Qingzhen from the Perspective of the Other

Consumption and Muslim Boundary-Making in Republican China, 1920–1949

Bibliographic Data

ID6081565
AuthorsFaizah Zakaria (0000-0001-5822-606X, corresponding author), Zakaria, Zakaria Zakaria (0000-0002-5935-5792)
Year2018
Volume3
Issue2
Pages21
Publication date2018-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2470-7074 • E-ISSN: 2470-7066
PublisherIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/jims.3.2.03
OpenAlexW2937181392
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited20

Studies of halāl (permissible) food production and consumption \nhave often been linked to the assimilation of Muslim communities into the fabric \nof secular and/or non-Muslim nation-states. Much of the academic discourse on \nthis subject has centered on the boundaries that religious dietary requirements \ncreate between an in-group of faithful adherents to the religion and an out-group \nof those who do not belong. Republican China (1920–1949), with its significant \npopulation of Hui and Uyghur Muslims largely concentrated in the northwestern \nand southeastern parts of the country, offers a new window onto this picture of \nsocialization through commensality. The present article flips the ethnographic lens \nfrom viewing Muslim communities alone to viewing the historical perspective \nof outsiders who interacted and broke bread with Muslims in the Republican \nperiod, thus bringing to the surface heretofore overlooked factors that impacted \nthe process of Muslim social boundary-making through consumption. This \napproach contributes to the historiography and anthropology of Islam in China by \nspotlighting discretionary agency and by moving away from a focus on practices of \nexclusivity on the part of Muslim populations or strategies of coercive repression \non the part of the nation-state. This has become especially important since the rise \nof 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 \narticle also demonstrates that gender, class asymmetries, and politics may be as crucial \nas religion in explaining the dining strategies of Muslim minority communities

Agency (philosophy · China · Communism · Islam · Political science · Politics · Population · Social science · Sociology · China's Ethnic Minorities and Relations · Demography · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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