In Bangladeshi student politics, political performances in public spaces play an essential role in establishing patronage relationships and determining local authority structures. As Thomas Blom Hansen has famously argued, “visibility means everything” in such a context. With the emergence of social networking sites like Facebook, new digital public spaces have appeared. Focusing on ruling-party student activists at Rajshahi University, this article examines how student politicians in Bangladesh utilize Facebook to become visible in their everyday politicking. It shows how longstanding performative repertoires in the nondigital public space have gained a new salience through performances in the digital public space. It is those digital spaces that allow the performer to rearticulate even mundane everyday events as political performances. As these new digital public spaces impact the politics of visibility, it is crucial to integrate them in our efforts to understand local politics in South Asia and beyond.

In die pre-modern Chinese codes, Yoshimune (8th Tokugawa Shogun, 1716–1745) found much of use to him in his attempt to reform the administration of justice in early eighteenth century Japan. Building on an interest kindled by studies of Ming law in his native han, Wakayama, Yoshimune gathered about him a cluster of confucianists, including Ogyu Sorai and his brother Hokkei (Kan), and they in turn developed a new Chinese-based jurisprudence with new legislative concepts and roles for law generally. Hokkei did a recension of die Ming penal code supplied with diacritics, and Sorai did a commentary to the code, explaining its meaning in simple Japanese; together these two works vastly increased die accessibility of Ming law to Japanese scholars especially after these works came out in a wood-block publication.

Also, Yoshimune put several other groups of scholars to work on other Chinese legal sources—the T'ang codes, the Ch'ing codes and the eighth century T'angderivative Japanese codes (ritsuryō). At die same time the largest daimyo, Maeda Tsunanori, built up his own extensive collection of Chinese legal sources and encouraged their study in Kanazawa han. Similar studies and uses of Chinese law are found in several han later, notably Kumamoto, Wakayama, Aizu and Hirosaki. Thus a minor reception of Chinese law in Tokugawa Japan has been heretofore largely overlooked between the major eighdi century reception of T'ang law and the massive nineteenth century reception of European law a millcnium later.

In the winter of 1909, at the height of Japan's informal rule in Korea, the protectorate government sent the Korean emperor Sunjong on an extended tour of the provinces. Applying the nation-building techniques of Meiji Japan, the residency-general had intended to promote unity and cooperation through the Korean royal house. Instead, the progresses sparked anti-Japanese nationalism and culminated in expressions of resistance. This article explores the political context of the progresses, the role of the newspapers in Korea and Japan in shaping public opinion, and the contest of official and popular nationalisms in Korea, defined by the symbols of the throne and the national flag.

Article III of the Philippine Constitution is the Bill of Rights. It establishes the relationship of the individual to the State and defines the rights of the individual by limiting the lawful powers of the State. It is one of the most important political achievements of the Filipinos.

The concept of a Bill of Rights, as such, is essentially an occidental prod-uct. For a number of centuries in British, French, and American political thought, there has grown the conviction that the rights of the individual must be preserved and safeguarded, not through the authority of an individual, not through membership in a particular group or party, not through reliance upon force of arms, but rather through the accepted processes of declared constitutional law.

When buddhist institutions directed their efforts to the evangelization of the common people during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods (1192–1573), they met a set of popular beliefs that were deeply entrenched in the lives of their new audience. In spite of local variations in the names of the deities worshiped and in the details of ritual performances, a series of “defiling” practices that were perceived as dangerous taboos (imi) provided Japanese worshipers with a common denominator that transcended geographic, linguistic, and time boundaries.

Sinology, and the case for the integrity of it: the one key word in that phrase has been as hard to define as the other has been to achieve in practice. If we can scarcely define it, and if there is no hope of achieving it for the masses, why then talk about it at all in the year 1964?

I believe we can try to define Sinology, and we can point to some who have achieved it in practice. It might have seemed wisest to ask someone who has at least come close to achieving the Sinological ideal to be its spokesman on this panel. And, in fact, I urged that course upon Mr. Skinner when he first asked me to participate. He ruled that out, not so much perhaps for fear that we'd have to import one, or that such a one could be expected to speak in an unintelligible accent and would read footnotes in seven languages from original sources only—but perhaps, anomalous as it is, from the justifiable fear that the real Sinologist might speak in a way that would confuse his own green and well-worked fields with the entire province, or his own home province with the whole realm. And integrity is what we are here to talk about. For it is that integrality of the whole realm, or world, of Chinese studies that I think should define Sinology. Therefore, let someone who thinks he sees a meaningful and universal ideal, but who does not expect the ideal to be judged by himself, discuss it with the freedom that can come from having nothing personal to defend. Otherwise, it would be indeed presumptuous for me to appear here as the spokesman for Sinology; this dilemma of the spokesman vis-à-vis his subject today clearly is one that does not afflict my colleagues on this panel (for reasons at least partially nattering to them all).

The ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) was the last and most successful of the dynasties of alien rule in China. “The key to its success,” noted Professor Ping-ti Ho, “was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization.” The integration of the Manchu ruling class with their Chinese subjects was most striking in staffing the bureaucracy. Unlike preceding alien dynasties, the Manchus over the course of 268 years of rule shared a good proportion of key offices with Chinese. The system of dual appointments of Manchus and Chinese operated in the capital, while Chinese dominated the local officialdom.

Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, edited by J. F. Richards, is a courageous attempt to survey late medieval and early modern monetary history on an appropriately global scale, while simultaneously representing the fragmentation of the present state of knowledge on the subject. Asian history has been particularly subject to an a priori compartmentalization that has hindered comparison and prevented appreciation of the elaborate connections and dependencies developing among different regions during this period; Moreover, the various ways in which flows of precious metals have been explained merely confirm this compartmentalization, both by neglecting other, central aspects of monetary history and by ignoring the wider historical questions to which it is inseparably linked. By supplementing the approach to precious metals with a parallel focus on the vigorous trades in less precious monetary media, it becomes possible to rephrase the problem in terms of infrastructural societal conditions in different regions, which in the first place permitted trade flows to take place. In this respect, we need to dissolve the hard frontiers separating the conventional units of discussion and to see international commerce, and a wide range of different regional developments, as part and parcel of an increasingly complex, many-levelled web of interactive stimuli, which now needs to be reconstructed, debated, and researched.

I began the work of this paper by trying to specify the different kinds of “hierarchy” that Louis Dumont uses in Homo Hierarchicus. Such an inventory, I thought, might be helpful to those who find the book difficult to read. Unexpectedly, in the course of the exercise, I began to uncover Dumont's argument and to find what I take to be solutions to two of the problems I had continued to have with this monumental work, even though it had been amply reviewed and discussed. I had been troubled by the mystery of “the mantle of our Lady,” that odd process of the encompassing and the encompassed, and the lack of fit between Dumont's model of the Indian caste system and that of his Anglo- American-trained colleagues. In the paper below, I present the inventory, argument, and solutions mentioned, as well as their implications for an understanding of Homo Hierarchicus by the empirically oriented social scientist.

The opium-smuggling trade that britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers' advent on the Chinese coast have become almost inextricably linked. Opium, however, was not simply a Sino-British problem geographically confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, a transimperial crisis that spread among an ethnically diverse populace and created regionally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.

In this paper I propose to look at Southeast Asian history for the most part before the era of European political control. My object is on the one hand to avoid the distortions of the picture caused by the wealth of writings on European activities in the area, which have tended to thrust into the background die history of the peoples of the area, and on the other hand to convey some idea of the importance of their history as a field of study today. Incidentally, it is a field in which most of the progress has been made by scholars whose names are largely unknown outside the esoteric circles of orientalism.

Study of China in the Soviet Union has just experienced a decade of rapid growth and fundamental change. Until the early 1960's the overwhelming reality for Soviet specialists was the fact that the Chinese revolution had succeeded—China had joined the camp of Soviet allies building socialism. Under these conditions, interpretations of the society which emerged after 1949 and of the historic circumstances which gave rise to revolution reflected both a need to reaffirm doctrinal principles about the uniformities of history and a hesitancy to contradict official Chinese communist positions. By the mid-1960's these limitations had been removed. Soviet sinologists repudiated the previous period for the “uncritical use of tendentious Chinese materials” and switched abruptly to demonstrating what had gone wrong in China, i.e., the abnormalities of history. The search was begun for those exceptional qualities of China's past which had deflected its advance to socialism and before that to capitalism.

Following the collapse of the old indigenous social order, tenth-century Korea was engaged in innovative cultural borrowing of a societal scale under the influence of the brilliant and mature Chinese civilization. Among the many institutions borrowed during this period, the civil service examination system (k‘o-chü in Chinese and kwagŏ in Korean), introduced in 958 by King Kwangjong (r. 949–975) of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392), constitutes perhaps the most engrossing case of institutional borrowing in traditional Korea. Aside from its long-range consequences for Korean society and culture, the significance of this particular instance of institutional transplantation lies in the wholesale manner in which the borrowing was made, adopting the system complete with its Confucian examination content as well as its Chinese system of writing. Significant too is the fact that the proposal for this institutional borrowing did not come from a Korean but the king's Chinese advisor, Shuang Chi. It was also to Shuang Chi that the youthful Korean king entrusted the role of cultural innovator in instituting the examination system. The far-reaching social and cultural implications of this undertaking and its great success as a cultural borrowing make this particular case a fascinating subject to study; that is, when fully explored, it may shed light on the problems of ongoing cultural borrowing in Korea today.

In the years that followed the overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911, China was ruled by military men who set up virtually independent governments in the various provinces. This inquiry into the policies of Yen Hsi-shan, governor of die north-western province of Shansi between 1911 and 1930, has been undertaken in the hope that a study of one of these warlords will result in a broader understanding of war-lordism as a political phenomenon and in this way illuminate further the whole subject of regional government in China during the early decades of the twentieth century.

In the sixteenth century, Makassarese in the South Sulawesi courts of Gowa and Talloq began to write. What they chose to write were historical texts that chronicled their origins and preserved the words of their ancestors. Scholars once knew how to make sense of such an event: it could not be but a watershed, a fundamental change or turning point of the first magnitude. Such is the nature of what we liked to call the “transition from orality to literacy,” yet more careful examinations have suggested that this confidence in the very idea of a shift from orality to literacy was misplaced. Literacy and orality are not states of being that are simply manifested in places like Makassar. This article extends the efforts of scholars to grapple with the considerable overlap, symbiosis, and exchange that seem to characterize a boundary once believed to demarcate firmly orality and literacy. Considerable work has gone into documenting the inadequacy of trying to delineate what formal characteristics mark oral and literate productions. For example, Wendy Doniger notes that it is only when we distinguish among texts that were composed orally, preserved orally, or performed orally “that we begin to glimpse the complexity of the problem” (1991, 31). Similarly, what should we do about traditions such as Javanese wayang in which oral performances are based on stories in texts, even though few puppeteers own, consult, or have even seen the written texts (Sears 1996)?

Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous” (the Whig Morning Chronicle, cited by Napier 1990, 197), a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the Indian press (the Bombay Times, “without a shred of evidence”) accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad (Napier 1990, xvi). The successful Annexation of Sind made Napier's name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils” (Mehra 1985, 496–97) and was knighted. In 1851 he quarrelled with James Ramsey, the Marquess of Dalhousie (governor general of India from 1847 to 1856), and left India. In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title, “Foreign Affairs”:

Popular music is a dynamic portal through which to gain a greater understanding of a vast array of social phenomena within Asia. In particular, the power of pop to actively shape conceptions of self and inform the ways in which we interact with others at the individual, communal, and even national and transnational levels has taken center stage, but understanding just how these identities are formed through the performance of popular music is quite complex in the current global moment. Through comparison of recent scholarship covering diverse types of popular music throughout Asia, this article explores how identity formation is informed by an increasingly nuanced understanding of globalization. Moving from a most intimate sense to broad transnational and inter-ethnic contexts, it not only expands the concept of identity in Asia, but also reveals how the study of popular music in general can illuminate other social issues important to Asianists.

This article argues that the study of China's history has long been caught in a teleological trap that presumes that history could have had only one evolutionary track. The author explains how he came to recognize the problems inherent in the teleological trap and to reconceptualize his approach. The article contrasts the history of the North China Plain, culturally rooted in dry-land grain agriculture and from time immemorial deeply intertwined with that of the adjacent grasslands, with that of the south, a culturally and linguistically diverse land of river valleys and riziculture. It concludes that the holistic empire we know today was not an inevitable outcome of these contrasting trajectories and that alternative paths are plausible, and asserts that scholars must recognize that until history is accomplished it does not follow a teleological trajectory.

The ubiquitous experience of wartime collaboration in East Asia has not yet undergone the analysis that its counterpart in Europe has received. The difficulty has to do with the political legacies that the denunciation of collaboration legitimized, as well as the continuing hegemony of the discourse of nationalism. Both inhibitors encourage the condemnation of collaboration rather than its historicization. Reflecting briefly on the 1946 trial of Liang Hongzhi, China's first head of state under the Japanese, this essay argues that the historian's task is not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject. In the face of the natural impulse to render judgment, this essay argues for the wisdom of hesitation.