Actors were luxury goods traded among the elite in late Ming and early Qing China. Not only individual actors but entire troupes were sold, bestowed upon friends, and bequeathed upon relatives. Their circulation served to create and maintain networks of social exchange, in much the same manner as did gifts of fine ceramic ware, calligraphic scrolls, and ancient bronzes. The cultural prestige of the actor as a luxury good, in turn, was predicated on a highly refined discourse of connoisseurship. For example, the theater aficionado Pan Zhiheng's (1556–1622) disquisitions on the art of acting were collected in a volume entitled Chongding xinshang pian (Recompiled texts on connoisseurship), published between 1600 and 1640 (Clunas 1991, 36). In this essay, I discuss the social significance of the connoisseurship of the actor, examining the exchange of actors and poems among a rarefied stratum of the mid-seventeenth-century elite.

Within the last decade, many publications have appeared in South Asia (especially India) and North America on subjects relating to women. Scholars concerned with the study of South Asia have generally neglected these publications instead of integrating them into research and teaching on South Asia. This neglect results from a “false specialization” on both subject matter and scholars interested in research on women, which has led to a “purdah of scholarship” or segregation of the new scholarship on women. The reasons for this segregation include prejudice, the absence of an emphasis on family and kinship in current South Asia studies, neglect of research on Muslim populations, the complexities of gender in the Hindu tradition, and the nature of institutional support for research on women. Advocacy for women's equality is characteristic of the new research on women in South Asia, both by North American and South Asian writers. The core of the substantive argument presented in the article is as follows: Gender differences are among the fault lines along which the effects of major social, economic, political changes are distributed within populations. Gender relations are proving to be vulnerable in the face of rapid change. The increased consciousness of women's issues in South Asia is the result of accelerated changes within these societies which have affected gender differences and gender relations. Gender is increasingly understood to be a factor in accelerating class differentiation and in other processes of change.

New contributions to the research literature on women and gender in South Asia are reviewed under three headings: (1) “complementary” studies that highlight forgotten sectors of the population; (2) stocktaking assessments that summarize data about women and government activities; (3) “integrative” studies that aim to develop social theory and methodology. The final section of the review suggests new lines for future scholarship, particularly with regard to control over female labor deployment.

Although India presents a scene of great local cultural diversity, in the study of religion the subcontinent may be viewed as a single large field of social action. Within this field new movements are constantly arising, whose practices and ideas interact with others and penetrate from one section of the subcontinent to the other, filtering across deep political and social barriers. Thus in ancient times Brahminical Hinduism spread south from the Northwest, and Hinduism and Jainism, originating in the Northeast, followed closely upon its path. In medieval times the various bhakti movements which arose in South India spread northward, but have continued to play an important part in the life of all regions. Similarly reform Hinduism, born under the impact of contact with the West, affects areas far from its points of origin.

“Great State” has gone missing from the vocabulary of state formations in Asia. Though widely used across Inner and East Asia over the past millennium, the term means nothing to most scholars today. It is not flagged, rarely noted, and never theorized. Recent thinking about inter-polity relations in Inner and East Asia has led me to regard the Great State as a distinctive type of political formation that should have a place in our conceptual toolkit if we scholars of Asia are to participate in writing the global history of empire. Given its near ubiquity, the virtual absence of a discourse on the Great State, ancient or modern, Asian or otherwise, may be more than just a curiosity, and it is worth wondering why.

Since the early twentieth century, groups of Burmese Buddhist sorcerers and their followers have taken on the duty of guarding the Buddha's sāsana from colonial, ideological, and Islamic threats. Sāsana (broadly, the teachings of the Buddha and the institutions and practices that support them) and how it should be sustained in the face of its inevitable demise have been central concerns of these societies, expressed in both their textual and oral representations. To illustrate this tension between endurance and change, this article explores ideas of the life cycle of the sāsana and how ideas about its responsibility to wider communities of Burmese Buddhists became expressed through the intersection of sāsana and sorcery. Examining the ways these associations understood themselves to be protecting and propagating the sāsana through various means demonstrates how sāsana vitality gave their beliefs and actions a distinct collective and collectively ethical tone.

Public health in China has become a global concern as a consequence of the outbreak and worldwide spread of COVID-19. This article examines the historical place of China in international and global health. Contrary to prevalent narratives in the history of medicine, China and Chinese historical actors played key roles in this field throughout the twentieth century. Several episodes illustrate this argument: the Qing organization of the International Plague Conference in 1911; the role of China in the work of the interwar League of Nations Health Organization and postwar establishment of the World Health Organization; Cold War medical diplomacy; and Chinese models of primary health care during the 1970s. These case studies together show that Chinese physicians and administrators helped shape concepts and practices of “global health” even before that term rose to prominence in the 1990s, and current events are best understood in the context of this history.

During the mid-1870s, fearing the legal innovations of a “civilized” state, geisha and their employers recast Tokugawa-era practices of civic engagement and educational attainment in the language of enlightenment. Proprietors built schools intended to transform geisha into productive and moral mothers, and geisha donated to local educational institutions and suggested that their own studies would lead to self-sufficiency and freedom. These efforts associated geisha with the values of productivity and enlightenment, although similar strategies proved less successful for prostitutes. However, by the 1880s, both geisha and prostitutes were increasingly denied access to education and excluded from ideals of enlightened femininity that were predicated on marriage. This article considers how a group of unlikely actors deployed the Tokugawa past to become civilized, and in the process promoted ideas about the purpose of women's education that would later be expressed by an icon of Meiji modernity: the “good wife, wise mother.”

After her disastrous defeat by Japan in the war 1894–95, China turned tardily to introduce such economic reforms as would facilitate her defense. She was pressed by concession hunters of many nationalities, who desired economic and political advantages which she was nearly helpless to withhold. Obliged to look abroad for capital to finance needed railway construction, Chinese leaders at the same time saw their empire's dominions threatened by their potential creditors: by Russia in Manchuria, by France in the South, by Germany in Shantung, by Japan in Fukien, and by England in the Yangtze Valley. That Americans claimed no political accommodations in return for monetary advances was an inducement to the Chinese to seek money in the United States. Furthermore, in the railway field, Americans had gained valuable experience through the construction of their own great transcontinental lines.

The historian and the philologist who study the written record of China's past in different ways and to different ends both face the problem of intractable Chinese texts. The mutual sympathy that this engenders is not unmixed with complacent condescension on the part of each toward the way the other goes about solving questions that are the concern of both, especially in the realm of translation. The historian's habit of translating the names of offices functionally (Imperial Chancery rather than Sanctum of Penetralian Scriptures for chung-shu sheng) and of simply not translating such terms as era names (nien-hao) outrages spirited philologues, who declare that the characters of which these era names are composed are words with “very transparent meanings” which can and should be captured in translation. Some years ago, having been impressed with this argument, I decided to try to translate the name of an era I was studying. What happened was that my search led me to a philologically sound, but, as it turned out, entirely erroneous interpretation.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, European colonial powers established economic and political control over most of Southeast Asia. The entrenchment of colonialism affected the lives of coastal merchants as well as those of peasants in interior villages. Yet how indigenous coastal merchants responded to the new situation has been a relatively neglected question in studies of this region. Based on the autobiography of Muhammad Saleh, a self-made Minangkabau merchant, this paper details the world and distinctive outlook of Minangkabau coastal merchants, and how Saleh successfully responded to changing political and economic conditions in West Sumatra in the late nineteenth century. Far from being the story of a helpless native merchant at the mercy of the Dutch governing power and Chinese merchants, the life of Muhammad Saleh reveals the adaptability of a certain sector of the indigenous merchant class in the Dutch East Indies. It also reflects the profound changes taking place within the world of Minangkabau merchants.

China's trade and financial surpluses, exchange rate, and currency reserves make headlines, daily, around the world. As such, it is more imperative than ever to understand the inner workings of currency policy in China. Yet the exercise of power and decision making in these areas has received surprisingly little attention in Chinese politics, political economy, and, arguably, economics.

The interconnected body of stories about Ch'un-ch'iu-Warring States times, known to most Chinese and embodied in a wide variety of verbal forms both oral and written, was a secular mythology—secular because it concerned men acting in the datable past, mythology because it was invested with a special authority for the culture at large. In my study of the sources and transmission of one small part of this mythology, the matter of Wu Tzu-hsii, I conclude that in the period down to the Former Han regional epics and hero stories were important vehicles for the transmission of Wu Tzu-hsü's story and of other stories like it. This part of Chinese verbal culture underwent a profound transformation during the imposition of centralized national rule in Ch'in and Han times. The epic tradition gradually disappeared and the old stories that survived were infused with a new meaning by historians who were driven by what can only be called a didactic imperative. Thus, epic was overwhelmed by history—China's secular scripture. The early literary versions of the matter of Wu Tzu-hsü provide compelling evidence of this.

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

The four articles in this “Catastrophic Asia” collection, while showcasing distinct disciplinary approaches to the subject of what anthropologist George E. Marcus (1994) might identify as “technopolitical” catastrophes, are united in the attempt to uncover the sociopolitical resonances of “manmade” damage in what we take to be regional Asia. In his book Technoscientific Imaginaries, Marcus recognizes that science is deeply political and already embedded in events. In this special section of JAS, anthropologists join with scholars in the physical and natural sciences to apply this idea to catastrophic phenomena, continuing a transdisciplinary conversation that began in April 2014 at the Catastrophic Asia Symposium at the University of Colorado. Here, I contribute to this transdisciplinary enthusiasm by sharing with readers of an Asia-focused journal my own perspectives on catastrophe as a scholar of Brazil and a cultural anthropologist interested in medical anthropology and critical science studies. Specifically, I consider how experts working on issues related to the Angra dos Reis nuclear energy plant in Brazil—the site of my current research—viewed and discussed the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown of 2011. By reading the current articles through the lens of my own research, I seek to situate catastrophe within a broader anthropological literature on environmental toxicity.

On December 4, 2016, Jatupat Boonpattararaksa, known by his nickname “Pai,” then a law student at Khon Kaen University in northeastern Thailand, was arrested and accused of violating Article 112 of the Thai Criminal Code, or defaming, insulting, or threatening the king, queen, heir-apparent, or regent. Two days prior, he had shared to Facebook a biography of the new king, Maha Vajiralongkorn, or Rama X, who became king following the death of his father, Bhumipol Adulyadej, Rama IX, on October 13, 2016. The BBC Thai biography was candid and highlighted Vajiralongkorn's string of wives, his four abandoned sons, and his conferral of a military rank on his pet dog, as well as his recent bike rides for charity (BBC Thai 2016). Over 2,600 people shared the BBC Thai link, but Pai was the only person to be arrested in December 2016 and the only person to be prosecuted to date (TLHR 2017a). The complaint that led to Pai's arrest was filed by Lieutenant Colonel Phitakphon Chusri, a Khon Kaen–based soldier who has followed him closely.

Since the end of World War II there has been a nation-wide burgeoning of academic interest in South Asia, that is to say, in India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Nepal. The pioneering teaching and research program in South Asian Studies was established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 with substantial support from the Carnegie Corporation. This program comprised a balance of humanistic and social science studies supported by the teaching of the appropriate classical and modern languages of South Asia as tools of research. Concerted efforts were early made to acquire adequate library materials to support all aspects of the program. These efforts which involved direct contact with the highly disorganized Indian book trade were initially frustrating but eventually met with success. Problems of processing and cataloging followed on those of acquiring the books but by the end of the first decade Pennsylvania had what seemed then to be quite adequate library support for its pioneer program in South Asian studies.

Japanese imperialism relentlessly besieged the Nationalist government of China during the Nanking decade. Chiang Kai-shek, believing that China was not ready to confront Japanese military power and obsessed with the desire to eliminate the Communists, adopted a policy of consistent appeasement toward the.Japanese. This enraged public opinion in urban China, and Zou Tao-fen, a popular journalist, led the cry for resistance to Japan. He and his associates were continually suppressed by the Nanking government; nevertheless, they published several journals in succession, each of which denounced Chiang's policy toward Japan and all of which achieved enormous circulation. Late in 1935 Zou and his followers helped organize the National Salvation Movement, which demanded that Chiang suspend the civil war against the Communists and fight the Japanese. When Chiang Kai-shek, acting under Japanese pressure, arrested Zou and the leaders of the association in 1936, they became national heroes, the legendary “Seven Gentlemen.” Zou's martyrdom and that of his associates transformed their movement into a powerful political force, one that opposed Chiang and increasingly favored the Chinese Communists.