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6. Abdulla Mäjnun Muqam Expert rachel harris The Uyghurs might be introduced as one of China’s big family of fifty-five minority nationalities (Weiwu’er zu, alongside the Tibetans, Mongols, Yi, Hui . . . ), or alternatively as one of the Central Asian nationalities (alongside the Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen, and Uzbeks), the only one that does not possess its own independent nation-state. There is truth in both of these statements, and both are controversial. Culturally we might best regard the Uyghurs as a Central Asian people, although they today live mainly within the borders of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), in the large desert and mountain region in China’s far northwest, known since 1955 as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In addition to the nine million or so in China, there are also fairly large populations of Uyghurs living in the neighboring Central Asian states. Their religion is Islam, of the Sunni tradition , and strongly influenced by Sufi beliefs and practices. Their language belongs to the Turkic language family, like the majority of Central Asian peoples, and it is very closely related to Uzbek. Unlike the other Central Asian languages, which now use Cyrillic, Uyghur has retained a modified form of the Arabic script. Uyghur music also displays many continuities with the folk and classical traditions of Uzbekistan and northern Tajikistan. Like the musicians of these regions, the Uyghurs use the same ensembles of voices, long-necked lutes (satar, tämbur, dutar), fiddles (ghijäk), and frame drums (dap), and gather their music into large-scale suites called Muqam.1 Among the Uyghurs, certain types of musicians are called ashiq or mäjnun. An ashiq is a lover, or a mendicant who has devoted his life to music making for God. A mäjnun is both an ashiq and a fool, a sarang. This chapter offers a biographical sketch of Abdulla Mäjnun,2 a Muqam-ist3 and Muqam expert 146 rachel harris from the southern oasis town of Khotän. Respected, feared, and despised in equal measure by his fellow musicians, Abdulla Mäjnun is one of the most colorful, even notorious figures in a world that bristles with larger-than-life characters but also indubitably one of the most skilled and knowledgeable musicians of his generation. Drawing on interviews with Abdulla Mäjnun, the chapter explores the status and roles of musicians in contemporary Uyghur society, looking at the impact of professionalization, the prominence of the state-sponsored song-and-dance troupes, and the more recent rise of the popular recording singers. The chapter traces Mäjnun’s journey from his roots in the local musical world of Khotän in the 1960s and 1970s, when paradoxically the Cultural Revolution gave him the opportunity to immerse himself in rural musical traditions, to his present position in the Xinjiang Muqam Ensemble at the center of the professional and highly politicized Uyghur music world, where he collaborates on the prestigious project to rework the Twelve Muqam (on ikki muqam). As the opening paragraph of this chapter suggests, the ways in which the Uyghurs and Uyghur music are represented are multiple and contested. In many ways, Abdulla Mäjnun sits uncomfortably in a volume alongside other “Chinese musicians,” as a figure whose language, musical repertoire, and ways of being in the world will be quite alien to readers more familiar with (Han) Chinesemusic.Inotherways,especiallyintermsofcontemporaryprofessional structures, Mäjnun is very much part of the wider world of Chinese music. In his discussion of ethnography as discourse (1986), the anthropologist Edward Bruner argues that stories make meaning: that narrative structures organize and give meaning to the raw material of experience. Proposing a diachronic model where old narratives are replaced by new narratives, typically when a new political order arises, Bruner suggests that changes in narrative require not only new theoretical constructs, but a whole set of new vocabulary, syntax, and structure. Bruner’s remarks are helpful in understanding the multiple ways in which Uyghur music and musicians have been represented in historical and contemporary narratives. Their contrasting styles are not only of abstract interest, because, as Bruner reminds us, narratives are structures of meaning and also of power. I present some of the narratives of Uyghur music history in some detail here because, as will become apparent, their different vocabulary and syntax impact directly on representations and self-representations of individual musicians today. As Bruner succinctly puts it: stories construct selves. [13.58.197.26] Project MUSE...

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