From the time when Southeast Asia first rose above their horizon, Europeans—the infinitesimal number of them who cared about such matters, that is—tended to treat that vague and insubstantial region beneath the sunrise as simply a more distant part of India. This practice went back at least to Claudius Ptolemy or, possibly, one of his redactors, who subsumed a good part of the region under the rubric “Trans-Gangetic India.” Subsequently the whole area came to be identified with one of the “Three Indies,” though whether India Major or Minor, Greater or Lesser, Superior or Inferior, seems, often to have been a personal preference of the author concerned. When Europeans began to penetrate into Southeast Asia in earnest, they continued this tradition, attaching to various of the constituent territories such labels as Further India or Hinterindien, the East Indies, the Indian Archipelago, Insulinde, and, in acknowledgment of the presence of a competing culture, Indochina. As recently as 1884, a German ethnographer saw nothing incongruous in designating the archipelago as “the Indian Islands,” a term that with the cultural predilection of his age, he Hellenized as Indonesia. Although the powerful and pervasive influence of the “most divine and wise Ptolemy” furnished impeccable authority for this nomenclature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there is no doubt that the practice also signified the recognition of South Asian cultural forms and institutions in the lands beyond the Bay of Bengal. Despite these forms differing subtly—and sometimes not so subtly—from those in India proper, they were so conspicuous that it was readily inferred, given the intellectual predisposition of the day, that they were the result of Indian colonization, if not conquest, in ancient times.

“Arirang” is known worldwide as the quintessential Korean folk song. Its iconic status in contemporary Korea derives from its perceived role in strengthening Korean resolve to resist the cultural violence of the Japanese colonial occupation (1905–45). A musical “skeleton” capable of countless improvised variations and interpretations, some “Arirangs” explicitly assailed the Japanese and thus were censored by colonial authorities. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, precisely the time when assimilationist pressures in colonial Korea were intensifying, Japanese songsmiths, singers, and recording companies released “Arirang” renditions in prodigious quantities, sometimes in collaboration with Korean performers. “Arirang” became the most familiar song in the Japanese empire: Its persistent theme of loss spoke to Koreans of their lost sovereignty and to Japanese of the ravaging effects of modernity on traditional lifeways. For both peoples, it served as a mirror for self-contemplation and an “ethnographic lens” for gazing upon the other.

We study the propensity for protest in the context of individuals’ alternative choices in urban China. Depending on the number and quality of social ties (or guanxi in Chinese), individuals may resort to one of two alternatives: to engineer life-changing events through personal connections or to join others in labor protest. We call one “adaptation” and the other “voice.” As our working hypothesis, we first expect them to be mutually exclusive. That is, adaptation through guanxi networks may help diffuse the will to protest, as those who enjoy better guanxi networks would advance their class status through such networks. With data from a national survey, our analysis rejects this working hypothesis. Those who are better connected are not only more likely to adapt but also more inclined to voice, and the effect of social ties on protest is significantly smaller for those who are connected to people with power. The implications are twofold. First, our data not only confirm the well-known effect of social connections on protest, but also specify the effects caused by high-class versus low-class connections. Second, in a comparative vein, the individual decision making on adaptation and/or voice offers a glimpse into the intertwining domains of social space in contemporary China.

The Kiangsi Soviet marked the first systematic attempt by the Chinese Communist party to use existing peasant models of collective action for purposes of building an independent military apparatus. The history of that attempt is here examined against the background of the moral economy school's claim that revolutionary movements in twentieth-century Asia have successfully wedded themselves to such traditional patterns of action in order to achieve larger political purposes. This analysis of the politics of mobilization inside the soviet area finds that peasant society was traditionally too stratified and too divided against itself to offer unified resistance to threatening external forces, and emphasizes that mobilization tended to engage collective competitive instincts, setting groups of peasants against each other, rather than against hated representatives of post-traditional authority in the countryside. This finding is in turn used as a point of departure for raising some larger questions about the model of revolutionary legitimacy postulated by James C. Scott and the moral economists.

More than one third of Asia is dry. From the Red Sea almost to the Pacific are a series of deserts and semideserts, the product of continentality, mountain patterns, and atmospheric circulation. Two areas of extreme aridity are present in die Rub al Khali of southern Arabia and the Takla Makan of western China, both essentially rainless and lifeless. Elsewhere, aridity fades off into subhumid lands with marginal potentials for settlement.

Few notions are so widely held among students of Japanese economic history as the view that the land tax during the Tokugawa period was cruelly oppressive. It is thought to have left the peasantry no significant surplus after production costs, and moreover to have become heavier as time passed. I propose in this paper to examine certain evidence bearing on this view, which strongly influences the interpretation of modern Japanese history.

Indian philosophical thought has always attempted to deal with opposite or binary values. However, when faced with contradictions, social scientists try to analyze the form, meaning and function of opposed values in real social situations. The problem of opposed values becomes difficult and anomalous when the culture, at different levels, not only permits oppositions, but simultaneously sanctions them. The data on meat-eating among the Kanya-Kubja brahmans of Katyayan gotra (primarily an exogamous group composed of several lineages) present this type of problem to the social anthropologist.

At the tip of southeastern Sri Lanka is the shrine of Kataragama, sacred to Skanda, the son of Śiva. There, every year in the Sinhala month äsala (July/August), devotees walk the length of a pit containing a thick layer of red-hot coals. Many Buddhists and Hindus, the fire-walkers as well as ordinary devotees, believe that this custom of the annual fire-walking ritual comes from mythic times and commemorates Skanda's victory over the asuras (titans). In fact, the present form of fire-walking in Buddhist Sri Lanka dates not from the asura war, but from World War II. Furthermore, those who walk the fire are not members of a hoary ancient ritual lineage; rather, they are modern urban people, uprooted from traditional Sinhala Buddhist peasant culture. Fire-walking is a new phenomenon, and it is a product of recent social change.

On March 9, 1945, the Japanese terminated French rule in Indochina and gave Viet-Nam its first “independent” government. As an accident of history, and although composed chiefly of technicians and professionals, the government of Tran Trong Kim unexpectedly carried out a partial revolution from above—characterized by the Vietnamization (Viet Nam hoa) of nearly all French-imposed institutions—and regained territorial unification for Viet-Nam, only to see the fruits reaped by Ho Chi Minh in August 1945. Kim's Empire of Viet-Nam was one side of the Vietnamese nationalist revolutionary coin; the reverse was Ho's Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam.

The discovery in Hunan in 1973 of silk manuscripts over two thousand years old opened a new field of Chinese studies. The find is of considerable value and importance to students of Chinese archaeology, palaeography, textual criticism, history, and philosophy. The Silk Manuscripts of Ma-wang-tui, containing around 120,000 characters, include two hitherto unknown versions of the Lao Tzu and probably the lost “Four Scriptures of the Yellow Emperor.” A preliminary investigation of these texts indicates that they represent a mode of thinking referred to in the Historical Records as the “thought of Huang-Lao,” that was prevalent in China in the second century B.C. and that may have originated in the ancient state of Ch'u. This paper proposes that the thought of Huang-Lao, as a fusion of Taoist and Legalist ideas, articulates a coherent political philosophy that emphasizes the inseparability of the metaphysical foundations of politics and the art of government as a daily routine.

This essay is an exploration of one aspect of the politics of gender representation in Thailand, namely, how the portrayals of Siamese women in Thai popular histories form part of the present-day shaping of gender relations. I argue that moving in tandem with developments in academic historiography, popular history since the 1980s has become a battleground for cultural hegemony.

Hitherto the preserve of antiquarians, popular history has caught the interest of the emergent middle class, who are intent on inscribing their reading of the past on the Thai cultural landscape. Where gender relations are concerned, the middle class has worked out a modern rationale for the traditional view that women are subordinate to men. However, critical scholars, alert to what they see as the perpetuation of the historical subordination of women through the medium of popular history, have sought to stem the tide by addressing their critiques of the middle-class interpretations to a popular audience.

In Bangalore, late in the summer of 2014, I listened to many animated conversations. There were political debates: the right-wing Hindu nationalist party had, earlier that summer, won national as well as state elections, evoking disparate reactions across society, sowing dissension even among the technological elite. There were technological arguments: should Bangalore continue to be an outsourcing haven for software services, or did India need a new model of development? Technology itself no longer seemed to unite people and offer exciting futures, as it had a decade ago. In Basavanagudi, a neighborhood named after twelfth-century social reformer Basavanna, part of the South Bangalore constituency where Tom Friedman's friend Nandan Nilekani had just lost the local election to the Hindu nationalist BJP candidate, I noticed a growing buzz around a social media campaign for a new documentary on climate change. Facebook, Twitter, and chats excitedly shared news of the upcoming global release of a film seeking to unite the globe in a social movement to stop climate change. Software engineers and social justice activists might, it seemed, be able to come together on this topic, if not any other.

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains?

An oft-overlooked part of the Global Sixties, the seminal event of April 19th (1960) set the foundation for South Korea's combative, youth-driven democratization struggles between the years 1960 and 1987. This article turns to the eve of the eight-week protest movement in order to examine the production of students as a nationwide social organization of youths well-versed in nationalist discourse and conversant in patriotic practices. Throughout the heady weeks of February, March, and April 1960, youthful protestors drew on elements of this ideological training in an unlikely fashion to employ them in protests against the state. Taking full advantage of the privileged position of students in nationalist discourse, the protestors of April 19th cemented the importance of the upright student demonstration in South Korea's emerging postcolonial, Cold War political landscape.

In October 2007, Malaysia celebrated sending its first astronaut into space, as part of a cooperative venture on board a Russian space mission. As Malaysia's first astronaut was a Muslim, the Malaysian government commissioned, through its Department of Islamic Development, a project to create a definitive set of guidelines for the practice of Islam in outer space, specifically on board the International Space Station. What may on the surface appear to be a practical exercise in clarifying religious practice reveals upon closer examination to be a complex restructuring of Malaysia's domestic and international politics, with the role of Islam as the catalytic and somewhat controversial centerpiece.

Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy rests on lifelong hierarchical bonds that are too clear to require constant verbal reinforcement. But strangers, women, peasants, migrant workers, and others often do not merit face work because they lack status, fall outside the network of insiders, or are politically taboo. Until very recently, European-style equivalents of “hello,” “please,” “thanks,” “sorry,” or “goodbye” existed only in impersonal-sounding translations restricted to brief contacts with foreigners. As Beijing steps back from the socialist revolution, it is promoting these “five courteous phrases” (ni hao, qing, dui bu qi, xiexie, zai jian) to expand courtesy to universal, reciprocal greetings. Popular acceptance of this “verbal hygiene” is spreading via rapid, urban service encounters in which one's connections are unknown. In this way, China's self-identity as an “advanced civilization” is being retooled in international terms.

The following two articles constitute the partial results of a project in comparative coordinated research in Southeast Asia. Prior to undertaking field research in Burma and Thailand in 1959–60, the authors developed a research design to ensure the collection of comparable data for description and analysis in the areas of social structure and economics. The original plan was modified in the field during an exchange of visits to the Burmese and Thai peasant communities eventually selected for study.

This essay explores the ritual dimension of the formation of Confucian orthodoxy in China from around the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Recent scholarship on orthodoxy has shown how the civil service examination system bound together hundreds of thousands of educated men with the court in pedagogical practices that effectively regulated what constituted acceptable knowledge of the classics used to legitimate the imperial regime and its policies. Without questioning the central importance of the examinations in the propagation of orthodoxy, in this essay I expand the scope of this problem to consider the role of ritual in reproducing orthodoxy by focusing on the uneasy convergence of the state cult of Kongzi—known in the West as Confucius—with the family cult of his flesh-and-blood descendants.

Due to the inadequacies of the surviving sources, this study of the highly controversial issue of Sung land tenure focuses on variations in land tenure practices in six regions of South China during the Southern Sung. It finds that large private landholdings predominated in only a few areas of South China, that they usually did not possess the contiguity and size some have attributed to a supposed Sung manorial order, and that most peasant households owned some land. Of those who worked another's land, three types are studied in detail—the land guest, the field servant, and the tenant guest. Normally the land guest was bound to the land, the field servant hired as a temporary indentured servant, and the tenant guest obliged to provide little more than rent. Working conditions south of the Yangtze generally grew less subservient the closer the area was located to the Lower Yangtze Valley.