This talk examines how Islamic lifeworlds are governed, reshaped, and sustained on the Sino–Kazakh borderland. Drawing on ethnography, Kazakh oral histories, Han settler literature, and state gazetteers, I show that state governance in its western borderland has relied on settlement, enclosure, and racialized control across ideologically distinct eras. I also trace how Kazakh religiosity—lived through embodied rituals, ancestral relations, and active remembering of sacred landscapes—shifts and persists despite secular developmental regimes. By foregrounding these contested memory politics over land and belonging, this talk extends the critical scholarship on religious governance in China to global histories of settler colonialism, secular power, and cosmological dispossession.
Guldana Salimjan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies and the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She is an interdisciplinary scholar of East and Inner Asia who uses historical and anthropological method to study the intersection of borderland, religion, memory, gender, and environment.