Some attention has been paid in recent years to the sociological analysis of political élites in the “new nations” of Africa and Asia with a view to understanding better their political behavior. W. H. Morris-Jones and Myron Weiner have both considered the characteristics of some of the politicians in post-independence India. But little has been done on the leadership of minority groups.

In many cases (eg., the Armenians, Copts, and Maronites in the Middle East, the Parsis in India, and the Chinese in Southeast Asia), the members of religious and linguistic minorities adapted more rapidly to modern ways than the majorities among whom they lived. Although the former sometimes enjoyed privileged status as go betweens for the European colonial rulers, they were also among the first to absorb the Western concept of nationalism. They even provided some of the early leadership for nationalist movements, until the mobilization of broader and lower levels of the population around neo-traditional religious symbols began to exclude them from the national self-definition.

The leitmotiv of the panel as a whole may be found in Mrs. Wright's phrase: “All history is implicitly comparative.” This particular apothegm should be pasted into the hats of all students of China. Mrs. Wright's hat clearly needs no such adornment, but it may well be the best way of distinguishing between a Sinology that is indeed not enough (in Mr. Levenson's sense) and a body of learning which should rightly stand at the very head of scholarship. Mr. Skinner tells us that “there is nothing particularly exceptional about Chinese villages when compared to those in other peasant societies. …” But surely the exceptional quality of the Chinese village is the fact of its incorporation within a greater whole, in cultural terms, which is, at least in degree, without parallel anywhere. Is this not part of the point, and a most convincing and important one, of Mr. Skinner's argument? I can only echo and applaud Mr. Freedman's final sentences, and commend their eloquence: “Cooperation which amounts to ingestion is cannibalism. The usefulness of social science to Chinese studies depends on its being allowed to be itself.” Amen. The point of no return in the care and feeding of scholars who concern themselves with China can be determined only by a very nice measure, to which I can provide no key—but I would emphasize that it is indeed a critical measure, and that it is just as critical for other disciplines as for anthropology.

It is now ten years since I wrote my own initial critique of the theory of sociological dualism presented by J. H. Boeke. In the intervening decade, all of us who are concerned with the problem of economic development and cultural change have, I trust, learned more about the nature of the phenomenon and hence the reopening of discussion by Professor Manning Nash at this time is very welcome. I should like to deal first with his main theme, and then with a few details of his paper.

Professor Nash shows the usual reluctance of the cultural anthropologist to generalize; he is unwilling to “deal with anything as complex, heterogeneous, and refractory as Southeast Asia as a whole.” The really interesting question, however, is surely how general tiie phenomena of dualistic society, multiple society, technological dualism, and underdevelopment are, and what the relationships are among them. Being less inhibited than Professor Nash, let me say at once that in my view technological dualism appears in all countries which can be regarded as underdeveloped. By this I mean that all such countries have two clearly distinguishable sectors, one with a capital-intensive and modern technology with high levels of man-year productivity, consisting of large scale manufacturing, plantation agriculture, mining, and the services associated with these; and die other, the “traditional” sector, consisting of peasant agriculture, small scale manufacturing and handicrafts, and the services connected with these.

In Yadgiri Tahsil, an administrative subdivision of Mysore State, many villages stage annual fairs or festivals in honor of local deities. These festivals, known locally as “jātras,” usually involve the enactment of ritual, competition between villages, public entertainment, commercial activities, and feasting and celebrating. Description of the jātra as an “interlocal festival” emphasizes its distinguishing feature, the entertainment of reified guest villages by an equally reified host village. Participants in a jātra consist of guests representing neighboring villages and of hosts representing the village where the jātra is held. Comparison of the jātra with such cultural features as the American county fair, the Creek Indian ball game, the Olympic games, the Mexican fiesta, Pueblo Indian ceremonials, and medieval European tournaments may well, at a later date, make possible the establishment of the concept of interlocal festivals as a basis for cross-cultural generalizations. For the present, four jātras held in Yadgiri Tahsil will be described and some of their possible functions suggested.

As social anthropology has set up new standards for the analysis of social structure, the lag in the study of religious thought and behavior has become increasingly apparent. New departures have been rare in this region and the figures of Freud, Durkheim, and Weber have continued to dominate the scene.

AS hard as I try, I cannot comfortably arrive at the conclusion that Manning Nash's concept of “multiple society” is really in conflict with Boeke's and Furnivall's notion of the “dual society.” The two concepts deal with somewhat different problems and thus they tend to highlight different phenomena. I must quickly add, however, that if either or both concepts are treated in a diffuse and fuzzy manner—and I believe that this has frequently been the fate of the “dual society” concept—then they may seem to overlap and conflict. And in the spirit of the Editor's search for controversy and drama, I will cooperate to the extent of saying that between Manning Nash's formula and the vague, general, and almost sentimentalized way in which the dual society concept has been used, I would put my support fully behind Nash. In short, if both are to be loosely used, I suspect that Nash's concept will prove to cover a broader range of reality and yield more rewarding insights than imprecise use of the dual society concept; and in this sense it is to be hoped that a valuable secondary consequence of Nash's effort will be to expose the weak and irrelevant ways in which the dual society concept has been used.

The following represents an amplification of some rather poorly expressed remarks made at the panel on Chinese Studies and the Disciplines at the recent meeting of the Association for Asian Studies.

The essential point (banal but nevertheless true) is that whatever a man's discipline, the broader and deeper his general culture—his “general education,” the more willing he is to bring whatever wisdom he has to bear on the subject he is treating. Whether this wisdom derives from the “methodology” of his discipline or not, it increases the likelihood of his saying something significant. Conversely, the mechanical application of an isolated “discipline” narrowly conceived in terms of a selfcontained “model” or “system” to a culture (whether contemporary or “traditional”) which has not been studied in any of its other aspects by a person of limited culture may lead to sterile and even preposterous results.

Beliefs about ritual purity and ritual impurity form some of the most all-pervasive themes in Hindu culture. They are the basis of “orthoprax” Brahmanism in that only a ritually pure individual may approach the higher gods. Brahmanic concepts concerning pollution relate the Indian system of social stratification to the Hindu religious system. These concepts are applied to matters of personal conduct, health, and justice, and are fundamental to such well-known aspects of Indian culture as untouchability, limited access to wells, and the setting apart of a priestly caste. One of the important rationales for caste separatism (their refusal to intermarry, eat with one another, or touch one another) is that some castes are more ritually pure than others, and that impurity may be transmitted from one caste to another through these acts. But on the other hand, castes are also brought together and integrated into a system of ritual interdependence by the belief that they differ in the degree to which they are ritually pure or impure. Some actions are thought to be ritually too defiling for certain castes to perform, and some castes are thought to be too impure to perform certain other activities. These beliefs are basic to the concept of a division of labor by castes and to the ideal that each caste plays a part in a larger mutually interdependent system.

One often has the impression that young Japanese writers today are more eager to follow Western fads than to explore the Japanese tradition. Far from being devotees of Zen Buddhism, they are more likely to come to it through translations of Kerouac and other beatniks. In this paper, I propose to examine the cultural and psychological bases for this curious situation, which I suggest stem largely from the Japanese obsession with being up-to-date or Westernized. Young Japanese writers are never free from the pressure of the reading public that they should be au courant with the latest trend in Western literature, and this imposes such a heavy burden that it is no wonder that they have no time to go to a monastery and practice Zen.

The Zaibatsu are said to be reviving in Japan. In his widely-read Nippon Keizai Nyumon (Introduction to the Japanese Economy) Professor Nagasu wrote in 1959:

The Zaibatsu have steadily built their power and have revived. No, more than that. Before the war, the Zaibatsu had to share their hegemony with large landowners and were under the Emperor and the militarists, but now there are no militarists or large landowners. The Emperor, too, has become an accessory. The power of Japan now rests squarely in the hands of the Zaibatsu, the sponsors of the Conservative Party.