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 Ramayana, one of Hinduism's two preeminent epics, has been retold in diverse ways over the centuries, but one modern rendition is unique: Nārata-Rāmāyaṇam(?). Its author, C. Virudhachalam (1906–48), wrote in Tamil under the pen name Pudumaippittan, meaning “one who is mad about newness.” Nārata-Rāmāyaṇam(?) presents colonialism as a continuation of the Ramayana narrative, showing how an ancient South Asian narrative can serve as an imaginative framework for modern Indian writers. The text mounts an astute critique of the notion of perfect rule, Ram Raj, and suggests that such a utopian ideal fosters the veneration of a glorified past that never existed. The text's modernist literary ploys encourage scrutiny of culturally constructed concepts such as nationalism, consumerism, and narrative coherence. This unusual Ramayana reveals how narrative resources can be used to question both ancient and modern ideologies.

In 1999, the East Kalimantan Dayak Association convened a watershed conference in Samarinda, Indonesia, that was attended by indigenous people from across the province. The conference, which was intended to nurture an emerging indigenous solidarity that aimed to transcend narrower loyalties, included sessions on organizational reform. This article examines the ongoing process of organizational rationalization within the association and investigates how that process comports with the evolving vision of indigenous solidarity that its leaders promote. It addresses challenges to that vision offered by constituents and others. The article also explores the role of symbols drawn from the social and natural worlds in fostering the development of an ethnic identity. The article reveals a paradox in the way that ethnicity is framed within the organization—one that invites comparison with the methods and goals of other indigenous and pan-indigenous movements.

This paper analyzes how democracy is conceptualized and operationalized among Tibetan exiles based on fieldwork conducted among Tibetans in Dharamsala during 1994 and in two settlements in Nepal throughout 1995. The Tibetan exiles are in a democratic transition, yet their transition resembles much more of a “muddling through” than a linear progression, as they struggle to interpret democratic values in the context of their own worldview and political circumstances. The Tibetan exiles' case can be interpreted as a new variation on the Asian democracy debate, with a focus on how authoritarian and popular choice interrelate in an actually existing democratic system. For the Tibetans, the issue is the place of the “enlightened mind” in modern forms of governance. The author finds that the exile context has both facilitated and limited the Tibetans' reform efforts.

Although recent expressions of “anti-Americanism” in South Korea have alarmed policy makers in Seoul and Washington and aroused fears about declining popular support for the bilateral alliance, they are understandable manifestations of civil society activism, which has grown since democratization began during the late 1980s. This paper analyzes anti-Americanism as a dynamic coalition movement accompanied by the all of internal competition, conflicts, and contradictions that characterize such movements. In the process, some actors and issues have become high priorities, whereas others have been marginalized or silenced. Professor Moon examines kijich'on (camptown) prostitution around U.S. military bases in Korea as a case study of how power conflicts within the coalition movement, which are focused on nationalism and gender, have exploited and shut out the very people who served as its initiators and early leaders.

This essay investigates the configuration of public space in Taipei City using the example of a small urban park. In particular, this essay considers how that space functioned and functions as a site for “occupation”—that is, when and how the public space was produced by, brought under the control of, or performed in by a specific cultural agent, whether a colonial government or skateboarder. Those occupations delineate and transform the space for purposes ranging from the official, macro, and long-lived to the subversive, partial. and fleeting. The park is a shifting pastiche of different moments of occupation, diachronically and contemporaneously layered, existing in a tissue of accommodation and anxiety. The primary focus here is the evolution of the park in the urban plans of the early Japanese colonial government; however, comparisons to both the pre- and postcolonial periods are made, and the contemporary conditions of the park are considered as well.