That the late Tang and Song form a watershed in Chinese history is an idea that needs no introduction in these pages. It has won the general acceptance of scholars of the most varying historical (and political) persuasions. New political institutions, including a sophisticated bureaucracy staffed by officials chosen for their ability; a proliferation of cities and towns, as well as the markets to support them; the largest standing army seen anywhere in the world to that time; a brilliant reformulation of the Confucian tradition with profound effects not only on the elite but on the population at large: the magnitude of these and other changes is undeniable.

This paper is primarily concerned with the institutional framework of economic policy formulation in China during the Northern Sung dynasty (960–1126). During this period there evolved a professional financial service whose members had a direct influence on economic legislation either as incumbents in fiscal offices or as members of Imperial advisory organs. The financial specialist was seen as possessing a specific body of expertise—administrative ability, talent in mathematics, a knowledge of classical Chinese monetary theory and familiarity with the history of economic policy. These attributes were tested in the civil service recruitment examinations and used as criteria for the recommendation and assignment of men to fiscal posts. The resulting consistency and predictability in legislation was a significant aspect of material progress in eleventh century China. The article is based on an extensive analysis of biographical information contained in chronicles, dynastic histories, records of conduct, and funerary inscriptions, as well as extant copies of examination questions and answers and edicts of appointment contained in the collected papers of Nordiern Sung writers.

A study of the interactions between the caste system and political democracy in India rejects the familiar theory that there is a dichotomy between a traditional society and a modern polity. On the contrary, it underlines the functional relevance of indigenous patterns of communication and differentiation to the process of modernizing. Where a relatively open society, by an act of conscious preference, resolves to undertake the task of building a modern nation through a democratic polity, the result is a progressive fusion of various elements. In India, under the impacts of Western education, nationalist movement, and adult franchise, the traditional community structure has continuously changed and adapted. What is important is the mutual exposure and adaptation of traditional and modern authority structures, communication media, and identification symbols. The new institutions establish their hegemony precisely by taking into their confidence the pluralities of the antecedent culture. Caste has been politicized, but in the process it has provided Indian politics with processes and symbols of political articulation.

Sinhalese Buddhists state that their religion was founded by the Buddha, who was a human being and is now dead. Cognitively this position is held by every Buddhist from the most learned monk to the most ignorant layman. Yet they usually behave as if the Buddha appears to them as a powerful and omnibenevolent god, a supreme being who is still in some way present and aware. (Perhaps we might say that cognitively the Buddha is dead, but affectively he is alive.) For instance, if assailed by dangerous demons a pious Buddhist will recite the qualities of the Buddha and thus keep any malevolent forces at bay. If asked to explain the apparent inconsistency, Buddhists say that the gods and demons are restrained by respect for the Buddha—but it is respect for his memory or for his doctrine, not for his active power. Moreover, Buddhists have dealings with the Buddha in which they behave as if he were at least numinously present; in particular, offerings are made before statues of the Buddha.

In the nineteenth century, the Mekong, Red, and Chao Phraya river deltas in Southeast Asia underwent a massive expansion in agricultural settlement and engineering (Dao and Molle 2000). Contending with crocodiles and herds of wild elephants in addition to more prosaic insect and bird pests (Terwiel 1989), settlers struggled successfully to make these deltas highly productive centers of rice and other agriculture. Such struggles, which were until very recently confidently labeled as “Man's Conquest of Nature,” used to be seen as representing Progress with a capital P. Historically, few men or women had doubts about the real struggle involved in making a living from Nature. In a lecture given in 1877, William Morris explained that “the race of man must either labour or perish. Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort or degree” (W. Morris 2008, 1). Human evolution could thus be summarized as a story in which “Man struggled with nature, and he is conquering it gradually through his intelligence, inventiveness, and skill” (Sigerist 1936, 597). Progress was the process by which Man Makes Himself, to cite the title of Gordon Childe's influential 1936 book on archaeology. By the nineteenth century, the problem for socialists such as Morris was that “the fruits of our victory over Nature [have] been stolen from us” (W. Morris 2008, 10); the basic necessity of “conquering” Nature was not disputed.

From about 1373 to 1570, or for nearly two centuries, the kings of Ryukyu engaged in a prosperous and active trade between East and Southeast Asia. Several hundred Ryukyuan ships voyaged to Southeast Asian ports, from Siam to Patani, Malacca, Sumatra, Java, and elsewhere. These were in addition to, and indeed complementary to, hundreds of trading voyages to China, Japan, and Korea.

However, there are only scattered references to the Ryukyuan trading expeditions to Southeast Asia in Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean records. What is more, Ryukyuan chronicles compiled in the seventeenth century contain only fragmentary notices of these voyages. This was most puzzling to modern scholars, for other records showed that tremendous quantities of goods of southern origin were carried frm Ryukyu to China, Japan, and Korea in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, indicating that there must have been a correspondingly large trade with southern regions. It had to be presumed that in connection with such trade, countless records and documents must have been compiled. And yet the official histories of Ryukyu made only passing mention of old contacts with countries in the southern seas.

An adequate understanding of the complex connections between changes in the social relations of production and changes in the bases of group formation demands an historical approach in which consciousness and its ideological products are viewed dynamically, not as the mechanically determined superstructural reflections of material relations but as an active and constituent components of everyday social life. The concepts required for such an analysis are developed here, drawing on the seminal work of both Marx and Weber, as well as on more recent scholarship, and are applied to recent changes in agrarian relations and ideological practice in Anuradhapura District, Sri Lanka.

After Vietnam's August Revolution in 1945, Hồ Chí Minh was venerated as the center of a newly created political religion that eventually became part of the Vietnamese religious landscape. This article traces the origins of Hồ Chí Minh's veneration and his own role in cementing his image not only as the leader of the nation but as the Uncle, the head of the Vietnamese national family. Through an examination of Hồ Chí Minh's first (auto)biography, it explores some of the means employed to achieve these results. Hồ Chí Minh's cult transformed the nation and altered Vietnamese cultural traditions. It served to acquaint people with the new order and to create and perpetuate people's loyalty to the newly formed state entities. This article looks at how Hồ Chí Minh went from being the master of his own cult to losing control over it and becoming its employee.

This paper is intended to present in outline form a structural analysis of the total religious system of the Sinhalese of Ceylon.

The Sinhalese, excluding those few who are Hindu, Christian, or Muslim, are Theravada Buddhists who also indulge in a rich array of magical-animistic and other “non-Buddhist” practices. Descriptive accounts of these various practices are readily available in the literature. But until now no one has examined the various beliefs and rituals to see whether and how they are related to one another, to what extent they combine to form an integrated system of “Sinhalese religion,” and how this system actually functions. I will attempt such an examination by focusing on the primary religious ideals, their practical implementation, and the problems involved in this implementation. Perhaps the most crucial problem facing Sinhalese religion is that the central ideal, salvation, which legitimates all religious action, is itself practically unattainable. This fact must have far-reaching implications for the total religious system.

One of the functions of higher educational systems everywhere has been the recruitment of an elite; for until the mass-education experiments of the twentieth century, highly educated members of major historical societies have been the chosen few. Similarly, the content of higher education has formed a culture the monopoly of which has served to set the highly educated apart from the common man. Hence the system of higher education in most societies forms a well-recognized institutional avenue of approach, not only to a society's high literary culture, but to prestige and power as well. These important properties of higher educational systems suggest that the content of higher education may have a social utility for the educated elite quite apart from its informational value. In this paper we examine the relationship between the college curriculum and the social reform activities of the educated elite of one Indian province, Bombay, in the late nineteenth century.

A few months after the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India in January 2006 that Tibetans should cease wearing clothing lined with endangered animal skins, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau destroyed millions of yuan worth of otter, leopard, tiger, and other pelts. Outsiders' interpretations of these events have flattened out the complexity of participants' motivations, which included not only religious and national loyalty, but also concerns about inequality wrought by capitalist development, framed through a lens of modern Chinese history. This paper traces heated debates among Tibetans about the burnings, including their implications for Tibetans' global reputation, the survival of Tibetan culture, and the possibility of a moral economy in an era of deepening commodification. It also explores the embodied, visual, and performative elements of the burnings through participants' videos. The role of local filmmaking efforts in spreading the burnings makes the accompanying videos especially relevant.

Though there have been in China since 1949 occasional deviations in the policy regarding family life, some ideals enunciated at the start of the revolutionary regime have remained constant. The dominant policy has been that the family should be retained and its strengths used. However, family commitments should not interfere with commitments to the state or the collective, and within the family feudal customs should be eliminated. The parents' stranglehold over the lives of their children should be broken. Children should be able to marry without parental interfence. There should be no buying and selling of brides, and big, ostentatious and wasteful wedding feasts should be stopped. In an effort to limit births, marriages should be delayed to age twenty-three for girls and age twenty-five for boys in rural areas. As part of the program for more equal treatment of women, parents should show no favoritism towards boys. Women like men should work in the fields, and nurseries should be established so as to help women join in productive work. At more sporadic intervals, young children have been urged to teach their parents about the thought of Mao Tse-tung in order to rid them of old feudal ideas.

Differing both in structure and operation from its parent Mughal model, the political system which came to be known as Hyderabad State developed in the Deccan in the second half of the eighteenth century. The major structural difference lay in the great power of two hereditary daftardars, the keepers of the central revenue records—these men could usurp the Diwan's (Chief Minister's) traditional control of government finances. Without overemphasizing contrasts with the Mughal model, for few behavioral studies have been made of Mughal administration, other apparent differences lay in Hyderabad's complete reliance on private contractors for revenue collection, the customary treatment of jagirs (land grants) as inheritable, and clear functional distinctions within the mansabdari system. Loosely structured patron-client relationships and the use of vakils or intermediaries characterized the operation of the system. The participants—nobles, local rulers, military men, bankers, record-keepers—were of diverse origins. The recruitment and composition of the Hyderabad nobility reflected the flexibility of the political system, as illustrated by an examination of the career patterns of the acknowledged “ten leading families” of the Hyderabad nobility.

Despite a large number of both historical and anthropological works on the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, a number of questions remain concerning this matrilineal and Islamic society. In a recent study, historian Ken Young articulated a growing consensus that the received models of Minangkabau social life are suspect, including the “idealised categories of nagari [village], adat [customs], matrilineal kinship, lineage property rights, and the autonomy of village communities governed by panghulu [titled men, Minangkabau spelling]” (Young 1994, 12). Anthropologists have been equally perturbed by what they consider to be inconsistencies in Minangkabau life, such as the contradiction between Islamic law and matrilineal adat (customary laws, beliefs, and practices concerning matrilineal kinship and inheritance). The inconsistency that I address in this essay lies in the contradictory representations of elite men's and elite women's power in Minangkabau literature.

The fifth day of the Lunar New Year marks the beginning of six weeks of religious festivities in the rural area of Chaozhou, a distinct dialect region in Southeast China. Scheduled on separate dates, processions of local deities are staged by different villages. On the morning of the chosen day, villagers flock to the main village temple, where wooden statues of the divine occupants are congregated with those from other local temples. Each family sets up a table in the courtyard, lights incense and candles, and presents its offerings (of chicken, duck, goose, fish, rice, wine, fruits, cakes, and candies) to the statues. With paper money set on fire, worship and prayers begin.

As part of the 1996–97 Fiftieth Jubilee celebrations, Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej published his version of the Mahajanaka Jataka, one of the many stories of the Buddha's former lives in the Theravada Buddhist tradition (Bhumibol 1996). The publication, in both English and Thai and complete with lavish illustrations, was heavily promoted by various agencies of the bureaucracy (especially in the media and the schools) and met with much public acclaim. Several editions of the book were published, including a cartoon version for younger readers (Bhumibol 1999). Tapes and CDs with readings of the story were released, and commemorative medallions were also available with purchases of the book. A musical version of the story was created and public performances held, with a number of the princesses involved in the production. The tale is of Prince Mahajanaka, who, though forced into exile, through his great perseverance (viriya parami) is able to return to his kingdom, claim his rightful throne, and bring prosperity to his subjects.

Let us imagine a graceful bronze image of Dancing Śiva before us. It was perhaps created by a Cola artist in eleventh-century Tamilnad to be installed in a temple to receive offerings of worship, and to parade around the town in a ceremonial palanquin on festival days. From there, this image might have followed any of several paths to stand before us now in a North American museum. Perhaps it was buried under a banyan tree in the fourteenth century when invading Islamic armies, feared for their iconoclasm, marched through the Kaveri delta on their way to Madurai. It could have been disinterred in the nineteenth century, during British rule, by a Tamil workman on a road crew, who showed it to the civil engineer, who brought it to the attention of the District Collector, who passed it on to the Director of Archaeology. In the twentieth century, perhaps, when an international market developed for such objects, it might have ended up in an auction room, a cosmic dance sold to the highest bidder. Or a government expert on culture might have selected it, after its long hibernation in the basement storehouse of its temple, as an image worthy to travel abroad as an ambassador of independent India in the international diplomatics of traveling exhibitions.

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society's language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin's creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation's people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.