Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam by Rachel Harris

Abstract

Reviewed by: Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam by Rachel Harris Eric Schluesselschluessel@gwu.edu Rachel Harris. Soundscapes of Uyghur Islam. Framing the Global Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020. 249 pp. $85.00 (cloth), $35.00 (cloth). The field of contemporary Uyghur studies was once preoccupied with nationalism and ethnic conflict as studied through the written word and short-term "guerrilla ethnography" in secular, urban, and male-gendered milieus. Rachel Harris's pathbreaking new book marks the successful inversion of that paradigm through an intimate study of sounded practices of Islam rooted in many years of fieldwork among rural Uyghur women. "Sounded" here refers to those ephemeral and embodied ways of making and experiencing sound, including but certainly not limited to music. The book's theoretical and methodological interventions thus illuminate vital yet neglected aspects of the human experience and have broad consequences for scholarship on Uyghur life. Anyone moving through a city or village in China will notice how all kinds of noise and music seem to contest for space and attention. In Xinjiang, that awareness is heightened by the interplay of varieties of sound, rhythm, music, and speech coded as either "Chinese" or "Uyghur"—or "secular/national" or "Islamic"—and many shades in between. Harris characterizes this politics of sound as "soundscape," the ongoing renegotiation of the boundaries of community through a complex field of sounding and listening that in turn shapes the rules of interaction (20). The soundscape of Uyghur Islam is a "'discursive tradition'…through which local actors attempt to define what constitutes true Islam and a good Muslim within relationships of power" (24), but also a "palimpsest" textured by erasure and reinscription (216). This seemingly abstract concept is intimately related to acts of repetition and to the (Uyghur, female) body as a "prime locus for imposing new regimes of knowledge and being" (213, 215). Attending to "sounded expressive practices" decenters the emphasis on physical appearance and dress that is common in the highly polarized political and media discourse surrounding Xinjiang (15). One of Soundscapes' most compelling features is its historicization of sounded practices as ways of negotiating community and space in response to shifting sociopolitical relationships that are otherwise difficult to perceive. Harris begins at the most intimate level, through a thick description of women's Sufi rituals. She convincingly analyzes these rituals' production of powerful feelings of community through rhythm, movement, and voice. While Soundscapes ranges far and wide across borders, and while the book presents a gradually broader scope, rhythm and the body remain at its core. How, Harris asks, do embodied practices of negotiating community encounter new sociopolitical and textual circumstances? Harris then demonstrates the importance of transregional connections by showing how women's Sufi groups have encountered different versions of a core Sufi text, which itself has circulated between written and spoken forms. She shows how those intimate sounds changed in interaction with transnational Islamic networks, as woman Qur'an reciters adopted recitation styles that index traditions across the theological spectrum. Soundscapes reminds us not to reduce Islam to doctrine: reciters refigure and reinterpret sounds, which gain new meanings in practice. Harris then turns to the stranger paths of circulation and analyzes the affective impact of social media and of audiovisual media of unknown origin. We see how a decontextualized sign such as a recorded recitation or a shocking video travels like a rumor, shaping discourses as it is shaped by them. [End Page E-30] Soundscapes then considers the contestation between the sounded and embodied practices of Uyghur Islam and those of the Chinese Communist Party. These aspects of piety, Harris argues, are also a technology of the state, as Ban Wang has characterized them: practices of embodiment, intended to create and enforce group feeling, that possess a specific lineage in Maoism (208).1 That lineage becomes clear through oral histories from rural Uyghur women that are presented throughout the text, including in a pair of lengthier "interludes." China scholars will recognize parallels with the study conducted by Gail Hershatter and Gao Xiaoxian (高小贤) of women's lives in rural Shaanxi,2 both in the approach to fieldwork and in the book's presentation of autobiographical narratives. Indeed, Harris's...