The privilege of addressing this audience is one I never expected to have. That it contains so many of my teachers and students, as well as past, present, and perhaps future colleagues, makes the occasion a particularly happy one for me. Something of a summing up seems in order. I shall make it brief.

A tiny, radical student group seems at first glance to be an unlikely vantage point from which to evaluate continuity and change in the social organization of Japan. Yet social scientists often study extremes and misfits in order to gain new perspective on the conventional and normative. Whatever the people on the margin share unquestioningly with the rest of the society hints at the breadth and power of social norms; whatever they question, or have trouble doing, points to the inevitable cracks in the social order. Moreover, when a society seems to emphasize harmony and order, it is particularly important to examine the points and processes of conflict. Points of conflict are the harbingers of social change, and processes for managing conflict reveal the price that is paid for order.

In the literature on the process of socioeconomic transformation, a major debate centers on the questions of how and how much indigenous traditions, including kinship structures, are transformed by the larger political economic framework (Sahlins 1985, Hobsbawm 1983, Wolf 1982). Marxist theoretical analyses tend to emphasize the eventual demise of gender inequality and male-oriented (patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical) kinship systems—kinship systems within which gender relations are also embedded (cf. Engels 1972). The analytical literature on Vietnamese kinship and gender in the socialist era is certainly not an exception in this regard. It is pervaded with general propositions regarding the nuclearization of the family (Houtart and Lemercinier 1981, Werner 1981) and the political-economy-based transformation of the system toward a structure of egalitarian gender relations (e.g., Lê thḷ Nhâm-Tuyêt 1973).

India's history provides one of the best documented examples of colonialism. The British kept meticulous records of their attempts to improve, govern, and even exploit the people and institutions of the subcontinent. Improvement and government often occurred at the expense of traditional institutions, especially in the area of the legal tradition. The British are responsible for the decline and eventual demise of the living dharmaśāstra (science of orthodox behavior) tradition. The tradition has not been resuscitated in independent India. Nevertheless, even though the office of Paṇḍita (traditional expert) has long been abolished from the courts and the very training of modern Paṇḍitas has become rare, the texts of the dharmaśāstra tradition continue to be used in a very “paṇḍitic” fashion by the courts of modern India. The justices function as Paṇḍitas, and the texts they cite are mere window dressing for the interpretations of Hindu law they seek to promulgate.

The Pervasive Presence in Asia of ascetic practitioners—whether sedate, shorn, and robed monks or fierce, ash-smeared, naked yogis—has long fascinated Western observers and certainly nourished stereotypes of a mysterious, otherworldly, and impenetrable East. In India especially, the ascetic's figure has fueled the speculations of scholars, artists, tourists, and religious seekers for centuries (Oman 1905; Narayan 1988). Most depictions of Indian culture, whether indigenous or foreign, evocative or analytic, include portraits or analyses of world-renouncers.1 And yet with the notable exception of numerous fictional explorations (e.g., Bhattacharya 1978; Markandaya 1963; R K. Narayan 1980), the renouncer remains a figure whose existence comments on the human predicament but whose human thoughts and feelings remain opaque.

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.