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Review: Rachel Harris, Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam Yale Journal of Music & Religion Volume 6 Number 2 Sound and Secularity Article 9 2020 Review: Rachel Harris, Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam Chris Hann Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/yjmr Recommended Citation Hann, Chris (2020) "Review: Rachel Harris, Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam," Yale Journal of Music & Religion: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17132/2377-231X.1204 This Review is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Music & Religion by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Rachel Harris Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. Xi + 249 pp. ISBN 9780253050182 (hardback), 9780253050205 (paperback), 9780253050199 (ebook). Islam is a religion of the book with origins know from the scholarly literature on in the Middle East, but, as Rachel Harris the Islamic heartlands, for example, with notes in the first ethnographic chapter of respect to gender. This periphery has this important study, “As experienced by been decisively shaped in the past by Sufi Muslims over the past fourteen centuries, heritage (even if that term is not used in most of whom could neither speak nor read the villages of contemporary Xinjiang) Arabic, the Qur’an is primarily sound, not and in recent decades by the controls of script.” The Uyghurs of Xinjiang, northwest the socialist state. China, at the eastern edge of the Turkic- Within the Xinjiang Uyghur Auton- speaking world, exemplify the merits of a omous Region (many activists and “soundscape” approach. Harris combines some scholars prefer to speak of Eastern ethnomusicological sophistication with Turkestan), Harris limits her enquiry to pioneering field research at the grass roots the titular people, who comprised over of Uyghur society and acute political 80 percent of this territory’s population analysis. It is an unfortunate consequence when it was incorporated into the republic of the present situation in Xinjiang that, in of Chairman Mao in 1949. Thanks order to protect her subjects, she is unable to minority recognition and socialist to divulge much detail concerning the local educational policies, a strong collective contexts or the religious specialists with ethnic consciousness has emerged. Yet in the whom she worked. very same decades the mass immigration of The theoretical background is laid out Han Chinese in the course of agrarian and in the opening chapter. Harris is concerned industrial development has rendered the to grasp the experiences, emotions, and Uyghurs a minority within their homeland. habitus of her Uyghur subjects, rather By the early twenty-first century, the than cerebral meaning and ideologies. The contradictions were boiling over (to use a thrust of her reflections on soundscapes metaphor frequently used by rural Uyghurs (mainly but not exclusively based on works themselves in other contexts). pertaining to Islam) is a holistic collapsing This book is the culmination of the of boundaries and causalities: place and author’s decades of productivity in ethno- body, affect and memory are viscerally musicological studies of Xinjiang. Harris intertwined, and discourses acquire their has previously investigated Uyghur classical power through repetition in the practices Muqam traditions as well as contemporary of everyday religion. Deploying the pop music. These are primarily male worlds. concepts of embodiment, emplacement, For this book, which is linked to a larger and entrainment, Harris shows that the comparative study of Islamic soundscapes forms taken by popular Islam in Central across China,1 she has exploited the access Asia diverge from the constellations we afforded to her by affinal connections 144 Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) to present ethnographic analyses of transmission of male performances in Uyghur women’s religious activities other genres. Drawing theoretically on the in rural southern Xinjiang. Participant well-known work of Charles Hirschkind observation in rituals in 2009 and 2012 is and Saba Mahmood in Egypt, Harris supplemented by interviews with diaspora presents evidence from Uyghur diaspora Uyghurs in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, communities in neighboring post-Soviet and by internet research after further states to show how Uyghurs have come to fieldwork in Xinjiang became impossible. connect with the sensoria of a vast spiritual Chapter 2 is devoted primarily to peasant compass. Local styles of qur’anic recitation women’s khätmä rituals and the transmission are devalued in comparison with the of the specialist knowledge of the büwi, who perceived modernity of those disseminated in addition to her female genealogies may from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and also maintain contacts with official imams. Pakistan. Yet these transnational circuits Particularly on sacred occasions such as the (sometimes underpinned by a commercial night of Barat, qur’anic recitation opens dimension, notably in the halal food market) up to rhythmic entrainment: song, trance, are compatible with local rootedness. and collective weeping. The analysis is Returning to her initial Barat example in extended in chapter 3 to performances of rural Xinjiang, Harris shows that multiple hikmät verse (religious poetry held to derive styles can be combined within the same from Khoja Ahmad Yasawi) well known ritual (“Salafi sounds in a Sufi ritual,” 128– throughout Central Asia. Harris integrates a 29); this is not syncretism but a “disjuncture” historical account with recent data from two typical of sonic globalization. locations in Xinjiang and a third just across The current plight of the Uyghurs the border in Kazakhstan. Ritual specialists becomes the dominant theme in the book’s have always operated at what Jack Goody closing chapters, in which the feedback called “the interface between the written loops that Harris has previously identified and the oral.” The manuscript versions of in the realm of sound are replicated as the Diwan-i Hikmät that circulated over spirals of violence in the realm of politics. centuries have recently been supplanted Chapter 5 consists mainly of internet by printed publications. As in the past, the ethnography. In 2013–14 the platform canon is continuously modified by more WeChat functioned as a form of “small prestigious written versions. Contemporary media” that allowed Uyghur users to intellectuals in Xinjiang base their editions communicate during their intensifying not on local oral performances but on “crisis of suffering” with intimate circles compilations published abroad. The era of of friends inside and outside Xinjiang. Islamic revival is characterized by simplified, With the rise of the smartphone, familiar less emotional performances on the basis of disjunctures appeared in new forms. texts that have been filtered by nationalists Social media purveyed the full gamut of in Turkey or Uzbekistan. sound, from the most sacred to the most While female renditions of hikmät profane horror memes (in Xinjiang even spiritual poetry do not circulate digitally, a Malaysian freak show could occasion the following chapters examine ways in contrasting religious interpretations). which new technologies facilitate the global Popular videodiscs harked back to Sufi Yale Journal of Music & Religion Vol. 6, No. 2 (2020) 145 traditions to provoke a surfeit of emotions, traditions as an integral element of their but austere performances of poetry praising national heritage. Allah called anashid, sung without musical Harris concludes that the Beijing accompaniment, also circulated widely. The government’s repression amounts to an emotional impact of the latter on youth was attempt at “erasure” of Uyghur soundscapes especially notable. Some of these sounds and the very identity of the Uyghurs merged with familiar tropes of masculinity as a people. She compares the state’s and secular nationalism (blood, wounds, “weaponization of music” with U.S. Army and sacrifice) to celebrate revolutionary practice during the Iraq War. However, just violence. Harris insists, however, that the as the traumas of the Cultural Revolution great majority of those who consumed the failed to eliminate Uyghur distinctiveness, new pious media were concerned with new Harris is confident that coercive listening ways of listening, not with fighting; with and forms of rhythmic “dressage” (Henri the formation of a counterpublic that was Lefebvre) in the re-education camps are ethically superior to the secular authorities, doomed to failure. The Chinese state rather than with revolutionary jihad. postulates a link between “terrorist” Since 2014, the possession and violence and the revival of Islam and has circulation of any Islamic materials have been able to get away with this since 9/11 been equated by the authorities with with the complicity of Western powers, terrorism. All traces of faith must be which pathologize Islam in similar ways. eradicated from the smartphone. In chapter Harris concedes that the “lure of the illicit” 6 Harris pursues emplacement in the form has made extremist positions attractive to a of territorialization (Gilles Deleuze). Like minority of Uyghurs, while insisting that the landscape, the soundscape is constructed wider Islamic revival in Xinjiang has more and contested. They merge
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