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.

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.

I am most honored and perhaps also startled to read these comprehensive scholarly essays dedicated to the question of the appropriation of Gender Trouble in Asian studies. Sometimes “appropriation” is a problematic activity, such as the cultural appropriation of artworks and styles from minority communities, such as the indigenous, for the purposes of market circulation, profit, or the augmentation of human capital. But when texts such as Gender Trouble enter the global market of books, a different kind of appropriation becomes possible. The book is at once taken up and refused, indicating the limits of translation or marking a resistance to cultural imperialism.

In his study of the reemergence of intra-Asian connections published in this issue of the Journal of Asian Studies, Prasenjit Duara has aptly underscored the importance of comprehending the patterns of interactions and connectivities among Asian societies during the precolonial period. The following comments will reaffirm most of his contentions, but also will problematize the issue, especially in regard to some of the neglected topics and the conceptualization of the premodern interactions.

When Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 andwas thereby rocketed into international prominence, the literary and theological worlds were afflicted with a rash of speculation as to whether or not his ideas were basically Christian. “The God of Gitanjali is no impersonal, imperturbable absolute of Hindu philosophy, but…whether He be explicitly Christ or not, He is at least a Christ-like God, and the experience of His suppliant and lover is one with the deepest core of all Christian experience.” “The ideas of Rabindranath, like those of so many thinkers of modern India, have often been quite wrongly assigned to Indian sources.” “In Rabindranath we get a glimpse of what the Christianity of India will be like….”

Opium smoking has long since disappeared as a social phenomenon in Java. But in the last century, and during the early decades of this one, smoking opium was a widespread custom in much of the island—the daily habit of hundreds of thousands, a routine part of social life among men in many regions, and a source of considerable profit to the Dutch colonial state. This article addresses the subject of opium in Java; it concentrates on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the historical period during which opium smoking was most widespread in Java and for which the most abundant documentary resources exist.

This is a brief bibliographical essay which surveys the literature published in Japanese during the past decade on various aspects of the Tokugawa economy. The purpose of the essay is twofold: the first is to present an annotated bibliography of selected books and a list of relevant articles for the convenience of scholars interested in sources relating to economic changes in Tokugawa Japan. The second is to present in summary form what appears to the authors to be the newly emerging consensus in the interpretation of these changes.

The emerging consensus is an acceptance of the hypothesis that the Tokugawa economy and its institutions steadily developed, resulting in a rise in the standard of living for most of the population during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. A majority of Japanese economic historians now seem to agree that the peasant class also benefitted from the economic growth, and numerous scholars through exacting case studies have produced evidence to show that agricultural productivity was rising faster than effective tax rates. Other research has documented the rapid development of economic institutions, including the market, credit mechanisms, and guilds. The old theme of stagnation and demise for the late Tokugawa economy has been discharged in favor of a new theme of continuous growth and development.

The problem of the relations between religious and political organizations and systems has been of long standing in the broad field of comparative historical studies and in the sociology of religion. The work of Max Weber, although more explicitly focused on the relations between economics and religion has, of course, contained many general and concrete analyses on the interrelations between religion and politics in general and between specific types of religious and political systems in particular. Some of the recent works dealing with this area have been devoted to the more general problem of “The State and Religion.” These discussions have emphasized the problem of their interdependence and mutual influence, especially in the more “developed” forms of both religious and political institutions, but have not always specified the exact types of religious and political structures whose interaction formed the object of the analysis.

When village communities exist in the context of a larger political system, understanding of the system of control at the village level requires analysis both of the system of control imposed on the village by the state and also of that which has evolved within the community through centuries of its existence. These two systems, of course, cannot operate altogether independently of each other but must somehow be articulated with one another. The specific ways in which the two systems articulate differ from society to society. Nonetheless a perusal of the literature suggests a solution to the problem of articulation which is common to many societies. The solution apparently is to maintain a relatively autonomous village community over which the higher authority exercises limited control through certain key agents or agencies, as is, for example, the case with Imperial China, Thailand, Ceylon, and Greece. And this was indeed the solution for Japanese villages of the Tokugawa period, in spite of the tight and rigid control of the military government over the peasantry which historians make much of. (Since our discussion will proceed at a general level at which differences in administration between the Shogunate and daimiate governments are minor, both types of government will be simply referred to as “the government” or “governments” without distinction.)

A unique feature of traditional Chinese law was the provision by statute that an offender who voluntarily surrendered and confessed before discovery and who made full restitution was entitled to remsision of punishment. Offenders who physically harmed their victims or offended against die state itself by commiting treason or escaping across borders were not entitled to remission, but could receive a reduction of punishment. Under the Republic this provision, known as tzu-shou, was continued in name but materially changed in substance under the influence of Western law as introduced through Japan. In general, the rewards for voluntary surrender and confession were reduced to mere reduction of punishment, but the scope was broadened to include crimes such as homicide, for which restitution was impossible. When the Chinese Communists first began developing a legal system in the 1930's, they too adopted tzu-shou. However, under them it became primarily an instrument of political control and social and ideological reform. It has remained an important aspect of Communist law even to the present though its application has ceased to have any strict legal significance.

For Western scholars, occupied Japan remains something of an anomaly: too remote (1945–1952) for most economists and political scientists, still uncomfortably close for historians. Americanists seem intimidated by the exotic hieroglyphics on the other side, while Japan specialists shy away in fear of losing their assumed thoroughbred image should their footnotes betray too much English. Buried under a veritable mountain of grist for research, as these two recent bibliographies attest, there is as yet no single scholarly overview of the subject in English. Such neglect is unfortunate, for the problems and potential insights involved are substantial.

Komori is a generic term that consists of a noun, ko (a child), and a verb, moru (to protect or to take care of); Japanese use it to refer to any person, male or female, old or young, who takes care of children. This article will focus on the young girls, hired by families in need of child care in the so-called modern Imperial period (1868–1945), who were called komori. Like their European counterparts, nursemaids and nannies, komori began to appear in what Michel Foucault has called the “discourse of power” in the late nineteenth century, i.e., in the formative period of the Japanese modern nation state. The komori's appearance in Japan's discourse of power corresponded to the emergence of a subculture among the komori that is the focus of my analysis in this article.

Inspired by the life and work of the late anthropologist Nancy Abelmann (1959–2016), this essay reflects upon public evocations of human vulnerability as central to understanding recent cultural phenomena and political transformations leading up to and during the Candlelight Revolution in South Korea. In this regard, how did the color vivid yellow come to define both spaces of protest and markers of dissident identity? Considering the prevalence of yellow ribbons, yellow balloons, yellow butterflies, and yellow paper lifeboats, what does it mean for such objects to have been circulated and recirculated in layered metaphorical assemblages that constituted new forms of public memory and new practices of political mobilization? This article addresses both the massive, peaceful Candlelight protests of 2016–17 that took place in downtown Seoul and the decade-long peace movement centered on Jeju Island's Gangjeong Village in order to theorize a vital politics of fragility that has imbued influential narratives, activist coalitions, and the material culture of protest in South Korea.

In her recent presidential address, “Reenvisioning the Qing,” Professor Evelyn Sakakida Rawski attacks the “sinicization” theme originally presented as one of the five major aspects of my 1967 article, “The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in Chinese History” (Ho 1967). In her essay—frankly admitted to have been based exclusively on “recent secondary literature”—she states that “a notable outcome of the new scholarship is the rejection of the sinicization thesis and its Han-centered orientation in favor of an empire-building model that emphasizes the importance of the Chinese empire's cultural links with the non-Han peoples of Inner Asia” (Rawski 1996, 827). It ought to be pointed out at the outset that my 1967 paper was not delivered, as she mistakenly presumed, from the podium of the president of the Association for Asian Studies; for I did not receive this honor until 1975–76, when, after having shifted my research interest so far away from the Ming-Ch'ing period, I addressed the Association with a paper entitled “The Chinese Civilization: A Search for the Roots of its Longevity.” The 1967 paper was an AAS panel presentation, not a presidential address.

Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary nationalist executed by the British in 1931, continues to be an enormously popular figure in contemporary India, immediately recognizable in ubiquitous posters, stickers and placards by his distinctive hat. This article uncovers the story behind Bhagat Singh's original ‘hat photograph’ by tracing the portrait's journey from the time it was taken, in 1929, to the early 1930s. The portrait was devised as a tactic of political subversion and intended as revolutionary propaganda, although it became more widely interpreted as an icon of defiant nationalism and a symbol of imperial injustice. The image quickly morphed from its original format, and rapidly circulated in the form of reproductions, paintings and drawings, travelling well beyond the confines of the literate domain, making a decisive impact on the charged political landscape of the early 1930s.

This Presidential Address explores Korean Buddhist travel undertaken for religious training, missionary propagation, and devotional pilgrimage. By traveling to India and throughout East Asia, as well as to the mythic undersea bastion of the faith, Koreans demonstrated their associations with the wider world of Buddhist culture, whether it be terrestrial or cosmological. Simultaneous with continued travel overseas to the Chinese mainland and the Buddhist homeland of India, Koreans also brought those sacred sites home through a wholesale remapping of the domestic landscape. As local geography became universalized, there was less need for the long, dangerous journeys overseas to Buddhist sacred sites: instead, the geography of Buddhism became implicit within the indigenous landscape, turning Korea into the Buddha-land itself. Once this “relocalization” of Buddhism had occurred, Korean Buddhists were able to travel through the sacred geography of Buddhism from the (relative) comfort of their own locale.

Perhaps best known today as a pioneering scholar of Inner Asia and a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, Owen Lattimore was more basically, like his friend Arnold Toynbee, a major player in the vogue of comparative history that captured wide public attention in the second quarter of the twentieth century. His lifelong intellectual project was to develop a “scientific” model of the way human societies form, evolve, grow, decline, mutate, and interact with one another along “frontiers.” In the process of working out this model, Lattimore appropriated for his own purposes, and often later discarded, some of the analytic devices most popular in his day, including ecological determinism, biological racism, economic geography and location theory, and Marxist modes of production. At every stage in his thinking, he sought to confound complacent teleologies, both those of Western “progress” and those of Chinese “civilization” of its pastoralist neighbors.

A consideration of colonial Bombay enriches the understanding of the activities and ideas of Christian missionaries and Orientalists in India and elucidates British conceptions of “the religions of India” and the production of colonialist knowledge. This article focuses on nineteenth-century Scottish missionary-Orientalists and examines how they and other Bombay-based Protestant missionaries understood the concept of religion, Christianity, and the structure, similitude and distinctiveness of “the religions” at the crucial moment when newly “discovered” religions were gaining recognition and a new vision of “world religions” was coming into being. It considers the writings on the religions and ethnographic scholarship of the Bombay Scottish missionaries, as well as their extensive and multifaceted interactions with Bombay's Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Parsi, Jewish, Roman Catholic and Andivasi communities. More specifically, it details the ways in which Bombay missionaries applied and related the concept of religion to diverse configurations of language, text, and practice that they understood as isomorphic species of the religion genus. By examining how Christian missionaries who were also Orientalists conceptualized a number of “religions” and interacted with numerous communities this article seeks to elucidate the presuppositions that shaped the ways in which Hinduism and the other “religions” of nineteenth-century Bombay were imagined.

Humiliated and shaken by the depredations of the imperialist nations, early twentieth-century Chinese leaders sought the establishment of a strong nation-state. Bitter struggles over the means to reach that goal—primarily over the distribution of political power—ended in the demise of the Ch'ing, the defeat of Yuan Shih-k'ai, and the turmoil of the “warlord” period. After Yuan's death in 1916, the dispute over distribution of power thrust into serious consideration the model of a federation for building a nation out of China's disparate regions and interests. Some felt that a federation was perhaps a more effective integrating form than the centralized bureaucratic model the late Ch'ing and Yuan Shih-k'ai had supported. The debate was not new in China. However, during the empire, proponents of centralization (chün-hsien) and decentralization (feng-chien) had been concerned with finding the form that would produce the greatest stability and administrative efficiency; now the Chinese were obsessed with the issue for life-and-death reasons. 2 Rapid national integration seemed imperative for China's survival. In 1901, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao had discussed the possibilities of a Chinese federation; 3 but, until 1916, federalism was effectively submerged by the centralizers. Amid increasing turmoil after Yuan's death, federalism seemed to provide an answer to chaotic instability.