Qingzhen from the perspective of the other : consumption and muslim boundary-making in republican China, 1920–1949
Studies of halāl (permissible) food production and consumption have often been linked to the assimilation of Muslim communities into the fabric of secular and/or non-Muslim nation-states. Much of the academic discourse on this subject has centered on the boundaries that religious dietary requirem...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2021
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10356/146152 |
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| Institution: | Nanyang Technological University |
| Language: | English |
| Summary: | Studies of halāl (permissible) food production and consumption
have often been linked to the assimilation of Muslim communities into the fabric
of secular and/or non-Muslim nation-states. Much of the academic discourse on
this subject has centered on the boundaries that religious dietary requirements
create between an in-group of faithful adherents to the religion and an out-group
of those who do not belong. Republican China (1920–1949), with its significant
population of Hui and Uyghur Muslims largely concentrated in the northwestern
and southeastern parts of the country, offers a new window onto this picture of
socialization through commensality. The present article flips the ethnographic lens
from viewing Muslim communities alone to viewing the historical perspective
of outsiders who interacted and broke bread with Muslims in the Republican
period, thus bringing to the surface heretofore overlooked factors that impacted
the process of Muslim social boundary-making through consumption. This
approach contributes to the historiography and anthropology of Islam in China by
spotlighting discretionary agency and by moving away from a focus on practices of
exclusivity on the part of Muslim populations or strategies of coercive repression
on the part of the nation-state. This has become especially important since the rise
of Communism in China, for fasting is one of the rituals of overt religiosity that the communist state has been keen to suppress. From a comparative perspective, this
article also demonstrates that gender, class asymmetries, and politics may be as crucial
as religion in explaining the dining strategies of Muslim minority communities. |
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