"The People’s Festival"–from Improvisation To Formalization In Xinjiang Kazakh Aytis

Based on the author’s fieldwork observations and documentary material collection inUrumqi and Yili Kazakh Autonomous Region, this paper utilizes relevant contemporaryanthropological theory to explore the cultural peculiarites of one of Xinjiang UyghurAutonomous Regions’ Kazakh areas’ widely popular folk arts—aytīs—and propose someproblems which have as yet been overlooked in Xinjiang aytīs research. The author’s ownunderstanding of these problems will also be presented in the paper.In the first section we will consider the place of aytis within other oral contest genresby surveying the variety of oral contests found in other ethnographies. That is followed bya survey of Turkic oral poetry using other types of ethnographic materials. Theintroductory material finishes with a discussion of the documentary materials and somecomments about my fieldwork experience.The second and third sections survey the specific situation of Kazakh aytis inXinjiang in the late19th and early20th century. The status of the performers will beconsidered in the political context of mid-twentieth century China, and the precariouspolitical position they held will be looked at in terms of contemporary ideological trends.Starting in the fourth section the modern aytis cultural festival will be examined.Beginning from some important structural changes in the festival, we will also look at acurrent example of political sponsorship and make some comparisons with Kazakhstan.After that we will consider the creation of this folkloric festival from the perspective ofBourdieu’s "field of cultural production" theory, where we will see that the festival is theproduct of a series relationships between the fields of restricted production, large-scaleproduction, power, and the cultural act of delimitation.Section six explores some of the difficulties of creating a folkloric tradition out of animprovisational poetic contest, including the necessity of the poets to censor themselvesand the creation of a canon. Finally, a sample of an aytis in which an aqyn violates theperformative grammar of modern Xinjiang aytis is presented in order to explain the otherfunction of aytis for some poets—making a point.