In ninth grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Herrington for a history class called “Eastern Civilizations.” At this point in my life, I was the furthest thing from a history buff or even a history fan, and I struggled to see studying history as interesting. In Ms. Herrington’s class, we studied the Silk Road and the Mongol Empire and that was the first thing in my high school history career that truly piqued my interest—why, I can’t really be sure. I still remember a packet that we had that told stories of Genghis Khan stuffed villagers into carpet bags and running them over with horses (once again, why this fascinated me so much, I’m really not sure). I am definitely looking forward to sending Ms. Herrington a letter at the end of the course when the website is posted and telling her about how I went on to college to serve as the teaching assistant for a large digital humanities project on the Silk Road, an interest that she originally cultivated in my education. Not only that, but I will be traveling 3500 miles along the Silk Road over 3 weeks in January. It’s crazy for me to think that one chapter that I particularly liked in my high school history book is now something that I get to go see and do. I never imagined that my academic career would bring me here, but I am so excited at the opportunity.
In class this week, while discussing the Mongol Empire, we talked about how Chinghis Khan holds the reputation of being incredibly violent, which, while true, conflicts with the reality that many towns peacefully surrendered to Chinghis Khan because they had heard about the Mongols by word of mouth. It stuns me that Chinghis Khan may not have actually intended to be a conqueror, but instead kept conquering for fear of retaliation from places he had already defeated. I find it fascinating perhaps the most successful conqueror in history may have done it by chance or convenience, rather than by intense engineering. While this video is aimed at a younger audience than our class, I think it gives a good basic representation of this struggle around Chinghis Khan’s reputation.
Monthly Archives: October 2016
Fashionably late to the party: bring the beat in.
This is my first blog post. Had I actually kept up with them like I was supposed to (I’m sorry) I could have given you (and me) a more fluid and clearer image of my process these past…well, this whole semester. Once I missed the first one, the big one, I kind of slipped and didn’t know how or where to pick back up. I continued my work with my fellow Hearts, but the website became this foggy intangible element that I was scared to approach. In fact, the whole researching/attacking a theme and direction process was foggy. Were any of these notes and findings actually applicable? Am I branching too far away from our decided central theme? Do I even have a firm grasp on what that theme is? Nothing felt solid or accomplished, in our group and in my own understanding of our individual and collective voice/role. Without that solid evidence and feeling, I had no idea what I could possibly write. Obviously, it would’ve helped had I just reached out immediately, but I didn’t. And here we are. So while I’d like to dump all those notes, feels, conflicts, and mini breakthroughs onto this entry now, I’ll allow this post to be a platform of moving forward: addressing the present as it is, and the hopes and goals to come.
Today was actually perfect for regaining my momentum with this project. Gavin Douglas (the professor of Ethnomusicology at UNCG who presented in class) reignited my confidence and excitement as he basically walked us through exactly what my group and I have been trying to attack. Our original idea having been following an instrument’s development and use across time and land, Gavin provided the foundation of a concrete history and narrative to easily follow. I was almost pissed sitting there thinking: yup, yup that’s what we’ve been looking for. No, don’t show the class the horse-head fiddle! That’s OUR thing. I’m pretty sure Emma and Emily, (who were sitting next to me, and definitely maybe sharing my thoughts), and I were ready to invite Gavin then and there into our group. Maybe interviewing him could actually be a helpful tool for us. We’ve already decided to use today and the contemporary use of musical performance as our vantage point of time to work backwards from. What if we used here, in Greensboro as the locale we’re traveling back from? Gavin even mentioned that the banjos we use in North Carolina are directly linked to movement from West Africa. Our narrative could be not only easier and more accessible for people stateside to comprehend, but it would be that much more intimate and personal to our own journey academically and physically. Musical tradition has moved and shifted a lot, and music also moves us. That’s something we should and can embody in the story and map we weave.
Setting up meetings
My team met today for our weekly meeting, where we discuss where we are in our research. Today we focused on planning when to meet for the deadlines.
One of the main problems we seem to be facing as a group is still coherency of narrative and how the story map is going to be analyzed. The plan to confront these problems is to have all our information up on the google doc by next Tuesday, along with a paragraph describing the narrative we see within our own individual topics, and some ideas for the points we find important to put on the maps. Then, we will all meet in person the next day to discuss the narrative.
I have some hope that the narrative will come together organically and naturally. Our topics of beauty standards, gender expression, and fashion are all interlinked, so a similar narrative for all three may emerge. I know we are already noticing many continuities within our topics, and I think that these similarities can be shaped into a greater, overarching narrative. We also have to figure out how the geography intersects, and how to arrange the points on the map in a cohesive manner. Maybe similarities will arise once we see the research from everyone’s individual topic. Then comes the issue of in what order to arrange the points on the map. Maybe we’ll be lucky and a clear pattern will emerge!
I have been facing some small issues concerning my own individual project. I have yet to find any Uygher fashion designers, or find any evidence about whether traditional clothing is the norm for day to day life. The artifact I have included shows a wedding celebration, and I’m wondering if they normally wear clothes like the ones pictured outside of special occasions. Other pictures I have seen of Uyghers at market places or other everyday areas seem to show a similar style of clothing. I also have to find some more scholarly sources: most sources I have found just through Google searches, and are often just descriptions of the clothing normally worn, or focus more on the ways the current social situation affects attire.
Despite all of this, I have still learned a lot of interesting information! It’s very interesting to me the way fashion can be used to tell information about a person: for example, unmarried Uygher girls often wear their hair in many braids, while girls who are married only wear two braids. Another interest I have is seeing how their fashion relates to their Muslim faith.
So, even though we have faced some issues with this project, and still have some problems to resolve, I am still confident we will be able to create an interesting and cohesive final project!
[The] Heart Will Go On
Hello old friend!
Fall break came and went, far more quickly than I think any of us intended! The day I got back on campus I holed myself up my room, picked up the books I’d left in piles on my desk, and proceeded to get really excited about our project!
We met with Eric the day before break began, and he suggested that we funnel our new direction into an even more specific area: the internationalization of silk road performative traditions and their relationship with authenticity. More colloquially, we are describing what is happening now by relating it to what it once was. This change is going to make our final map product look a whole lot cooler because the topic has the potential to span more geographical regions than our original idea did. For instance, Jilly has shown some interest in dance. Performances of traditional Mongolian dance are actually occurring across the globe now, and we could very feasibly plot a point for our project in New York City. This sense of a geographical journey will lend really well to the narrative that Eric and Zhihong are looking for.
This honestly doesn’t change my research too drastically, but it does give everything a clearer shape for me. My most recent research has involved the age of current Shamans in the regions of Mongolia. I have found that the majority of current Shamans in the Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia are over the age of seventy–they took up Shamanizing in their youth, thus narrowly escaping the attempts to eradicate Shamanism during the cultural revolution.
Our most recent readings for class also filled in some gaps I’ve had in my brain about Shamanic practices and their intersections with musical traditions: I learned about the way that the shamanic drum is actually traditionally played in a dissonant manner. This style of drumming is rhythmically asymmetric in an attempt to imitate the sounds of the natural world, such as whistling winds or the thumping of horses’ hooves, which I think is extraordinarily beautiful.
I think that we are going to be having a lot of really fascinating conversations about what this “authenticity” in our new topic really means; I know that in my research I have already run into a lot of seemingly silly new-agey approaches to Shamanism that seem appropriative to me. I am very interested in concepts of performativity and what necessarily makes one spiritual practice more authentic than another, so I am excited to connect my research to these new more philosophical ideas.
SYMBIOSIS
Coming back, I think we all feel a pressure to have some sort of solid work to present. As the Silk Worm, I do not feel that stress but I am waiting anxiously to see where we are headed. I trust that the members of my group will come through. From the beginning, I think my group members and I imagined this project to be much more elaborate than it is. When we (the Silk Worms, Eric, Zhihong, and Tierney) broke it down the other week, we were all able to breathe a little more easily. It is always best to make things as least complicated as possible.
That said, while awaiting for the research my team gathered, I was quite inspired by the content of this weeks readings. The readings focused around music along the Silk Road and the convergence of culture. What struck a chord with me was the clips of Abigail Washburn performing. Abigail Wahburn is a world renowned singer and banjo player who also has a background in Chinese. I became aware of her and her work after listening to an ON BEING episode. ON BEING with Krista Tippett is a wonderful podcast that explores what it means to be human in modern day. This particular episode starred Abigail Washburn and her husband, Bele Fleck. Although it was not specifically about Abigail’s travels and music performed in China, it focused in the bridging of past and present and different peoples through music. I found a really neat video that reflects this:
The video was contributed by Chris Heagle, who is the producer and technical director of “On Being.” The video captures the magic of what music brings to a moment. In the video, Abigail Washburn is sitting in a room in Urumqi among a Uygher feast sharing an impromptu jam session with her band and friends. What strikes me about this clip is the mingling of language and sound. She is singing an American classic–Wayfaring Stranger–yet is accompanied by traditional Chinese instruments. WHAT A SOUND!
My group and I have decided to focus on the present–what even is contemporary Chinese music? What we are discovering is that the “music of the Silk Road” may not take place on the Silk Road at all, but instead is performed in California and New York, etc. This brings up questions of authenticity in art. Does mixing sound, culture, and language somehow make an art form disingenuous? These are the questions that we are playing with.
On a side note, I have a new favorite word that I came across in the this weeks readings. It is SYMBIOSIS. I don’t know how it took me so long to learn of it because it is nothing but excellent.
SYMBIOSIS = a mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups
Khan you believe how little time is left until this project is due
The readings for the past few classes have been incredibly useful in my research. It’s been really refreshing and rewarding to have so much material all of a sudden to work with and I’m very excited. One of the biggest challenges I’m facing right now is with The Secret History of the Mongols. I’m incredibly grateful that I was able to find the full text online but skimming through it to find valuable information is proving to be difficult. While the amount of useful primary source information is overwhelming in The Secret History of the Mongols I am having trouble choosing what information is most useful for our story map.
Right now my goal is to find as much information as I can on the time period in which Marco Polo was visiting the mongol court from within The Secret History of the Mongols. In order to make sure our story map is the best it can be I will need to meet with both members of my group as soon as possible so that I can insure the information I am gathering is useful and will improve our story map instead of just being repeated information.
Another Idea I’ve been toying with recently is of adding a fun side bar of information on our page giving some general background on the practices of the Mongols. While I think that our map will do a great job of providing a lot of information, I think it would also be good to provide the readers of the site with some more background info. I was thinking about doing a small paragraph section on the importance of the horse to the Mongol people. I think giving people an option to delve deeper into the culture of the Mongol people and learn about why they were such an effective military would be really useful. I’ve typed up a few drafts of what the paragraph would look like and have gathered what I believe will be all the sources I need for it. I also found a portrait of Genghis Khan that I think will make a good title addition above the paragraph to draw people in.
I’m excited to pitch this idea to my team and seeing if maybe they too would be interested in making an additional info paragraph to help add some density to our page in the end so the readers have lots of options. I’m feeling really good now that I have so many sources to look through and am getting really excited about being able to learn so much. I can’t wait to start the next set of readings as I think they will prove to be very useful as well! So far things are going great !
(Kashi)-ing Up to Kashgar: Picture Perfect
你好,
I hope you’re doing well! (And am mildly proud of myself for finding a Chinese keyboard)
Last week, following her comment on my post, Tierney linked me the instructions to create a Gigapixel StoryMap. The online example was enthralling: focused on a famous Impressionist painting, each slide zoomed in with remarkable detail, even going so far as to comment on an individual brushstroke. Our group was very excited for the possibilities. We proposed that we could zoom in on each individual dish and ingredient in the meal, and then provide information on point from there. While this sounded great in theory, Tierney brought up an important point I hadn’t considered. In order to get such a high quality zoom on the map, we would need an incredibly high resolution photograph. This outed our idea of simply scanning a sketch of a meal we fabricated, taking a picture of a pre-existing meal, or photoshopping one together. We also proposed going ahead and generating our points on the map and placing a background later and shifting points around, but Tierney informed us that the site doesn’t function in that manner. However Tierney stated that she may have misunderstood our project ambitions, and will continue searching for other sites and applications.
In Friday’s class, she introduced us to GIPHY and hipster ipsum, both valuable resources to spice and mock up our website while it’s in the developmental stage.
In addition to these new applications, Eric provided valuable clarification about the final product. We need an amount of points vastly smaller than we had anticipated, which makes it much easier to formulate a cohesive map.
Up until this class, and perhaps even after, I think everyone in our class was anxious about the expectations for the map. This being a new course, we had no model to base our own projects of off. But I know I personally was greatly relieved with hearing the dimensions and specifications for the project. It focuses on quality, not quantity.
In the spirit of the interwebs, here are two parting Gifs to represent my feelings about this project.
Before Friday:
http://lookhuman.com/
Now:
http://iheartcatgifs.tumblr.com/post/12968948480
Thanks for reading!
Regards,
-Delaney
(Kashi)-ing Up to Kashgar: Converging Visions
Hello readers,
I hope you’re well!
I write to you from the comfort of my couch, basking in my first official day of Fall Break. This has provided me some much needed time to reflect on our group’s project and progress.
This Thursday, the Tongue group met to gauge our project and discuss recent research. As Recorder, I drafted notes through the meeting.
We began by solidifying each of our specific areas of research:
-Billie is researching porcelain, the chekish used to stamp naan, and the human body as a tool
Zach helped Billie create a more comprehensive list of ways the hands are used in
cooking. Pleading dumplings (the motion used to close them), kneading dough, pulling
noodles, hand flicks and rotations used with a wok, grating noodles, etc.
-Chris is focusing on kebabs and mutton, cumin, chili, tea, yoghurt marinade and other sauces
-Zach is continuing to research tandyrs and their relation to Indic-Turkic cultural diffusion, and the dichotomy between the use of rice and noodles
-I am looking into lokantas (Turkic cafes) and their Italian origins, fan and t’sai (ying and yang of food), and the 5 elements (wood, water, fire, wind, metal) and their integration into food
Billie suggested looking into the Five Elements, harking back to a project she completed
in high school
In addition to narrowing our research topics, we all set goals for ourselves over break:
-Chris hopes to have a completed timeline for his spices, and will explore StoryMap as host (the account under which the map is created)
-Zach hopes to develop, but not finish, a timeline for the cultural diffusion of earthen ovens and tandoors, and perhaps one on rice and noodles
-Billie hopes to organize, cite, and digitize all of her resource, and maybe play around with Photoshop to see if we could manufacture a picture of a meal
-I hope to cite all of my sources and draft a timeline for lokantas
Jumping off of Billie’s topic, we spent some time researching some really innovative cooking techniques. We gleaned that in the Kashgar region they occasionally roasted animals in mud, barbequed on rocks, covered foods in clay before the rise of using boiling water.
A book that Billie ordered to Guilford for us on Kashgar was sent back to its origin, due to the fact that we didn’t retrieve it in time. Whoops! Luckily we can reorder after break. Other book woes relate to a very informative book we found: “A History of Food Culture in China” by Rongguang Zhao. There are no physical copies in any close vicinity to Guilford, nor can they be ordered, and Guilford doesn’t have access to the PDF copies at other universities. If we find it a very crucial source we’ll contact Rachel, but otherwise we may leave it be.
As for our tandyr-making plans, they’re looking up! Chris succeeded in getting funding from the International Club, and Zach has proposed creating a “Tandyr Club”. After break we also plan to take a group trip to Home Depot to price materials.
Thanks for reading! Bis dann!
Regards,
-Delaney
Group meeting today
At last, it seems like our project is coming together. Our topics are solidifying: our main task now is to narrow down some locations and discuss how we will frame some potentially controversial topics. The language barrier is also a big issue: a lot of potentially useful sources are written in Chinese or other languages.
I’m looking forward to doing some research over fall break. During the semester, I’ve often been worn out by other classes and assignments and don’t feel like delving into Silk Road research, but I think the free time over break is a good research opportunity. My team has decided that we should have the majority of the research done by the end of fall break as well.
I have a few paths of research I’m contemplating. Most of the fashion I’ve found has represented a traditional form of dress, and I’m wondering what kinds of other clothing are worn by the Uygher women, and whether traditional clothing is only used for special occasions, or is the norm for some women. I’m also hoping to find some Uygher fashion designers. I’m interested to know whether these designers are normally men or women, and if they typically design more traditional or other types of clothing. I’m also looking into some research about how Uygher women’s Muslim beliefs play into how they dress.
The Process: 5
Upon reading several websites, blogs and viewing pictures, the common theme is that Kashgar is a pretty killing city. Some blogs described it as a city out of another time, while others noted that while it’s in China, it really isn’t Chinese (Wei). This is mostly because of its traditional markets, mostly farmer population and the predominant language spoken being Uyghur. Despite its traditional aspects, Kashgar and the entire Xinjiang region is encountering modernization. The Chinese government has developed several sections of the old city, often wiping out many of the cultural heritage locations in the process. This is decidedly uncool for the people who live there given that it is their traditional lifestyle that is being decimated, not the Han Chinese. However, the government has stated that this is in the name of progress and that their infrastructure and development will benefit the area in the long run.
Despite these modernization projects, Kashgar maintains its “old city” allure. A big attraction is the Sunday Markets which draw over 100,000 people to the pavilions and open fields. Because nearly 90 percent of Kashgarians are farmers, their income mostly comes from selling excess crops and selling their animals (Wei). A sheep is about the same price as my two-way flight from Raleigh to Beijing ($900) according to some bloggers. However, the Kashgar New Land International Travel Service Company puts the price of a sheep at a mere $230. Either way, sheep are fascinating and are the livelihood of many Kashgar residents today and thousands of years in the past.
More about sheep: A high nose bridge, long ears, and a big tail, makes a good sheep. So next time you’re out at Walmart, keep that in mind. The Kashgar sheep are famous according to the same website, as many inland Chinese like to have their Kashgar mutton and transport it from Xinjiang. Mutton is primarily used in stews and Kebabs but is also the meat of choice among Uyghurs as they must respect the Halal preparation rules.
Sheep are a big deal, but so are camels. The History Department of the University of Washington calls camels “the most important animal for the development of the long-distance overland trade across Asia.” Camels are not only useful for carrying 500 pounds worth of stuff, their milk is used in yogurts as well as to make a drink called shubat. Both camels and sheep were used for clothing purposes as well.
That’s quite enough about livestock for now. Next time we’ll take a look at what the livestock becomes after it has lived its glorious life. Kebabs, clothing and dishes, what can you make from your camel?
Finally, a quote from a human by the name of Alitash, found in Clarissa Wei’s blogpost about Kashgar and its markets, published on Vice.
“Camel milk is good for tuberculosis. Camel meat is the cheapest type of meat. Pregnant women won’t eat camel meat because it’s said to elongate their pregnancy by months.”