There are approximately five million Muslims in Thailand (7 percent of the total population), with about 1.8 million in the southernmost provinces bordering on Malaysia. A considerable literature in history, anthropology, political science, international relations, and religious studies has been produced since January 4, 2004, when a violent Muslim insurgency dramatically erupted in the area. At that time over 100 Muslim insurgents raided an arms depot of the Fourth Army Engineers in Narathiwat Province. On January 22, in south Thailand, two Muslim young men on a motorcycle used a long knife to slit the throat of a sixty-four-year-old Buddhist monk, killing him. The monk had just returned from his early morning round of tham bun (alms-collecting extending merit to Buddhist families).

Since 2000, a number of performing troupes have been established in South Korea, made up largely of musicians and dancers who were professionally trained in North Korea prior to their migration and presenting a range of music and dances related to both the North and South. Combining ethnographic data with performance analysis of one such troupe, the Pyŏngyang Minsok Yesultan, I show how the nation and the state intersect in the space of performing arts as the troupe's creative culture reflects the settlement experiences of North Koreans in the South. While the troupe's organization, membership, and performance culture delineate migrant adaptation and understanding of their new citizenship, the performance of these Koreans is a complex terrain in which the two Koreas converge and are contested as the performers enact a constant negotiation between “being” and “negating” North Korean-ness, expressing their cultural hybridity as emergent citizens of the South.

It seems impossible anywhere in this century of the common man for history to remain a mere matter of recording and analysing the deeds of uncommon men. The most traditional of historians finds himself obliged to assess not only the influence exerted on the course of events by individual statesmen and generals, but also the collective influence of the wishes, the fears, the interests, or the prejudices of large numbers of anonymous individuals, grouped generally, for purposes of convenience, under such rubrics as “the urban middle classes,” “the city,” “the workers,” “the farmers,” “the discontented intellectuals,” or “the electorate.” Sometimes the statistical implications of such terms are recognised, as by the English Namierites, in the use of openly statistical methods of approach. Other historians use less tedious, and it must be admitted less convincing, means of summation. In any case, the business of writing history has become more complicated. The purpose of this paper is to give some account of the treatment Japanese historians have afforded one such large category of individuals who can no longer be ignored in recounting the history of Meiji Japan, namely “the landlords.”

In this essay, I will survey recent scholarship on several major issues in the political, social, and economic history of ancient China, from the beginning of the Shang Dynasty to the end of the Han Dynasty. Archaeological aspects will be discussed only when their historical significance requires it, since the archaeological discoveries of recent decades have already been the subject of Professor Kwang-chih Chang's state-of-the-field article in The Journal of Asian Studies.

The cult of Khaṇḍobā, one of the largest contemporary popular Hindu cults in the Deccan, is extremely rich in both mythology and ritual; yet, the most popular ritual festival in the cult has no corresponding cultic myth. Interviews with pilgrims, analysis of pilgrim behavior at the festival, and examination of certain astrochronological notions prevalent in popular Hinduism indicate that explanations of the place of the festival in the cult and of its importance for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year are to be found not in any aspect of the mythology of the cult but rather in notions, preserved generally in popular Hinduism, of the special accessibility of power at special times.

Though relatively less known in the West than his contemporary, T'ao Yüan-ming, Hsieh Ling-yüna (385–433) was in his own generation and for some centuries thereafter the most popular poet of the age. Thirty-two of his shorter poems were included in the Wen-hsüan (compiled about 530), while T'ao is represented there by only eight pieces and Yen Yen-chihb, another contemporary whose name is often coupled with Hsieh's, by nineteen. His fame seems to have rested largely on his ability to depict the natural beauties of the Chekiang mountains which he loved, and to evoke in his readers the moods which they inspired in him. In fact he is counted by some to be the originator of the type of “landscape poetry” which was later so successfully exemplified by poets like Wang Wei (699–759) and Liu Tsung-yüan (773–819). There can be no doubt also that the art of landscape painting, which likewise reached its first flowering with Wang Wei, had its roots in the same soil that produced the landscape poetry of Hsieh Ling-yün.

Baniyas (moneylender/traders) have a bad reputation. Though the functions they perform are similar, they in no way enjoy the respectability and admiration accorded bankers and businessmen, their brethren in spirit. They are castigated by villager and scholar alike as shylocks, parasites who—if given half a chance—squeeze clients dry through exorbitant interest rates on loans and on goods-on-credit. In an Indian village, one quickly becomes aware of the sometimes fearful respect they command. One approaches them for credit as a supplicant; for the defaultor, there is no more distressing sight than the Baniya at the door demanding to go over accounts. Baniyas are far from lovable; their popular image as fawning, cowardly, greedy sorts who take undue advantage of the weak while ingratiating themselves with the powerful appears singularly well deserved.

Economic development makes resources available for a variety of desirable social goals. However, many of these goals are not automatically related to the economic mechanism of production and income distribution in a private enterprise economy. The social values that sustain economic development are often hostile to a non-market redistribution of resources. This dilemma between the welfare potential of economic development and the social values that make development possible has long been a subject of intense interest to sociologists. In recent years, economists have been paying increasing attention to the problem.

Views of desert regions of the world as areas with little productive use for the support of mankind have always been tempered by the optimism expressed in the phrase “to make the desert bloom like the rose.” We also know that the concept of the “Garden of Eden” was evolved in a desert environment. Thus, it is well realized that in a temperate or warm arid region, the flow of water from springs or from exotic rivers or the availability of fresh ground water derived from distant rainfall or snow-melt may create green oases of productive agriculture. One such region is China's colonial realm of Sinkiang, and especially the Tarim basin in central Asia. Here, such land and water resources presently provide some seven million people with food and materials for clothing. This also is a region with valuable unexploited mineral resources both varied and substantial.

Prior to the October I, 1965 coup attempt, the leaders of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) controlled the largest Communist organization in any non-Communist state. The Party itself, with some three million members, was the center of a web of mass organizations claiming 15 million members and seeking to mobilize specific segments of the population: workers, peasants, youth, women, students, cultural workers, university teachers, and even village officials. D. N. Aidit, M. H. Lukman and Njoto, the triumvirate that had led the Party since January 1951, were honored by President Sukarno at home and by the major Communist parties abroad. A Djakarta-Peking axis was the base of a vociferous confrontation against the West, and Communist youths spearheaded government-sponsored demonstrations against “neo-colonial” establishments within the country. Meanwhile, several non-Communist politicians and military officers appeared to be plotting their own opening to the left in preparation for a Communist takeover.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the biggest rebellion Imperial China had ever experienced, had undoubtedly exposed the many inadequacies of the dynastic government. The decrepit state of the army was at once revealed. The Manchu banner troops had long decayed while the Chinese Army of the Green Standard (Lü-ying) had also reached its nadir at the turn of the nineteenth century. The government, therefore, had to depend more and more on local, gentry-led armies. The defeat of the main government armies in 1860 eventually forced the court at Peking to place full responsibility in the hands of these gentry-led armies, thus introducing a new phase in the war of suppression.

The Buddhist monkhood in each of the Theravāda countries of Southern Asia—Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka—is segmented into smaller fraternities (nikāyas). In Sri Lanka these fraternities have proliferated since the early nineteenth century. This proliferation has been interpreted as evidence of a Buddhist reform or return to orthodoxy and portrayed against the background of Sinhalese society as a whole. In this essay I argue that the establishment of twenty-five such nikāyas in the Low Country of Sri Lanka can be better understood both as serving a variety of interests (of which reform is one) and in terms of regional groups of monks and lay people.

Most studies of wartime Japan have assumed a close and complementary relationship between business and the military. This essay challenges this view by examining the complexities and tensions of wartime institutional dynamics. The lack of a monolithic industrial and political structure hindered efficient economic mobilization. This can be seen in the industrial control associations (kōgyō tōsei kai), which were intended to be the most important link between military, government, and business after 1941. Their organization and functioning reveals a three-way administrative struggle between business, military, and bureaucracy. All three power groups were internally divided over both the formulation and the implementation of policy. Japan, the epitome of government-business cooperation in the postwar era, was surprisingly divided during the war.

This article considers the relationship between the official, legislated claims of heritage conservation in India and the wide range of episodic and transitory inhabitations that have animated and transformed the monumental remains of the city, or rather cities, of Delhi. Delhi presents a spectrum of monumental structures that appear variously to either exist in splendid isolation from the rush of everyday urban life or to peek out amidst a palimpsest of unplanned, urban fabric. The repeated attempts of the state archaeological authorities to disambiguate heritage from the quotidian life of the city was frustrated by bureaucratic lapses, casual social occupations, and deliberate challenges. The monuments offered structural and spatial canvases for lives within the city, providing shelter, solitude, and the possibility of privacy, as well as devotional and commercial opportunity. The dominant comportment of the city's monuments during the twentieth century was a hybrid monumentality, in which the jealous, legislated custody of the state became anxious, ossified, and ineffectual. An acknowledgement and acceptance of the hybridity of Delhi's monuments offers an opportunity to reorient understandings of urban heritage.

This article examines the market for cocaine in India during the early twentieth century and the efforts of the colonial state to control it. The British authorities issued regulations to prohibit the drug's use as early as 1900, and yet by the start of World War I, cocaine's appeal had become socially diverse and geographically wide. This account of a significant market for a powerful new drug suggests that Indian society was able to rapidly develop a demand for such products even when the colonial state had no part in their introduction. Indians used these new products in complex ways—as medicines, as tonics, and as intoxicants, albeit through the localized medium of the everyday paan leaf. The study points to a reconsideration of a number of debates about the history of drugs and modern medicines in Asia.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of overseas Chinese businessmen created a private international remittance network linking the southeastern littoral zone of the Qing empire with the colonies of mainland and archipelagic Southeast Asia. Holding together this transnational network were Qiaopiju remittance firms that succeeded in controlling the remittance trade not by relying on traditional forms of economic organization or behavior, but by pioneering a unique combination of capitalist profit-making strategies, culturalist customer services, and flexible interfirm relations. The organizational structure and business practices of Qiaopiju allowed them to successfully adapt to and negotiate with the emerging regulatory regimes of the nation-state, colonial, and capitalist world systems in order to dominate the international remittance industry for more than a century.

This article aims to establish the importance of pamphlets as a medium of political propaganda in early twentieth-century colonial Bengal. Through an analysis of pamphlets issued by revolutionary terrorists in Bengal, the author shows that pamphlet propaganda proved to be an effective means of legitimizing the ideology and practices of terrorism. The effectiveness of pamphlet propaganda was largely attributable to the propagandists' skillful use of rhetorical mechanisms to establish an emotional connection with the targeted audience. In the process of framing public meaning for the political beliefs they sought to propagandize, the pamphlet writers made clever use of cultural symbols such as stories, images, and figures that had immediate resonance in Bengali society. Ultimately, this process of politicization through the reinforcement of cultural identity deepened cultural and political divisions in Bengal.

In 2003 a monument was erected at the site of the 2002 Islamist militant attacks in Kuta, Bali. Government and other official discourses, including the design brief, represent the monument as an integrated and culturally harmonious public testimony to the victims. However, the monument is also a discordant association of ideas, meanings, and political claims. While originally designed to subdue insecurity, the Bali bombings monument, in fact, constitutes a site of powerful “language wars” around its rendering of memory and its presence in Bali's integration into the globalizing economy of pleasure. This paper examines the ways in which the monument is being articulated and “consumed” as a social and cultural marker for the island's tourism geography. The paper pays particular attention to the increasing diversity of Bali's visitors and the ways in which a precarious “cosmopolization” of the Kuta-Legian area is being experienced and expressed at the monument site.

The article examines the spatial turn in the contestations between the Indian nation and the British empire, as manifested in the creation and annulment of a new province at the turn of the twentieth century. The province, Eastern Bengal and Assam, was a culmination of the British Indian empire's eastern gaze since the early nineteenth century across northeastern India, Burma, and southern China. While the new province was expected to facilitate the empire's eastward transregional engagements, the national resistance to the scheme was influenced more by the comfort zone of the agro-ecological regime of the plains of the Bengal Delta, imagined to be capable of sustaining the Bengali nation in decline. The province was dismantled within six years in the face of the razing national movement, but a century later its legacy returns as India looks east.