The timeline for this project is slowly narrowing – 2 weeks now – and the time has come for me to get all of my thoughts and ideas that are floating up in the air, and bring down the few that I can actually finish in two weeks. The two topics that proved the most fruitful in research and the most interesting to me were porcelain and bread (specifically naan/nan).
Porcelain is similar to silk, although not quite so illustrious and famous, in the way it originated in China and spread west on the Silk Road. Porcelain was made out of a very specific type of clay, kaolin clay, that could be found in parts of China. China began firing this clay in cities where kaolin clay was abundant, such as Jingdezhen, and keeping the details of this production secret. The beautiful white, hard, semi-translucent ceramics became coveted in the regions of Persia, but they held neither the means of production nor the knowledge of how to obtain those means. In places such as Iraq, potters began to emulate Chinese porcelain with materials they had access to, but could not recreate the porcelain imported from China along the Silk Road.
In Kashgar, porcelain cups are used for tea in tea houses or within personal homes at meals. These cups may be the simple, white porcelain or the blue and white porcelain that is often thought of as “china” or Chinese porcelain. On the Tongue team’s table of a Kashgar meal, black tea will be served in porcelain cups and we will tear off pieces of our naan and dip them into our tea.
Nan is huge in Kashgar, as I have previously discussed in blog posts. Many associate nan with India, which is not wrong, but it is important to highlight the similarities in bread and the way it is baked and prepared throughout Asia. Nan is traditionally Persian and its connections with China through the Silk Road resulted in the use of the tandoor oven and the baking of this thin, round bread. As Kashgar was a very central location along the Silk Road, and one that  very much connected the East of China and the West of Persia, it is not surprising that nan is a staple in everyday life.
Besides the brief history of nan and tandoor ovens (only as the oven relates to nan, though, as Zack will be going in-depth about tandoor ovens), I will mainly be talking about the preparation of nan and the ways in which it is both cooked and served. The narrative of nan within the Tongue Team’s meal is crucial, because it acts as both a stand alone component of the meal and a utensil in which to eat other parts of the meal.
In the next few days I will be writing out the narratives and the plans for my map/prezi points for these two topics as well as uploading all of my artifacts into SharedShelf.

Last weekend, as timekeeper, I roughly outlined a schedule for the Tongue team and then as a team we went through it to make it our official timeline for the rest of the project. While organizing and scheduling usually takes away some anxiety and stress this seemed to take my vague anxieties for the project and solidify them into very real and scary due dates and approaching deadlines. We are too close to finishing this…
What I love about my team is our ambition and our passion; however, the requirements for this project have downscaled and we are still moving ahead on our fairly elaborate goals. I think we have a chance of pulling them off, because we have been working pretty hard from the beginning with research and planning, but it’s still extremely daunting. I can’t tell if I think we are being slightly unrealistic or if I am just really stressed about the amount of work it will require. Hopefully I am overthinking it and it will be more doable that I am expecting.
We have definitely gotten all our ideas in order, though, and have concrete goals and ideas. One of the questions we have been having is how we will be a part of the storymap since our project is different from the standard idea. Our team is writing the narrative of a meal in Kashgar and had hoped early on to have an image on the class’ map set in Kashgar of our scene (a table with each component of the meal). We have been trying to come up with ways to do this with the technology we have been given, but have found it extremely restricting instead of inspiring, which is the whole point of the class’ focus on digitalization. Our most recent idea has been to link a Prezi presentation of an image of our meal and each of our separate research on each component. I gave it a quick try during our last team meeting with a randomly chosen image from google images of a table with multiple dishes on it and it is very similar to what we had hoped for! We think this might be our best option, despite the fact that Prezi is a pretty horrible system to work with – it is extremely frustrating and arduous in regards to the technology/site’s abilities and parameters.
I kept working on that example Prezi of what our project might look like for the sake of demonstrating our group’s end goal as well as tinkering around on Prezi to get familiarized with it. Here it is: http://prezi.com/hsvs-xr8snsw/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
Side note:
I contacted a photographer, Ramdas Iyer, who has a whole page on his site dedicated to magnificent open markets along the Silk Road, including Kashgar (http://ramdasiyer.travellerspoint.com/40/). He said we would be able to use all and any of his images free of charge because they will be used for educational purposes. Here is one photo I think is incredible… because I love bagels!

While this is probably extremely basic and obvious, it has taken me this long in my research to come to the realization that the body is a tool of its own in cooking and that there is a history and culture to the body as a tool.
To make noodles, people in Kashgar as well as many other places in China use a very specific technique of stretching, folding and, basically, slapping to thin dough into noodles. This technique is highly unique and the use of the fingers and hands are so integral and specific to the process and end result. How did this technique come to be? I must know! Hopefully more to come on this front.
To make naan and bagels in Kashgar, bakers have to shape the dough in order to get the right shape. Tools such as rolling pins and a chekish might get used, but no tool can replace the hands for certain steps of this process.
Hands molded the pots used, carved wood into certain kinds of utensils, slap naan onto the walls of ovens, knead dough, roll dough into balls, pick vegetables and fruit, pick up bread to dip into tea or dinner. What else? Are other parts of the body important to different steps of cooking or handling of food? What specialized tasks do fingers have in different cooking scenarios? Are feet ever used for kneading dough, making grapes into wine, etc?
I believe this is really where my epiphany came from: I was so focused on tools, utensils and modes/methods of cooking that got created over time that I completely forgot about the one thing that is present in every kind of cooking everywhere: the human body. I am still focused on tools created for cooking, but now I have a whole new avenue of research to go down! This is getting me super jazzed about research (which might also have to do with the time of day -2am- and amount of coffee consumed) and I can’t wait to go through videos, photos, and texts to study how people in Kashgar use their hands, their arms, their feet, and any other part of their body to cook.

So far photographs and videos have been much richer in information and content than anything I have read, in regards to food and its preparation. For instance, I have found this travel blog site with a section dedicated to Kashgar entitled, “Pictorial Essay and Record of a Historic City Salted for Destruction.” The pictures are incredible and there are small stories written in between some of the photographs that go into the feel of Kashgar as a city that are fascinating. The pictures depict pottery and metal (copper?) pots and naan and bagels; I want to know so much more about the those men and women making and selling those products, where they picked up the trade and the history behind their practices. The pictures can’t tell me all of those details, but those photographs seem to hold more information than most of my database searches. Why is that? Is what I am searching on these databases or in google searches not the right avenue of research? Am I not using the right keywords? I feel as though I have tried going less specific with searches and gotten nothing that pertains to subjects I need, and then getting absolutely no results from more specific searches. And then the middle ground to those searches only get my toes wet in terms of the information I hope to gain or the topics I hope to delve into.
I have tried searching in Mandarin and then google translating websites, but even then my results are few and lacking substance. My most substantial sources of information have been YouTube videos (that I linked in a previous post) in Mandarin.
Now that I have become slightly burnt out on the naan and bread-making front, I have turned to porcelain. Porcelain has been proved a better topic of research so far. I have found a fair amount through databases, but I have not read through all of the possible articles and journals so I cannot say so far whether or not this avenue of research will be successful or not. Pottery in general in Kashgar, however, has been a trickier topic of research than expected. Again… why?????? I see incredible forms of pottery in photographs or wooden utensils used for cooking (such as special rolling pins for rolling out the naan), but can not find those details that look so important in photographs and videos in written form or documentation.  These cooking tools and methods are important and should absolutely have an interesting and influential history and significance, which is why I am being so stubborn in my research. There should be way more information available than what I have found!
The articles, blogs, and websites I have found on the making of naan or pottery  are all modern, and the vast majority of them are not made by Chinese citizens or citizens of Kashgar. The creators or writers are, instead, Westerners who write about parts of Kashgar that seem to be novel or special. This perspective that keeps coming up in my searches is not necessarily surprising, as modern documentation is significantly easier and more accessible, but it is also important to look critically at these sources, because they do not hold multitudes of valuable information, but rather fairly surface level information. I also am thinking critically about the fact that there doesn’t seem to be much in-depth or non-western sources of information in the searches I have done. Were cooking practices in Uyghur communities or in Kashgar not documented or uncovered? Am I, for the most part, only going to find research on what the West has found important? For instance, I have found significantly more on white porcelain than I have on the history of bakers of naan or potters. I assume this is because white porcelain is world renounced and recognized by the world as an important outcome of trade from China. The documentation and history of naan is probably not as important to the western world, but it is very important to me and my research.
I will continue to dig deeper and try new ways of researching in order to find information from more perspectives (than just western perspectives).

I have been struggling with creating momentum for my research this week. The combination of other work and some road blocks in research have slowed me down this week in terms of the Tongue Team project.
The two main subjects I wanted to look into this week were the pillow-like oven tools for breaking bread and the stamper (chekish) used to make puncture designs in the naan bread. I expected, since these tools are used today, that there would be a fair amount written on both of these tools. I suppose I was wrong, or I have not found the right kind of search or type of source, yet. I googled “kashgar chekish,” “kashgar naan stamper,” “naan chekish,” “naan stamper,” and came up with mostly recipes and small portions of information on the cooking of naan in Kashgar. While this is fun to read and somewhat useful, I have not found what I was hoping to find: history and cultural influence of these tools. I am slightly disappointed and discouraged, but will try again and shift my focus and search in the hopes of better results.

This week I watched a bunch YouTube videos. The first one I found was about the different kinds of traditional breads that get baked in this really incredible earthen oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39bRJSUewNE. While the actual baking of the bread by the professionals and watching how everything gets done was fun and illuminating, the three men leading this video expedition were very annoying and would have ruined the video for me if not for the delicious bread I got to watch. This initial video led me to others, all in Mandarin. My favorite so far is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJM38DtTCkk. What I hadn’t realized before this, is that so much information about cooking, cuisine, and traditions surrounding food in Kashgar would not always be documented in the usual ways we expect: scholarly journals or even official/trustworthy websites. Instead, much of the details that I, as well as my group, am so interested in learning about can be found in more creative and personal ways of documentation. Watching three YouTube videos gave me more information than all of the other research I had done through databases and google searches thus far.
Being somewhat familiar with Mandarin, I was able to pair the visuals with the spoken content to an extent. However, the truly enlightening part of watching videos as a source of research is actually seeing everything get prepared and cooked, such as the ways in which they rolled the dough or pierced it with these decorated tools that create beautiful designs in the bread. I now know how the bread gets slapped into the sides of the earthen ovens with pillow-like tools and how the naan sticks to the sides to bake. I now know that the bagels in Kashgar don’t have a hollow middle (like the hole in bagels we have here), but just a dip in the middle. I now know that in tea houses, 茶馆, they dip the naan in their tea and drink out of beautiful white porcelain. In Kashgar they also spread chili sauce onto the naan or tear the naan into pieces and put them into soup/broth. 
I have so many new avenues of research to explore that I might never have known existed or were important before now. My next main foci for research will be the clays and earthen ovens/pottery, porcelain, the pillow-like oven tools, and the decorative piercing tools for naan. Additionally, I hope to find more YouTube videos to explore.
~ Side note: these videos, similar to 舌尖上的中国, give me such immense joy. They are so beautiful and fun to watch. Watching these videos held two educational components for me: research and the practice of my Chinese listening and reading (subtitles). I forgot so much Mandarin, but I also gave myself too little credit for how much I do remember; I was able to recognize significantly more characters than expected. ~

Last night our group met, because we now meet every Monday night (this week at 7:00, every week in the future at 9:00). We discussed what we had each done up to this point, which, to be clear, has been minimal for all of us. Zach is stoked about Tandoor ovens and Youtube videos about making them as well as videos on street food and other meals in Kashgar. The rest of our research seems to be rather hard to progress with. Delaney and I were talking about how there seemed to be some stuff to read, but that nothing felt valuable or felt like progress. There are very few books about the history of Kashgar, let alone food or culinary practices in Kashgar; the research on Kashgar I have done in various databases is also fairly limited and feels like context rather than the content we hope to have in our project. I have had slightly better luck zooming out to Xinjiang and hoping to find specifics about Kashgar within. My next step is going to be expanding my search to google and not just databases. I am hoping to sift through websites and any other results that might pop up form google searches either today or tomorrow (9/21). Ideally I would like to be spending at least 30 minutes to an hour every day on research for the Tongue team and I am hoping to attempt to accomplish that minimum this week as a trial run and see how successful I am. As a reminder to myself and a statement that might help keep me accountable for fulfilling this: I need to create a more thorough and upgraded timeline for my group as “timekeeper”.
The largest part of our meeting centered on how we were going to make a narrative out of our separate parts of the whole Tongue Team project. This led us to the question of how we wanted our portion of the map to look like and how it will travel from point to point. I was envisioning a picture of our meal as our main point and then have the ability to click on each aspect of the table in order to bring you to the background of each component of the meal. I don’t know, technologically, if that is possible, so we also discussed how the traditions of the order of what got served or eaten first might help us with how the digital map travels from point to point. We discussed a lot of ways in which we could turn our project and all its facets into a map for the final project. It was really fun to think of that creative aspect of the project and to look ahead at what it might look like when it’s all said and done.

This early stage of the project has been primarily about passion. The Tongue Team started out with passions and ideas all over the place and some confusion on how to interpret the parameters of “tongue” and unify ourselves. This process began with a dump of ideas and the back and forth that comes along with inspired people bouncing all their ideas off of each other. During the first few meetings of our group (in class and outside of class), we had the loose interpretation of tongue as language and the diffusion of culture through the Silk Roads. With this vague topic we attempted to narrow in on either a specific route traveled throughout time, a specific region, a group of people, or a time period. We needed to ground ourselves in one of these areas, but this task seemed fairly impossible to accomplish without knowing more about any group of people, route or time. Recommendations of following the Maritime route and spices were given to us, yet we still didn’t seem sure of that; we didn’t feel sparked from that route or the time period of the 13th Century C.E.
Nothing had fallen into a place that felt right for our group, so we kept moving pieces around and bouncing new and changing ideas off of each other. Chris, Zach, Delaney, and I met in the library to flesh out a solid concept for our group to unify around. Through a very enthusiastic conversation that kept bringing us from tangent to tangent of different possibilities, we landed on an idea that had us more inspired than any other: a meal. The topic of food and the cultural diffusion of cuisine had been circulating for some time, but had not taken the forefront of our group’s mind until this discussion. Once the topic of food was focused in on, the ideas bounced around faster and with growing excitement. The idea that cinched the topic of food for us was the concept of choosing one meal in order to break down and zoom out from in the different directions of the specific components of that meal. We also decided that a meal was not just going to mean cuisine for us, but also the traditions that came along with the preparation, serving, and customs of the food and eating of the food. Each of us would choose part of the meal (the beverage served, the bread, the meat, the way in which it was served and by whom, etc) and conduct our own research about the history, context, and significance of that piece of the meal.

The next stage of evolution for our team was the location and time period of this meal, which brought us to the nomads of the steppe region in a very early time period; roughly 3rd Century CE Xiongnu Empire. What we very quickly figured out was that this group of people and time was not going to work out. The Xiongnu did not write and therefore the knowledge we have of them is scarce. The suggestion by Eric to focus on a modern meal and trace back each component set us on the track we are now ploughing forward on.  
The foundation on which we plan on building our project off of is this: the etymology of a meal in Kashgar. We chose Kashgar, because it holds a mix of many cultures along the Silk Road. Kashgar is a fairly central location along the Silk Road, and one that holds geographical significance as it is an Oasis city and would have encountered a lot of traffic of merchants and travelers over time. The etymology piece of our project is the key component; each member of our team will be exploring a part/a few parts of the meal through time and space along the Silk Road. The meal itself will act as the glue that holds our respective components together and enables those separate pieces to become more digestible to our audiences (pun intended).
At this point in time, the breakdown of our team is based on experimental research that will determine what meal we choose and will help us to narrow in on our individual pieces of the meal through the process of starting with large research and slowly zooming in. Zach, the presenter, is looking into the beverages consumed in Kashgar, the significance of these drinks, how they were drunk, the processes of making these drinks, and how the culture around food diffused out of and into Kashgar. Delaney, the recorder, is focusing her research on the food customs in Kashgar as well as the significance of folklore; how folklore has diffused knowledge about food and traditions around food. Chris, the facilitator, is researching the ingredients common in Kashgar dishes: spices, meats/animal products, pasta, etc; he will be mapping out where these ingredients originated from, how they were used by themselves and in larger meals, and their significance within the culture of food in Kashgar. My personal role is that of the timekeeper, and my research is on the different kinds of preparation of food in Kashgar, equipment used, and the methods of cooking. I am very interested in learning the different ways meats, breads, and other components of dishes were cooked; what kinds of tools were used, what form of cooking did different meals have, what were ingredients cooked in and how were those pieces of equipment made. Bread has become a special area of focus for me, because of its importance within a meal and the especially delicious ways that bread is made and cooked in Kashgar.
The technological component of this project was initially intimidating to me, because I thought I would have to learn skills such as coding that would be an added challenge to an already challenging team project. On the contrary, however, WordPress seems clean and straightforward. Seeing the skeleton of the website we will be adding flesh to made the project seem real for the first time and built up the anticipation of seeing all the separate components of the individuals and groups start to come together on it.
While sometimes confusing and slightly stressful, this has been an extremely fun and rewarding process thus far. Our group feeds off each other’s enthusiasm and inspiration in a way that creates really wonderful products and a kind of cohesion that can often be hard to accomplish in group projects. I think our passions are what drive the group, which has been vital so far, but might hurt us along the road when our passions keep us from making concrete decisions. I have high hopes for our team, our explorations, and our creations.