When I began studying the Uyghurs of Central Asia and China in the early 1990s, I was consistently discouraged by the lack of contemporary ethnographic studies of this group. Although some anthropologists were starting to publish books and articles on the Uyghur people, most studies then lacked ethnographic data, the rich descriptive accounts of everyday life in communities drawn from “participant observation.”
There were several reasons for the paucity of data. First, both China and Central Asia had only recently opened to the world, and Western researchers had only begun to conduct ethnographic research for the first time since the 1930s. Second, there were virtually no baseline ethnographic studies of Uyghurs informed by American and European schools of anthropology on which new research could build. Furthermore, while participant observation became possible in the former Soviet states of Central Asia by 1992, the Chinese state remained sensitive to the idea of...
