Folklorist Nathan Light’s Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang explores the editing of the texts of the Uyghur Twelve Muqams in twentieth-century Xinjiang. An adaptation of Light’s 1998 doctoral dissertation, the work utilizes ethnographic and textual approaches, drawing from his fieldwork in 1990s Xinjiang and from primary and secondary resources in Uyghur, Chaghatay, Chinese, Russian, and several European languages. One of the main foci of the book is what Light, following Frazier (1997), refers to as cultural intimacy. Cultural intimacy lies in contrast to national culture, which is publicly disseminated and celebrated, and is worked out in backstage zones, private spaces where it is reinterpreted for presentation as national culture. The work of editing the Twelve Muqams, Light argues, was carried out in these backstage zones by Xinjiang Uyghur cultural elites concerned with modern, international notions of national culture and belonging. Light introduces each of these ideas in the first chapter of the book.
In chapter 2, Light takes a look at the Twelve Muqams within the broader realm of Uyghur performing arts, arguing that the muqams have become a more important ethnic symbol than dance because their formal structures and musical elements are seemingly more complex than dance—and thus more fully “Uyghur” in the eyes of editors and cultural elites. Uyghur as they may be, however, in the past the texts of the muqams contained a number of cultural intimacies. Light reveals some of these intimacies in chapter 3 in a discussion of what he terms “literary Sufism,” or the portrayal of mysticism and religious experience through printed literature. Contemporary, realist interpretations of Sufi images—e.g., the potentially homoerotic image of the male poet writing to a male beloved—and the very fact of the poetry’s religious basis, are elements that elites felt must be reinterpreted to make acceptable public culture.
Chapter 4 explores several historical narratives that feed into a dominant view of the Twelve Muqams as symbolically Uyghur. From the wall murals of Ghazi Ämät, which connect modern Uyghurs to Buddhist Uighurs centuries before them and thus write away some of the cultural intimacies associated with the arrival of Islam (and impure foreign culture), to the popular story of ?m?nnis? Kh?n, which places the origins of the contemporary muqam canon directly in the sixteenth-century Yarkand Khanate, the import of these narratives is grounded in modern notions about the connectedness of a people to land, the connectedness of culture to a people, and people’s ownership of cultural products such as music and other arts. Where such dominant narratives exist there are challenges to those narratives, however, and so in chapter 5 Light discusses the ways in which the views of Ömär Akhun, a muqam performer with whom he studied during his field research in Ürümchi, countered dominant discourses and were excluded from professional muqam circles as a result.
Chapters 6 and 7 look directly at the changes that editors have made to muqam texts: chapter 6 focuses on ghazals, a poetic form used widely in muqam songs, while chapter 7 explores dastan and mäšräp songs. In both chapters Light compares word usage, poetic structure, and other textual elements across varying editions of muqam texts to suggest where and why certain elements were deemed inappropriate and thus changed. In chapter 8, the conclusion to the book, Light reemphasizes the importance of cultural power and the role of elites in creating national culture by ridding it of embarrassing cultural intimacies. He stresses once again that the editing of the Uyghur Twelve Muqams has been a Xinjiang Uyghur project of cultural reflexivity, acted out backstage.
Politics, and particularly nationalism, have dominated writing on Uyghurs in Xinjiang and continue to be important elements in humanistic studies today. One of the greatest strengths in the work is the balance Light takes toward writing about a topic that is in many ways political but not exclusively so. Light recognizes that politics are at work in the editing of the Uyghur Twelve Muqams: indeed, part of the reason that cultural intimacy is a fitting model for his work is that it plays a role in the construction of national culture. But the processes on which Light focuses go beyond politics and power, as well, portraying “Uyghurs themselves working to figure out who they are, how best to represent Uyghur society using cultural and historical materials, and how to present that self-understanding to the many audiences they would like to reach, locally, within the Chinese state, and internationally” (2). Moreover, Light avoids the tendency of scholars writing about “minority” performing arts in the PRC to interpret the symbolic importance of music to ethnic identities primarily as an outgrowth of the state’s role in creating and perpetuating stereotypes of minority peoples as primitive music lovers. In contrast, Light keeps his discussion of the state to a minimum. And rather than claiming to represent the lived experience of the common person vis-à-vis the state, he focuses on the role of Uyghur elites in creating idealized models of ethnic and national identity.
Whether the processes of editing and institutionalizing the Twelve Muqams are located thoroughly in modernity, as Light reiterates throughout the work, is a difficult question. Light’s point in connecting the ideologies of modernity to discourses of culture and nation is well-taken. It is plausible, however, that the tradition known today as the Uyghur Twelve Muqams was edited by powerful leaders pursuing particular agendas at varying points in the past. This does not necessarily undermine the twentieth-century editing projects on which Light focuses. Rather, it suggests that although technologies and discourses may change, the editing and repackaging of what we call culture may have a longer history than Light’s view in this book suggests.
Light’s work addresses a number of issues relevant to specialists on muqam and Central Asia: for example, whether muqam is related to the Arab concept of m?q?m, as well as the relationships between Kashgar and Ili variants of the tradition (200–02; 285¬–86). Additionally, Light’s discussions of “literary Sufism”—complete with biographies of classic poets and analyses of important compendiums—will be an invaluable reference tool for students of religion and history in Central Asia (c.f. chapter 3). But the work has a wider significance, too, in that it offers a theoretically-grounded case study of cultural elites reinterpreting the past to create a public culture that is both locally and internationally relevant. Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinijang thus makes a significant contribution not only to scholarship on Xinjiang and Central Asia but also to scholarship in folklore, ethnomusicology, anthropology, and social theory, more broadly construed.
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[Review length: 1091 words • Review posted on June 23, 2009]