Historians of India often write as if India, at the end of the nineteenth century, had only four cities: Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, and Poona. Several elements contribute to this perspective: Indian historians' own predominant interest in the development of nationalist politics in late nineteenth century India naturally leads them to concentrate on these four urban centers, the birthplaces of such politics1. But the structure of late nineteenth century politics in India itself mirrored more fundamental aspects of the administrative organization and social structure of the country. Administratively, the country was organized in a hierarchy of authorities of descending prestige and geographical scope, with authorities of greatest power centered in the three port cities, and authorities of least power, at the taluka and village levels in the hinterlands. This structure decisively established the political predominance of the port cities and assured a flow of potential recruits for government service and the white collar professions out of the countryside and into the Presidency headquarters towns. At the same time, India's status as a raw-materials exporting colony of an industrial mother country, and the increasing penetration of the world market economy, required that business and industry be increasingly concentrated in and about the port cities.

In 1947, when Pakistan was created, scarcely any attention was paid to resolving the problems inherent in a culturally plural society. Existing institutions proved inflexible and new ones did not evolve to respond to the aspirations of the Bengali people. As a result, Pakistan was dismembered within twenty-four years of its birth. Contrary to expectations, Pakistan's national disintegration failed to generate analysis or debate among intellectuals. Via thematic analysis of a cross-section of Urdu creative writing about the events of 1971, the author of this article probes the mentality of selected writers, searching for their response to the disintegration of their nation. What is the meaning of Pakistani nationhood? How do the writers interpret the breakup of 1971? And what implications do their attitudes have for the issue of regional versus national identity? The author concludes that the ethos of the writers scarcely differs from that of their society—it is an ethos that might well have precipitated the 1971 crisis.

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.

We provide evidence contrary to long-standing general expectations that before 1949 most Chinese women married up the social hierarchy and that footbinding facilitated this hypergamy. In our sample of 7,314 rural women living in Sichuan, Northern, Central, and Southwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century, two-thirds of women did not marry up. In fact, 22 percent of all women, across regions, married down. In most regions, more women married up than down, but in all regions, the majority did not marry hypergamously. Moreover, for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls' marital prospects. We do find regional variation: Sichuan showed a significant relation between footbinding and marital mobility. Nevertheless, our evidence of the basic economic circumstances of rural women's marriages from several of China's regions, including Sichuan, supports a different cultural belief as relevant to the lives of most women: marriage among equals. These results have implications for understanding pre-1949 Chinese gender relations and rural life as well as for theorizing social causation.

Representations of dancing minorities have often been viewed in contemporary Chinese studies as examples of a broader discursive practice of “internal Orientalism,” a concept developed by anthropologists in the mid-1990s, based on fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s. A historical examination of state-sponsored minority dance in the early PRC (1949–54) suggests that internal Orientalism may not be a generalizable explanatory framework for minority dance and its relationship to PRC nationality discourse. During a time when external military threats to the nascent PRC loomed large, long-standing ethnic stereotypes were perceived as a vulnerability to national security and targeted for reform through new policies of state multiculturalism. Thus, rather than portraying minorities as exotic, erotic, and primitive, early PRC dance constructed minorities as models of cultural sophistication, civility, and respectability. Likewise, rather than envisioning a developmental hierarchy between Han and minority dance, national performing arts institutions established during this period constructed Han and minority dance as parallel modes of ethnic performance categorized together as a new genre, “Chinese folk dance.”

Since World War II, the monopoly on Indonesian studies acquired by the Dutch as a consequence of the course of Western expansion has gradually been broken. The traditional barriers between geographical areas of study along the lines of their political frontiers are gone, and now the gap between continental and insular Southeast Asia may be bridged. This paper will demonstrate how data from the continental area may be used to solve a problem in the insular area.

The rational-choice paradigm has been attractive to many area specialists in their efforts to arrive at explanations of social and political behavior in various parts of the world. This model of explanation is simple yet powerful; we attempt to explain a pattern of social behavior or an enduring social arrangement as the aggregate outcome of the goal-directed choices of large numbers of rational agents. Why did the Nian rebellion occur? It was the result of the individual-level survival strategies of north China peasants (Perry 1980). Why did the central places of late imperial Sichuan conform to the hexagonal arrays predicted by central-place theory? Because participants—consumers, merchants, and officials—made rational decisions based on considerations of transport cost (Skinner 1964–65). Why was late imperial Chinese agriculture stagnant? Because none of the actors within the agricultural system had both the incentive and the capacity to invest in agricultural innovation (Lippit 1987).

This article examines daily life in North Korea from the perspectives of recent North Korean defectors from a variety of social backgrounds. The following three questions are explored: how does the individual live from day to day; what tactics does one continuously evolve in order to survive; and, most importantly, what theoretical and methodological frameworks are available to explain the strategies for survival employed by the country's population? Employing the concept of “everyday politics,” this study argues that state-society interactions once constrained by a highly centralized regime, characterized by an emphasis on political and moral motivations, have yielded to more fragmented and autonomous systems strengthened by realization of individual self-interest. In the process, the state and society have reshaped patterns of interaction regarding information flow structures, rules of behavior, and motivations. That is, both the state and society seek coexistence, and the “market” spontaneously developed by the population functions as a shock absorber.

THIS paper constitutes an attempt to reconcile—at least for one region of Southeast Asia: central Thailand—one of the discrepancies in analyses of contemporary Theravada Buddhism. The model proposed below—which is the outcome of comparing some of the relevant literature with my own field data—encompasses two distinct sections of society, each holding a different attitude towards Buddhism. The interaction between different interpretations of religion may well be one of the major factors n i the process of religious change in Thailand. Furthermore, this model may be of use for other Theravada Buddhist countries.

Literature on the Subject

A survey of the literature on the practice of religion in Theravāda Buddhist countries reveals what may be a unique situation in the study of religions. Many authors state unequivocally that Theravāda Buddhists adhere to more than one religious tradition. Apart from “otherworldly” Buddhism, these Southeast Asian peoples adhere to other strands of religion, generally classed under rubrics such as “non-Buddhist beliefs,” “folk religion,” “animism,” or “supernaturalism.” Yet, though virtually all authors recognize this situation, there is no consensus in their views on how the different subsystems are interrelated.

In 1881, the Japanese introduced the newspaper as a means of public communication into Korea. Publication of the Chōsen shinpō in the open port of Pusan is related to the political and economic circumstances in which the Japanese found themselves there. Elsewhere in East Asia, a comparable role was played by Westerners. In addition to viewing the Chōsen shinpō in the context of Japanese efforts to influence Korea's modernization, the author suggests studying this newspaper as a component of the comparative history of the press in East Asia.

The subject of this essay—better so labeled than as a research paper—is too broad to permit more than a sweeping as well as selective treatment in the short space of a journal article. It may nevertheless be worth presenting in those terms, painting with an overly broad brush on too large a canvas perhaps, but attempting through its scope to relate as parts of a common phenomenon events and patterns in separate areas. Such an effort may help to throw light on an aspect of the grand design of European colonialism in Asia and on some of its consequences. These were different in each area and some of the differences, notably between China and the rest of Asia, may be instructive as they can help us better to understand idiosyncratic aspects of the diverse history of modern Asia. But the similarities in events, patterns, and consequences which such a gross comparison can also illustrate may be equally instructive, and often overlooked. India's modern history and China's, Japan's, and Southeast Asia's, are for good reasons commonly examined separately by separate specialists. Many politically conscious Asians of the colonial or semi-colonial period, and most of the colonialists themselves, did not see Asia that way but more nearly as a single system, for all its regional variety, on which the overt and implicit force of the modern West as an alien system was attempting to impinge.

Much of the personal investment in this study derives from my awareness of being an “Oriental” as a child growing up in two British colonies. All of my education, in these colonies (Palestine and Egypt) and in the United States, has been Western, and yet that deep early awareness has persisted. In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.

One bright winter afternoon in 1992, in the mountains of Yunnan Province, China, Li Yong told me a story. Li Yong and I were crowded into a courtyard in his largely Yi (or Lòlop'ò) village, at a mortuary ritual for one of his affines. In the courtyard's center, where the corpse had lain in its coffin seven days before, a crude trough had been scratched into the earth, with a shallow hole at the end where the corpse's mouth had been. The dead woman's daughter, her husband's sisters and their daughters, and some of their female friends sat on benches on either side, singing formal poetic laments about labor and pain. To accompany her tears, the daughter ladled water from a bucket into the hole in front of her. The water overflowed into the trough and gradually turned the lower surface of the courtyard to mud. Women from the dead woman's son's family moved about the courtyard pouring alcohol for the hundreds of guests, who drank while squatting, sitting or standing, their feet in the mud.

The tardy and ineffectual response of China to the Western challenge remains one of the most significant problems confronting historians. This article attempts to shed light on one of the factors that appears to have contributed in some measure to the decline of the Chinese empire in the nineteenth century, viz., chʻing-i, or literati opinion. An initial section sketches the historical origins of chʻing-i. Then, I trace the influences that chʻing-i brought to bear on the process of policy formation during the early 1880's, when the Chinese empire fought a war with France in a vain attempt to save an imperial tributary from Western domination. Finally, I speculate upon the course the empire might have taken had not the throne—a term that here refers essentially to the Empress Dowager Tzʻu-hsi—had to tack and shift to meet the demands of chʻing-i.

China's political “opening to the West” in 1979–89 directly affected historical scholarship on Ming and Qing socioeconomic history. Some PRC scholars were able to travel abroad, others met foreign specialists at international conferences held in China, and many more were introduced to foreign scholarship through Chinese translations of articles and books published in Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and North America. Foreign scholars, also, profited from new access to archival sources for research; a few anthropologists and historians even were able to reside in the countryside and interview villagers. While increased access and scholarly exchange have enriched research, they have not erased national differences in interpretation and approach.

What were the reasons for the development of a right-left division of South Indian castes? Why has this division become less of a focus of rivalry in modern times? This article uses observations collected in the Coimbatore region of Madras State between 1964 and 1966 to suggest that this earlier opposition expressed a fundamental economic principle: the distinction between castes who held direct or indirect rights in land and those who were primarily dependent on renumeration for specific professional services. This contrast was expressed symbolically by the use of the terms “right” and “left,” and in day-to-day activity by the opposition of instrumental to ritualistic values in the evaluation of social status. Use of the terms right and left had gradually become outmoded, due to substantial changes in economic organization. The social correlates of this earlier opposition, however, have continued to endure in certain regions. It is hypothesized that this persistence of social contrasts is related to the absence of Brahmans as an important land-owning group in such areas.

Anthropological data is typically produced in single villages, but consumed by persons interested in peoples, regions, and nations. Although this paper suffers from the disabilities implied by that situation, its goal is to attempt to ameliorate them. The status of headman which I will describe in Ban Ping is found, named, and assigned the same legal duties in all Thai villages. This should permit other fieldworkers to make straightforward comparisons with their communities.

It is not wrong to say that the nature and intent of a society reveal themselves in the legal and customary concepts of property held by the various members and classes of that society. These property concepts do not change without an incipient or fundamental change in the nature of the society itself. The history of property relations in a given society is thus, in a way, the history of the society itself.