A Study On Culture Adaptation Of The Uzbeks In Xinjiang

Uzbek in Xinjiang, as one of the transnational ethnic groups in China’s northwest, it’s also one of the ethnic groups with minor population in China. As is stated by statistics of the sixth national census, the number of the Uzbek’s population is only 14,502 and most of them are scattered to live with Uyghurs, Kazakhs and the rest, in different cities and towns from north and south of Xinjiang. In history, once with the status of “Bukharas”,“Andijans” and “Kokands”,they flowed in trade networks between China and central Asia, thus forming the networks of migrants and finance built on it. Meanwhile, they finally came into being a group of China’s Xinjiang through developing a sequence of “living in frontier with commerce, merging in frontier with commerce”. In the transnational trade and migration practice of about half a millennium, Uzbeks have constantly adapted to the local culture of Xinjiang and multiculture of China with Han culture as the mainstream under objective external stress. Socially merged with various behavior adaption, they gradually completed the “Sinicization” in the lengthy process of cultural adaption. If we treat the period from War of Resistance on Japanese Army to Three Districts Revolution as the constructing level of Uzbek’s ethnic consciousness and China’s national political identification, then the period from the founding of People’s Republic of China to Culture Revolution was the comprehensive deconstructing process of the Uzbek’s ethnic consciousness. In the whole process, Uzbeks actively took adaptive measures of cultural integration, namely, on the one hand, they passively and actively got well on with members from mainstream society, on the other hand, they strived to keep their original cultural status and feature. However, it turned out that their original group culture has been deconstructed with the result that language and characters, livelihood, dress culture, customs, religious rituals, family titles, etc. also gradually became homogeneous with the Uyghurs and Kazakhs. At the same time, the cultural boundary has been blurred and national consciousness tended to be diluted. What’s more, under the new historical background, confronting the social culture with Han culture as the mainstream and the western discourse, Uzbek’s peripheral features began to be paid attention by the elites of itself in the unified educational system and market economy environment. Some of them blurred to tackle the weakness emerged in occupying social resources and in market competition through active revise on the ethnic appellation. By virtue of the possible opportunities brought by the attention to intangible culture heritage under the western discourse and China’s economic belt of Silk Road, part of them also re-emphasized the ethnic boundaries and culture difference, and they interacted with the mainstream society through continuing the social functions of the Uzbek’s social organizations. All in all, affecting by the shift of political powers and part of the objective external forces, Uzbek’s cultural adaption was a process that adapted under pressure, integrated in adaption and identified in integration, accompanying by persistence and breakthrough, exceeding and maintaining.