“The study of ancient China, particularly from the historic period on, requires A the collaboration of historians, archaeologists, palaeographers, as well as specialists in other disciplines.“

Isolated phenomena of a dualistic nature in various Shang institutions have long been recognized (see below), but their interrelationship and their possible relevance to a coherent dualistic system generally prevalent in Shang society cannot be clearly understood unless the various specialists on ancient China break disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with vigor and mutual understanding. This paper attempts to bring attention to some of these phenomena and to define the probable areas of research for a highly important problem in Shang studies. To begin, let us examine some interesting features at the archaeological sites of Hsiao-t'un and Hsi-pei-kang.

The decline of the central authority of the Mughal empire during the first half of the eighteenth century resulted not only in a change in the power relationship between the center and the provincial government of Bengal, but also in changes in the relationships between the leading military, administrative, and economic groups within Bengal. Shortly after 1700, Murshid Quli Khan, first as Diwan and later as Nawab of Bangal, began a series of revenue and administrative reforms. By increasing revenue collections, he was able to satisfy the demands of the central government for more money from Bengal, and at the same time to pay adequately his mansabdar followers within Bengal and Orissa. He also began to ehnahce his control by acquiring many of the most important official positions in the provincial government for himself and his relatives, and by retaining within Bengal a following of mansabdars who were loyal to himself.

Since many of the smaller and/or less efficient zamindars were unable to pay the increased revenue demand, they lost their zamindaris. Consequently, the pattern of many relatively small zamindaris was replaced by one of relatively few and much larger zamindaris. The result was that the more powerful zamindars tended to become more influential, and to act increasingly ai partners in the Mughal provincial government.

A third element, the bankers, also became important within the ruling group of Bengal after 1700. The Jagat Seths became bankers for the provincial government, and also supplied loans to zamindars to cover their revenue payments.

Thus, by 1739, Bengal was ruled by a loosely organized coalition of military, landed, and monied interests, who provided a reasonably stable alternative to the centralized Mughal government of earlier days.

The period since the end of the Allied Occupation of Japan has seen a number of attempts to reverse several Occupation policies. Some, such as the revoking of administrative decentralization of education and the police force, have been successful, while others, such as constitutional revision, have not. In general, the period since the 1950s has seen a pattern of conservative social change backed by the Liberal Democratic Party. An area that illustrates this trend is that of language policy, specifically the policy toward script. The partial revision of the immediate postwar script reforms that occurred over a twenty-year period from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s, most notably the revision of the 1946 list of recommended characters, is an example of a policy that, while not imposed by the Occupation authorities, had been arrived at during the Occupation and was later reversed to some extent in a conservative direction through direct LDP intervention.

This article seeks to spark a conversation about shifting conceptualizations of disaster under modernizing states. It employs case studies of two major disasters, the North China Famine of 1876–79 and the Yellow River flood of 1938–47, to map changes and continuities in Chinese responses to disaster. State approaches to the late-Qing famine both drew on a millennium of Chinese thinking about disaster causation and anticipated new issues that would become increasingly important in twentieth-century China. The catastrophic Yellow River flood occurred when China's Nationalist government deliberately breached a major dike in a desperate attempt to “use water instead of soldiers” to slow the brutal Japanese invasion. The Nationalist state's technologization of disaster, its rejection of cosmological interpretations of calamity, and its depiction of flood victims as heroes sacrificing for the nation mark departures from late-imperial responses to disaster, but foreshadow features of the devastating Mao-era Great Leap Famine of 1958–62.

This article uses an important Sri Lankan Supreme Court case concerning religious sound as a starting point for thinking about the intersections of Islam, law, politics, and Buddhism in Sri Lanka. It argues that Sri Lankan Muslims find themselves in three interlacing legal “environments” at the present moment: in an environment of general laws governing religion, in an environment of special laws and administrative bodies for Muslims, and in a broader constitutional environment that grants special recognition to Buddhism. These environments offer differing opportunities and imperatives for expressing Muslim identity, religious equality, diversity, rights, and freedoms in contemporary Sri Lanka. Through a consideration of these legal environments and the way they affected the case, this article illuminates ongoing questions about the legal and political status of Muslims on the island and provides a snapshot of the legal debates and discourses that have flowed into and fortified recent anti-Muslim sentiments on the island.

Among their fellow Bengalis, the Bauls, who constitute a religious sect, are esteemed because their iconoclasm, disregard of caste, and merger of Hindu and Islamic traditions gives them an enviable freedom to confront life as individuals outside the prevailing social and religious confines. They are loved, too, because they do not preach but rather woo with charming poems set to irresistible tunes that may compel them to dance.

Political developments in Ceylon during the 1950's drew attention to the forward thrust of a social formation in the Sinhala districts which has been described variously as “the rural middle classes,” “the lower middle-class traditionalists,” a “new village leadership” and so on. The political antecedents of this “group” were not traced beyond the 1930's, though several writers recognized that it was part of a social category which existed in British times. In recent articles it has been argued that the political activities of individuals drawn from this social category date back to the late nineteenth century. Be that as it may, it is obviously of value to clarify the lines of differentiation between this middle-level social category and the indigenous elite placed hierarchically above them. The former can be described as a “sub-elite,” a “subordinate elite,” an “intermediate elite,” or a “local elite.” The latter can be described as a “macro-elite,” a “central elite” or a “national elite.” Though convenience dictates the choice of one of these combinations, a reference to the alternatives is necessary because each captures a facet which the other labels do not convey.

Before the opening of the Second World Congress of the Communist International (July 19–August 7, 1920) [which met on the first day in Petrograd but subsequently in Moscow], Lenin prepared a draft thesis on the national and colonial question. M. N. Roy, a young Bengali attending his first international Communist gathering, eagerly responded to Lenin's request for criticisms. As a result, Lenin invited him to write an alternative thesis. Both theses were modified as a result of discussions within the National and Colonial Commission, and both were subsequently adopted by the Congress. After his encounter with Lenin, Roy rose rapidly in the Comintern hierarchy. In 1922 he was elected a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), and a full voting member in 1924. He became a member of the Presidium in 1924. It was in the year 1926, however, that Roy attained the peak of his influence in the Comintern. In February of that year he was appointed to the editorial staff of the Communist International, and in the following December he was reelected to the Presidium and joined the Political Secretariat of the ECCI. At the time of the Seventh Plenum of the ECCI (November 12–December 16, 1926), Roy became Secretary of the Chinese Commission, a post he held jointly with Petrov, and a member of the Agrarian Commission. The Plenum, convened for the purpose of considering the China problem, adopted a thesis on the question and Roy was sent to China as a representative of the Comintern to carry it out. Following the events in China in 1927, Roy's influence declined precipitately, though he was not formally expelled until December, 1929.

On May 25, 1895, amid a festive atmosphere at the governor's yamen in Taipei, China's island province of Taiwan (Formosa) was declared a republic. News of this extraordinary event was received in Peking and elsewhere with reactions of dismay and skepticism. Most Ch'ing authorities and foreign observers suspected that the creation of a republic was merely a desperate scheme to keep Taiwan from being ceded to Japan as an outcome of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Nevertheless, to a few witnesses the unprecedented move of establishing a republic in an area of imperial China suggested at first more hopeful signs for the future. James W. Davidson, then a Taipei news correspondent, initially surmised, “If it has been conceived and carried out altogether by Celestial minds we are emboldened to believe that there is, after all, a new China in the nursery from whom great things may eventually be expected.”

There is no easy answer to the question: What is the status of Chinese philosophy? On the Chinese side, philosophy is much more than a professional commentary on and the extension of a canonical tradition constituted by philosophical systems and theories. Chinese philosophers have traditionally been scholar-officials whose theoretical reflections have been tempered by practical responsibilities—fully, the daily workings of government and society. “Philosophy” in the contemporary Chinese context, then, despite the avowedly Marxist orientation of the state, continues to range over the relationship between cultural values and the social and political life of the people. Philosophers have been and still are the intellectual leaders of society. Hence, a “state-of-the-art” reflection on Chinese philosophy from an internal Chinese perspective would be primarily practical: a survey of the intellectual discourse as it has driven and shaped recent social, political, and cultural developments.

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period.

Gail Hershatter's presidential address at the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.

It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble's thematics sometimes syncopated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one's heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might intend as the unnoticed grounding of one's sense of and use of language itself laid in so deeply that it disappeared from immediate purchase). Gender Trouble also asked us to address the seemingly intransigent separations between interiority and exteriority and the obdurate artifice of an “interior core” (psyche, soul, etc.), which, because it was constituted as a priori, meant that people believed it lay beyond being touched or constituted by any social, economic, or political exigencies, “regulations,” or “disciplinary practices” and thus “preclude[d] an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject.”

In order to express what is uniquely accomplished in the field, Asian studies should be reconceived as Asian humanities and should adhere to three principles: care first, learn from, and connect histories. A review of the history and criticisms of Asian studies as a field calls for a positive theoretical articulation of what the best scholarship in Asian studies does and has done. The principles advocated here are not exclusive to Asian studies and should be extended to all area studies fields, but they are offered as a way to understand Asian studies as an essential field of the university and the academy, unique because of its content but common in spirit with the humanities generally.

In his 1955 book, The Political Role of Women, Maurice Duverger brought our attention to the lack of representation of women in politics. Since that time, the dismal underrepresentation of women in politics has not much improved. Few women rise to leadership positions in politics; as Jean Blondel found in a more recent cross-cultural comparison of political leaders, less than 0.005 percent of all leaders were women (1987, 116–17). Regarding women's political participation, political scientists used to assert that women tended to “limit attention to the superficial and irrelevant aspects of politics” (Lane 1959, 213). Many argued that women had a different political view than did men: they were apolitical, they personalized politics, and they adopted their husbands' political orientations. Accordingly, they became political leaders only by default, as substitutes for deceased husbands or fathers.

Most discussions of economic growth and economic policy in postwar Japan focus on the economy as an isolated sector, neglecting its place in Japanese history as a whole. Partly this is because discussion of the economy usually moves quickly to technical problems. Partly it is due to the common assumption that high-speed economic growth emerged out of an attempt to create high-speed economic growth for its own sake-thus making redundant any sustained inquiry into its origins (as opposed to its mechanisms). We now have a fairly clear understanding of the technical means by which Japan became rich: rapid growth was achieved through high savings used for technology-led investment, based both on market forces channeled into planned directions and a flexible response to unplanned opportunities, such as American assistance to Japanese economic development. What is murkier is the social and political context for economic growth.

The galaxy of non-indigenous elements confronting the student of Indonesian cultural history has often obscured the fact that, in order to elucidate a valid picture of their role and significance, these elements need to be studied in their own terms, in relation to their own environment and at specific synchronic levels, such levels being but points on the continuum of the historical process. Thus to consider Javanese culture exclusively as a linear (and corrupt) descendant of Indian culture on the one hand, or as perpetually conditioned by a hypothetical indigenous ur-society in the manner of Rassers on the other, leads to a dead end, and has stultified much otherwise useful and impressive research.

Japan's role in Far Eastern history has been unique in many respects. Traditionally an integral part of the Chinese zone of civilization, Japan has nonetheless demonstrated a marked ability to remain independent of continental influence. In recent years Japan's remarkable record of adjustment to the conditions imposed upon her by the spread of Western civilization to the Orient has raised the provocative question of why Japan, of all Far Eastern societies, should be the first to climb into the ranks of the modern industrial powers. Is it possible, as one scholar has suggested, that Japan “has been the country which has diverged the most consistently and markedly from Far Eastern norms, and these points of difference have been by and large, points of basic resemblance to the West”?

Until 1530, sculptural images of Confucius and varying numbers of disciples and later followers received semiannual sacrifices in state-supported temples all over China. The icons' visual features were greatly influenced by the posthumous titles and ranks that emperors conferred on Confucius and his followers, the same as for deities in the Daoist and Buddhist pantheons. This convergence led to visual conflation and aroused objections from Neo-Confucian ritualists, culminating in the ritual reform of 1530, which replaced images with inscribed tablets and Confucius's kingly title with the designation Ultimate Sage and First Teacher. However, the ban on icons did not apply to the primordial temple of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong. Post-1530 gazetteers publicized the distinction by reproducing a line drawing of this temple's sculptural icon, and persistent replications of this image helped to popularize his cult. The same period saw a proliferation of non-godlike representations of Confucius, including his portrayal as a teacher, whose iconographic origins can be traced to a painted portrait handed down through generations of his descendants. In recent years, variations of this teacher image have become the basis for new sculptural representations, first in Taiwan, then in Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora, and finally on the mainland. Now installed at sites around the world, statues of Confucius have become a contested symbol of Chinese civilization.

Virtually all interpreters of Hinduism agree that the notions of samsara, karma, and moksa are central to nearly all varieties of Hinduism. That is, it is agreed that most Hindus assume continuing reincarnations (samsara), that a person's current incarnation and experiences are, at least in part, the fruit of past actions (karma), and that release or liberation (moksa) from this ongoing cycle is possible and desirable. As David Kinsley (1982:8) says, “certain underlying beliefs are accepted by most Hindus: karma, samsara, and moksa, for example.” J. L. Brockington (1981:5) notes, “Doctrines concerning … samsara, karma and moksa … may be regarded as axiomatic by most schools of Hindu philosophy.” Thomas Hopkins (1971:50) observes, “By the early sixth century B.C.E., transmigration and the “law of karma” had been generally accepted as basic facts of existence and were rarely challenged from that time on by any major Indian system of thought.” According to A. L. Basham (1989:42): “These [karma and samsara] are the beliefs of nearly all Indians, other than Muslims, Christians, and Parsis, down to the present day.”