Uyghur neighborhoods and nationalisms in the former Sino-Soviet borderland: An historical ethnography of a stateless nation on the margins of modernity

This is an historical ethnography of the Uyghurs of the Ili valley, a stateless Muslim nation lodged between Russian and Chinese spheres of influence in Central Asia. The central questions that the study addresses are how and why peoples such as the Uyghurs persist in asserting their sense of nationhood without sovereign statehood in our present world system. In tackling these questions, the study does not only increase our understanding of the phenomenon of the stateless nation. It also asserts that through an understanding of the motivations and activities of disempowered and de-territorialized people, especially in international borderlands, we can better understand the roles of power, identity, and territory in our modern world system. The study combines ethnographic and historical methodology in an attempt to transcend the perspectives of both disciplines. While it is divided into ethnographic past and ethnographic present sections, the text seeks to problematize the divisions between the past and present as well as between the disciplines of history and anthropology.; The study concentrates on this community's local engagement with global processes, charting both the Ili valley Uyghurs' marginalization in the world system and their resistance to this marginalization. One of its central themes is the importance of the production of locality to this borderland community's survival as a unique people whose social life transcends the border dividing them and resists the homogenizing forces of modernity. In particular, the study concentrates on the importance of community rituals as a means of inscribing social space and creating local subjects, both of which defy the prescriptions of the states in which they live. In its examination of the twentieth century, the study also accents the importance of the production of a Uyghur national identity that is negotiated through the practices of local Uyghur communities and is unified by a mediated culture of books, newspapers, and other media that convey a specific narrative of the nation.