Singing the Village: Music, Memory and Ritual among the Sibe of Xinjiang by Rachel Harris (review)

The past 15 years or so have seen a distinctive “spatial turn” within ethnomusicology that foregrounded the significance of space, place, and region in the analysis of historical, social, political, economic, and demographic issues as they relate to music and musical practices. This is perhaps only to be expected, given the continuing large-scale migrations of people across international borders and large expanses of the globe at phenomenally rapid rates and speeds that have resulted in new diasporic migrant communities and the increased cultural (and musical) complexity of many societies, both large and small.

The notion of place-based identity and its musical implications with respect to a particular ethnic minority culture in China is the subject of Rachel Harris’s book, Singing the Village: Music, Memory and Ritual among the Sibe of Xinjiang. Unlike most of the ethnomusicological literature on musical diasporas that examine music cultures that have been transplanted from one country to another as part of Western colonialist projects or as a result of more recent sociopolitical upheavals or developments, the Harris study looks at the music culture of a small minority ethnic group within China, the Sibe, who had been uprooted from their home in Northeast China by the Chinese imperial state in 1764 and forcibly relocated to northern Xinjiang in the far reaches of Western China, where they remain to this day. Notwithstanding the fascinating angle brought on by the “lost tribe myth” that had reportedly initially caught the author’s interest, the Sibe provides an unequivocally interesting case study that offers a detailed look into how this minority ethnic group continues to cling to and maintain their Northeast Chinese heritage through song amid close coexistence in Xinjiang with several other non-Han minority ethnic groups and despite the pressure to assimilate and adopt Han Chinese customs.

The Xinjiang Autonomous Region (formerly known as Chinese Turkestan) sits on the westernmost reaches of the Chinese People’s Republic. As a frontier area bordering several countries (Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India), it has a very ethnically diverse population, so much so that it is not unusual for visitors to the region to sometimes forget that they are still in China. Except perhaps for Urumqi, the regional capital, which has an overwhelmingly large Han population and seems no different from other large cities in China, many parts of Xinjiang are inhabited by members of non-Han Chinese ethnic groups. The largest of these is the Uyghur, who have been in the news as of late mostly as a result of having been at the forefront of the ethnic riots and protests against Han Chinese rule. Among other groups are the Kazakh, Hui, Kyrgyz, Mongol, Dongxiang, Pamir, and the Sibe—the smallest of the minority ethnic groups in Xinjiang and the focus of this book.

Harris asserts that the cultural situation of the Sibe within Xinjiang’s culturally pluralistic environment is more complex than that presented by the duality of either to be of the Han or to be of an often despised and disadvantaged Other that needs to be Sinicized in order to become civilized. This situation has other counterparts in Chinese music history, that is, the tendency of the Han Chinese to adopt and refine the music of the Other so as to bring it closer to their standards. Harris professes her aim in this book is “to counter this monolithic view of Chinese culture by demonstrating a more complex picture of layers of syncretism and multi-directional cultural flow between discrete sub-cultures, within and without the larger Chinese cultural domain, calling into question the naturalness of this basic duality” (3). She begins by describing the Chinese state’s position toward ethnic minorities, discussing at length the establishment of a classification system in...