What these four quite different books broadly share is a focus on the role of the state in Myanmar society. Current scholarship describes the authoritarian state in Myanmar, which has been controlled by the army since 1962, as either dominantly present or neglectfully absent. Censorship and the repression of autonomous spaces in society, on the one hand, and the failure of the state to enforce efficient health and environmental policies, on the other, are keywords in these works that illustrate the double-faced appearance of the state's existence and role in society.

This paper argues that the new forms of communication have had a major impact on gender and sexual ideologies and practices across East Asia. In particular, it focuses on the impact that the new media had on Chinese masculinities in the post-Mao years, a period that coincided with the “Asian economic miracle” and the rise of China. This was also the time when women's studies became well established in the West and men's studies was becoming increasingly prominent in the academic arena. But throughout this time, research into Asian men has been very limited, although Asian women have been voluminously described, analyzed, and publicized. Men's studies scholars such as R. W. Connell were well aware that a large proportion of the world's men did not receive any attention in gender studies and that this neglect was a serious problem in the field. In the first article in the inaugural issue of Men and Masculinities, he called for a more global understanding of the world gender order (Connell 1998).

Today historians hesitate to judge collaborators with the Axis powers in World War II, citing the impossibility of putting oneself in the often untenable position collaborators found themselves. Nonetheless, contemporary moral philosophy continues to ponder the ethical choice of complicity versus resistance. Yi Kwang-su (1892–1950?), Korea's most distinguished modern novelist as well as one of its more notorious pro-Japanese partisans during the colonial period, offers a compelling test case for how we might attempt to not only understand, but also morally adjudicate, his support of Japan's occupation of his country. With the ongoing debate over collaboration with the German Reich in mind, I contend that the case of colonial Korea presents us with important first-order ethical issues to resolve.

This study presents an overview of attempts by Chinese literati during the twentieth century to articulate a coherent Chinese mythology, primarily based on ancient texts but eventually to some extent drawing from ethnographic materials and folklore as well, and all much beholden to Western examples such as Greek and Norse mythology. This examination of text-based activities sets the stage for an inquiry into a wave of monument building during the Reform Era, much of which has celebrated China's ancient myth, history, and legend. A recent park in Wuhan dedicated to the legendary sage ruler and conqueror of floods, Yu the Great, serves as a case study of how, over the last three decades, old Chinese myths have been inscribed on the new Chinese landscape, and allows exploration of this phenomenon in relation to deeper issues concerning the role of myth in Chinese society, particularly its unexpected marriage with modernity.

Burma/Myanmar's postcolonial elites have established a military-state with hybrid-imperial structures, characterized by high despotic but low infrastructural modes of power, and fueled by rent-extraction. Given the resulting evisceration of opposition political groups, citizens understand explicit politics as dangerous. That said, cleavages between state and the polity afford vast space for “civil society” groups (CS) to form and operate. CS stabilize the political economy by managing citizen needs; conversely, CS stand as a wedge between state and masses, (potentially) constructing spaces to coordinate and magnify potential demands. Yet CS currently err toward managing needs. Opposition must politicize Burmese masses and CS through idioms that interface with CS's material tasks—a “politics of the daily”—encouraging them to make, collectively, a multiplicity of non-adversarial demands. This may compel the state to pivot and seek new bargains, at which point elite advocacy-oriented CS can provide progressive policy reforms. The paper will examine recent inchoate social-political movements in Burma for models of this politics.

Food-safety problems constitute a new, urgent, and multifaceted challenge to Chinese people, society, and the state, involving a number of social, political, and ethical issues beyond those of food safety, nutrition, and health. In light of Ulrich Beck's theory of risk society, this article examines food-safety problems in contemporary Chinese society at the levels of food hygiene, unsafe food, and poisonous foods and argues that food-safety problems not only affect the lives of Chinese people in harmful ways but also pose a number of manufactured risks that are difficult to calculate and control. More importantly, food-safety problems in China have contributed to a rapid decline of social trust, thus posing a risk of distrust that has far-reaching social and political ramifications. In this sense, a risk society has already arrived in China but it comes with certain local characteristics and poses some new theoretical questions.

The ubiquitous experience of wartime collaboration in East Asia has not yet undergone the analysis that its counterpart in Europe has received. The difficulty has to do with the political legacies that the denunciation of collaboration legitimized, as well as the continuing hegemony of the discourse of nationalism. Both inhibitors encourage the condemnation of collaboration rather than its historicization. Reflecting briefly on the 1946 trial of Liang Hongzhi, China's first head of state under the Japanese, this essay argues that the historian's task is not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject. In the face of the natural impulse to render judgment, this essay argues for the wisdom of hesitation.

From the 1960s to the present, scholars of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional literatures and cultures have spelled out their differences with either their Freudian or Foucauldian counterparts on the articulation of love, desire, and embodiment in these literatures (Alter 1997; Benton 2006; Dimock 1966; Doniger 1973; Doniger and Kakar 2002; Kakar 1989; Kakar and Ross 1986; Ramanujan 1981; Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994; Stoler Miller 1977; Sweet 2002; Wujastyk 2005, 2009; Zysk 2002). The subcontinent's textual cultures, they argue, interrogate Freudian notions of human personality as rooted in the “truth” of sexual desire. These scholars placed the study of erotica and the sciences pertaining to human bodies within structures of teaching-learning with very long historical pedigrees.

An oft-overlooked part of the Global Sixties, the seminal event of April 19th (1960) set the foundation for South Korea's combative, youth-driven democratization struggles between the years 1960 and 1987. This article turns to the eve of the eight-week protest movement in order to examine the production of students as a nationwide social organization of youths well-versed in nationalist discourse and conversant in patriotic practices. Throughout the heady weeks of February, March, and April 1960, youthful protestors drew on elements of this ideological training in an unlikely fashion to employ them in protests against the state. Taking full advantage of the privileged position of students in nationalist discourse, the protestors of April 19th cemented the importance of the upright student demonstration in South Korea's emerging postcolonial, Cold War political landscape.

This essay examines the importance of Chinese nation-building in the contemporary era. Defining nation-building in terms of processes that help to bridge local differences especially but not only when also distinguishing China from the rest the world, I argue that a focus on globalization has masked the importance of Chinese nation-building to contemporary social change. I analyze three very different societal arenas in which national forms of commonality are being constructed: the consolidation of the education system, the expansion of the urban built environment, and the spread of the Chinese Internet. Though each arena illustrates a very different aspect of the nation-building process, they all result in an increased degree of commonality in lived experience and communicative practice across China.

Put simply, hair and clothing make a difference. To phrase the matter another way, the presence of these material and visual forms, or alternatively their absence from the human body, embodies potent cultural meanings and has concrete effects in the social world. To be sure, more-hidden body parts may lurk below the surface that signal our membership in certain social categories—gender, to give a prime example. In practical terms, however, when we see strangers walking toward us from a distance, we are in the habit of assuming they are a man or a woman not because we have observed their genitalia (it would be strange indeed if that were the case) but rather because we recognize and extract meaning from a more readily visible set of identity markers—primarily clothing-related (sartorial) and hair-related (tonsorial)—whose semiotic rules must be learned culturally and which vary across space and time.

During the Cold War, when South Korea was under a military dictatorship, the term “collaborator” (ch'inilp'a) often functioned as a kind of prohibition, indicating that a person or certain texts were not worthy of serious scholarly attention. Collaboration was also a politically taboo topic since many of the South Korean political and military elites, including President Park Chung Hee, were former collaborators. Criticism of collaborators could be seen as questioning the legitimacy of the regime. Though some important studies were published during this period, such as Im Chongguk's courageous Ch'inil munhaknon [On literature by collaborator writers] in 1966, it was not until after the victory of the democracy movement and the end of the Cold War that research on collaboration became active. During the past two decades, a variety of approaches to the issue have emerged. There have been, as one would expect, nationalist denunciations, but also attempts, influenced by cultural studies, to reconceptualize collaboration in ways that can produce new readings of their times. John Treat's article is an effort to contribute to this growing literature, and it offers an approach that has some similarities and important differences with recent studies on the topic. Similar to some of the work of younger South Korean scholars, he conceives of collaboration as “a structural feature of modernity” and situates the issue in a broader, more international context through his examination of texts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Henry James. Significantly, he also focuses on understanding the basic morality of collaboration. It is an attempt to return scholarly discussion to the basic question, one that has proven to be difficult and painful to face—why did Korean intellectuals collaborate with the Japanese empire?

Gail Hershatter's presidential address at the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the “sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness.

I begin my rejoinder to Timothy Brook and Michael Shin by reiterating the important question with which Brook ends his piece. “[W]hen Hamid Karzai's government falls in Afghanistan, or Nouri al-Maliki's does in Iraq, who then will be the nation's heroes and who the collaborators?” Questions such as this and other present-day conundrums (including the choices I make living in a national security state) were certainly on my mind when I began thinking about collaboration during the Second World War and particularly within the Japanese empire. The line between then and now is direct and short for me. Timothy Brook himself has been the target of an internet smear campaign assailing his work on Chinese collaboration for purportedly preparing an alibi for American mischief in Iraq and Afghanistan. Paramount among my own thoughts was always: what would I do, were I faced with the choices a Yi Kwang-su, a Liang Hongzhi or a Wang Jingwei was? It seems an irresistible reflex to me that we place ourselves in the position of those in the past who wagered and lost, and rehearse their calculations as our own: judgment of their decisions is as inevitable as it is necessary. The question is not if we will judge—to refuse risks our claims to moral agency—it is how. Timothy Brook, whether he once declined or now hesitates, indeed does make ethical judgments (he is on the record, for example, against advocating “collaboration as a morally positive or politically advisable course” [2008]), and indeed he should. That we have not come to similar conclusions only points to our missing consensus on a moral calculus, and not to the lack of an imperative to possess one.

As regionalism has become a politically and economically advantageous policy across much of Asia, vernacular popular music has concomitantly become an important arena for articulating and codifying shared regionalist sentiment. This article explores the reasons for the emergence of subnational regionalism within post-independence India, and its more recent resurgence since the 1990s, arguing that expansion and diversification of popular music (in combination with other media) industries have been central to these processes. Examining the case of the protest song “Nauchami Narayana” from the Uttarakhand Himalayas, the article then investigates how vernacular popular music can blend local signs of devotion and cultural identity in order to effect political change and articulate a space of regional belonging.

This paper uses the cult of Assunta Pallotta, an Italian Catholic nun who died in a north China village in 1905, to critique the existing literature on missionary medicine in China. She was recognized as holy because of the fragrance that accompanied her death, and later the incorrupt state of her body, and her relics were promoted as a source of healing by the Catholic mission hospital, absorbed into local folk medicine, and are still in use today. By focusing on Catholics, not Protestants, and women, not men, the paper suggests similarities between European and Chinese traditional religious and medical cultures and argues that instead of seeing a transfer of European biomedicine to China, we need to think of a single globalized process in which concepts of science and religion, China and the West were framed.

This article examines the rise of the chastity cult—the quintessential symbol of patriarchal suppression of female agency for modern reformers—during the sixteenth century. Despite the resultant stricter control over female sexuality, the growing dominance of the chastity cult cannot be simply construed as a product of top-down imposition. What made possible the penetrative power of chastity practice, this article argues, was a state indoctrination working in reverse. That is, the fast ascendance of the chastity cult in the late Ming was powered by various strains of activism that sought to protest and repair the failing system of chastity awards. The activist impetus greatly enhanced the centrality and influence of chastity practice in social life and, in doing so, opened the notion of chastity to contentious and sometimes subversive negotiations.