The Case of the Disappearing Altar: Mysteries and Consequences of Revitalizing Chinese Muslims in Yunnan (original) (raw)
Related papers
This monograph is an important contribution to the field of Islam studies in China and provides thought-provoking insights on the Islamic revival movement in twenty-first century Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province. It has a special focus on the contemporary Salafiyya and Tablighi Jama'at movements, which remain understudied in the context of China. The anthropologist Stewart immersed himself in the Muslim community of Xining as participant observer for eleven months (apparently between 2012-2013 ). In eight chapters, he vividly describes different aspects of the Islamic revival movement based on individual examples. He examines how the younger generation of Muslims and new Muslim converts are especially attracted by Islamic revivalist ideas of the Salafiyya and Tablighi Jama'at and how they participate in these movements.
(2005) Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China - Introduction
"First chapter of, _Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China_ (Hawaii 2005). This brief introduction outlines some of the various sources used in the study of local religion, and some of the problems I encountered doing fieldwork as a historian. The full text of this book is now available at http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/handle/10125/23070
Resurgence of Indigenous Religion in China 201306 China Watch Fan Chen
Many scholars have observed in recent years that religion and spirituality are resurgent around the world. Contrary to the predictions of sociologists and others that modern society will eventually become completely secularized, it appears that human beings are engaged in a wide range of religious and/or spiritual experiences, disciplines, beliefs, practices, etc. that were virtually unimaginable two decades ago.
The secularisation of identity in a religious world : a case study of the Atayal Bienjing village
2015
This study analysed the religious transition of the Atayal people of Bienjing village in Miaoli, Taiwan, and how it influenced the Atayals’ conceptualisation of both the ethnic and cultural identities. The study focused on the Atayal people’s mass conversion to Christianity in the early 1950s, which not only changed their worldview and cultural values but also altered their sense of belonging, as well as the idea of being an Atayal person. In investigating the process and influences of this conversion, I analysed the ritual performances, cultural values and cultural memories of the Atayal people to determine their understanding of the tenets of Christianity. I also examined the power structure, education and daily practices in the village to investigate how the social reproduction of religious beliefs influenced the production of their identity. As a result, rather than looking at the religious affiliations of individuals, their engagement in religious practices or the influence of ...
Butterfingers: Resculpting Religion at a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery
Provincial China, 2010
'moment' at the so-called Ta'er Temple. The event which I witnessed as the major annual Tibetan Buddhist 2 occasion of Monlam Chenmo in 1993 but which the Qinghai Daily cites in the Chinese time-and-cultural frame of the Lantern Festival in 2003 has a long history as the former. Its redefinition, or apparent makeover, in the past ten years raises questions of state and local agency, readings of the past, and particularly the political uses of space and occasion. As state agency politicises religious space and practice here, I suggest that at this politicised cultural moment, not only butter is being sculpted into new forms at this particular Tibetan Buddhist monastery. While I hope to leaven the inevitable subjectivity of personal encounters with wider analysis, based primarily in history, I also offer an individual's perspective in the tradition of witness, contingent of course on the witness's own informational, cultural, psychological and many other filters . Although moments take place in places, diverse participants, commentators and interpreters may not all conceptualise the site of action in similar terms. To start with names, the site in question -the Tibetan Buddhist monastery of this paper's title -has two prime locally-used names, 'Kubum' in Tibetan and 'Ta'ersi' in Chinese. Tibetan Buddhist and contemporary Chinese texts agree that the monastery is the most important of its kind in the region, and one of the six great Gelugpa monastic establishments of the Tibetan world. It lies 26 kilometres southwest from the provincial capital Xining in the town of Lushar, seat of Huangzhong (Tib: Kubum) County, which used to form part of Haidong Prefecture but since December 1999 has been moved under the administration of Xining Municipality. Haidong has been both a cultural-ecological frontier and a geopolitical frontier for centuries, whose population has experienced cultural and to some extent political integration into both the Tibetan and Chinese worlds at different times. The area lies at multiple crossroads of culture, religion and civilizational influences. Since the rise of the Tibetan Empire in the 7th century, Tibetan and Chinese civilizations have pressed the region of Haidong -east of the lake 3 -from the west and east respectively. Islam's centuries-old presence links it in culture and religion to Central Asia, while Mongol hegemonies, before and after the Mongol adoption of Tibetan Buddhism, left demographic and cultural footprints into the present. Ecologically Haidong forms the sole naturally arable segment of Qinghai Province, thereby attracting the only significant Chinese settlement in the region before 1949. Beyond Haidong lie the vast grasslands and mountains of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau where, prior to PRC development projects, Tibetan and Mongol mobile pastoralism provided the only livelihood for human inhabitants. 3 Qinghai (Ch.), Kokonor (Mong.), Tsongon (Tib.), the vast inland saltwater lake west of Xining. Huangzhong became a Chinese county at the same time Qinghai became a Chinese province, in 1928, as the Nationalist Government sought to consolidate its tenuous hold over Republican China's northwestern territorial claims. Lushar was then a small shabby trading town inhabited by a variety of people, only loosely connected to the administration in Xining, more appended to Kubum Monastery about a kilometre up a hillside at the south end of town. (Rock, 1956, 6, 23) Today this pattern still echoes in the topography and atmospheric dynamic of Lushar. Kubum still in a way defines Lushar, if not culturally or demographically in a county 77 per cent Han Chinese and 15 per cent Hui (Chinese Muslims), 4 then touristically, as Kubum is methodically reconstructed as the major drawcard in Qinghai's tourist industry. The wording of the article in the Qinghai Daily struck me so forcibly when I first saw it because it presented an event in terms that seemed anomalous with what I had seen take place ten years earlier. At that time, I and most of those who were at Kubum construed proceedings as the occasion of Monlam Chenmo, the Tibetan Buddhist year's most significant celebration, which at Kubum is distinguished by a butter sculpture exhibition that marks Monlam's end. This interpretation was conveyed to me by representatives of various nationalities, including Han Chinese, at least in the sense that the main event was the Buddhist festival, highlighted by the butter sculpture exhibition. Even a Han deputy-director of Qinghai's CITS had presented it to me in these terms, not even mentioning the coincidence of the Lantern Festival which I found out later in situ. Monlam Chenmo, or the Great Prayer, is held at the beginning of the Tibetan New Year which sometimes, and in the Amdo region usually, 5 falls at the same time as the Chinese New Year. As is well known, New Year is the most significant festival period of the Chinese lunar calendar year, and in Qinghai Province's Xining districts, where Chinese have been settled for centuries, it is celebrated in distinctive local rituals throughout the countryside as well as a mass parade in the capital city a couple of weeks after New Year's Day. The Lantern Festival (灯节Dengjie, 元宵节Yuanxiaojie), held throughout the hemisphere of Chinese civilisation, forms part of the series of celebrations during the Lunar New Year, or Spring Festival. Falling on the night (宵xiao) of the 15th day of the first (元yuan) month of the lunar calendar, when the first full moon of the new year appears, it marks the end of the Chinese New Year period. While its origins probably lie in multiple religious and cosmological sources, 6 in its recognisable form as Yuanxiaojie it dates at least from the Tang Dynasty (618-906AD). Basic celebratory practices include eating a special food, tangyuan 汤圆 (or 元 宵 yuanxiao), symbolising family unity, and carrying lanterns around in the evening. The Lantern Festival, and the main finalities of Monlam Chenmo, thus take place on the same date: the night of the full moon two weeks into the new year.
In Pursuit of Islamic “Authenticity”: Localizing Muslim Identity on China’s Peripheries
In this ethnographic sketch, I analyze the complex processes of Sino-Islamic identity formation by examining the variety and diversity of locally produced "authenticity," situated within a global understanding of Islam. Even within a single province, among a single official minzu (nationality) that People's Republic of China propaganda, media, and scholarship often construct as a unified, static group, localized practices and processes of identity formation are remarkably diverse. This article investigates how trans/national discourses and practices of Islamic authenticity are localized within two specific field sites: the provincial capital of Kunming and the rural Muslim enclave of Shadian. For the purposes of this article, I focus primarily on how life is temporally and spatially structured, both in everyday practice and in imaginings of one's place in history, modernity, the Muslim world, and the Chinese state. By setting out details of the daily lives of two Hui Muslim women, I aim to elucidate how temporal and spatial structures of life, which are tied to urban or rural location, reflect and shape local identity formation. I argue that as actors involved in their own self-production, Hui Muslims in Kunming and Shadian negotiated, appropriated, and contested both monolithic notions of Islam and the official statepropagated minzu classificatory system, producing their own versions of authentic Hui Muslim identities. What constituted authentic Hui Muslim identity depended to a great extent on the residence of the individual.
In a small Uyghur village in southern Xinjiang, sixty women have squeezed themselves into a large guestroom in a village house. Behind closed doors in the baking mid-summer heat, they recite from the Qur’an, perform dhikr, and they cry. This form of women’s ritual practice is widespread across the Uyghur region of Xinjiang. Within the village, participation in these rituals offers women status, community, and opportunities for artistic and emotional expression. In the wider political arena, however, they are doubly marginalized: they earn the disapproval of the new Muslim orthodoxy and the suspicion of the authorities who seek to suppress or control ritual activities outside the sphere of official religion. In this paper I argue that investigation of the Uyghur village soundscape provides important insights into the ways in which gendered and ethnic hierarchies are sonically negotiated within village society, in relation to the state, and in relation to global trends in Islam.