Xenomania

Why are these people happy?



I don't know!

I am Xenomanic. I take sick perverse pleasure in subjecting myself to things I don't understand. Before my last bout of homelessness I had a large collection of awesome books in languages I couldn't read which I bought at cut rates from a guy who saved them from dumpsters. There were books in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Yiddish, Hungarian, and some kinds of African and Indian languages, plus some books in German and Spanish.

After having to sell those off in desperate need of cash and before the rise of non-English Wikipedias which I now use to satisfy my sick impulses, I had to indulge my appetites by searching for incomprehensible books at libraries.

I also looked for books and audio tapes with incomprehensible foreign titles at used book and music stores. Half Priced Books had a bin where they threw tapes that came in that no one in the store could make sense of. I could afford handfuls of them.

One tape I got my hands on was a tape of samples of folk music from the autonomous regions of China. It included a couple of selections from the Uyghur peoples of Xinjiang Province. [Click to see a xenomanic-friendly map.] Not knowing who the Uyghur peoples of the Xinjiang Province are made the music irresistible to me. I had to go to Suzallo Library at the University of Washington to find anything about them.

Here's what I found out at the time. The Uyghurs are modern settled descendants of certain Turkic tribes of Central Asia, which may or may not have all been formerly nomadic. They are namely the remnants of those tribes which made up what in historic retrospect is now called the Uyghur Empire, which stretched all the way from the Caspian Sea, maybe, to Manchuria, for sure, and was a dominant power in the region for a couple centuries until the year 840, when some other Central Asian people you hadn't heard of, the Kirghiz, as in Kirghistan or Kyrgyzstan or Kirgizistan, overran them. For the last millennium or so the Uyghur have been mostly Islamic and mostly living in Xinjiang Province, using an Arabic script, although there are Uyghur communities elsewhere that use Cyrillic and Roman alphabets.

Prior to the establishment of the aforementioned empire, the ancestors of the Uyghurs were most noted on the world stage for having been a part of the Hunnic empire and having quite possibly made up most of the mercenaries who formed the Hun invasions of Europe in the 5th Century. The Magyars of Hungary may be more Uyghur than Hun. Anyway, "Hungary" supposedly comes from a turkish word that means ten, as in ten tribes, not from "Hun", and nine of the ten tribes may have been Uyghur, for all anyone knows.

Hearing the music on the tape inspired me to create one of my theories. The theory is that the Gypsies, who are not Uyghurs, nevertheless came by Uyghur music in their travels in the region of Hungary, where it had taken root in the form of a variety of Hungarian folk music. While I am sure Gypsy vocal music has its roots in the area of Northern Indian where Romani originates, the theory is that the instrumental and dance music that is thought of as Eastern European Gypsy stems mainly from the Uyghurs, by way of the Attila connection. I'm not saying it didn't get changed in the process. As usual, I don't care if the theory is true, so it isn't important to disprove it. If I thought it was true I'd lose interest in it. That's how Xenomania works.

Here's a supposedly Uyghur song I don't understand that I think makes the theory seem plausible.