Book excerpt: The ten chapters of this book, all of them published previously in specialist works, derive from the author's ethnographic research among the Uyghur of Xinjiang and Kazakhstan in the mid-1990s. Approaching beliefs and practices as politically embedded, the articles have historical value in documenting the possibilities and constraints of fieldwork in this region in the 1990s. They also offer a point of departure for new studies of the Uyghur and their relations with their neighbors in the increasingly difficult conditions which characterize the early twenty-first century. (Series: Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia, Vol. 31) [Subject: Sociology, Anthropology]