Exploring the Political Construction of Identity through the Case of Islam in China [Conference Presentation] (original) (raw)
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.
The Construction of Chinese Muslim Identities in Transnational Spaces
Review of Religion and Chinese Society, 2018
Since the beginning of the reform and opening up in China nearly four decades ago, China’s Muslim minorities have restored connections with the global Muslim ummah (community) through religious pilgrimages, business activities, and educational and cultural exchanges. Whether attracted by better economic prospects or for religious purposes, an increasing number of Chinese Muslims have found ways out of China, taking sojourns or eventually settling down in diverse locations across the globe. Drawing on the author’s field research in China, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates, combined with a review of key studies on Chinese Muslims in Southeast Asia, this paper traces the shape of Chinese Muslim transnational networks and examines the construction of “Chinese Muslim” identity in the diaspora. By locating the study of contemporary Chinese Muslims within the broader scholarship on transnational religion, this paper deepens our understanding of the impact of globalization on ethnoreligious minorities.
Historical Social Research, 2019
»Muslime als Hui im spät-imperialen und republikanischen China«. As a minority in China, Muslims have had to deal with a twofold problem: maintaining the boundary of their group and integrating into larger society. The various responses to this problem in different contexts and under different circumstances are evident in various group identity configurations. Based on Stausberg, it is proposed that the ways the identities are constructed refer to the dynamics of various types of social differentiation. The author argues that there were divergent identity configurations among Muslim elites regarding their identity sign Huihui in late imperial and post-imperial China, with the former constructed in the direction of religiosity and the latter in the direction of secularity. In the concluding remark, the author suggests a theoretical account of his empirical observation by drawing on elements of Luhmann's theory of social differentiation.
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.
2004
How are nations "made"? This paper suggests that nations, and the peoples that compose them, are made by fbllowing established paths of representation. As Thongchai Winichaku1 (l994: 15) has eloquently argued, nations become mapped through the imposition of borders, boundaries, and categories of configuration upon previously borderless, unbounded, or uncategorized regions, peoples, and spaces. In this paperI argue that it is through "path dependence" that nationhood is created by the promotion of stereotypical representations of nations and nationalities perpetuated through national censuses, museums, fblklore, and the interaction of subject peoples and the states that legislate their identity. As Takashi Fojitani (1993: IOI) has argued, promulgation of the accepted "folklore of a regime" becomes an accepted hermeneutic by which contested and convoluted tales of history and society become master narratives among several competing versions. This paper wi...
The Rectification of Identities: Constructing Orthodoxy in Chinese Society, Confucianism, and Islam
From the time of the Han dynasty until the Revolutionary era of modern China, the social identity question of “what is Chinese” has been answered in terms of Confucian ethical and social ideals. Self-definition is always contingent upon contrasting with others, however, so increased interaction with foreign peoples over time led to discourse on the definition of what it means to be Chinese in dialogue with what it means to be Confucian and what it means to be Muslim.