Guangtian Ha

Andrew Nevins

Jonathas de Andrade

Anderson Almeida-Silva

Xenia Benivolski

Chung Yung-Feng

Sturla Brandth Grøvlen

Hsia Hsiao-Chuan

Hu Wei

Mi Chan Wai

Laurel V. McLaughlin

Musquiqui Chihying

Moe Satt

Zeng Yu Kun

Te is an annual bilingual publication of contemporary art and cultural anthropology. Each issue expands on a selected theme that inspires us to invite practitioners in diverse fields to explore and reflect on the dynamic cultural landscapes across regions. Recurring motifs include the fluidity of cultures, languages, and beliefs in specific communities and the adaptation of individual narratives to the shifting social and geopolitical environment.The name te comes from the Hokkien pronunciation of "tea": [dæ]. The shifts in its sound are evidence of the globalizing forces in motion through human history: te traveled from Quanzhou, Fujian, along the Maritime Silk Routes to Europe, where it became "tea". Although the pronunciation of "tea" is alive as part of the global lingua franca, few have an idea of its etymology and or the interest to trace its evolution. Therefore, we hope to create a publication that embraces movement and fluidity. An essential condition of the contemporary, fluidity fosters cross-disciplinary practices that we aim to showcase through written words and images. We hope to delineate phenomena sprouting in the liminal space where cultural values, material advancements, individual and community aspirations, and institutional practices meet, often in misalignment.We never imagined that globalization aspirations would be so abruptly arrested by the cold realities of a pandemic. "Isolation" seems to be the only common vocabulary of our time. Stranded on individual islands, people feel besieged by flaring nationalist sentiments and ideological confrontations that exasperate through their screens. . If ideology is like a vast ocean, then te shall be a pebble thrown into the water. These subtle ripples are the responses and dialogues that ensue, informed by personal experiences and honest reflections, no matter how modest in reach, would be the reward we cherish.

Song of the Nightingale

Te Magazine No.2

The Jahriyya Sufis—a primarily Sinophone order of Naqshbandiyya Sufism in northwestern China—inhabit a unique religious soundscape. The hallmark of their spiritual practice is the “loud” (jahr) remembrance of God in liturgical rituals featuring distinctive melodic vocal chants. The first ethnography of this order in any language, The Sound of Salvation draws on nearly a decade of fieldwork to reveal the intricacies and importance of Jahriyya vocal recitation. Guangtian Ha examines how the use of voice in liturgy helps the Jahriyya to sustain their faith and the ways it has enabled them to endure political persecution over the past two and a half centuries. He situates the Jahriyya in a global multilingual network of Sufis and shows how their characteristic soundscapes result from transcultural interactions among Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and Chinese Muslim communities. Ha argues that the resilience of Jahriyya Sufism stems from the diversity and multiplicity of liturgical practice, which he shows to be rooted in notions of Sufi sainthood. He considers the movement of Jahriyya vocal recitation to new media forms and foregrounds the gendered opposition of male voices and female silence that structures the group’s rituals. Spanning diverse disciplines—including anthropology, ethnomusicology, Islamic studies, sound studies, and media studies—and using Arabic, Persian, and Chinese sources, The Sound of Salvation offers new perspectives on the importance of sound to religious practice, the role of gender in Chinese Islam, and the links connecting Chinese Muslims to the broader Islamic world.

Voice, Gender, and the Sufi Mediascape in China

The Sound of Salvation

Slavs and Tatars

A satirical poem about the rivalry of various fruits becomes a point of departure for investigations of tolerance and identity in a pluralistic world. The Contest of the Fruits takes a nineteenth-century Uyghur satirical poem as a departure point for investigations of language, politics, religion, humor, resilience, and resistance in a pluralistic world. Composed at the crossroads of multiple civilizations and empires and born of the Uyghurs' liminal position at the edges of Islam and the frontiers of China, "The Contest of the Fruits" captures a world in which borders are gateways rather than dividing lines. The poem, highly performative, embellished with verbal flourishes, and featuring the ribald rivalry of such fruits as mulberry, pomegranate, quince, and pear, may be the first Turkic rap battle. The book, which accompanies a project by the art collective Slavs and Tatars, brings together artists, academics, poets, and performers to create a visually compelling volume that deploys different registers (high and low) to examine subjects often considered mutually exclusive (for example, religion and hip-hop). It offers essays by leading scholars and journalists that cover topics ranging from language politics to the prominence of Uyghur rappers in China. Shorter "pop-out" texts take a more tentacular approach to Uyghur culture, sampling poetry by diaspora Uyghur poets and discussing such subjects as calligraphy, Uyghur pop music, mäshräp, and the Sufi practice of Samāc. Copublished with Haverford College

The Contest of the Fruits

Maria Jaschok

Rachel Harris

Imagining Transnational Communities: Conflicting Islamic Revival Movements in the People's Republic of China / Alex STEWART -- The Ban on Alcohol: Islamic Ethics, Secular Laws, and the Limits of Ethnoreligious Belonging in China / Ruslan YUSUPOV -- Religion, Nationality, and "Camel Culture" among the Muslim Mongol Pastoralists of Inner Mongolia / Thomas WHITE -- Displaying Piety: Wedding Photography and Foreign Ceremonial Dresses in the Hui Community in Xi'an, China / Yang YANG -- Listening In on Uyghur Wedding Videos: Piety, Tradition, and Self-Fashioning / Rachel HARRIS and Rahile DAWUT -- Marketing as Pedagogy: Halal E-commerce in Yunnan / Michael C. BROSE and SU Min -- Women's Qur'anic Schools in China's Little Mecca / Francesca ROSATI -- Equality, Voice, and a Chinese Hui Muslim Women's Songbook: Collaborative Ethnography and Hui Muslim Women's Expressive History of Faith / Maria JASCHOK and SHUI Jingjun, with GE Caixia -- The Gender of Sound: Media and Voice in Jahriyya Sufism -- Guangtian HA -- Translocal Encounters: Hui Mobility, Place-Making, and Religious Practices in Malaysia and Indonesia Today / HEW Wai Weng -- Diasporic Lives of Uyghur Mollas / Elke SPIESSENS -- "Force Majeure": An Ethnography of the Canceled Tours of Uyghur Sufi Musicians / MU Qian, with Rachel HARRIS -- "Travelers" in the City: Precariousness and the Urban Religious Economy of Uyghur Reformist Islam / Darren BYLER.

Ethnographies of Islam in China

In the late 1970s Islam regained its force by generating novel forms of piety and forging new paths in politics throughout the world, including China. The Islamic revival in China, which came to fruition in the 2000s and the 2010s, prompted increases in government suppression but also intriguing resonances with the broader Muslim world—from influential theoretical and political contestations over Muslim women’s status, the popularization of mass media and the appearance of new patterns of consumption, to increases in transnational Muslim migration. Although China does not belong to the “Islamic world” as it is conventionally understood, China’s Muslims have strengthened and expanded their global connections and impact. Such significant shifts in Chinese Muslim life have received scant scholarly attention until now. With contributions from a wide variety of scholars—all sharing a commitment to the value of the ethnographic approach—this volume provides the first comprehensive account of China’s Islamic revival since the 1980s as the country struggled to recover from the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution. The authors show the multifarious nature of China’s Islam revival, which defies any reductive portrayal that paints it as a unified development motivated by a common ideology, and demonstrate how it was embedded in China’s broader economic transition. Most importantly, they trace the historical genealogies and sociopolitical conditions that undergird the crackdown on Muslim life across China, confronting head-on the difficulties of working with Muslims—Uyghur Muslims in particular—at a time of intense religious oppression, intellectual censorship, and intrusive surveillance technology. With chapters on both Hui and Uyghur Muslims, this book also traverses boundaries that often separate studies of these two groups, and illustrates with great clarity the value of disciplinary and methodological border-crossing. As such, Ethnographies of Islam in China is essential reading for those interested in Islam’s complexity in contemporary China and its broader relevance to the Muslim world and the changing nature of Chinese society seen through the prism of religion.

Guangtian Ha

Books

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