Coming to you today from the journey of Team Tongue is a brief recap of our most recent escapades. As chief photographer and video editor, I was tasked with the exciting goal of filming the process of cooking our Uyghur meal. Teammates Billie and Zach built our tandoor oven over the course of several hours this past Thursday (Props to them for some crazy hard work). Billie was also able to capture much of the process which I am currently editing together for a portion of our final project.
With the Tandoor complete, our essential structure for cooking the meal out of the way, we began preparing our dishes early afternoon on Saturday. For nearly seven hours our group toiled over our eternally smoking (and as Zach found out, highly-flammable) homemade, oven. Our aim was to cook the entire meal using traditional means and in my humble opinion we were most successful.
Interestingly enough, our cooking session coincided with a reading assignment concerning the Uyghur people and the Xinjiang region. As it should happen, our three dishes matched up with three of the “local specialties,” mentioned in the book, Xinjiang, the Land and the People. If anything, it was good to know we were on the right track.
Seven hours later we sat down to nang bread, chicken kebabs, pilaf and tea. I was hardly able to take a few pictures of our display before Zach tucked into the heavenly spread. This commenced the consumption of absorbent amounts of food. Worth the wait, the singed arm-hair, and a shirt that will eternally smell like the inside of an earthen oven. 100 percent.
Below you will find some photos-a teaser-preceding the unveiling of the main event.
Monthly Archives: November 2016
Soon!
The semester is beginning to wind down (how do we only have one month left?), the deadline for the website is approaching, and shockingly, I feel ready for it.
I have worried this whole semester over the amount of information I have, and whether my team is creating a cohesive project. But now, with our points decided upon and the beginnings of an introduction written, I feel a lot more confident.
The information I had didn’t feel like enough until I began to actually pin down physical sites and started to notice a pattern in what I was researching. Making concrete deadlines within the group for choosing sites and beginning to input information onto the storymap also really helped: before, it had been easy to sort of push work back and fall behind. Basically, moving from the research stage to the actual creation of the project led to a lot more confidence!
The conversation the Sky group had with Eric a few class periods ago also made things clearer. I had been worrying about cohesiveness as a whole, however, he suggested on “exploring phenomenons” instead. This put the project into a new perspective for me. Before, I thought that we would have to all be making the same point, just through the different lenses of beauty standards, queer identities, and fashion. But, now I realized that we could each explore slightly different ideas under the umbrella of “Body aesthetics within Uighur communities.”
My subsection of this topic is fashion, and I’m focusing on how fashion is used among Uighur women as a form of self-expression. One way of doing this is through the braiding of the hair I mentioned in my last blog post. But a more serious way this is being done is through silent protest against laws limiting outward expressions of Islam. There have been many bans against veils and other clothing items the Uighur wear to show their Muslim faith. Despite this, many Uighur women continue to wear these items not only to represent their religion, but to quietly rebel against these limitations. There have also been pressure from the government pushing for different ways to express faith without the use of veils.
It’s incredibly interesting to see the many ways fashion is being used. These strong strategies of self expression and protest provide a powerful contrast to the idea that fashion is a vapid and shallow interest.
Kashi-ing Up to Kashgar: Tandyr to My Heart
Buenas Noches readers,
I hope your day’s been swell!
The Tongue Team is getting down to the nitty gritty topic we’ve all been waiting for……….FOOD!
Since the focus of our whole digitized project is cuisine in Kashgar, we thought it appropriate to present and serve a meal during our presentation, and to focus our Prezi points on a photograph of a meal we create. We’ve long been discussing the logistics of building a tandoor oven, and through fire permits, changing locations, and fluctuating prices, Billie and Zach finally got it built today! The original plan was to donate it to the Guilford Farm, but the oven would need to be under a structure to prevent rain decay, which would violate fire codes. Therefore Zach now has it stationed in his backyard.
(I’ve provided a very low-quality view of the inside. Video credits to Billie)
Saturday Zach and I, perhaps Chris and Billie, are venturing to Costco to purchase the ingredients for the meal. Here’s the very rough shopping list we formulated (that is by no means complete):
-Kabobs
- Lamb or chicken
- Cumin
- Chili Flakes
- Fennel Seeds
-Naan
- Dry active yeast
- Salt
- Sugar
- Flour
- Sesame Seeds
- Poppy Seeds
-Pilaf
- Chicken
- Jasmine Rice
- Carrots
- Onions
- Garlic
-Tea
- Black tea
I’ll be providing the wok for the pilaf, Zach the tandoor oven and the hand tools, and we’re all hunting for a porcelain teapot and dishware (or at least good replicas). Billie has searched Goodwill, but we’re continuing to search HomeGoods and thrift stores.
To append to Billie and Chris’s Honor’s project over the J-term trip, we’re filming every aspect of the process: building the tandoor, purchasing the ingredients, practicing the food preparation, cooking the meal, and serving it. We thought cuisine too three-dimensional a topic to simply be read about, and it certainly lends itself to being interactive. We’re going to incorporate it as a series of videos on our map and site page.
Fortunately, tonight’s reading coincided with a main focal point in our project: the Uyghurs!
One of the first sources stated that “Uighur” is not a romanization of “Uyghur” (or vice versa) but a completely different ethnic group! I was immediately concerned, because I wasn’t sure that all of us delineated between the two in our findings due to the fact that we thought them identical. However I could find no articles supporting this statement, though I did find many stating that the people themselves prefer the “Uyghur” spelling because it is more in accordance with phonetics of their native language (“Uighur” violates vowel harmony). Other sources went in depth to the rise of Islam in Xinjiang, evidencing why Kashgar has such a religious focus. The Karakhanids established their capital in Kashgar, and sometime later Yusuf Khass Hajib wrote “Wisdom of Royal Glory”, which referenced the Quran and hadiths, providing stark evidence of Islam. Kashgar became a Muslim religious center but was eventually taken over by the Manchus, though Yakub Beg later established an independent khanate to return Muslims to power.
I realize that was a fairly brief update on the multi-faceted beast of this course, but I hope it suffices! Many more insights to come.
Have a wonderful night!
Regards,
-Delaney
Kashi-ing Up to Kashgar: Research and Respite
Ciao readers,
I hope you’re well!
There’s been much that’s occurred since I last blogged.
Last Tuesday, most of the course trekked to Chapel Hill to see esteemed Sufi musician Youssou N’Dour perform an amalgamation of religious and “pop” music. Although Eric and a fellow professor I was riding with seemed to be ecstatic over him, I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Would the music have more auditory similarity with African music than Arab? Would the music be restrained, or lively? Would it have an overt religious focus? I could’ve easily browsed his repertoire on Youtube, but I wanted to be surprised, letting the live concert be my first experience. As soon as the first musician approached centerstage, the auditorium was awash with color from the embroidered robes and caps, and booming with a cacophony of instruments. I recognized some of the drums spoken of during the little pre-concert presentation we attended, and mulled over the fact that to play ⅔ drums displayed one must be born into a genealogy of drummers. This theme of genealogy seemed an integral theme in the Sufi tradition, because apparently most of the songs Youssou sings are recitations of family histories. Sometimes people are even hired to memorize family trees and sing them at events! Another tradition, or perhaps just a one-time event, I found curious was the collection of money by the performers. One older gentleman with the surname Mbaye (who was N’Dour’s musical inspiration as a child) incited viewers to swarm the stage during his performance, offering bills which he swiftly pocketed. Later a younger performer made rounds with a basket. Overall, I found the concert incredibly engaging. Instead of a somber, dignified affair, it was lively and struck something in me solely with the sounds, as I couldn’t understand a single word.
To switch gears to the Tongue Team’s project, we’re currently in the process of compiling individual research. My focus on culture and customs has narrowed to hover around the practices surrounding lokantas and tea. Lokantas are Turkic cafes, mostly frequented by those of the Uyghur ethnicity, that serve snacks and conversation between community members. They are often divided into sections for men, women, and children. To simplify, they could be compared to Western cafes. I’ve found many recent sources documenting these establishments, however I ran into a complication with my historical research: “lokanta” was (and is in some places) also a general Turkish word for restaurants. This means that most of my search results in academic databases are in Turkish (without translation) and the results are broad, not honing in on the specific type of lokanta I’m seeking. I peddled around for awhile trying to avoid taking on the bear of translation, but most of my other lokanta sources were just blogs/first-hand accounts and not proven as scholarly, so I thought I still needed something to supplement them. This Monday I met with Rachel, the research librarian at Hege, to discuss my hindrances with this topic. She provided me with a myriad of options I hadn’t previously considered:
-Finding a Turkish speaker at Guilford through the Study Abroad office or the Learning Commons
-Contacting the Islamic or Turkic Studies department at UNCG
-Getting sources from NPR cultural pieces
-Using other sources like anthropology databases
She assured me that I could use blog or more contemporary sources as long as I felt them legitimate.
We also got into a discussion about tea, from whence she recommended “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” by Tom Standage, which contains a whole portion on tea. I’ve requested for the library to order it and am excited to see what it holds!
Below I’ve attached an exterior example of a lokanta:
Thank you for reading! Bis dann!!!!
Regards,
-Delaney
A Hearty Dose of Research
Hello there!
This week has been a very interesting one in regards to this course, and I am excited to fill you in!
Last Tuesday, we took a class field trip to Chapel Hill, where we got to see a performance by Youssou N’Dour, one of the most famous pop musicians in Senegal. The entire show was brilliant and full of incredible energy; even when I couldn’t fully grasp what was going on (there was a point where people handed the performers handfuls of dollar bills?), I could sense how much the event meant to the West African members of the audience. My favorite part of the show was that a group of audience members went up to the front and danced. Something that I found really cool was the way that Youssou N’Dour incorporated a narrative-style storyline into his performance and, of course, this sparked some ideas regarding our silk road project.
I’ve become a lot more interested in the role that the Cultural Revolution played in the current shape of modern Shamanic practices. Of course, the region that I am the most focused on (as far as origins go) is Mongolia, but as we have learned most recently in class, the regions of Mongolia fluctuated quite a bit. The regions that were heavily impacted by the Cultural Revolution were also impacted by the reign of the Mongols.
An article that has been especially helpful to me recently is called New Material on East Mongolian Shamanism, and it was written in 1990. Of course, newness is relative here because it is now 2016, but a lot of the content has been instrumental in my research and I am learning that when you delve into the depths of history like this, sometimes the best source really is a rather old one. This field of study (although I definitely agree with our professor Eric’s ideas about the limitations of typifying disciplines) is different from psychology in that it is not necessarily detrimental to cite a source that is old. Additionally, as I become more specific with my research the range of sources diminishes–thank god! This particular article focuses on the Shamanism of the Mongol population north and east of the Hsiang mountains up to the Yablonoj mountains, and it includes names for types of Shamans and semi-Shamans, which I thought was really cool. For instance the word for male shamans is “boge” and the word for female Shamans “iduyan.”
Anyway, I look forward to sharing how our week shapes up–on Thursday we are meeting with Tierney to put all of our research up on the StoryMap!
xoxo