Process posts will, believe it or not, reflect on the process our group is through in researching our topic and completing this project. After getting together today to research and brainstorm, I’m feeling much more confident about our current path. We’ve highlighted personal responsibilities, our research outlines and have even managed to schedule a weekly meeting time (incredible, given our various schedules).
Though we primarily researched on our own during the hour, we also bounced ideas off one another regarding how we’ll be presenting the final product as a narrative. Unfortunately, as of right now, we don’t have much knowledge of the story map program we’ll be using for the final piece and what its capabilities are. Our goal however, is to write our research out as a story, following specific people’s lives in Kashgar. We’re thinking about placing the audience around a dinner table and zooming out to different aspects of the meal from there. We even drew up a fantastic diagram of what this could look like which I tried to attach, but upon previewing it, could not see it clearly.
Given these posts are meant to include some reflection on research, I’ll be attempting to throw in a piece of information or quote I found interesting with each post. Here’s an appetizing description of a popular Kashgar snack according to the website Chinatouronline.com.
Lungs and Intestines. “A traditional snack and Uyghur favorite, Lung and Intestine poured with Flour and Rice is made of the lungs and intestines of sheep. The lung poured with flour is soft and the intestines are tasty, causing tourists at home and abroad to praise its special flavor.”

Greetings readers,
I hope you’re well!
Tonight has been one of fulfillment, of both stomachs and aspirations. Over pho and other East Asian dishes in local Greensboro joint, the Tongue group bonded and had a chance to converse about life without pressure of impending assignments.
At the outset of this project, I was honestly dubious about the results, and would never have imagined it to have gone as well as it has. Being objectively categorized into groups by interests sounded like a common-sense approach to delineate topics, but when I was categorized into the Tongue group I wasn’t sure that I meshed incredibly well with the other members. Instead of being a random amalgamation of oral-related interests (languages, food, social stratification and roles, etc) it seemed that it was a group of three vehemently excited by cuisine and one only mildly. Within this broad interest, we had group members interested in the rise and falls of empires, the role of women along the Silk Road, and linguistic diffusion. I wasn’t quite sure how we could come to a proposal all members were satisfied with.
Therefore our group was initially very malleable: all our fixations were orbiting around “tongue” aspects, but no one could pin down a topic that equally incorporated everyone.  After reviewing a timeline of nomads in class and being urged to looking into spices by a professor, we loosely decided upon researching spices and the Xiongnu people. However we soon realized that there were very little sources about either of these (spices had substantially more, but not from the timeline we had honed in on), and it seemed like we were just spinning our proverbial wheels. To start over, two members met with Eric and crafted the idea of focusing on the Kashgar region and following a meal.
Within following a meal from the Kashgar region, our team split into four focuses to make a more adequate attempt at gleaning a speck of knowledge on the topic. Christopher is focused mainly on foodstuffs (yoghurt, meat, vegetables), Zachary on beverages (grain, yoghurt, milk wine), Billie on preparation and consumption (utensils, ovens, dishware), and I of the cultural role (etiquette, types of meal settings, cultural diffusion). More specifically, I’m focusing on the customs and traditions behind dining, serving, and consuming.
I’ll admit that I was a mite disappointed when we shifted from a language-focused topic to one of cuisine, but I soon realized it was a blessing in disguise. I love linguistics, but dealing with translations and mapping of tongues that I’m not even remotely familiar with within the confines of this course would have been impossible. Additionally, it’s much more interesting to foray into an entirely new topic than adding to one with a sustained bank of knowledge. I’m actually very intrigued by the cultural concepts behind food, and how food can translate culture in the stead of a shared language. I’ve always found “exotic” food interesting to the palate and the mind, but the way it originated never sparked in my mind as an area of research. While I’m excited to journey into a new area, I’m a little frightened by my lack of expertise. Everyone else in my group can name food documentaries, dishes, and restaurants off the top of their heads, and I sit there enthralled but reeling. I just hope in my unfamiliarity I don’t drag them behind. We had hoped to dine at Apple China tonight but consumed pho instead, I engulfing myself in a cloud of culinary cultural awareness I didn’t know existed outside of cooking shows.
Anxiety-wise, I’m nervous about research and reception. I’m grateful that my topic is probably the farthest removed from the food itself, but am still unsure of how to find sources. I’ve done many collegiate research papers and projects before and can list numerous sources by rote, but absolutely nothing about food. I’m hoping that I can find guidance in the librarians, the professors, and my group members, but I want to be able to stand as an independent entity, not burdening them. Obviously in the time since writing emerged in Asia there must be enough combined sources, but I’m afraid I won’t access them. As for reception, I’m not quite sure of the effect this project will have. Eric urged us to avoid being daunted by this task, because it will only be “a drop in many oceans”, if that, but I still want our project to be original and significant. Through synthesis of established sources I’m not sure how many radical new ideas will emerge.
At the outset I believed that our group was a thrown together group of individuals, but ended up discovering that Zach, Billie, and Chris had all closely bonded freshman year. This naturally made me feel like an outlier, and wonder how the dynamic would progress. In the beginning I think our issue is that we were too polite with each other: no one dared to say no, or shoot down an idea. A contained version of this is fine when brainstorming, but we ended up in a place where we had a myriad of ideas and couldn’t sacrifice any of them. I think we, or at least I, also felt slightly confused working together because none of us were sure what the actual specific outcome of the class was supposed to be. We had meetings to brainstorm and seemingly got nowhere because we couldn’t decide what to hone in on. However after nailing down the topic of Kashgar cuisine we seem to be doing well. Continuing research on dishes to solidify our plan, but slightly coasting, working towards our next deadline. We’ve spent our time tossing around the ideas of tofu raps and food documentaries and interactive website karaoke. I think once we recognized each other as people other than project partners productivity flourished.
Thus far, I would honestly say that my efforts have been more minimal than they should be, at least in comparison to other members in my group. They’re regularly watching food documentaries and seeking additional context, and I feel like I never have much to add. I’ve completed all the required assignments and pulled my weight in suggested research, but haven’t done much additional research. It’s not for lack of interest; I have a dozen documentaries in my queue. Nor for lack of will. More lack of time in a busy schedule. Between four classes, three clubs, three jobs, and applications, I don’t have much free time to explore my own fancies. I think I’m on-par with the expectations of the course, but not actively engaging enough to satisfy my own curiosities or aspirations.
Overall, I’m very excited for the course and trust in team ingenuity. Thank you for reading.
Regards,
-Delaney

As a member of the tongue Group I have been quite pumped. Initially our group was centered around cultural interactions as well as the rise and fall of civilization, a fascinating topic but quite open ended. As our group progressed we all shared our interests with the rest of the group. We all had different specific interests but it seemed that we all shared a common interest in food. This is how we discerned our topic from the other options. Within the topic of food is many project options. As a group we decided that focusing on the culture of sitting down for a meal would be the best course of action. The way in which we came to this conclusion was through having a conversation on our passions and what got us excited within the realm of the Silk Road. I hope that as a group we are able to pick a meal that comprehensively shows the culture of the people from Kashgar and explains some of their customs. One of the things I am most looking forward to is discovering the journey of Islam onto this area of the world and what sort of food customs might follow. Some foreseen obstacles are lack of historical cookbooks, culinary sources that tie present food to historical food, and an overall familiarity with this region of China and all the accolades that come with that. Our current research methods are that we are all researching an individual aspect of Uyghur cuisine and that eventually our research will culminate on tieing all our information together.My personal thoughts are that this is a wonderful idea for a group project, the real work will be finding a dish that represents such a vast culinary horrizion. To the west we have “middle eastern” food; some typical dishes would be lamb kebabs, rice biryani, samosas, Naan and other dishes of the sort. To the east there is noodles, stir frys, dumplings and many more culinary dreams. With all of these culinary options I feel slightly dazed and confused about how to make sense of this. Which foods should my group represent? What dishes are more Uyghur? How do we know? These are all questions that I am asking at this early stage of group work.
As a team we were initially recommended to check out the maritime trade routes and the role of spices,while this is an interesting topic the group was not sold on the idea. We went around in a circle and then started talking about our interests. Chris started us off by speaking on his interest in the rise and fall of civilization, particularly their collapse. I then spoke on my passion for all things food related. This note definitely struck up some similar feelings in Billie who then shared with the group her passions. Billie seemed primarily interested in the culinary interactions between cultures and how they took place, from a merchant traveling or perhaps through a translator? This area of inquiry has yet to go answered by the group. Lastly, Delaney spoke on her interests too. She spoke on social stratification and in what form did it exist in the cultures we will be studying.
After the class period had ended we all decided to meet in the library to have a quick meeting and help define our area of study. So Chris, Billie, Delaney, and I all met in the library. Upon arrival we all warmly welcomed each other and began to spitball ideas. Relatively quickly we settled on the concept of a meal. The reason why we chose this concept is because of all the facets of a meal. With the dishes that are made, there is a style of presentation, typically there are food cultures and customs as well as typical setting for certain foods and this comprehensive view of a meal excites us. After narrowing down our topic to a meal we discussed what region and culture and time period we would like to explore. Although we all had interest in the past we decided to start with the present due to the need for sources. We also figured that tracking back in time would be lots easier that trying to track forward in time. Next we chose Kashgar as our point of interest, this was due to Kashgar having a central location on the silk road as well as its regional significance as the capital of the Uyghur state in China, Xinjiang. The culture of the Uyghur people will also be a fascinating part of our group research. I say this due to the little amount of preliminary knowledge I have on the Uyghur people. I know that they are of Muslim faith and of Turkic ethnicity. Both of these tidbits on the Uyghur culture provide valuable insight into how they stand out culturally in China . Being either or Turkic and Muslim in China makes you a minority but both is a double whammy! This sort of distance from the Han make for an interesting dynamic that I am excited to learn about.
Some things I look forward to the most in this project are research on earthen ovens and honey drinks! Both of which pertained to the main topic of a meal in Kashgar, yet both have their own place in history as well as my heart. First the earthen oven; equivocal to a tandoori oven in India; the earthen ovens of Kashgar serve the same role. As a household’s main source of culinary heat and helps develop the Char taste equated with certain dishes know to be prepared in these ovens. Not only does there use and role in the kitchen fascinate me; but the actually logistics of how these ovens are built also calls to me. Hopefully our group will be able to build one in conjunction with the rest of our project. In conclusion the Tongue Group is looking good! We are very excited at this stage of the class and hope to build off this momentum and bring together something really special.

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.

What an immense task it is to choose a specific topic out of a region spanning three continents and over 2000 years. The Silk Road is full of interesting history, cultural diffusion, empires, nomads, languages and more.
As part of the Tongue Team, I can attest that we were initially overwhelmed. Our focus drifted from examining empires and social structures, to looking at translators and the maritime trade route. Our interests were then piqued by the nomadic Xiongnu peoples of the steppe in central Asia, who’s milk wine and pastoral lifestyle grabbed our attention. However, upon realizing this group of people left no traces of a written language, we shifted our scope yet again to concentrate on the city of Kashgar, the Uyghur people, and the Xinjiang region of Western China.
Despite figuring out a location, we were left to pinpoint our interests to form a coherent and feasible project. Our interests in the history of the region coupled with Kashgar being a landmark city throughout the history of the Silk Road, made choosing a time period especially challenging. Several members of our group—myself included—had expressed particular interest in Chinese cuisine. In a moment of brilliance, the thought of using a contemporary meal as a vehicle for examining the customs, history and society of Kashgar, was put on the table (pun intended).
While we have yet to decide the components of the contemporary meal of choice, many options are available to choose from. The importance of breads such as nan, spices like cumin, tea and other beverages as well as livestock, provide a variety of choices regarding traditional meals. Similarly, the traditions behind preparation, storage and eating habits will certainly play a role in our research in the weeks to come. As the tongue group, we had ironically shifted our stance from the tongue being a symbol of language to a symbol of food.
Having chosen food as our focus, roles for our group simply grew out of food itself. My interest in cuisine stems from eating food in China. The unique dishes, cultural values and symbols food has in certain areas are fascinating, not to mention how incredible the food itself tastes. As a fan of spices, noodles and street food, I’ll be examining the diffusion of peppers, the significance of grains and also the importance of livestock to the Xinjiang people throughout history. My research will likely take me from the Mediterranean to the Ming dynasty in search of why people eat what they eat in Kashgar.
Unfortunately, in my research so far, food has not been commonly documented. Following spices from place to place will require considerable browsing through first-person accounts as well as merchant records if available. I’m predicting that this is the main area where our group will need technical assistance. How to effectively find articles that will prove useful to our project may require some outside help. Though this could be a deterrent, our focus on contemporary food will give us a good starting point for our research, as we won’t be blindly searching for the traditional meals of 12th century Xinjiang residents. It so happens that a previous teacher of mine identifies as Uyghur and lived in Xinjiang much of her life. I am looking forward to speaking with her about this project and the valuable insight she may provide through personal experience.
As far as our group’s experience on this topic goes, we have very little background. However, I have no doubt in the creativity of this team—definitely a strong suite—which was realized during the brainstorming process. The connections and ideas that were discussed for our proposals were often ambitious but exciting. Personally, I want our final project to be a creative product that really draws in the viewer. Not only are these much more interesting to our audience, they’re more fun to create. If there is some way to share a meal through a narrative with characters, almost in the form of a story, I think we’d enjoy the creativity it would bring. Another option could be sharing in the style of a first-person account of their experience with food customs in the Xinjiang region.
No matter what way we decide to present our project, I still feel quite out of my league regarding my knowledge base in this area. While our subject of study is slowly taking shape, I’m worried that we may constantly be discovering new avenues of research that despite being interesting, pull us away from our core element of the meal itself. Following the strands of evidence through the history of the Silk Road is much like following the Silk Road itself: exhausting. I hope we don’t lose our passion for our theme midway through the project, or somehow find all available resources exhausted. Despite these concerns, I know that working as a group will be a motivational factor behind staying interested and responsible for progress.
Progress that I hope to make surrounding the digital aspects of our project include learning more about web design and the graphics involved in creating a visually appealing website. It is easy to tell when browsing through webpages today, which websites were created by professionals and which were thrown together haphazardly. Unfortunately, the ones that are haphazard are often a gold mine of information that gets ignored. I hope we are able to display our research with style and flair. Following the design aspects, I’m unsure about how programming and writing code will contribute to the creation of pages, I’d be interested in dabbling in the programming behind the website itself if it seems applicable.
Besides these technological interests, I am particularly excited to research food itself. It is an inescapable, essential part of culture, and in my humble opinion one of the greatest parts. At the completion of this course, our January Term journey will take us through the same regions we are studying. Having an appreciation for the history and cultural values around the food will surely enhance the enjoyment of eating the meals themselves.