The bharatiya dalit panthers is an organization of Maharashtrian Dalits (ex-Untouchables) who have converted to Buddhism and adopted as their long-range political goal the establishment of a democratic socialist state. The ideology of the Panthers, embodied in their texts and practices, synthesizes threads of Buddhist and Marxist philosophies. Longstanding debates about the supposed incompatibility of Buddhism and Marxism pose questions regarding the conjunction of religion and politics in popular movements, the role of popular texts in constituting ideologies of resistance, and the ways texts and beliefs become transformed into actions.

People impatient to get out were pushing me from behind; people anxious to get in pulled me out. Somehow I landed on my feet on the dusty platform. I gathered the few packages and made my way out of the railway station through a crowd. The reasons for the crowds became clear: today was the day of the weekly market, and the “god” on his journey had reached this town to make a day's halt. My guide and I picked our way through heaps of millet and wheat and rice, through pots and pans, through bales of cloth and saris, toys and hand-mirrors, vegetables and sweets—everything displayed on both sides of the road. Farther on, there were amusements—the revolving cradles and merry-go-rounds, gramophones shrilling loudly, a snake-charmer, a troupe of tight-rope dancers.

India alone of the countries with great railway networks is unindustrialized. In the other leading railway powers—particularly the United States, Russia, Germany, though to a lesser extent in sparsely settled areas like Canada and Australia—the railway was the veritable dynamo of the Industrial Revolution. It has had no such effect in India, even though the country's network by 1947 was 40,500 miles long, counting only first-line main track, or 57,000 miles long, counting just about everything. I propose to sketch the setting in which railways were brought to India and then to review the 75 years of argument and experiment as to which form of enterprise (public, private, or some combination of the two) was best suited to India's railway development. I shall attempt to give a picture of the absolute and comparative magnitude of the Indian railway system as of 1947, and to discuss its economic and historical significance for Britain and for India.

The ethical values and norms which are to guide social behavior in Communist China are often conveyed through fables and stories. It thus might not be inappropriate to begin a discussion of these values with a story that is now perhaps as familiar to students of contemporary Chinese affairs as it is to the Chinese. The story is from traditional Chinese folklore, but it became a part of the Chinese Communist tradition when it was retold by Mao Tse-tung in his concluding speech to the Seventh National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in June of 1945:

“In ancient China there was a fable. ‘How Yu Kung Removed the Mountains.’ It is the story of an old man in North China in ancient times, by the name of Yu Kung of the North Mountain. His house faced south and its doorway was obstructed by two big mountains, Taihang and Wangwu. With great determination, he led his sons to dig up the mountains with pickaxes. Another old man, Chih Sho witnessed their attempts and laughed, saying: ‘What fools you are to attempt this! To dig up two huge mountains is utterly beyond your capacity.’ Yu Kung replied: ‘When I die, there are my sons; when they die there will be their own sons, and so on to infinity. As to these two mountains, high as they are, they cannot become higher but, on the contrary, with every bit dug away, they will become lower and lower. Why can't we dig them away?’ Mr. Yu Kung refuted Mr. Chih Sho's erroneous view and went on digging at the mountains day after day without interruption. God's heart was touched by such perseverance and he sent two celestial beings down to earth to carry away the mountains on their backs.”

T the great texts of the great traditions are in some sense unchanging, but as Milton Singet pointed out, the anthropologist's task is to “find fot these ideas a local habitation and leain how they operate in the lives of ordinary people” (1972, 39). What I wish to present here are the changing meanings of texts that are thought to form the core of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and the story of how their interpretations have altered as the South Asian community of Parsi Zoroastrian interpreters has changed. Much about this story echoes the experience of other South Asian communities: as the Btitish rose to dominance and their missionaries strove to teach Parsis that theirs was an inferior, weaker faith, Parsis began to represent their religion as similar to that of the Protestant Christians, even while steadfastly refusing (for the most part) to convett.

This paper attempts to redefine the nature and conditions of bondservants in the late Ming, particularly in the highly productive T'ai-hu basin. It proposes that the great economic and social differences among bondservants obliges us to treat bondservitude as a legal status, not as a class. It discusses the many causes of bondservitude and its highly varied conditions. Agricultural bondservants accounted for no more than one-fifth of the rural population and usually had to pay rent and perform specific manual duties for their master. Bondservant managers are seen to have acquired far more wealth and power than their legal status would suggest and, along with other “brazen servants,” participated in the bondservant uprisings in the T'ai-hu basin during the late Ming and early Ch'ing.

During the Qianlong period (1736–95) in China, knowledge of Manchu origins, much of which had been of a folk or informal character, was given documentary institutionalization—that is, incorporation into the Qing (1636–1912) imperial cultural mosaic by the act of writing something official about it. Much but by no means all of Manchu civilization was derived from Jurchen culture (tenth–seventeenth centuries), which was primarily a folk culture in which oral tradition, shamanic ritual, and clan custom were the mainstays of orderly social life. Inseparable from those folk traditions were elements of tribal rule that affected political life in many ways in the Later Jin (1616–35) and early Qing periods. To the extent that Manchu society retained the archaic forms through the Qing era, the folk heritage was brought into conflict with the political institutions and classical traditions of conquered China, especially the emperorship. The history of the Qing court and its relation to the Manchus may be viewed as the aggregate of the processes by which the dynasty attempted to resolve this conflict through formalization of the old culture. In its political aspects this meant the progressive bureaucratization, regulation, and depersonalization of the state in displacement of the personal, diffused authority that had once been vested by tradition in the clans and confederations. In its cultural and ideological facets, it meant the documentation of descent, myth, clan history, and shamanic practice; what had once been various and mystically obscure was now made visible, manageable, and standard.

In tokyo's fashionable roppongi crossing, just down the street from the Almond Cafe where urbanites converge to meet their dates, a sign over a Chinese restaurant bears two Chinese characters: Kō Hi (Xiang Fei).The establishment's menu and business cards display a portrait of a beautiful East Asian woman in Manchu dress; her expression is enigmatic. The restaurant's advertising describes a Chinese emperor's consort renowned for her miraculous fragrance, and promises equally aromatic culinary delights.

The diffusion of Indian Civilization and its “great tradition” to the extreme south of the peninsula occurred in the earliest stages by sea, not by land. Such characteristics of civilization as script and literacy, kingship and the state, and organized religions, developed at first in the earliest urban centers in Tamil Nadu, which were located on the coast opposite Ceylon. In the half millennium before Christ there was sea traffic between the coasts of Gujarat and Sind, and Ceylon, which laid the basis for the development of civilization in that island. Early civilization in soutliern Tamil Nadu developed parallel with this, and most of its intrusive features were analogous with those in the island, or were inspired by them. The earliest attractions of the far southern coasts were pearls and gems, which brought merchants, and ultimately, script, religions, and the Pandiyan dynastic traditon. Early civilizations characterized by the Colas and Keralas, as well as in the Andhra deltas, were inspired by sea traffic. Sources are early Tamil and Ceylon Brahmi inscriptions, Tamil Sangam literature, early Ceylon chronicles, etymologies, legends, and some archeology.

Throughout history floods and droughts have undoubtedly been the two greatest natural scourges of China. Being thus far primarily an agricultural nation with a close dependence upon nature, China's concern with floods and droughts is clearly understandable.

As is generally well known among sinologists, China has a heritage of unbroken recorded history, covering a period of approximately three millennia. Partly owing to the important role floods and droughts played in the life of the nation and partly because of the supernatural significance attached to the occurrence of these phenomena, numerous instances of floods and droughts have been recorded usually with definite dates and places.

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the “sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness.

While a growing scholarship has shed light on the spatial transformations of Tiananmen Square and its environs, not enough attention has been paid to the sacralization of power through symbols, rituals, and mythologies that lend enduring legitimacy to the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist revolution it led. This article examines how the official iconography of Tiananmen Square constructs the charisma of power through what I call the “military sublime.” Using the 1985 film The Big Parade as a primary example, I argue that the martyrology and pageantry of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) exemplify the dominant mode of symbolic investment of space which not only constitutes the nation as a militarized body politic but also frames the tradition of dissent associated with the Square, most notably the 1989 protest movement.

Much has been written in recent years about the environmental degradation in China's ethnic minority regions and the impact that this degradation and the policies that have been implemented to combat it have had on minority populations. To date, however, the research has focused mainly on the livelihood and lifestyle of minority herders and farmers. This article shifts the focus to the more symbolic realm of discourse and identity and to the minority educated urban elite, for whom this environmental degradation is linked primarily to ethnic politics. Based on an analysis of popular songs by famous Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan musicians, along with interviews with the musicians who created them and other minority intellectuals, this article proposes that China's minority intellectuals have appropriated the global discourse of environmentalism to construct minority environmental discourses that they use to assert their ethnic identities, express ethnic concerns and aspirations, and make ethno-nationalist claims.

China's 2010 census revealed a population of 1.34 billion, 50 percent urban, 13.3 percent above age sixty, and with 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls. In this article, we discuss how gender imbalance, population aging, and their interaction with rapid urbanization have shaped China's reform era development and will strongly shape China's future. These intertwined demographic changes pose an unprecedented challenge to social and economic governance, contributing to and magnifying the effects of a slower rate of economic growth. We organize the analysis according to the proximate determinants of economic growth: first, labor input and its productivity; second, capital investment and savings; and finally, multi-factor productivity, including social stability and governance. We argue that the economic, political, and social context that turns labor and capital inputs into economic outputs is perhaps the most important and least understood arena in which demographic change will shape China's rise.

A successful pattern of close ties between the state and large-scale private enterprise in Japan and Korea has attracted the attention of scholars, policymakers, and businessmen. The prewar Japanese state (Moulton 1931; Lockwood 1955; Nakagawa 1983) with its distinctive methods of promoting private enterprise played a major role in this eminently successful case of a “late developing” (Gerschenkron 1966; Rosovsky 1961) society. It also provides an early example of what has recently been termed a “capitalist development state” (Johnson 1987). Studies of prewar business-state relations have distinguished business policy associations as major loci of state ties with Japanese firms (Ishida 1968; Tiedemann 1971; Heidenheimer and Langdon 1968), thereby offering insight into the formation of an entrepreneurial elite and the role of private enterprise in state-directed development efforts.

A hundred years ago, on January 9, 1915, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India after approximately two decades of living and working in South Africa. In 2003, the Government of India designated the day of Gandhi's return as official Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or Overseas Indian Day. The centenary of Gandhi's return was marked at this year's thirteenth annual Pravasi Bharatiya Divas with appropriate official fanfare. The occasion was also observed in a wide variety of public celebrations, including a full-scale reenactment of the disembarkation from on board the S. S. Arabia of Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, at Apollo Bunder in the Bombay Harbor; and with rallies and functions held all across India (see NDTV 2015; Outlook 2015; see also Roy 2015). These centenary celebrations follow upon more than a decade-long shift in official Indian policy towards overseas Indians, or, in official parlance, Non-Resident Indians and Persons of Indian Origin (see Amrute 2010; Hercog and Siegel 2013; Upadhya 2013; Varadarajan 2014). The policy, at first, was directed mainly towards attracting the wealthy in such places as the United States and the United Kingdom. Even though it now extends to the much larger labor diaspora, both old and new, settled throughout the regions of the world, the focus remains on the rich, whose investments in India are greatly coveted. The embrace of a diasporic and deterritorialized Indian imaginary—anchored, ironically, in the commemorations of Gandhi as the poster boy for the global peripatetic Indian—is a symptom of the changes in the nation-state's relationship to global capitalism in these times of accelerated globalization.

As social anthropology has set up new standards for the analysis of social structure, the lag in the study of religious thought and behavior has become increasingly apparent. New departures have been rare in this region and the figures of Freud, Durkheim, and Weber have continued to dominate the scene.