| This dissertation presents the results of an ethnographic investigation of social identity in a predominately Uighur suburban community in Northwestern China (Yining, Xinjiang) in the 1990s. Through the interpretive analysis of community members' folklore performances and other everyday interactions, public and private, the author examines how Yining Uighurs express and enact local understandings of community, gendered sociality, personality, prosperity and piety.;In section one, the spatial configuration of social life in Uighur neighborhoods is described, and the relations between this spatial ordering and the individual lifecycle, the dynamics of family relations, and processes of urbanization and Han in-migration are outlined. In section two, the gendering effects of child-rearing and childhood play are examined, demonstrating that these activities encourage boys to perform masculine identity by symbolically dominating other social actors. Variation within the performance of adult masculinity is shown in a comparison of courtship activities, marital relations, and extra-marital trysting. Section three examines two institutions that collectivize masculinity and integrate individuals into a local imagined community of men. First considered is the olturax, a secular men's gathering in which agonistic masculine interactions are regulated by codes of moral behavior. Next a combined social-structural and interpretive analysis of men's nicknaming practices demonstrates the role of nicknames in ordering individual personality and collectivizing masculine identity. In section four, the patterns of Uighur private entrepreneurship are described (including local retailing practices, middleman brokering in Yining's trader-tourist wholesale markets, and Uighur sojourning abroad), and the role of these activities in producing social difference is examined. In section five, a description of the social dimensions of Islam in Yining is presented, and tensions between secular and sacred forms of sociality within men's status competition are analyzed, as expressed in secular joke narratives and pious practices accompanying Ramadan fasting. A traditional form of men's gathering (maxrap) that promotes Islamic revitalization and community activism is described, and shown to be associated with the popular unrest that led to a violent state crack-down in Yining in 1997. |
