practices. It is in his discussion of male drinking evenings called olturash that Dautcher finally explicitly turns to more masculine spheres of social interaction. Dautcher sees these gatherings as the central event around which Uyghur men in the mehelle organize their lives, and as such, as important occasions for the performance of masculine identity. Through face-to-face interaction in the olturash, both real and imagined communities are created and maintained, all imbued with ideas of masculinity and by extension identity.
After discussing identities produced through Uyghur economic activity that are primarily associated with market trading both in Yining and abroad, Dautcher moves on to consider the importance of Uyghur religious practice to the ideas of masculinity discussed earlier. Most interestingly, Dautcher contrasts the olturash ritualized drinking nights of bawdy neighborhood men with the more pious public religiosity of their mosque-visiting neighbors. He sees male religious gatherings as the direct counterpart of the olturash; just as masculinity is performed in olturash as men seek social status, so too in cultivating piety through Islamic meetings men are able to raise their status in the community.
For the folklorist, Down a Narrow Road includes detailed analysis of numerous joke texts, multiple stylized narratives, and other episodes of folkloric “play.” Dautcher does an excellent job of melding methodology from folkloristics with his larger concerns.
The book’s importance is not in its novel theoretical implications or its groundbreaking ethnographic insights, but rather that Dautcher’s meticulous documentation of the minutia of everyday life in the Uyghur mehelle offers the reader a larger scope and greater breadth of Uyghur cultural interaction than previously collected in one place or than has previously been subjected to rigorous analysis. To that end, Dautcher expertly takes the reader on a journey through the stories and life-worlds of his informants. In sum, Dautcher’s nuanced approach contributes immensely to the standard politically-charged narratives of Uyghur life. Using tools common to the folklorist, he begins to unpack the specificity and complexity of issues of identity specifically in relation to conceptions of place, space, gender, and, finally, Islam. One hopes that political realities in China will make this kind of work more common and that the older kinds of literary treatments of Uyghur life will continue to become increasingly rare.
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[Review length: 778 words • Review posted on September 22, 2009]