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.

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.

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.

Men's references to women's writing in vernacular Korean script never term this practice “calligraphy,” and yet articles of women's intricate brushwork reveal that in late Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) this was a highly aestheticized practice with recognized social importance and a meticulous training process. This article captures the moment when vernacular Korean scriptural practices ascended the elite canon, which resulted in the emergence of high vernacular culture. It historicizes the gendered logic of representation in a male-authored historical archive to uncover the contours of a women-centered vernacular aesthetic canon that assumed a status of prestige alongside male culture in literary Chinese. The article unravels the meaning of the term “calligraphy” when it is applied to women's vernacular handwriting and ponders the connection between women's bodily discipline, productive work, and exquisite vernacular brushwork. This opens an alternative perspective not only on the gender politics of the Chosŏn society but also on the culture of the time, which is hitherto seen as dominated by a male-centered literary Chinese canon.

During the seventeenth century, an alliance took shape between Japan's Tokugawa bakufu and the Zheng organization of southeastern China and Taiwan. The Zheng, especially under the half-Japanese Koxinga in the 1650s, were ideal partners because of their domination of maritime East Asian trade, privileged access to much-coveted Chinese goods, and commitment to Ming restoration against the Manchu Qing, a popular stance in Japan. The organization jointly administered the Chinese community at Nagasaki with the bakufu, and received aid in Japanese armaments and probably mercenaries. Starting in the 1660s, the alliance unraveled amid the depletion of silver to purchase Chinese goods, the rise of a robust domestic market in Japan, and the destruction of the Zheng by the Qing. This article portrays Japan's “isolation policy” (sakoku) as a dynamic process, from active involvement overseas to withdrawal, based upon rational assessments of the international climate and subject to contestation from local and foreign players.

This article examines the emergence in colonial Korea of a command economy for forestry products following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). It does so, first, by tracing the policy mechanisms through which the colonial state commandeered forest products, especially timber, firewood, and charcoal. Second, through an analysis of the wartime promotion of a “low temperature lifestyle,” it offers a thumbnail sketch of the lived experiences and corporeal consequences of state-led efforts to rationalize fuel consumption. Considered together, these lines of analysis offer insight into not only the ecological implications of war on the Korean landscape, but also the bodily privations that defined everyday life under total war—what might be called the “slow violence” of caloric control.

Salman rushdie calls mythology “the family album or storehouse of a culture's childhood, containing [its] … future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles” (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, “the waking dreams our societies permit” that celebrate “the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks” (73). Of course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood—an industry that, I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia.

The August Revolution of 1945 constituted the most important turning-point in recent Vietnamese history.It formally marked the end of French colonialism in Vietnam and the beginning of Vietnamese national independence. It also marked the end of the Confucianist-oriented monarchy and the beginning of a Communist-oriented democratic republic. Much debate has been focused on why the Communist-dominated Viet Minh Front succeeded in seizing political power in August 1945. Anti-Communist detractors have generally attributed the Viet Minh success to an historical accident, i.e., the Viet Minh happened to be on the scene as the Japanese surrendered to the Allies. The Vietnamese Communists themselves have narcisistically attributed their success to skillful leadership in organization and propaganda. Actually the August Revolution must be explained by both the “objective material conditions” of the Vietnamese society of the time and the “subjective” predisposition of the Viet Minh. In March 1945, the Japanese occupation forces had destroyed the French colonial regime in a lightning coup d'etat. The general political confusion following the coup aggravated a severe famine which then ravaged Vietnam. Of several Vietnamese political groups, the Viet Minh emerged as the only one capable of organizing the Vietnamese people through their existing “liberation Committees.” In August 1945, following the Japanese surrender, the Viet Minh quickly seized political power and has retained it since. Thus both historical fortuity and revolutionary leadership accounted for the Viet Minh success.

It seems almost axiomatic to state that the 1970 elections in Pakistan produced a revolution through the ballot box. In the Punjab and East Pakistan, large victories—in terms of seats won—were given respectively to two political parties (the People's Party and the Awami League) which based their platforms on essentially secular issues and which were able to rout those groupings rooted largely in religiopolitical programs. In the other provinces of West Pakistan the picture was less clear. While in the Punjab traditional land-based elites were defeated, the People's Party win in the Sind appeared to be an amalgam of secular, economic issues with traditional strengths of the landed wadera class. In Baluchistan and the Frontier, both the results and the means by which they were attained were mixed.

Fundamental changes occurred in chinese civilization between the fifth century B.C.E. and the second century C.E., roughly corresponding to the Warring States (which officially commences in 453 B.C.E.) and the Ch'in and Han empires (Han rule ends in 220 C.E.). The emergence and maturation of philosophical speculation and of new sociopolitical models have traditionally constituted the ground on which other elements of the contemporary civilization have been drawn. As a consequence, the nature of religious traditions during this period has been poorly understood and insufficiently studied; first, because the documentation preserved in received literature overwhelmingly reflects the politico-philosophical leanings of an elite social stratum and thus offers only a partial, biased view of the range of religious belief and practice; and second, because modern research on Warring States, Ch'in, and Han religion by and large relies on the viewpoints expressed in the received record. Whereas the study of Buddhism and, more recently, of religious Taoism and popular religion is thriving among an ever-growing number of scholars of the history of Chinese religion, the ancient period of Warring States, Ch'in, and Han is still dominated by scholars engaged in the study of the philosophical tradition. The idea that religious belief during the period was tempered by philosophical reason is a widely shared assumption.

Muslim movements in the twentieth century have sought to develop new reading and listening publics attuned to the messages of reform and renewal. Across Asia and the Middle East, scholars, poets, and activists have created distinctive vernacular genres intended to make the words of scripture widely available. Newspaper columns, quickly printed tracts, and popular poetry have been shaped to the task of tafsīr, the interpretation of scripture. International networks of printers, booksellers, and, more recently, television producers have extended the reformist's reach far beyond older networks of scholarship and communication (Metcalf 1990; Eickelman 1992). Often modernist writers have signaled their break with past scholarly traditions by writing in vernaculars, sometimes developing new vernaculars. They wrote in Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, or Indonesian, rather than the traditional religious and literary languages of Arabic, Persian, and Javanese (Anderson 1990; Freitag 1988; Mardin 1989).

I should like to share with you some thoughts about modernity and modernization that are drawn from notes I took during a visit in October 1992 to Hachinohe in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan. I report from these notes mainly as a historian and partly as an amateur ethnographer without any special claim to “ethnographic authority.”

On that occasion, some one thousand citizens from the region gathered in Hachinohe to celebrate the 290th anniversary of the birth of Andō Shōeki (1703–62), the provocative eighteenth-century thinker and physician who practiced in this former castletown. I had been invited to give a lecture at a symposium on “Andō Shōeki and Today” and the “sympathetic relationship between community and nature” (Najita 1993).

This article is a preliminary exploration of the impact of the world depression of the early 1930s on the rural populations of Southeast Asia. The first section of the essay considers some of the statistical evidence relating to living standards and economic welfare in rural Southeast Asia during the depression. The second section examines a number of factors—the alleged coercive power of the colonial state to secure its tax revenues and of rural capitalists to enforce debt and rent payments during a period of severe deflation—which would have had a major direct influence on levels of peasant consumption in the region in that period. The final section considers three indirect indications of changes in economic welfare in Southeast Asia during the depression: Indian immigration and repatriation rates; the import level of cotton piece goods; and mortality rates. The author advances two principal arguments: the sharp deflation of the early 1930s brought varying degrees of economic distress in the major export-oriented rural districts of Southeast Asia; but that even in those districts more severely affected by the crisis the decline in peasant welfare was markedly more modest than has hitherto been widely accepted.

In administrative districts throughout Taiwan, political factions resembling political machines compete for political offices and the attendant rewards of power, profit, and prestige. The forces that unite a faction and divide it from its opponent(s), however, vary from place to place. In many areas of mixed ethno-linguistic settlement—such as Taoyuan and Hsinchu counties—a Hokkien-based faction competes with a Hakka faction. In Kaohsiung Municipality, the urban destination of considerable rural outmigration, native-place associations form the core of the political factions. These ethnolinguistic and native-place lines of factional alignment and division offer no surprises. On what bases, however, do political factions align and divide in relatively homogeneous districts? This article, the result of eighteen months' field research in one such rural Taiwanese township, attempts to answer this question.

North China in a.d. 546 was the scene of a contest between two men, de facto rulers of the fractions of Northern Wei which had held the entire area for over one hundred fifty years but had been split in the middle of the previous decade. One of the two men, Kao Huan,b headed the state called Eastern Wei, in Shansi and Honan, which became the dynasty of Northern Chʻi under his descendants. The other, Yü-wen Tʻai,e ruled Western Wei, in Shensi, later to become Northern Chou. The ensuing half-century witnessed the final victory of Northern Chou over Northern Chʻi, the usurpation of Northern Chou by the founder of the Sui dynasty, and Sui's destruction of the last of the Southern Dynasties to unify all of China and usher in the era of Tʻang.

Nationalism is an emotionally colored concept in many respects, and this makes it quite difficult for an outside observer to attain an objective, rational understanding of it. When we deal with the nationalism of modern Europe, we can find a common background of Christian culture which transcends all the differences in nationality and national character among European countries. No doubt each variety of modern European nationalism is characterized by its own national tradition, national interest and national mission. There have also been severe competition and numerous conflicts among the national states of Europe, and whatever differences exist among European countries can be easily attributed to the uniqueness of national character and can be explained in terms of nationalism. But those differences are only relative and parts of the unified whole.

There were mines and smelters located in all the provinces of Ch'ing China before the nineteenth century. Their sizes varied greatly, as did their role in the local as well as national economy. Government policy regarding these industries was not based on a uniform code, but rather reflected a body of principles that served as guidelines for coping with each individual situation as it arose. Indeed, reading the early Ch'ing documents on mining leaves one at first with the impression that the authorities were eternally debating over the question, “to mine or not to mine.” Upon closer examination it soon becomes clear, however, that “mining affairs” were far from being administered along haphazard lines. It is the intention of this paper to describe some of the basic factors that went into the making of government decisions regarding mineral enterprises. In doing this, it would be helpful to keep these questions in mind: how did the mineral industries fit into the general framework of an agrarian-based civil bureaucracy? In the application of policy, did the government invariably let its actions be determined by a priori conceptions, or did it base decisions on pragmatic grounds? What sort of relation was generally accepted as the norm between the government and the operators of the enterprises in the instances where government interest was manifest?

When we speak of social change in China we most often have in mind one or the other of two pictures. The first is the change that we see today, when radically new ideas, techniques and forces from foreign countries have shaken the traditional social order, altering the old patterns rapidly and sometimes violently. The second picture is that of the dynastic cycle, a concept that we have inherited from the traditional Chinese historian, sometimes adding a few embellishments of our own. The political fortunes of a ruling house are often reflected (and perhaps affected) by a characteristic cycle in the whole political and economic order of the nation: from successful adjustment and control to maladjustment and chaos. The end of each cycle, if we focus our attention only on these factors, leaves Chinese society much as it was at the end of the cycle before. But this perspective tends to omit qualitative changes that occur in Chinese society on a different plane.

The industrial Patriotic Movement (Sampō) symbolized the suppression of labor unions in prewar Japan, but it also shaped the development of Japan's postwar system of industrial relations. When first launched by officials of the Home Ministry in 1938, Sampō was intended to be a constructive reform movement for reducing conflict and for maintaining an efficient labor market. With the support of the police and of some labor leaders, Sampō encouraged formation of factory committees with elected worker representatives for negotiating wages and working conditions. The resistance of business leaders led to the assertion of direct bureaucratic control over the movement, and with army interference in civil administration after 1940, Sampō eventually led to the suppression of unions. Nevertheless, the foundations were laid for the spread of enterprise unionism on a national scale in the postwar era even under military rule.

Western writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries found it plausible to refer to India and China in the same breath as if they were species of a single genus, employing concepts like “Oriental despotism” and “the Asiatic mode of production.” No more. Indeed, modern language and area studies have so impressed upon us the historical uniqueness of these two societies that only infrequently will scholars cite an idea or event in the one to illuminate the experience of the other. Nonetheless, there is much to be gained by making comparisons when they cast light on particular problems or reflect upon the methods of scholarship. I thus vault the Himalayas and discuss below some contrasts in the approaches taken and the results achieved when students of historical India and China have examined the problems of subsistence. The three fine papers by James Lee, Peter Perdue, and R. Bin Wong, and the stimulating introduction by Lillian M. Li provide the pegs for these brief comments.