The Uyghur and the Scholar: Competing Narratives of Ethno-religious Identity
Loading...
Date
2010-09-01T19:05:49Z
Authors
Conway, John
Keyword
Xinjiang , Uyghur , religion , religious nationalism , semiotics , myth , narrative , historiography , religion , Islam , Muslim , China , religious minorities
Abstract
This paper engages the nationalist and ethno-religious discourses among and
pertaining to the Uyghur of China’s Xinjiang province. The purpose of such engagement
is to illustrate that the scholarly discourse that has alternately deconstructed or validated
the narratives of history that contributed to the ethnogenesis of the Uyghur is complicit in
this wider discourse. The widely held assertion that the notion of the ethno-religious
identity ‘Uyghur’ is both a construction of the twentieth century, and largely artificial or
misleading, challenges the pre-existing discourse among the Uyghur themselves and the
governing bodies of the People’s Republic of China. A close examination of the
scholarly narrative in consideration of theories of ethnicity and semiotic discourse
therefore illustrates that this narrative competes among other claims to the ‘natural’
identity of the Turkic oasis dwellers of Xinjiang. My aim is to illustrate, in view of the
case of the Uyghur, that it would be naïve to consider the work of scholars on ethnicity
and religion to be mimetic reflections of reality. Indeed I contend that scholars possess
the same propensity for myth-making as any given object of their study.