The legal debate in india over the worship and glorification of sati (widow burning, previously spelled “suttee”) stands unresolved at present. After several years of controversy, the practice of worshipping sati was made illegal in 1987 after the death of a young Rajput woman named Roop Kanwar. At that time the Indian government revised the colonial legislation banning widow immolation to include sati glorification and thereby outlawed ceremonies, processions, or functions that eulogize any historical person who has committed sati. The law furthermore prohibited the creation of trusts or fundraising to preserve the memory of such persons. This legal debate over sati worship provides the context in which this essay examines the cultural politics of how Calcutta Marwaris, a wealthy business community, have been among the most vehement defenders of sati worship in the last several decades.

Both the population and agricultural production of the Dongting Lake region in Hunan and Hubei provinces developed rapidly from the late Ming period through the mid-Qing period. During this period, the interests of local dike builders in clearing more land increasingly came into conflict with the efforts of Qing officials to prevent floods by supervising dike repairs and preventing overbuilding of dikes. Although local landowners accepted state subsidies to restore damaged dikes in the early Qing period, their power to resist state authority over water control increased through the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, official prohibitions on dike building were ignored, and a series of disastrous floods occurred.

It began with the Phoenicians. Most written languages now use their invention— a phonetic alphabet. The invention of alphabetic writing escorted an influential theory of language onto the intellectual stage. Aristotle expressed the basic outline of that theory, which has since dominated Indo-European views of language:

Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of the spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of—affections in the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of— actual things-are also the same.

This article examines family planning during the Emergency in India, drawing upon the archive of the Shah Commission of Inquiry. It aims, primarily, to understand why family planning became such an important point of state intervention during the Emergency, when millions were sterilized. I argue that family planning was intended as a technocratic fix for the problem of poverty and that, although the family planning program existed before the Emergency, it received a fillip through Indira Gandhi's Emergency-era push for poverty eradication thanks to the established position of population control as a prerequisite for economic development. Secondly, it aims to understand how the Emergency and sterilization have become conflated in popular memory, such that the driving forces of poverty eradication and economic development have dropped out of the story altogether. The link between poverty eradication and population control has been forgotten, and a narrative of arbitrary family planning “excess” endured.

The author questions the assumptions of an “Asian school of scarcity and risk,” of which James C. Scott is the principal exponent, using Bengali peasant history as a case in point. He argues that it is more likely that the subsistence traditions of Bengal derive from locally generated values of abundance and indulgence than from a universal “moral economy” and suggests that detailed accounts of subsistence traditions in other parts of Asia will confound attempts to prove that European experience is a reliable guide to Asian practices.

Translation is not only a science or an art, but also a practical tool of international communication in the world-wide exchange of ideas. The importance of translation has been heightened by the increasing contacts among nations of widely divergent cultures. In the Western world, translation is considered more frequently from the linguistic than the cultural point of view, for the West has a common pattern of culture underlying its linguistic variety. The problem of communication between the East and the West is more difficult in that there are not only language barriers but also divergent cultural patterns.

The translation of Western works into Chinese began near the end of the sixteenth century. Moved by religious enthusiasm, the Jesuits initiated the process and the Protestant missionaries followed. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, translation programs have been a characteristic part of Chinese governmental activity directed toward modernization and, consequently, both the subject matter translated and the languages from which they were translated indicate trends in modern Chinese thought as well as changing governmental policies. Moreover, the motivation of translation and the shifts in intellectual interests are reflected in the character and quantity of translations produced at different times.

As we all know, the modest, colorless, and ambiguous term “area studies” emerged during the course of World War II as a way of describing one minor enterprise in the war effort. It was an enterprise designed to achieve an encapsulated understanding of the unknown areas of the world in which we suddenly found ourselves engaged. During and after the war, most area studies were contemporary in orientation and, given the circumstances of their origin, extremely vulnerable to the charge of serving “nonscholarly” political or military interests.

On june 15, 1936, 120 fresh cadets assembled at Manila's Tutuban Station to board a train for the Philippine Military Academy (PMA), recently established in the mountain city of Baguio. At the end of the line, the cadets changed to Benguet Auto Line buses for the 4,000-foot climb up the zig-zag road to Baguio. As the buses pulled into the campus, some forty upperclassmen, all transfers from the superseded Constabulary Academy, were waiting to greet the new arrivals with a ritual called “hazing.” Even fifty years later, these cadets would recall their reception as traumatic (J. Mendoza 1986, 16).

Nomadic states in Inner Asia were generated by external relations with state societies. Because the Hsiung-nu state could not have supported itself by exploiting the relatively undifferentiated and extensive pastoral economy, the state hierarchy was financed by exploiting the resources available from outside of the steppe. The nomads on the steppe were organized into a powerful military force that was used to systematically exploit the Chinese economy. The Hsiung-nu raided the frontier directly and then used the disruptions they caused as a tool to extort trade and subsidies from the Han court, thus maintaining a monopoly on this flow of Han goods to the steppe, which gave it great economic power and stability. The imperial level of Hsiung-nu government was therefore primarily concerned with conducting foreign affairs, organizing military campaigns, and maintaining unity on the steppe, while it ceded power in domestic affairs to indigenous tribal leaders. This created an imperial confederacy that acted as an autocratically ruled state in its dealings with China but that remained federally structured internally. This form of organization proved remarkably stable and provided the model for later empires established by nomads on the steppe.

Analyses of Thai political economy since World War II have sought to define the stages of Thai social evolution from earliest times to the present and to determine whether or not the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and the 1932 coup mark changes in the social formation and/or the mode of production. Over the past decade, as a consequence of political change in the mid-1970s, a new generation of historians has rejuvenated Marxist methodology, using it to pry the chronicles and archives away from royalist and nationalist myth-making concerns, to dismantle the court-centered historiography, and to erect a new historical paradigm for the late twentieth century.

In some areas of the Philippines, three important and interrelated changes in the traditional pattern of local leadership recruitment and faction organization had been taking place for several decades. Notables from old leading families were being replaced in positions of leadership by upwardly mobile “new men” from more humble backgrounds. Professional politicians were emerging in the local arena. Local factions were being transformed from traditional family-centered organizations into specialized machines. These changes were most likely to occur in areas of comparatively high social mobilization and low concentration of landownership. Changes are explained primarily by the impact of increasingly intense national political competition in rural communities and growing mass participation. These changes represent a decline in the autonomy of local elites, as they were accompanied by the latters' growing reliance on central resources to maintain their machines. These changes and the forces behind them are well illustrated by the pattern of political change in the town of Taal, Batangas during this century, which is reported in great detail.

The harmonium is both widely played and widely condemned in India. During the Indian independence movement, both British and Indian scholars condemned the harmonium for embodying an unwelcome foreign musical sensibility. It was consequently banned from All-India Radio from 1940 to 1971, and still is only provisionally accepted on the national airwaves. The debate over the harmonium hinged on putative sonic differences between India and the modern West, which were posited not by performers, but by a group of scholars, composers, and administrators, both British and Indian. The attempt to banish the sound of the harmonium was part of an attempt to define a national sound for India, distinct from the West. Its continued use in education served a somewhat different national project: to standardize Indian music practice. This paper examines the intertwined aesthetic and political ideals that underlie the harmonium controversy.

During the late Ming an entirely new charitable institution, the benevolent society (t'ung-shan t'ang), emerged even though there were already in place channels for charity provided by lineage organizations, religious institutions, and the state. To account for the appearance of benevolent societies, this article attempts explanations in terms of worsening conditions and dynastic decline and then moves beyond such considerations for several reasons. Although China had long experienced much poverty and numerous periods of extreme social unrest, it was not until the late Ming that the responses to these maladies took the form of benevolent societies. Although the benevolent societies were sometimes founded in an atmosphere of social tension, they endured long after any sense of crisis had passed and thrived through periods of calm. The benevolent societies arose because they satisfied—in ways that existing forms of charity could not—the emotional and social needs of the sponsors in an environment altered by commerce. To achieve a harmonious society, officials and gentry acquiesced to the investment mentality of merchants, and by making charitable contributions toward a moral society, merchants justified their wealth. Highly visible and tolerated by the state, the benevolent societies expressed social alliances based on money and a spirit of civic pride.

Historians frequently describe the Russo-Japanese War as a time when Japan achieved great power status, won world acclaim, and fulfilled the Meiji dream. It was a landmark in modern world history: everywhere leaders of sujected peoples were inspired to believe that they too could import Western science and industry, rid themselves of white control, preserve their national character, and themselves oversee the process of industrialization. Jawaharlal Nehru, for example, records in his autobiography that the Japanese victories were a memorable event in his early life, describing them as “a great pick-me-up for Asia” which kindled his nationalism and his determination to “fight for India.” Eager to learn more of the Japanese experience, “I invested in a large number of books on Japan and tried to read some of them.” But he confesses ruefully (perhaps recalling an account of Bakumatsu politics?) “I felt rather lost in Japanese history.”!

Millenarian movements provide a dramatic expression of discontent with the present order and an anticipation of its imminent and radical transformation. When they arise within a context of cultural confrontation, in which the limits of an indigenous culture are seen for the first time against the perspective of an advanced—and advancing—civilization, they may at times incorporate within their vision of the millenial condition some of the desirable aspects of that civilization. Indeed, under suitable circumstances movements that begin with chiliastic expectations may end by passing to major involvement with larger societies and the modern world. It is not a common condition, to be sure, and has recently been discounted. “Millenialism,” observes Bellah, “… could contribute only under very special conditions to social innovation, for it was usually a symptom of severe social pathology. Its consequences were often destructive, or the energies it released were quickly rechanneled into traditional forms….”

Ai Weiwei is famous for crossing boundaries, especially the boundary between art and politics. To appreciate the often contradictory nature of Ai's work, this essay employs multiple narratives: “Ai the Heroic Warrior” who criticizes the Chinese government; “Ai the Court Jester” who plays with the Chinese state and Western media; and “Ai the Middleman” who acts as a broker between China and the West, between young and old people, and between civil society and the state in the PRC. The essay concludes that a fourth narrative can bring together these three stories in a multicoded understanding of Ai's work: “Ai the Citizen Intellectual” who sometimes works with the state, and at other times against it—but always for the good of China. By comparing Ai's work with that of other public intellectuals and placing it in the context of debates about civil society, the conclusion argues that “citizen intellectual” also tells us about a broader movement of activists and public intellectuals who are creating a new form of political space in postsocialist China.

This article examines Dalit (ex-untouchable) and low-caste women activists within the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Underrepresented in Indian political history, these women frequently portray political activities as seva or social service, thus recalling upper caste/class notions of self-sacrifice and philanthropy of colonial memory. Seva, however, finds no place within the history of Dalit politics articulated through a language of rights. This article argues there exists an interlocking relation between the resurgence of seva and the process of upward class mobility that was a precondition to both the creation of the BSP and women's political participation within it. Further, it suggests that women activists appropriate and re-enact gender idioms and models coined in colonial India, refashioning them for the exigencies of contemporary politics. In turn, this points to the presence of shared structures of gendered political agency cutting across time, class, and caste among Dalit/low-caste communities usually considered as “other.” In addition, this ethnographic focus on agency challenges the usual trope of Dalit/low-caste women as “victims,” offering a critique of the burgeoning field of Dalit studies.

During the first half of the twentieth century, new mass media practices radically altered traditional cultural forms and performance in a complex encounter that incited much debate, criticism, and celebration the world over. This essay examines how the new sound media of gramophone and sound cinema took up the live performance genres of Tamil drama. Professor Hughes argues that south Indian music recording companies and their products prefigured, mediated, and transcended the musical relationship between stage drama and Tamil cinema. The music recording industry not only transformed Tamil drama music into a commodity for mass circulation before the advent of talkies but also mediated the musical relationship between Tamil drama and cinema, helped to create film songs as a new and distinct popular music genre, and produced a new mass culture of film songs.

The fraught encounters between biological sciences and religions such as Buddhism have raised philosophical issues for many. This essay will focus on one of them: Can form ground the truth of life? The author suggests that, along with the introduction of evolutionary biology from Europe, literary realism in China has emerged as a technology of biomimesis, among other such technologies, to grapple with the problem of “life as form.” Focusing on Lu Xun's early interest in Ernst Haeckel and science fiction, especially his translation of “Technique for Creating Humans” and his narrative fiction “Prayers for Blessing,” which drew extensively on a Buddhist avadāna, the essay seeks to throw some new light on the familiar as well as unfamiliar sources relating to Lu Xun's life and works and to develop a new understanding of how the debates on science and metaphysics have developed in modern China.

There was a time, not so long ago, when the primary fault line in American studies of Japan lay not between “Japan-bashers” and “Japanapologists,” but between those who presented the history of Japan in terms of an ongoing process of modernization and those who did not. During the 1970s, younger scholars of Japan attacked modernization theory with considerable passion (see Dower 1975), eliciting rather defensive responses from its practitioners. The 1980s saw the emergence of yet another, though somewhat smaller, generation of American scholars, which has been not so much anti-modernizationist as non-modernizationist. Like the critics of the 1970s, historians of this newest generation have dealt with conflict, social problems, and state repression, but most no longer believe it necessary to discuss the problems raised by modernization theory.