Nineteenth-century observers of the Fuzhou area, both Chinese and Western, were struck by the worship of a group of deities associated with pestilence and epidemic disease. The local people called these gods the Five Emperors (Wudi). To Justus Doolittle, an American missionary stationed in Fuzhou, Proclaimed Zuo Zongtang, Governor-General of Fujian and Zhejiang: “the rival societies for getting up processions to parade the idols have from the beginning violated the law and corrupted morals, hence the evil must be stopped without delay” (Zuo 1867, 22). While these two observers each brought his own concern to bear on his perceptions of popular belief and ritual practice, they were united in their focus on the dangers the worship of these deities posed to public morality and order; neither was much interested in the identities or histories of these gods. But a detailed investigation of their identities and histories may explain how the deities were perceived as dangerous to public morality and order, and offers rich insight into the social history of Late Imperial China.

One of the most important contributions of the recent wave of historical and anthropological scholarship on community identities is to analyze the complex manner in which identities are constructed and to study how such constructions influence their enactment. Similar arguments have been made about caste and “communal” categories and conflicts (see, for example, Dirks 1992; Pandey 1990 and 1992). Political theorists and philosophers have contributed to dismantling old categories by exploring the diverse meanings, possibilities, and limits of secularism in India (Bhargav 1994; Bilgrami 1994; Chatterjee 1994). Given these important methodological and theoretical developments, which focus on the construction of community identities, are there distinctive contributions that students of Indian politics can make to the study of community conflicts? The essays in this symposium provide several important responses to this question.

In 1956, eight years after political independence was secured for Sri Lanka, a major transformation was effected through the ballot. A confederation of forces led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) under S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike turfed the United National Party (UNP) and its right wing, English-educated leadership out of office. These forces represented a groundswell of the underprivileged against the privileged, and, as such, represented a radical socialist thrust. They also included a powerful strand of Sinhala nativism, i.e., of cultural nationalism, which made Sinhala the language of administration and which espoused conspiracy theories directed against the influence wielded by Catholic cabals. This body of thought has been described in the literature as “Sinhala linguistic nationalism” and “Sinhala Buddhist nationalism.” What requires underlining here is the fact that this ideological corpus had previously been in a defensive position because it was deemed a “communalism.” But, now, in 1956, the majoritarian sanction of a populist and radical victory converted it into a nationalism (see Roberts 1994, 258–59, 263–64, and ch. 12)–a force which some scholars, standing in the mid-1990s, would redefine as “chauvinism.”

In his Quirky First novel, The Prevalence of Witches, originally published in 1947, Aubrey Menen tells the story of an Education Officer posted to Limbo, “six hundred and fifty miles of clumsy hills and jungle” in British India. Here, “for a thousand years the inhabitants had shot at everybody who came into it with arrows and their aim was usually adequate to their purpose of keeping people out; where the bowmen failed to get home, the mosquitoes did not” (Menen 1989,1). Soon after the Education Officer's arrival, the village chief kills his wife's paramour. The chief does not consider himself responsible for the act; he feels that he has been pushed into it by a witch. The rest of the story skittles around the funny and increasingly improbable efforts of the Political Agent (Catallus), the Education Officer, and two others to save the chief, awaiting trial in prison, from being sentenced for this crime. They arrange a miracle to convince the Judge that what the Limbodians practice is a religion and that the chief should be let off since he was only practicing his religion. But the Judge, a Mr. Chandra Bose, is a member of the Rationalist Press Association and treats the miracle merely as an interesting case of mass hysteria. Eventually, Catallus slips the key to the jail to the chief, who then escapes from prison.

In examining post-war south korea, we cannot but be struck by the rapid decrease of farm work and the dizzying increases in urban production and petty-entrepreneurial work over the course of a single generation. It is remarkable, for example, that from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s the farming population declined by almost 50 percent. Indeed, South Korea is an exemplar in the development industry and a popular example in the annals of development studies (Amsden 1989). Sociologists, however, have reached little consensus about the meaning of these structural transformations and the nature of their effects on individual and familial trajectories. In consideration of the reorganization of the labor market, even some of the most basic numbers are debated because analysts do not agree on how to characterize and classify post–Korean War jobs.

Early modern rulers in asia and europe frequently sought to secure a better grasp of the land and other resources that provided them with the economic resources t o maintain their governments, expand their power, and permit them to conquer new lands (see, for example, Tilly 1985; Hellie 1971; Ali 1966). The “reunification” of Japan and consolidation of authority in the hands of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and his Tokugawa successors is generally viewed in this same light. There is widespread scholarly agreement that Hideyoshi's authority and that of the early Tokugawa shoguns represented a new, unprecedented level of political centralization in Japan. Hideyoshi's edicts on class separation, pacification of the countryside through sword hunts, and inventories of daimyo financial resources are all taken as emblematic of this new authority. So, too, are the Laws of the Military Houses, Tokugawa edicts compelling the destruction of castles, and related measures.