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.

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.

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.

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.

Women's studies an interdisciplinary area of inquiry is a recent phenomenon in India. Some scholars view women's studies as a harmless fad; others see it as a threat to the intellectual integrity of disciplines, or at least to the male domination of faculties. Women's studies certainly questions the androcentric assumptions of many scholarly fields and seeks a greater piece of the academic pie for women scholars, but that is not the whole story. In the past decade or so, gender has joined class, race, and ethnicity as an element in theories about the major forces that shape society. Women's studies is not only concerned with changing intellectual inquiry but also with changing society itself. Scholars and activists sometimes inhabit different bodies, but by and large people who are concerned with inquiry into women's condition are also engaged in trying to change that condition.

A full decade has passed since Frederic Wakeman, Jr., published his influential “Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History” (1977). He opened his article with the observation, “During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print.” He added that most of these studies had been published in the People's Republic, but in his bibliography he listed dozens of entries by Western scholars on the topic. Significantly, while noting that Western studies of peasant resistance in China “drew upon Chinese scholarship to write histories of their own,” Wakeman emphasized that Western historians were divided on the issue of whether the “Maoist depiction of Chinese history as perennial class struggle” was accurate. He summed up the controversy in these words:

Was an immiserated peasantry ruthlessly exploited by a venal landlord class through the sweep of pre-modern Chinese history? Or would it be more accurate to say that, while the population suffered in times of epidemic or famine, there were long periods of plenty when relatively affluent farmers benefited from rising agricultural prices, and negotiated rental contracts to their own liking with accommodating landlords? (Wakeman 1977:202)