According to official PRC reports, on the night of April 4, 1952, hundreds of small rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county. The next morning, villagers in this remote corner of western Heilongjiang province awoke to find sickly voles scattered in haystacks, piled on rooftops, and even squirming on kangs next to slumbering women and children. Government reports praise the inherent wisdom and decisiveness of the Gannan villagers. Well-versed in the natural flora and fauna of the region, they immediately suspected that these rat-like animals were an alien species, a form of biological weapon disseminated by American planes that had crossed the Yalu River from the Korean front. By noon the villagers had killed, burned, and buried every vole they could find (ISC 1952, 40–3).

The Hui minority, the largest of ten Muslim nationalities in China, is distributed throughout every province and city and over 70 percent of all counties (Map 1; Diao 1967:169). This paper endeavors to shift discussion away from conventional considerations of whether the Hui are really “Muslim” or merely inheritors of a cultural tradition somewhat different from the Han majority. Instead, I propose to examine one important area of interest to Hui communities throughout China, namely the lore and events surrounding various tombs and shrines, which I categorize as historic, Sufi, and local. Historic tombs reflect concerns that put local Hui identity in an international perspective; Sufi tombs link the Hui in national networks and often divide them regionally; and local tombs evoke interests that are more communal, reflecting practical concerns and personal identities.

Many scholarly articles and some of a polemical nature have been written on the 1971 insurgency in Sri Lanka. Recent studies of this movement (Fernando 1972, Egan 1972, Kearney 1973, Arasaratnam 1972, Warnapala 1972) have helped us to understand some of the underlying political, social and economic causes of the uprising. These articles have dispelled early speculations regarding the social backgrounds of the insurgents, particularly by government apologists and theoreticians from the traditional left parties of Sri Lanka.

Tamil Hindu and Sinhalese Buddhist pilgrims gather each year at Sri Lanka's most important polyethnic shrine, Kataragama, where they worship the deity Skanda (or Murukanṉ). The remarkable tone of ecumenism and tolerance there stands in clear contrast to the mutual mistrust which has recently characterized Tamil-Sinhalese interaction in other social institutions. Does Kataragama help to quell mistrust and to create a bond of common identity between Hindus and Buddhists? The role of Kataragama in Sri Lanka's poly-ethnic social system is examined by comparing the role of the Kataragama pilgrimage in the religious lives of Hindu and Buddhist villagers. These roles are radically different; indeed, most Hindu and Buddhist pilgrims find themselves in disagreement about the qualities of the deity and about the way he ought to be worshipped. Despite the appearance of ethnic harmony at the site, pilgrims are today likely to leave with a sharp impression of the gulf that separates Tamil and Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka—yet there is evidence that the site may come to play a different role in the future.

This paper examines the benefits and the liabilities in Gandhi's exploitation of his own Gujarate regional and bania caste heritages in mobilizing political support.

From his father, a prime minister in a small, princely state in Kathiawad, Gujarat, Gandhi learned of methods of nonviolent political protest including the fast, passive resistance by sitting dharna, and organized disobedience to law. Later he employed these Kathiawadi techniques, designed for local struggles, in his national program. Recognizing the political potential of bania financiers, Gandhi chose in middle life to work in Ahmedabad, the business capital of Gujarat, and won the community's support for the Congress. In turn, Gandhi's swadeshi campaigns, proclaimed to encourage cottage industry, also stimulated Ahmedabad's textile industry. Gandhi also found organizational support in Gujarat: a nascent labor union; a press; efficient, nationalistic civic leadership; and caste-based agrarian groups chafing under British land policies.

Gandhi's innovative use of various Gujarati and bania heritages won many supporters across India, but is also alienated important groups: many Bengalis favored violence; Marxists called Gandhi a capitalist stooge; princes and landowners feared his mass-organizations; and Muslims found his Hinduism unsympathetic.

My lecture is a lecture on biology. Therefore we will not be dealing with venereal diseases or perversions but with perfectly normal sexual phenomena. From my experience during the past two semesters I know that most of my students, or about sixty percent, still live chaste lives. We will become familiar with many technical terms and foreign (European) words. On the one hand, using technical scientific terminology is unavoidable, and on the other, we use it to avoid making obscene associations … I expect you to be familiar with the textbooks in physics and naturalhistory and urge you to also take a look at the textbooks from girls' schools … I consider knowledge a product, lecturers like myself both the creators of knowledge and at the same time original researchers and brokers of knowledge.

Rajasthan, a large, arid state in northwestern India, is widely known to have an excess of males over females. When we consider how such a high sex ratio usually affects the relative availability of potential spouses (i.e., the marriage market), it seems logical that the scarcity of females would generate a “marriage squeeze”— an asymmetry in the availability of potential spouses—against males and thereby give females an advantage in the marriage market. It would be ironic if the “culture against females” (Miller 1981:15) that characterizes Rajasthan had the unexpected side effect of granting females the competitive edge in choosing spouses and forcing males into marriages based on compromise.

I Approach my topic—the development of the modern Japanese political cartoon—with some trepidation. Humor is a fragile product that can easily be damaged by academic scrutiny. As Evelyn Waugh once remarked, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog—much is learned but in the end the frog is dead. Waugh was right. Most analyses of humor cannot be read for amusement. On the other hand, why should they be? If Shakespeare scholars are not expected to write in iambic pentameter, why should students of humor be expected to keep their readers in stitches? As the editor of the International Journal of Humor Studies recently told a reporter, “We are not in the business of being funny” (New York Times, 19 December 2000).

Justice in chinese society was literally of cosmic importance. Traditional Chinese thinking considered man and nature organic elements of a seamless cosmic web. Injustice of any kind did not simply rend the web in one place but placed tension on the entire structure. To restore equilibrium, the injustice had to be perfectly redressed, no more, no less. To ignore the injury was to risk catastrophe. As one late-Qing official wrote, “The recent natural disasters and interferences with heavenly harmony [i.e., the droughts and famines of the late 1870s and early 1880s] are a product of the countless number of cases where no appeal could be made, where there were no impeachments of the delinquent officials, and where consequently the innocent suffer deep injustices in the underworld” (Xinzeng XAHL 1886, 50:5a).

The Indian National Congress came into being as an organization of the new educated, professional and commercial classes which had developed in India during the course of the nineteenth century. Its early leadership consisted of men steeped in British liberal thought who endeavored to learn the British art of governing and to benefit from the blessings of the British constitution. They demanded representation in the legislative councils, a greater share for Indians in the civil service, protection for Indian industries and reduction in unproductive public expenditure. Since the franchise was very restricted, it was not necessary for the aspirants to membership of legislatures to build a mass electoral organization. Their social base remained relatively small. Apart from holding annual sessions and passing resolutions on a variety of public issues, the Congress had no program, except in Bengal during the anti-partition agitation, which required for its implementation a well-developed party organization with a large membership, a body of full-time functionaries, financial resources and agencies to direct and coordinate its activities.

Although the Ch'ing period is generally regarded as one of the better studied and understood periods of Chinese history, the existing fund of our knowledge is actually far from adequate. A systematic discussion of the significance of the entire period from 1644 to 1912 would require a large number of articles, monographs, and fresh syntheses. Since the purpose of this paper is merely to stimulate further discussion and research, I hope to be excused for making a few highly tentative generalizations.

The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein—to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system—has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians. While a few social scientists interested in the past have sought to apply his model, the majority of historians have either gone no further than to acknowledge the importance of bilateral relations with imperial Britain in the construction of modern South Asian society, or else—it would seem increasingly—have retreated behind the walls of the “indigenous,” the “local,” the “particular,” and, at times, the just plain “peculiar” in their interpretations of South Asia's modern experience. But few historians of imperial Britain see it as a completely freestanding and self-determining entity, able to direct its relationships with India or elsewhere in a manner unconstrained by developments in other areas of the world. And on closer examination, many of the most quintessentially South Asian institutions and structures, including a large number of those that twentieth century modernization theorists please to call “traditional,” can be seen to have been shaped by global forces.

By definition, the cold war was understood on both sides of the conflict to be a global struggle that stopped short of direct military engagement between the superpowers (the U.S. and the USSR). In Europe, the putative center ofthat struggle, the geopolitical battle lines were fixed after the early 1950s, or they at least could not be altered by normal military means without provoking World War III—which would result in mutual annihilation. Therefore, each side hoped to make gains over the other by using more subtle, political, and often clandestine methods, winning the “hearts and minds” of people in the other bloc (as well as maintaining potentially wayward support in one's own bloc), hoping to subvert the other side from within. The cold war was an enormous campaign of propaganda and psychological warfare on both sides. A vast range of cultural resources, from propaganda posters and radio broadcasts to sophisticated literary magazines, jazz bands, ballet troupes, and symphony orchestras, were weapons in what has recently come to be called the “Cultural Cold War” (Saunders 1999). Studies of the cultural cold war have proliferated since the late 1990s, most of which focus on U.S. cultural policy and are concerned with the European “theater” of this conflict (Hixson 1997; Fehrenbach and Poiger 2000; Poiger 2000; Berghahn 2001).

The importance of Louis Dumont's work—both for specialists in Indian studies and for general social science theory—is by now obvious. Yet, since the publication of the initial volumes of Contributions to Indian Sociology (old series, coedited with D. Pocock), Dumont's work has been subjected to intensive criticisms that do not simply suggest he is wrong about a particular ethnographic fact, but rather that his approach is wrongheaded, that his starting points are idealist, biased (in favor of upper castes), or irretrievably tied to “French intellectual currents.”

Most accounts of South Indian commerce in the seventeenth century depend on European documents and focus on Indo-European trade along the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. This article makes use of indigenous documents to analyze the way a caste of itinerant salt traders, the Nakarattars, combined worship and commerce in the interior of Tamil-speaking South India. It focuses on Nakarattar activities in the seventeenth century before they had achieved power under their better-known name, Nattukottai Chettiars, and at a time when their commercial expansion wasjust getting under way and when the close association of this expansion with rituals of religious gifting was already apparent. The two main purposes of the article are to illuminate the ritual dimension of commercial activity in precolonial South India and to enrich current transactional models of the relationship between temples and small groups in South India by incorporating a mercantile perspective.

As was true of many other fields of learning in Japan, Chinese studies entered a new stage of development with the Meiji era. The valuable tradition of kangaku (“Chinese learning” of the Tokugawa period) was affected and, to a degree, replaced, by Western scientific methods of inquiry.

Śītalā, Goddess of Smallpox, is the preeminent tutelary deity of villages in southwestern Bengal, and a goddess of the same name has a prominent role in Hindu pantheons throughout northern India. Her rise to importance is closely related to the history of smallpox, which was not recognized, in Ayurvedic medical texts, as a serious or fatal disease before the seventh century A.D. There is no evidence of the Goddess of Smallpox before the tenth to twelfth centuries, and she appears to have attained her present special significance as goddess of the village in southwestern Bengal abruptly in the eighteenth century. Earlier Indian approaches to smallpox treatment were naturalistic; when Śītalā was added to the etiology of the disease, her worship was not seen as a replacement for the biologically based therapy, but as something different and complementary. The appearance of smallpox as an epidemic calamity, rather than as an ordinary disease, during a period of more general distress in rural Bengal, marked its goddess as a figure especially suitable for community worship.

As K. Sivaramakrishnan has pointed out in a paper published in 1993, one of the persistent ironies of postcoloniality “has been the way elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period.” And of the varied strands that have constituted the twentieth-century knowledge and self-knowledge of India, none is more central than the notion of the timeless, conservative caste, and its antediluvian ancestor, the unchanging primitive tribe (Sivaramakrishnan 1993; Inden 1990, 70–72). In this view South Asians, like other unprogressive people, did not change—they merely accumulated, with the latest addition to the population overlaying its predecessor, much as geological strata did. This paper will attempt to expose the historic roots and explore the contemporary ramifications of this model.

This article seeks to explain how, given Japan's “nuclear allergy” following World War II, a small coastal town not far from Hiroshima volunteered to host a nuclear power plant in the early 1980s. Where standard explanations of contentious nuclear power siting decisions have focused on the regional power utilities and the central government, this paper instead examines the importance of historical change and civil society at a local level. Using a microhistorical approach based on interviews and archival materials, and framing our discussion with a popular Japanese television show known as Hatoko's Sea, we illustrate the agency of municipal actors in the decision-making process. In this way, we highlight the significance of long-term economic transformations, demographic decline, and vertical social networks in local invitations to controversial facilities. These perspectives are particularly important in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima crisis, as the outside world seeks to understand how and why Japan embraced atomic energy.

Mainstream Chinese discussions of “democracy” have long betrayed a decidedly populist understanding of the concept. Xi Jinping draws freely on this tradition in formulating his China Dream. Xi's efforts are part of the Chinese Communist Party's “re-Orientation” of official propaganda to showcase the glories of the ancient civilization that it claims to represent and rejuvenate. The idea of “democracy” (minzhu 民主)—understood in populist rather than institutional terms—plays an important role in the process. This populist interpretation of “democracy” seeks to elide the fundamental contradiction between Enlightenment values and illiberal politics. Whether it will prove persuasive to contemporary Chinese intellectuals remains to be seen.