Nationalist struggles are invariably civil as well as anticolonial wars. The processes of popular politicization are shaped as much by internal contests as by mobilized sentiments against foreign rule. Political engagement by the rural poor is typically influenced by local power struggles, ethnic conflicts, and class tensions that may deflect the poor's stakes in and concern for national liberation. To discover the quotidian contours of revolution, we must turn to these sorts of relationships and constraints. To understand the conditions that foster or discourage the active participation of subordinate groups in revolution, we must appreciate the local relations under which people labor as much as the political context in which they fight.

Too often the thought and scholarship of Huang Zongxi (1610–95), a prominent Chinese intellectual and political activist of the Ming-Qing transition period, are treated in isolation, as though the man stood in a sphere above and apart from most other thinkers of his day. The greatness of his scholarly achievements and the incisiveness of his ideas are stressed, with little attempt to relate those to the accomplishments and ideas of his mentors and contemporaries. This approach has created the widespread impression that Huang was one of only three or four figures who had anything very original to say in the seventeenth century. But the more we study seventeenth-century thought, the more we recognize that Huang Zongxi's forte was less in originality than in a keen awareness, examination, and articulation of issues that were current in his time. The perpetuation of notions about Huang's creative singularity obstructs our understanding not only of his intellectual milieu but also of the man's own attitude toward progress in learning. I do not wish to challenge the idea that Huang was an outstanding intellectual of the later imperial era in China but to urge that he be viewed differently: as someone who placed in bold relief ideas that emerged in the late Ming period and brought to fruition in writings of enduring value various approaches to scholarship that had been gestating since the latter part of the sixteenth century.

I appreciate being here in this role, remembering those, including my teachers, who have stood here before me, and remembering the role of the AAS in providing the commonality from which all Asianists benefit, the freemasonry of shared learning. Most of us prefer to work individually as scholars, but none of us really works or writes alone. We are sustained by our links, in print and in person, with generations of fellow scholars. That vital nexus is greatly enhanced through our common enterprise in the Association, and we owe it and its dedicated staff a profound debt. This is our fortieth annual meeting, and we have much to celebrate: our sound organizational and financial position and—the object of all our collective efforts—a vigorous community of scholars of Asia.

On the face of it, rural Java and Bangladesh appear remarkably similar. The similarities are particularly pronounced in lowland Java and southeastern Bangladesh where there are virtually identical population densities and nearly universal modern rice technology. Extraordinary population pressure on the land is accompanied by minute farm size and, despite lower land concentration than in many other parts of the world, both Java and Bangladesh display substantial disparities in control over land and high levels of landlessness or near-landlessness.

This article traces the development of ethnic relations in West Java during the period of transition from local government to Dutch colonial rule. Changes in relations between Javanese and Chinese-origin elites provide its subject matter, the West Javanese principality of Cirebon its locale, and the half century preceding the massacre of the Chinese in Batavia by the Dutch East India company in 1740 its period.

When Hoàng Ngọc Phàch, a young Vietnamese living in Hanoi, published Tô' Tâm (Pure heart) in 1925, his book immediately became a cause célèbre. The first three thousand copies sold out in two weeks. The publisher printed another two thousand copies, and they too quickly disappeared from the bookstores (Phan Cự Dệ 1974:21). Girls disappointed in love succumbed to the influence of the work and committed suicide by jumping into Lake Tây or Lake Trùe Bạch. The work provoked a debate concerning what was proper reading for young women that continued into the 1930s.

Academic writing on the post-Mao reforms—as indeed on almost every other aspect of China since 1949—has been largely in the hands of social scientists. Much of this writing, moreover, has been done either explicitly or implicitly from a systemic perspective. That is, it seeks to understand the reform process as unfolding within a particular kind of social, economic, and political system and to infer from other reform attempts in comparable systems something about the course the Chinese reforms are likely to take. When Chalmers Johnson (1982) applies the “Leninist government paradigm” to the Chinese case and makes certain observations about the potential for “peaceful structural change” within societies that conform to this paradigm, he is operating from the systemic perspective.

Historical studies of how myths and symbols change have only recently begun to emerge. They tend to stress the layered and historically stratified nature of myths, each stratum reflecting the concerns of an epoch or a particular group. Marina Warner (1982) has shown how the image of Joan of Arc has been differently interpreted by Nazis, nationalists, and feminists, among many others, and Jacques Le Goff (1980) has demonstrated how ecclesiastical and popular images of Saint Marcellus of Paris came to resemble each other but ultimately always remained apart. James Watson's stimulating study (1985) of Tian Hou, or the empress of heaven, argues that the outwardly unitary symbolic character of the goddess Tian Hou concealed important differences in what various social groups believed about her. Pioneering as they are, these works are only the start of efforts to probe the enormously complex relationship between change in the symbolic realm and historical change among social groups and institutions.

In america we love to put our names on things. Everything from tree trunks to subway cars bears the evidence of our desire to announce what we are and own, and in the world of arts and letters the landscape is little changed. There the copyright expresses our instinct that even creativity has its property aspect: we claim what we have composed. There is a great tendency among us to be suspicious of anything unsigned, and pseudonymity is rare.

By what standards should we judge works of art from another culture or era? We are generally used to the idea that understanding the meaning of an image requires consideration of its distinctive context—literary, religious, social, and so on. Evaluating the quality of a work of art is another specific case of this broad dilemma of understanding. Do we evaluate good and bad images by the “proper” criteria and in the way that is appropriate to them?

Anarchists publishing in small student journals in the years before the 1911 Revolution made a significant contribution to Chinese feminism. They linked feminism to their call for a complete social revolution; they understood the oppression of women in China to be linked to modern class divisions and economic exploitation as well as traditional culture. They discussed the relationships among feminism, individual rights, and political liberties. He Zhen in particular severed feminism from nationalism, proclaiming “women's liberation” not “for the sake of the nation” but out of moral necessity.

Justice in chinese society was literally of cosmic importance. Traditional Chinese thinking considered man and nature organic elements of a seamless cosmic web. Injustice of any kind did not simply rend the web in one place but placed tension on the entire structure. To restore equilibrium, the injustice had to be perfectly redressed, no more, no less. To ignore the injury was to risk catastrophe. As one late-Qing official wrote, “The recent natural disasters and interferences with heavenly harmony [i.e., the droughts and famines of the late 1870s and early 1880s] are a product of the countless number of cases where no appeal could be made, where there were no impeachments of the delinquent officials, and where consequently the innocent suffer deep injustices in the underworld” (Xinzeng XAHL 1886, 50:5a).

An estimated seven and a half million people died of starvation and related diseases in China, Vietnam, and India during the last half of the Second World War. This death toll reflected the severity with which the poor were affected by the combination of natural disaster, military imperative, political conflict, economic dislocation, and corruption that caused these famines. But famine mortality is also a function of the effectiveness of the relief system. The famines in China and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, occurred in times of administrative disruption. During the Bengal famine of 1943, however, the central and provincial administrations were intact, if under strain, as the Japanese army tested the eastern defenses of India. Moreover, the Bengal government had recently revised the instructions for bringing relief to those affected by famine. The possibility of an ordered administrative response to the crisis means that the analysis of this operation provides an opportunity to make a contribution to the general understanding of famine relief.