Eric Schluessel - Land of Strangers

To my colleagues who have disappeared, or are imprisoned, or silenced: I wish that I could name you here and celebrate your scholarship. I hope that someday you will read this book, and that, when you do, it pleases you. You nurtured meyou were patient when I was headstrong, subtle when I was brash. You taught me diligence, dedication, and commitment to historical and scientific truth. Thank you for welcoming me in.

Thank you to Gwendolyn Collao, without whom none of this is worth it. You push me to be betteras a scholar and as a personand to seek out moments of joy. Thank you for your perspicacious eye and quick mind, and for insisting that I take breaks.

This book is the product of many years of other peoples kindness. Members of the original dissertation committee tolerated the mounds of paper that I occasionally wadded up and lobbed haphazardly in their directions. Thank you to Mark Elliott for taking me on as a student, pushing me to consider the position and impact of scholarly work, and insisting on philological rigor. You were there for me during some of the hardest times in this process, and I will never forget it. Thank you to Michael Szonyi, who showed me how to build an argument that might withstand his vigorous questioning, fielded endless queries about puzzling through local archives, and modeled a joyful and humane professionalism. Ildik Bellr-Hann was present in this work from its very conception. Her insightful methodological and empirical critiques enriched the argument greatly, ensuring that it remained grounded in ethnography and textual scholarship while engaging wisely with theory. William Alford, who is a profoundly benevolent individual, saw the value in this works underlying project and encouraged me to pursue a more disciplined comparison. From the age before Harvard, the humid days of Indiana, I must thank Gardner Bovingdon, who taught me Xinjiang history and politics but, just as importantly, let me play in the great sandbox of social theory. Much of this book is a working-out of questions that I began to ask because of Gardner. Devin DeWeese not only taught me Chaghatay and all sorts of things about Naqshbands but was kind enough to read a draft of all of fourteen years after I first walked into his classroom. It has been a great pleasure to reconnect with Christopher Atwood, who understands what kind of book this is. Many other established scholars have given their time and effort to support my mad caper, among them Pr Cassel, Cemal Kafadar, Ablet Kamalov, James Millward, Carla Nappi, Ahmed Ragab, David J. Roxburgh, Birgit Schlyter, Jun Sugawara, Donald Sutton, Onuma Takahiro, and Qiu Yuanyuan. Yet special thanks surely go to Wheeler Thackston, on whose sofa I learned not only to puzzle through a text in Chaghatay, but to grasp it. I hope sincerely to pay their generosity forward.

There is no creativity without a community, and I am fortunate to be part of a generous one. So many hours of intellectual ferment were spent in the company of other true believers in this quixotic enterprise, not least among them Gregory Afinogenov, Katherine Alexander, Elise Anderson, Sarah Bramao-Ramos, David Brophy, Darren Byler, Belle Cheves, Sakura Christmas, Brian Cwiek, Maura Dykstra, Devin Fitzgerald, Joshua Freeman, Billy French, Kelly Hammond, Justin Jacobs, Macabe Keliher, Nicholas Kontovas, Ben Levey, Eve McGlynn, Aysima Mirsultan, Anne-Sophie Pratte, David Porter, Max Oidtmann, Guldana Salimjan, Rune Steenberg, David Stroup, Hannah Theaker, Rian Thum, Wei-chieh Tsai, Noriko Unno, Nicholas Walmsley, and Xin Wen. Special thanks to Mira Xenia Schwerda, who volunteered to read this shambles of a book the weekend before it was due. Many of us met under a purposefully vague rallying cryNew Directionsand the promise of snacks, or else because of our questionable decision to study Inner Asian history and culture. We seem repeatedly to demonstrate the power of community, of generosity and collegiality, to raise all of us up and help us achieve the impossiblewhich is precisely how some originally characterized the concept of this book. Thank you for reading the drafty chapters that emerged over the years, but thank you also, as times have grown darker, for standing up for what you know to be right. That is the kind of scholarly community I want to be part of.

Friends and colleagues at the University of Montana in the Departments of History and Political Science and beyond lent time and patience to this project. Thank you especially to Claire Arcenas, Abhishek Chatterjee, Brad Clough, John Eglin, Robert Greene, Tobin Miller-Shearer, and Jody Pavilack for understanding. Thank you to the core members of the Montana East Asia Workshop, or MEAW: Brian Dowdle, Maggie Greene, and Rob Tuck. I am glad that we value one another as scholars and as human beings. Time spent with youover Robs unfairly good cooking, Brians backyard dinners, or fleeing into the mountains to meet Maggie halfwayhas meant the world to me. Much of the thinking behind this book played out in conversation with my students at Montana as we tracked patterns of change across the broad sweep of Chinese history, talked through Neo-Confucian philosophy, or critiqued theories of nationalism. If you read this, please understand that it is a singular privilege to know you and work with you. Take a moment to look east along the Clark Fork River, into the space between the mountains, and consider the mystery.

The final draft of this book was completed during research leave under a Mellon Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, where conversations with Nicola di Cosmo, Karl Gerth, and Lydia Liu especially influenced its composition. Research and writing have been paid for in various ways by numerous grants and fellowships: a Fellowship for Assistant Professors from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; research and workshop grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and Henry Luce Foundation; a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship; a faculty development grant from the Department of History at the University of Montana; a Yamaguchi Fund grant from the Mansfield Center at the University of Montana; a one-month residence at the Yuelu Academy at Hunan University; traveling fellowships from Harvard University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Asia Center; and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities dedicated to translating the