I deas about gender organize the social relations between men and women. They gain their power because they seem to be the products of a natural order of things, deeper than any social conventions. Reproductive processes, like eating and drinking, sickness and death, appear as part of the biological substratum of human experience, operating according to universal laws that apply to all human beings and to other living creatures as well. Older practitioners of the history of science, when confronted with the bewildering variety of customs, rituals, and medical aids surrounding childbirth in remote times and places, usually recorded these as superstition or the products of naive empiricism. The consequent interpretation of the history of medicine as the gradual replacement of error by science retains its positivist appeal even today.

In 1934 Liu Jihua, a classically trained feminist at Yanjing University, published an article on the history of the concept of chastity in China. Meticulously documented and lavishly illustrated with quotations from the classics (beginning with the Book of Changes), her long essay argued that, by the Qing dynasty, female chastity had “become a religion” (zongjiaohua): a prescriptive norm accepted as a matter of faith by most men and women.

It is generally accepted that Qing China (1644–1912) was a straitlaced, sexually repressed society. Robert H. van Gulik, for example, ended his study of sexual life in China with the fall of the Ming dynasty, in part because he believed that Chinese attitudes toward sexuality became much more repressive after the Ming, and the generalizations he made in his book were not appropriate for the Qing (1961:333–36). This dramatic change in attitude has been attributed to the resurgence of Cheng- Zhu Neo-Confucianism, with its strict view of sexual relations in general, and female sexuality in particular (Ropp 1981:120–24).

Models of ethnicity in Nepal stress, on the one hand, unlimited ethnic diversity and, on the other, a rather limited set of ethnic contrasts: Hindu versus Buddhist, tribe versus caste, mountain versus middle hills versus lowland Terai. However, ethnic relations in Humla District, in Nepal's far northwest Karnali Zone, are characterized more by interaction, interdependence, and mobility than contrasts and boundaries between groups.1 In Humla, individuals and even entire villages readily change their ethnic affiliation and their position in the caste system. There, too, ethnic groups are linked by a regional economic and social system, and changes in a group's ethnic affiliations are coincident with changes in their economy and style of life. Finally, the case of Humla reaffirms what other scholars have noted: ethnic relations today are the outcome of a historical process of accommodation between regional ethnic systems and the policies of a centralizing state.

In his presidential address at the 1977 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Marius Jansen pointed out that the relationship between monarchy and modernization in Japan is a significant subject of research for Western scholars specializing in Japanese studies. Specifically, Jansen emphasized the need to investigate the popular perceptions of the monarch usually overlooked by Japanese historians. He noted that a study of Japanese mentalité must cover a vast area, including “imagery, iconography, and ritual.” Until we “get at” this level of the social and cultural history of modern Japan, Jansen feared, we will fail to gain “a better understanding of modernization, of Japan, in world history” (1977:612–22).