At A time when the whole political system of Southeast Asia seems to be on the verge of complete reshapement and when a new cycle of development, dominated by native forces, may be expected to emerge from the present turmoil, an inquiry into the ideological foundations of native government will not be out of place and, perhaps, will even be of more than purely theoretical interest. What were the religious and philosophical conceptions which underlay and shaped the states of Southeast Asia? Are they still living forces with which we have to count or are they dead and gone? Is it possible to inoculate new ideas into old traditions, thereby avoiding a complete break with the past, a dangerous uprooting of oriental thought and culture?

Having put a very successful Olympics in the rearview mirror, China entered 2009 with a set of new challenges, brought on in part by the worldwide economic crisis and the resulting demands to ensure necessary employment levels and in part by the familiar issue of maintaining social stability. While the hope, presumably, was to move reasonably smoothly from the Olympics of August 2008 to the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in October 2009, the Chinese media has instead become proactive in alerting local officials and the general public that China is entering “a peak period for mass incidents” (quntixing shijian, 群体性事件), with further warnings that a single national-level event, handled poorly, could “resonate” (gongzhen, 共振) into a threat to overall social stability and a serious political crisis.

Even before the completion of land reform, the Communist regime had introduced in most parts of China the two new institutions through which it planned eventually to socialize rural trade, namely the state trading companies and the supply and marketing cooperatives. The former, wholly owned by the state and controlled by governmental departments of commerce, were normally established in cities and central market towns. Each company specialized in certain lines—e.g., grain, edible oils, marine products, stationery supplies—and established branches in nearby market towns as required for sales or purchases. With few exceptions, free competition obtained between the state trading companies and private firms until November 1953, when the companies began to acquire official monopolies of important commodities. By the end of 1954, state concerns had absorbed a number of larger private firms and captured a major share of the wholesale market.

In December 1995, the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals, ICMI (Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim se-Indonesia), held its second national congress in Jakarta (Kompas, December 4–10, 1995; Republika, December 4–10, 1995; Gatra, December 9 and 16, 1995; Forum Keadilan, January 1, 1996; Ummat, December 11, 1995). Twelve hundred delegates, representing 42,000 members from all Indonesian provinces and from many Indonesian Islamic communities abroad, participated. Minister of Research and Technology B. J. Habibie, generally considered President Suharto's favorite cabinet member, was chosen for a second five-year term as national chair. Sixteen ministers, nearly half the cabinet, were elected to leadership positions, and the president himself was designated ICMI's “Protector” (Pelindung).

The north indian movement of spiritual renewal widely known as the Tablīghī Jama'āt dates from the 1920s and exists today throughout the world. The movement's fundamental goal has been tablīgh: “conveying,” specifically conveying sharī'ā-based guidance. To this end, it has consistently used vernacular works based on translations of the Qur'ān and, especially, hadīth in its quietistic work of inculcating correct and devoted religious practice among Muslims. In this use of the vernacular, primarily Urdu, the movement has been heir to over a century of translation and subsequent publication of religious works. These publications, often in inexpensive format, have been produced by the lithographic presses that became especially common in the late nineteenth century. As in the Indonesian cases considered in this symposium, the 1930s and early 1940s were a key period for translating and printing influential texts based largely on translation of hadith. In this period, the reformists' printed texts not only reached a larger number of people but were used in new settings as Tabligh institutions evolved. Texts were never meant to stand alone and have always been secondary to practice.

No longer does the state in vietnam require that farm land be aggregated, consolidated, and farmed collectively by work teams under the direction of rural cooperatives. Instead, the state is open to diverse production arrangements. In particular, family farming, which for decades was officially discouraged and outlawed, is now officially celebrated. Households may work their own fields, to which they have use rights (leaseholds) for several years. This is a major policy change, comparable to the shift that occurred in northern Vietnam when the extensive land redistribution of the mid-1950s was followed almost immediately by the collectivizing of that land.

Most previous scholarship about the civil service examination system in imperial China has emphasized the degree of social mobility such examinations permitted in a premodern society. In the same vein, historians have evaluated the examination process in late imperial China from the perspective of the modernization process in modern Europe and the United States. They have thereby successfully exposed the failure of the Confucian system to advance the specialization and training in science that are deemed essential for nation-states to progress beyond their premodern institutions and autocratic political traditions. In this article, I caution against such contemporary, ahistorical standards for political, cultural, and social formation. These a priori judgments are often expressed teleologically when tied to the “modernization narrative” that still pervades our historiography of Ming (1368–1644) and Ch'ing (1644–1911) dynasty China.

A great deal of confusion exists on how to discuss, and theoretically characterize, political developments in India during the last decade and a half. There is, of course, a consensus that the Congress party, a towering political colossus between 1920 and 1989, has unambiguously declined. While there are legitimate doubts about whether the decline of the Congress party will continue to be irreversible, it is clear that much of the political space already vacated by the Congress has so far been filled by three different sets of political forces. The first force, Hindu nationalism, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Basu 1997; Hansen and Jaffrelot 1998; Jaffrelot 1993; Varshney 1993). The second force, regionalism, has also spawned considerable research of late (Baruah 1999; Singh forthcoming; Subramanian 1999). A third force, not so extensively analyzed, covers an array of political parties and organizations that encompass groups normally classified under the umbrella category of “lower castes”: the so-called scheduled castes, the scheduled tribes, and the “other backward classes” (OBCs). How should we understand the politics of parties representing these groups? How far will they go? What are the implications of their forward march, if it does take place, for Indian democracy?

This paper argues that the new forms of communication have had a major impact on gender and sexual ideologies and practices across East Asia. In particular, it focuses on the impact that the new media had on Chinese masculinities in the post-Mao years, a period that coincided with the “Asian economic miracle” and the rise of China. This was also the time when women's studies became well established in the West and men's studies was becoming increasingly prominent in the academic arena. But throughout this time, research into Asian men has been very limited, although Asian women have been voluminously described, analyzed, and publicized. Men's studies scholars such as R. W. Connell were well aware that a large proportion of the world's men did not receive any attention in gender studies and that this neglect was a serious problem in the field. In the first article in the inaugural issue of Men and Masculinities, he called for a more global understanding of the world gender order (Connell 1998).

By the 1990s it was a commonplace that Mao-era anti-imperialist nationalism in China was dead. The anti-imperialist perspective had pitted an exploitative foreign imperialism against a courageous Chinese people (Hu 1955). This nationalist understanding of Chinese history was encapsulated in the Great Leap Forward-era film on the Opium War, Lin Zexu, which drew a contrast between patriotic Sanliyuan villagers and traitorous ruling groups in the capital city. If the brave peasants would join with all patriotic Chinese and not fear to die, then, under correct leadership, the foreign capitalists who got rich in making Chinese poor by forcing opium into China would be thrown out. But ruling reactionaries, afraid of popular mobilization, preferred to sell out to the imperialists. As with patriots who had led exploited peasants throughout Chinese history, Mao's Communists would save the nation by providing the correct leadership that would mobilize patriotic Chinese, push imperialists out of China, and thus permit an independent China to prosper with dignity.

The profound disdain with which most governments—Qing, Republican, Communist, or, in the case of Southeast Asia, colonial—have treated Chinese secret societies, as well as the undeniable involvement of many of these societies in violent and criminal activities, have obscured the religious elements at the core of the early Heaven and Earth Society (Tiandihui), the most widespread and well-known of Chinese secret societies. The vast historiography treating Chinese secret societies, often grounded in documents produced by hostile governments, has in large measure reproduced the image of secret societies contained in these documents, even if not all scholars have embraced the moral and legal assumptions of their sources. Consequently, society practices and symbols which would be treated as religious in other contexts are frequently dismissed as epiphenomenal or “esoteric” (Stanton 1900, 9; Morgan I960, 5), or as functional means of unifying “dissident” groups (Yang 1961, 61–64).

In place of the distinct peoples and cultures that once formed the object of ethnographic inquiry, anthropologists have for some time been emphasizing the political and economic processes that connect people and places, and the ongoing production of cultural difference in contexts of unequal power. This trend in scholarly analysis contrasts with assumptions about primordial difference that inspire indigenous rights activists to defend the autonomy of culturally distinct communities from state and market processes intruding on them from the outside. It contrasts also with the emphasis on difference and isolation in official discourses that cast “development” as a program to bring change to people without history, stalled at an earlier point in an evolutionary process.

During a visit with my wife to India in 1954–1955 I had an opportunity to do a methodological field study in South India. The purpose of this study was to chart an intellectual map of some of the researchable territory that lies between the culture of a village or small community and the culture of a total civilization. This study is not easy to classify in terms of prevailing conceptions about “research,” since it is something that falls between the intensive anthropological field study and the purely conceptual types of methodological analysis. But despite its unorthodox character, it seemed an appropriate type of study to undertake in a new and not well known field. Although the study was primarily designed to serve the methodological purpose of giving an empirical content to some very general ideas and to suggest concrete hypotheses for further research, it also turned up some substantive findings which have importance on their own account. In this report I shall mention some of these in passing but will in the main confine myself to the problems of method posed by the study. A more detailed and documented account of the entire study is in preparation.

Few events have been more important to the history of modern South Asia than the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The coming of partition has cast a powerful shadow on historical reconstructions of the decades before 1947, while the ramifications of partition have continued to leave their mark on subcontinental politics fifty years after the event.

Yet, neither scholars of British India nor scholars of Indian nationalism have been able to find a compelling place for partition within their larger historical narratives (Pandey 1994, 204–5). For many British empire historians, partition has been treated as an illustration of the failure of the “modernizing” impact of colonial rule, an unpleasant blip on the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial worlds. For many nationalist Indian historians, it resulted from the distorting impact of colonialism itself on the transition to nationalism and modernity, “the unfortunate outcome of sectarian and separatist politics,” and “a tragic accompaniment to the exhilaration and promise of a freedom fought for with courage and valour” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 3).

The rise of the other backward classes (OBCs) is certainly one of the main developments in the Hindi-belt politics over the last ten years. The OBCs are castes in the Indian social system that are situated above the Untouchables but below the forward castes (the “twice born,” Brahmins, Kshatriyas [warriors] and Vaishyas [merchants]) and the intermediate castes (mostly peasant proprietors and even dominant castes). They form the bulk of the Shudras—the fourth category (varna) of the classical Hindu social arrangement. The OBCs, whose professional activity is often as field-workers or artisans, represent about half of the Indian population, but they have occupied a subaltern position so far. Their rise for the first time seriously questions upper-caste domination of the public sphere.

It has become customary among many Western scholars to consider Japan as part of an East Asian cultural area, or as a participant in Chinese or Sinic civilization. In a general conception of Asian culture viewed as consisting of East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern cultural areas dominated by Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations respectively, it seems obvious that Japan belongs in the first category. Yet most Japanese scholars use another classification which would divide Asian culture into four areas: Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and—as a separate category on the same level as the other three—Japanese. Without denying the close relation to China, the Japanese scholar is apt to emphasize the unique configuration of Japanese culture which makes it in some sense sui generis. This is only one among many manifestations of the widespread feeling in Japan that Japanese culture is “unique,” and “different.” This sense of Japan's uniqueness may give rise to pride, sorrow, or a feeling of loneliness; but that it is shared by Japanese with otherwise quite varying views is itself a fact of significance.

It is well known that mahatma gandhi felt that sexuality and desire were intimately connected to social life and politics, and that self-control translated directly into power of various kinds, both public and private. Gandhi's enigmatic genius and his popular appeal among India's masses may be attributed, at least in part, to the degree he was able to embody a powerful ideal of sexual self-control that linked his sociopolitical projects to pervasive Hindu notions of renunciation (S. Rudolph 1967). Affecting the persona of a world-renouncer, Gandhi was able to mix political, religious, and moral power, thus translating personal self-control into radical social criticism and nationalist goals. Gandhi's mass appeal was partly effected on a visceral level at which many Hindu men were able to fully appreciate the logic of celibacy as a means to psychological security, self-improvement, and national reform. Although my concern in this paper is not directly with Gandhi's notion of self-control, it is against the larger backdrop of his political legacy that I situate this discussion of sexuality, gender, and nationalism in contemporary India.

Models of ethnicity in Nepal stress, on the one hand, unlimited ethnic diversity and, on the other, a rather limited set of ethnic contrasts: Hindu versus Buddhist, tribe versus caste, mountain versus middle hills versus lowland Terai. However, ethnic relations in Humla District, in Nepal's far northwest Karnali Zone, are characterized more by interaction, interdependence, and mobility than contrasts and boundaries between groups.1 In Humla, individuals and even entire villages readily change their ethnic affiliation and their position in the caste system. There, too, ethnic groups are linked by a regional economic and social system, and changes in a group's ethnic affiliations are coincident with changes in their economy and style of life. Finally, the case of Humla reaffirms what other scholars have noted: ethnic relations today are the outcome of a historical process of accommodation between regional ethnic systems and the policies of a centralizing state.

The article critiques the “Kerala model,” which holds up Kerala State, India, as a model that may be emulated by other developing countries, on account of its remarkable advances in social development. The dominant left in Kerala has often claimed credit for such achievements, leading to its glorification as a model for social democracy. This uncritical adoration, which has acquired the status of national commonsense in Kerala, has reduced marginalized people in Kerala, particularly the lower-caste Dalits and tribals, to a state of abjection. The present effort seeks to show how the marginalization of these social groups and their confinement to governmental categories was not a historical accident, but the effect of political strategies on the left that led to their exclusion from productive resources, and of the assertion of upper-caste agency in left-led anticaste struggle.

Two basic positions have framed recent debates about South Korea's remarkable economic growth. The neoclassical position traces South Korea's take-off to a set of policy reforms in 1964 and 1965 that launched the country on the path toward export-led growth (Frank, Kim, and Westphal 1975; Kuznets 1977; Krueger 1979). Policy was far from laissez-faire, but on the whole, the reforms moved Korea in a more market-oriented direction that sought to exploit Korea's comparative advantage. The “statists,” by contrast, detail the pervasive intervention of the Korean government in the economy, even after the shift toward an outward-oriented strategy. Moreover, they argue that such intervention promoted rapid economic growth (Leudde-Neurath 1985; Jones and Sakong 1980; Amsden 1989).