Every religious system in Nepal, including that of the Tamang, is multifaceted and has numerous practitioners. Without apparent contradiction, western Tamang simultaneously engage Buddhist lamas who preside over elaborate rites of death, sacrificial lambu who propitiate chthonic divinities and exorcise harmful agents, and shamanic bombo who recapture lost shadow souls, revive life-force, unveil an enigmatic divine, and reveal. Interpretations of religion in Nepal have treated divergent ritual strands as isolates, and there is a persistent image of the religious situation in Nepal as an amalgam of Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous strands. This article, which ends with a Tamang myth about diverse ritual strands, concludes that particular ritual practices must be interpreted with reference to their relations to other strands in an encompassing ritual field. The field, though, need not be coherent and unified, as has often been assumed in culture theory. The ritual structure of the Tamang emerges as a variant of other ritual systems found throughout Nepal and in greater South and Southeast Asia.

Japan's Modern Myth is a scathing attack on those Japanese academics who shape current attitudes toward the Japanese language. They are portrayed as ignorant of linguistic science and as incapable of producing a sound comparison of Japanese with other languages. The book also attacks the Japanese media and the Japanese government for propagating the unscientific, racist theories of these academics. The belief that Japanese is too difficult for foreigners to master and its obverse, that Japanese must pay a heavy psychological price to master a foreign language, are only the most serious of the various notions attacked in Japan's Modern Myth.

Analyses of Thai political economy since World War II have sought to define the stages of Thai social evolution from earliest times to the present and to determine whether or not the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and the 1932 coup mark changes in the social formation and/or the mode of production. Over the past decade, as a consequence of political change in the mid-1970s, a new generation of historians has rejuvenated Marxist methodology, using it to pry the chronicles and archives away from royalist and nationalist myth-making concerns, to dismantle the court-centered historiography, and to erect a new historical paradigm for the late twentieth century.

The film Gandhi is one of several events that have recently brought Gandhi's ideas to public attention in India and the West. In this review of the field of Gandhian studies, the author looks at the literature that probes beneath the popular images of the man. The author identifies some of the landmark works in the field and assesses recent publications. He finds that in India, especially, the emphasis is on the application of Gandhian ideas to movements for social and economic change.

K. C. Chang has been instrumental in the West in propagating the view that North China in Neolithic times was lush, moist, and densely forested. A close scrutiny of data relating to palynology, soil science, and paleoclimate, however, indicates that the true loess areas of North China were, and have always been, semiarid steppe. In addition, the author considers Chang's belief that the earliest northern Chinese agriculture was a system of slash-and-burn or shifting cultivation to be invalid. Whereas the crucial problem in the slash-and-burn systems of the tropics and humid areas is fertility, the crucial problem in the agriculture of the loess areas is moisture, not fertility. The ability of loess soil to retain its fertility under semiarid conditions has accounted for the self-sustaining character of the agriculture of North China. These important issues, and others, are discussed in the volume under review.

In 1947, when Pakistan was created, scarcely any attention was paid to resolving the problems inherent in a culturally plural society. Existing institutions proved inflexible and new ones did not evolve to respond to the aspirations of the Bengali people. As a result, Pakistan was dismembered within twenty-four years of its birth. Contrary to expectations, Pakistan's national disintegration failed to generate analysis or debate among intellectuals. Via thematic analysis of a cross-section of Urdu creative writing about the events of 1971, the author of this article probes the mentality of selected writers, searching for their response to the disintegration of their nation. What is the meaning of Pakistani nationhood? How do the writers interpret the breakup of 1971? And what implications do their attitudes have for the issue of regional versus national identity? The author concludes that the ethos of the writers scarcely differs from that of their society—it is an ethos that might well have precipitated the 1971 crisis.

The five books discussed in this review article deal either with famine or with related issues concerning access to food in South Asia. Famine is a powerful but distorting lens through which to look at any society. Both the causes and the consequences of famine reveal important social and cultural facts about parts of South Asia at particular times. More important, the analysis of famine is inseparable from the problems of agricultural technology, inequality, and dependence in normal times. The underlying argument of this article is that famines raise questions about the changing relationship between the structures of enfranchisement and the realities of entitlement in the societies in which they occur.