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Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang. Nathan Light. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology/Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, vol. 19. Chris Hann, Richard Rottenburg, and Burkhard Schnepel, general editors. Berlin: Lit Verlag Dr. W Hopf, 2008. Distributed in the USA by Transaction Publishers ([email protected]). 334 pp.
Nathan Lights Intimate Heritage: Creating Uyghur Muqam Song in Xinjiang is a dense and learned book that draws on the author's fieldwork in Xinjiang in the early 1990s, as well as on a broad knowledge of source materials and scholarly literature in a host of languages. The title of the book notwithstanding, Light's focus is not song per se, but the poetic texts of the Uyghur muqam songs. Light examines in detail the crucial role of song lyrics in the canonization of Uyghur muqam that has been ongoing in Chinese Xinjiang since the 1950s. As such, Light's study complements the excellent, recently published work of Rachel Harris, whose book, The Making of a Musical Canon in Chinese Central Asia: The Uyghur Twelve Muqam, focuses on the musical forms themselves (2008).
After a schematic overview of the Uyghur muqam's historical roots and present-day performance tradition, Light proceeds to his analysis of the texts, beginning with a fine historical account of what he calls "the poetics and politics of literary Sufism." Light's point here is that the poets who forged the Central Asian Islamic tradition a half millennium ago and contributed to it in the ensuing centuries reveal a great deal about the cultural politics...