Ethnic conflict is said to be rampant today. To all those instances familiar to us from the recent past, we may add the latest explosions in Southern Russia, in Eastern Europe, and in India's Kashmir.

A great deal has been written on the historical antecedents of ethnic conflicts, and on the political, religious, economic, and social circumstances in which many of them have broken out. These accounts include the effects of global processes that stem from metropolitan centers upon satellite countries, the assumptions and the problems of nation-making, and the politics of ethnic and other group entitlement claims in plural societies.

Contemporary readers of philosophy, literary criticism, and related modes of discourse face a constant challenge. Even as we doubt, or indeed, fain to reject outright, the adequacy of traditional understandings of language, we are compelled to follow its insidious rules, and in rebellion we succumb to complicity with the system we suspect. The mechanics of interpretation, the possibility of consensus on the meaning of any given word, the relation between language and physical reality or thought, the hope for communication—all these things are thrown open to severe suspicion, and even under indictment, they control the flow of evidence and the disposition of judgment. “The mastery of (a) language” no longer means the inception of babbling autonomy in a toddler, a student's competence with a foreign tongue, or critical acclaim for a new writer's genius. Now perhaps it's language that's the master. The signal ambiguity inherent in that preposition “of” both sets up and already deconstructs this possibility.

The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein—to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system—has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians. While a few social scientists interested in the past have sought to apply his model, the majority of historians have either gone no further than to acknowledge the importance of bilateral relations with imperial Britain in the construction of modern South Asian society, or else—it would seem increasingly—have retreated behind the walls of the “indigenous,” the “local,” the “particular,” and, at times, the just plain “peculiar” in their interpretations of South Asia's modern experience. But few historians of imperial Britain see it as a completely freestanding and self-determining entity, able to direct its relationships with India or elsewhere in a manner unconstrained by developments in other areas of the world. And on closer examination, many of the most quintessentially South Asian institutions and structures, including a large number of those that twentieth century modernization theorists please to call “traditional,” can be seen to have been shaped by global forces.

The maoist era of egalitarian collectivism has decidedly come to an end. Although some villages persist in developing cooperative enterprises, the collective is being transformed from a dominant organizational form to one that plays a subsidiary role to the private household sector. In effect, the collective has been relegated to the position formerly held by the private sector. Everywhere the emphasis is on economic growth based on household production and marketlike forces. What is the relationship between these institutional changes and economic growth?

The japanese writer Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) is known in the West primarily as a haiku poet. But he was also a master of Japanese prose, both haibun (short pieces of poetic prose) and kikō (travel literature). It is in his prose, particularly his travel journals, that Bashō portrays a vision and a way of life that is profoundly religious.

Although there has been great interest in how properly to conceptualize the person in Indian culture, few have explored Indian perceptions of leadership, achievement, and agency as valued features of individuality (Singer 1972; Mines 1988; Fox 1989). Indeed, since Dumont (1970a,b) forcefully argued that the values of equality and liberty that support the Western notion of the individual were absent from Indian society, the important roles that personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement play in Indian history have been largely overlooked or understated. This paper reconsiders an Indian sense of these roles by examining the south Indian concept of the “big-man” (periyar, periyavar), a notion of individuality and instrumentality that is central to the politics of south India and crucial to an understanding of the dynamic relationship that exists between action and organization in Indian society (cf., Fox 1989).

North china heretofore has been only minimally involved in the modern anthropological analysis of Chinese patrilineal kinship. In this region, lineage organization prior to the Communist era comprised a social structure, symbolism, and arrangement of ritual that call into question the line of anthropological inquiry that has focused almost exclusively on the linkages between a lineage's corporate resources and its social cohesion. The characteristics of lineages in Yangmansa, a village approximately seventy-five kilometers south of Beijing, appear to have been typical of this broader north China pattern considerably different from those associated with the southeastern Chinese model that has dominated the anthropological literature. Although many elements of northern lineage organization are found also in the southeast and elsewhere in China, they are combined in the north into a distinctive arrangement of cemeteries, graves, ancestral scrolls, ancestral tablets, and corporate groups linked to a characteristic annual ritual cycle. I deal first with the expression in Yangmansa of key features of the north China pattern, but also draw on other sources to fill out the picture and establish its broader regional relevance.

Toward the end of a diary entry for Sunday, June 14, 1925, the writer reminds herself to “answer Gerald Brenan, & read the Genji; for tomorrow I make a second £20 from Vogue.” For a short review of a long book, £20 was worth a bit of excitement: advertisements in the London press that summer indicate that the yearly wages of a cook or housemaid ranged from £28 to £45. For someone in search of a Bloomsbury flat of one's own, £20 could keep you in modest, furnished comfort on Gordon Square for ten weeks.

Ch'oe namsŏn (1890–1957) was a leading Korean intellectual during the era of Japanese control (1910–1945). His activities included publishing Korea's first popular modern magazine, pioneering modern poetry in Korean, drafting the Declaration of Independence for the 1919 March First Independence Movement, and publishing numerous articles on Korean culture. He was also a leading Korean historian at a time when Japanese scholars monopolized Korean studies.

The procession troupes at the gods' festivals so common today in southern Taiwan, as on the China mainland in the past, perform a kind of ritual drama. The processions themselves occur on god's birthdays, in great ceremonies of renewal (jiao) or, in a more abbreviated form, at pilgrimage sites. The troupes (zbentou) are dramatic elements in the procession in that the performers dress up, portray a story, and try to entertain. What they do may be classified as ritual: forms and content are stereotyped, repetitive, condensed, and conventionalized (Tambiah 1985). The performances are for divine as well as for human enjoyment, and vary little as the troupes parade from temple to temple.

As recently as one decade ago, there was no “field” of Chinese demography. There were virtually no demographers of China and little available data. It is fair to say that China was at once the largest and the least known of any human population.

The change has been sudden. New sources of data now place China among the better-documented national populations. Publications on Chinese population have boomed. In consequence, we can now speak of a field of Chinese demography, although it is hardly in a steady “state.” We can only outline the explosion of demographic research that is continually expanding and refining our understanding of Chinese population today and in the past. This outpouring of data and knowledge provides unprecedented opportunities for the study of Chinese society and offers unusual challenges to our understanding of comparative population dynamics.

Sri lanka's inability to contain ethnic violence as it escalated from sporadic terrorism to mob violence to civil war in recent years has disheartened observers who had looked to the nation as a success story of social and political development. In retrospect, Sri Lanka lacked effective local institutions to integrate the society, and the Sinhalese elite relied on welfare and preferential policies for the Sinhalese majority to maintain power. These alienated the minorities and resulted in Tamil demands for a separate state. This article documents one of the more intractable areas in which ethnic conflict has arisen, land “colonization.” Both major parties competed for the votes of the Sinhalese, but the creation of agricultural settlements in the undeveloped interior of the island, or colonization, is associated primarily with the United National Party (UNP). During the UNP government of recently retired President Junius Richard Jayewardene (1977–88), both the level of violence and the pace of colonization in the Dry Zone between the Sinhalese and Tamil majority areas increased.

The anti-rightist campaign of 1957 and 1958 had dire consequences for many of China's artists, just as it did for hundreds of thousands of China's intellectuals (Link 1984:11–14). A sculpture instructor and Communist Party member at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, for example, refused to testify against the artist Jiang Feng, the academy's director and a man to whom he felt personal loyalty. The sculptor was declared an “extreme rightist” and sent to a labor camp at Xingkai Lake in Heilongjiang on the Soviet border. His entire sculptural output for the following years, 1958 to 1979, was a small box filled with crudely carved tree roots, work conducted in secret without professional tools or materials (interview with A 1986).

It is no easy matter for a government seeking to foster rapid economic and social changes to win acceptance of its programs. Too much control by the center assures local resistance; too much dispersal of authority empowers it. The dilemma is a familiar one today, but it is not, of course, a new one. The leaders of Meiji (1868–1912) Japan found it to be the knottiest problem in their efforts to construct a modern state. They needed to exert sufficient central control of local government to assure that their initiatives could be enacted in Japan's villages and that taxes would flow to the center in a predictable and orderly manner. But these goals required the central government to permit a measure of autonomy—to rely on pre-Meiji inter- and intravillage organizations originally devised to guard and insulate the village from the demands of higher authority. Their efforts to resolve the dilemma quickly took on a note of desperation: in the first twenty years of the Meiji era, the government radically altered the system of local administration four times.