Located on the high altitude slopes in China's mountainous southwestern hinterlands, the Nuosu (Yi) have long been characterized by ethnologists in China as a slave society. In this essay I explore the appropriateness of the label with reference to the distinction, associated with the classicist Moses Finley in his studies of Greco-Roman society, between slave societies and societies with slaves (Finley 1983, 79–83). But my main purpose in focusing on Nuosu slavery, as we know it from the first half of the twentieth century, is to gain a better understanding of Nuosu identity. It makes sense to me that the process by which outsiders, that is, slaves brought in as captives, became insiders reveals a great deal about the constructs of the Nuosu ideology of common origins and identity and about how this transformation from alien to native worked in practice among people historically “remarkably resistant to acculturation,”with boundaries that remain to this day sharp, clear, and relatively impenetrable (Harrell 1995, 101, 104).

By the late ming (1573–1644), the values of frugality and spending had often gone to battle. Those who promoted frugality sometimes did so with specific goals in mind—the acquisition of a plot of land, or the stockpiling of resources to ride out a failed harvest—and other times with a social conscience that militated against indulging the self while others suffered from want. Others claimed that spending was acceptable if it did not deplete one's resources or would benefit people in the long run. Yuan Ts'ai, for example, instructed his family: “A degree of luxury in accord with your financial resources is not what I am calling wasteful” (cited in Ebrey 1984:265).

Serfdom was pervasive in Tibet and all laymen with the exception of a few hundred aristocratic families were hereditary serfs, tied to a lord through an estate. Nonetheless, the Tibetan social system was not rigid and closed. There was a significant modicum of mobility although mobility only between various serf substatuses.

The article examines the nature of the major serf sub-statuses and particularly focuses on the status of “human lease.” In a sense analagous to leasing land, the human-lease serf leased his personal freedom of movement and livelihood from his lord and was no longer obligated to work his lord's estate. But he was still a serf. He still had to pay an annual “lease” fee to his lord, and moreover, this linkage to his lord was still passed on to his offspring. The most striking feature of traditional Tibetan social structure emerges not as rigidity or flexibility but rather as the incorporation of a significant potential for mobility with a matrix of pervasive and hereditary serfdom. The institution of human lease reinforced the ideology underlying the estate system while providing the system the flexibility it needed to adapt to changing political and economic conditions.

Much attention has been devoted, by scholars and others, to the dramatic growth of Singapore in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as a great commercial entrepôt, as a flourishing city of tens of thousands of Chinese migrants, and as the maritime focus of two economic empires, the British and the Dutch. The direction and the intensity of this interest are, of course, understandable, but it has done much to obscure the role of Singapore as a focus also for the cultural and economic energies of the Malaysian world which existed alongside but in many ways separate from the world created by the West. While the comparison cannot be pressed too far, Singapore in the nineteenth century may be likened to Malacca in the fifteenth, in its role as metropolis for an area that embraced the whole Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, from Kedah and Acheh to the Celebes. Island trade in Malaysian or Arab hands, Indonesian migration to the Peninsula, the pilgrimage to Mecca and its subsidiary activities in the fields of Islamic teaching and publication, brought together in Singapore a great variety of Malaysian and Muslim peoples from differing social and economic background but sharing a lingua franca and important elements of a common culture, and often freed from the more hampering restraints of traditional social systems. Urban life has in all places and times been an important breeding ground for new ideas and new ways, and to this general pattern Singapore at the close of the nineteenth century conforms.

This essay explores the convergence of maps, mother/goddesses, and acts of martyrdom in patriotic pictures produced during the twentieth century in India in order to understand how artists pictorially transformed national territory into a tangible and enduring object deemed deserving of the bodily sacrifice of the citizenry. The archive for the essay is constituted by visualizations of Indian national territory produced by “barefoot” cartographic practice, which routinely supplemented the scientific map form of the nation with the anthropomorphic presence of Mother India. Such anthropomorphized maps, the author argues, prepared the ground pictorially for the map of the nation to receive the sacrifice of the passionate patriot.

Does ongoing animosity between South Korea and Japan over the disputed Dokdo Islands and other issues that originated from historical disputes generate rally effects in Korean domestic politics? This article argues that the Dokdo Islands dispute—and related disputed issues rooted in the colonial experience of Korea under Japan's rule historically—strongly influence Korean presidents’ abilities to effectively mobilize domestic support for not only the issues, but particularly the public opinion of presidents. Using data on Korean presidents’ approval ratings between 1993 and 2016, this article shows that Korea's bilateral disputes with Japan tend to promote Korean presidential popularity. The findings suggest that external crises with Japan related to historical disputes have positive political effects on leadership ratings in Korea.

The Shimazu daimyo of Satsuma-han maintained indirect contact with the China mainland throughout most of the Tokugawa period. This contact was possible despite the seclusion policy of the Tokugawa government which prohibited Japanese from going abroad and the policy of the Ming dynasty which would not allow Chinese to trade with Japanese. The link between Satsuma and China was die Ryukyu kingdom. Through the Ryukyu Islanders, the Shimazu daimyo obtained valuable Chinese commodities which were then sold for a profit to other parts of Japan. This commercial activity was a breach in the shogun's monopoly of foreign trade, which was supposed to be confined to the single port of Nagasaki.

This article explores the history of intraracial (Indian-on-Indian) rape in early colonial India. Though at times uneven and unpredictable in their rulings, British judges created a set of evidentiary requirements and a body of legal decisions that were as harsh on rape victims as the precolonial Islamic system was presumed to be. Despite the colonial promise of a more modern and humane criminal law, the gradual displacement of Islamic law did little to widen rape victims' path to legal remedy. English common law presumptions about the frequency of false charges and a suspicion of women's claims combined with a colonial insistence on the peculiarity of Indian culture to make it difficult for victims of rape to prevail in court. The colonial legal treatment of the “unsensational” crime of rape was rather unsensational. It largely reflected contemporary trends in England, which raises the important question of what was distinctively colonial about it. 

This article examines the recent assertion by a scholar of Burmese history that extensive landholding by the Buddhist monkhood helped to undermine every dynasty between the ninth and nineteenth century. It argues that religious wealth, possibly before the fifteenth century and certainly after that period, was less significant than has been suggested, and that the institutional relation between throne and monkhood was by no means static. During the later dynasties, secular elites represented the principal threat to the centralization of resources. Further, in certain instances, royal purification of the Religion sought not to deprive the monkhood of wealth, but to strengthen both the Religion and the crown at the expense of private lay interests.

This essay examines the circulation and consumption of foreign literature in socialist China, showing that even during the most xenophobic times of High Maoism, Chinese readers had access to foreign literature through a variety of channels. An unstated though widely shared commitment to the intrinsic value of foreign culture, I argue, reveals deeply ingrained cosmopolitan practices that belie a nationalistic surface rhetoric. To trace the interest in and commitment to foreign literature, this article inspects three distinct yet overlapping modes of literary circulation: the private sphere, the restricted public sphere of internal publications, and the open public sphere. Access to foreign literature was limited, but the flow of transnational culture never stopped, as editors and readers alike perpetuated an intellectual framework that was grounded in the valorization of transnational culture and that predated the People's Republic's founding in 1949. These findings call for a reevaluation of Chinese socialist cultural consumption and production from a transnational perspective.

“In order to decide whether one can speak of a caste system in a society, one must ask: are status and power completely dissociated, can one find the equivalent of a Brahman/Ksatriya relationship? This question, though it may appear improper, has the virtue of immediately fixing a limit to Indian influence in South-East Asia. Important as this influence has been from the cultural and even social point of view, it would seem, roughly speaking, that nowhere in Indochina and Indonesia has the king been dispossessed of his religious prerogatives.”

This claim concerns the important question of the degree to which the Indian caste system can be, or has been, exported—a question that elicits deep-rooted and contentious problems inhering in our understanding of the nature of the caste system itself. Two propositions may here be identified and distinguished. The first is that, in India, kings—however powerful politically—did not formally possess religious or ritual authority; whereas in Indochina, however weak they were, kings formally possessed religious as well as political prerogatives. This is the contention cited above. The second is that, the first being true, it is also true that in Indochina kings possessed and exercised a degree of real control over social organization, by virtue of their ritual position (which was foreign to India): they were social engineers. In brief, they were oriental despots. The first proposition does not entail the second, but the two tend to go together; many writers have shown an inclination to accept the second, sometimes on the evidence of the first, sometimes on the evidence of facts about Indochinese kingdoms.

The Indian social reform movement in the nineteenth century, like the political reform movement, remained unorganized on an all-India basis until the 1880's. Local groups functioned throughout the country in many cases along similar lines, but without regular and specific knowledge of each other. Virtually the only effort for social reform well publicized throughout the country had been Vidyasagar's Widow Remarriage movement, which however was never nationally organized and which found local support only when a reformer felt inclined to press for it; the founder himself lost interest in the cause long before his death in 1891. Unlike the political reformers, the social reformers gave no evidence, so far as the present writer knows, of concern about the absence of a national organization to direct and stimulate their activities. If it had any strength, such an organization would, in fact, embarrass them into a unity of principles and methods for which, before 1880, they were quite unprepared.

This article examines a text containing the late eighteenth-century family history of a line of South Indian “little kings,” or pāḷaiyakārars. The text provides the basis for a discussion of the Maṟavar caste of the Tirunelvēli region in southern Tamil Nāṭu and the notions held by this and other related groups concerning royal appropriateness and sovereign authority, political and social relations, and kingly privileges and gifts. Further, the text is seen as a cultural form of “history” that has an integrity of its own. Indeed, a structural analysis of the text reveals that the text can not be separated into “fanciful” and “historical” sections, and that underlying assumptions about the past are revealed by the form as well as the content of the text. The results of this analysis are seen to have significance not only for understanding how the past is viewed from within, but also for how it must be analyzed from outside the cultural context. Thus, ethnohistory is asserted to be not simply one agenda for “history” but a way of setting the actual agenda of “history.”

Hindus regard all humans as fundamentally unequal. Hindu society is organized around groupings of people into ranked castes. On this there is general agreement, as Dumont's apt characterization, Homo hierarchies, affirms and attests. No similar agreement exists, however, as to the criterion of caste rank. On the one hand, attributional theorists such as H.N.C. Stevenson emphasize the physical nature of a caste and its placement on a continuum of purity and impurity, with the more pure castes held to rank above the less pure. On the other hand, interactional theorists like McKim Marriott emphasize the coded exchange between castes of culturally valued foods and services, with the givers of food held to rank above the receivers, and the receivers of service above the givers; here it is not the religious values of purity and impurity, but behavioral dominance that seems to be at issue.

Political culture in India is not merely a reflection of community life-style. It is also the link between historical experiences of politics and model identities, on the one hand, and the needs of new political forms, on the other. Defined thus, it becomes not only an emergine national idiom, but also a cultural vector diat is gradually entering the community's life-style as a legitimate force of social change.

There are four historical stages in the development if the culture of Indian politics. The contemporary political culture also consists of four strands, each with its own psychological problems of adaptation and their typical cultural expressions. These strands are related, on the one hand, to the four corresponding historical stages and, on the other, to different levels of personality functioning in the model Indian. Within this framework, a new approach can be taken to the analysis of the major themes and symbols in Indian politics. It is possible, for example, to decompose some of the major themes into their stage-specific contents which, again, can be related to the larger adaptive problems faced by the community at different historical phases.

In August 2011, India was in the headlines due to an anti-corruption hunger strike that played upon Gandhi's legacy of civil disobedience and mass protest. The strike was initiated by a short, bespectacled, 74-year-old man called Anna Hazare to protest the government's new anticorruption legislation, which Hazare said was too weak. Hazare's call for a strong anticorruption Lokpal (ombudsman) had slowly gained momentum in the first half of 2011, when the self-styled Gandhian had collected a sizeable following. But it was Hazare's unexpected arrest on the eve of the August hunger strike that pushed him into the limelight, sparking candlelit marches across the country. A shaken government ordered his release in less than twelve hours, but in stunning turnaround, Hazare refused to leave and began his “fast unto death” in Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail, South Asia's largest high-security prison.

The Indian Municipal Elections of 1959 raised in compelling form the question of the relationship between urban life and political radicalism; radical parties of both the left and the right gained ground in Bombay, Delhi, and Madras. In Calcutta, radicalism already had a long history. The Madras results, when put in the context of the state's political history, raise further questions: is urban life an experience or a location; are city and village two different and separate worlds whose politics are discontinuous; or do the politically salient experiences of urban and rural people in some measure overlap?

Some years ago, in his contribution to a collection of essays on the Supreme Court and the Indian Constitution, Pratap Bhanu Mehta emphasized the political significance of the Court, saying, “there is not a single important issue of political life in India that has not been, by accident or design, profoundly shaped by its interventions … the courts participate and collaborate in governing India” (Mehta 2006, 162). How exactly might this happen? In beginning to explore answers to this question, I want to focus on the formation of a distinct environmental jurisprudence and its relationship to the changing and dynamic qualities of a democratic polity in India. And in formulating my analysis I draw here on my current work on courts and the environment in India or how the environment came to be a legal object in India over the last century.