During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print. Most of these were published in the People's Republic of China, where they represented an effort to create a new revolutionary history of class struggle, intended to replace the elite history written by Confucian historiographers under the empire. Embodying Mao Tse-tung's belief that “the ruthless economic exploitations and political oppression of the peasantry by the landlord class forced the peasants to rise repeatedly in revolt against its rule” (Mao 1961, Vol. III, p. 75), these studies of popular uprisings describe a bewildering variety of social phenomena.

Ongoing cultures, by virtue of the personalities they produce and the social arrangements they embody, create tensions or strains for their individual members; and they provide as well for the institutionalized expression and alleviation, if not complete reduction, of these tensions in culturally approved channels. In this view, cultural stability refers not to the absence of persisting conflict on the individual or social level; but rather to a high degree of complementarity between institutionalized sources of strain or conflict for the individual, and institutionalized arrangements for tension reduction or expression. This conception of stability does not assume that all relatively stable cultures are equally productive of psychological well-being, even assuming this nebulous condition could be specified. Nor does it assert that all stable cultures are equally adaptive in the face of external pressures. It does imply, however, that sources of conflict and channels for its expression will be sufficiently balanced to insure perpetuation of culturally standardized social arrangements and beliefs over many generations.

This paper seeks to address the theme of this volume by exploring the place of the fabulous in the imaginary geographies of a lost world in the Indian Ocean.

I begin with three enchanted flights of imagination that seek to convey a useful truth. All three are occasioned by travel to a real place—Kanyakumari, the “Cape Comorin” of colonial atlases, and the land's end of the Indian peninsula and of its Tamil-speaking region (“Tamil Nadu”).

This paper deals with ideal masculine types in the gender discourse of Korea's modernizing nationalists during the late 1890s and early 1900s. It begins by outlining the main gender stereotypes of Korea's traditional neo-Confucian society, and it argues that old Korea's manhood norms were bifurcated along class lines. On one hand, fighting prowess was accepted as a part of the masculinity pattern in the premodern society of the commoners. On the other hand, the higher classes' visions of manhood emphasized self-control and adherence to moral and ritual norms. The paper shows how both premodern standards of masculinity provided a background for indigenizing the mid-nineteenth century European middle-class ideal of “nationalized” masculinity—disciplined, self-controlled, sublimating the sexual impulses and channeling them toward the “nobler national goals,” and highly militarized—in early modern Korea.

Thailand has seen a growing number of women elected to Parliament in recent decades. Yet, little research has been done on who these women are and how they affect the quality of democracy. This article is an attempt to fill this lacuna. Drawing on previously untapped Thai-language primary sources, it argues that the majority of female members of Parliament elected since 1975 have contributed to entrenching family-based rule and stunting the growth of political pluralism. This argument is based on the finding that most female MPs are related, by blood or marriage, to former male MPs. These women from political families constitute one part of the long historical process through which Thailand has lapsed increasingly into a family-based patrimonial polity since the absolute monarchy was abolished in 1932. The importance of families remains undiminished over time; the advent of electoral politics has only accentuated it by bringing more women with powerful family connections into Parliament.

This paper engages with the critical literature on development through a study of transnational environmentalism in China. Within the last decade, international development efforts have become increasingly important in shaping China's encounters with global sensibilities, funds, and projects. The author builds on scholarship that approaches China as a transnational entity and examines the emerging politics of the environment in China. Based on an ethnographic case study of a conservation and development project in Yunnan Province, the paper argues against conceptions that international development agendas can be unilaterally imposed. Rather, it suggests that in order to gain traction, agendas require a variety of agents. These agents create convergences through forms of “transnational work,” by and through particular social engagements. Finally, this paper reveals how such convergences remain tenuous and fleeting, and can be quickly dissolved when one side or another changes its orientation.

A renaissance in literature and art took place in the People's Republic of China from the late 1970s through the 1980s. In poetry, the outburst of vitality first showed itself in 1978–80 in the underground Today (Jintian) group, which included cofounders and editors Bei Dao (b. 1949) and Mang Ke (b. 1951), and such contributors as Jiang He (b. 1949), Shu Ting (b. 1952), Gu Cheng (1956–93), and Yang Lian (b. 1955), to name only a few of the best-known in the West. Today lent momentum to the flourish of Menglongshi, commonly translated as “Obscure Poetry” or “Misty Poetry,” in the early 1980s and became the major source of inspiration—no less than the target of criticism and revolt—to post-Menglong poetry in the second half of the decade. Like Menglongsbi, post-Menglong poetry is a term of inevitable, even misleading, simplification, since it refers to a wide range of varying styles and modes of writing. Rather than being unified by a set of formal and stylistic characteristics, it is marked by a radical openness to experimentation. The multiplicity of experiments in poetry since the mid-1980s may be more broadly and appropriately referred to as avant-garde poetry or experimental poetry (Yeh 1992). This paper will focus on an interesting—and unique in today's world—phenomenon that I call the “cult of poetry.” I will first examine the “cult” by defining its salient features and then present a critical analysis of the diverse historical and psychological forces that contribute to such a literary phenomenon.

Karl Marx is responsible for the famous if inaccurate dictum that while previous philosophers had been interested in explaining the world, he was interested in changing it. Yet the fact remains that Marx was passionately interested in explaining the world. The drive to explain is presumably intimately bound up with the drive to change and yet one cannot help but feel that as Marx becomes involved in some of the more complex problems of social history the desire to explain often becomes for a time at least the overriding end.

The author of this article examines the role of Sinhalese Buddhist deities within the long Sinhalese tradition of using Buddhism to support political authority. Extensive contemporary information on deity territories suggests that because state political integration involves territorial integration localized deities have both reflected and been used to bring about an integration of local people into state administrative structures. However, this integration is not brought about by having the territories of the deities parallel administrative units (which they do not); it is brought about by having people think that they do, think that the territories of the gods correspond level by level to the administrative villages, districts, and provinces. As the relationship between these levels and the state has changed historically, that is, when center-hinterland integration has gone from strong to weak to strong again, people's understanding of the pantheon appears to have changed as well.

Nonalignment today is a protean international phenomenon, accommodating a host of national impulses and identities. This paper, however, is chiefly concerned with this phenomenon as it was nurtured on Indian soil: it seeks to interpret India's nonalignment by probing its rationale as a security policy during the Nehru years.

The pages that follow attempt to answer two questions: (1) why was it that the issue of India's security evoked a particular type of response which came to be identified as nonalignment; and (2) what were the peculiar characteristics of this identity?

“In the city,” says carl schorske, writing of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, “… the truth of industrial and commercial society had to be screened in the decent draperies of pre-industrial artistic styles. Science and law were modern truth, but beauty came from history” (1981, 45). Quotations from the past were equally the mark of architectural styles that were forged in colonial and postcolonial societies, as history became a resource for defining new ideals of beauty. If the retreat into (classical European) history was a striking feature of public architecture in colonial India (Evenson 1989, 99–109), an attempt to command a long and respectable lineage of authority equally marked the efforts of Indian nationalists in the early post-independence period.

As katherine verdery notes, dead bodies have had political lives in virtually every civilization since antiquity. They frequently emerge as powerful metaphors of change, especially after a time of crisis when the meaning of political symbols is redefined. This is vividly exemplified by what happened to the exhumed bodies of various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia (Verdery 1999, 1–22). Postwar discourse is another site in which dead bodies frequently emerge as metaphors. Some of the most unforgettable sights concerning World War II are pictures of huge piles of exhumed human bodies from the mass graves of Jews. We know that these are not skeletons of those who have died natural deaths because these images have often been shown along with the pictures of inmates of the concentration and death camps, emaciated to the point of nonrecognition as living human beings. Through this process, the pictures have acquired an independent status as encoded language: they signify unbelievable evil committed against humanity, and they display the moral weakness of the rest of humanity that failed to resist and end such atrocities.

This article identifies a major transformation in India's approach to strategic technology development from an earlier Commission model, epitomized by atomic energy, that seeks the enhancement of sovereign power, to a Mission model, epitomized by telecommunications, directed toward the furthering of biopolitical power. It compares five strategic industries in India—atomic energy, space, electronics, biotechnology and telecommunications—and shows that no single factor is responsible for technological success or failure. Outcomes depend on the strength of political networks, the structure and maturity of the industry, the extent of bureaucratic resistance, and the technological strategy adopted. This finding contests the widely held perspective that success in strategic technology development is the product of the extraordinary efforts of a single individual, a technology “czar,” and explains the persistence of this narrative by highlighting the role of technoscience in mediating a highly ambivalent relation between the Indian middle class and the state.

Tracing the entangled genealogies of spaces of media spectatorship, modes of visual perception, and practices of capitalist consumption, this article explores how the shift in Manila's main commercial street from Calle Escolta in the 1930s to Avenida Rizal in the 1960s reveals changes in the imagination and experience of capitalism and modernity. Previously embodied in the infrastructure, architecture, and technology of the cityscape, which only government and business were perceived as having the capacity to produce, modernity became reconfigured as a dynamic force that ordinary residents came to believe they could harness. The article comparatively analyzes variations and dissonances in the print and audiovisual media of the two periods, particularly in the contrasting representations of awkward vaudeville comedians and youthful movie antiheroes. Instead of treating consumer and media culture as a source of docility and atomization, it sees the collective spectatorship of mass entertainment as generating the potential for self-transcendence and revolution.

Astrology is a neglected cultural form in the study of South Asian society. It is also one which pays attention to the individual in ways that seem to fly in the face of scholarly understandings of Asian societies as places where individuality has little importance. The ideology of caste, the institution most often taken as an analytical entry to South Asian societies, gathers people into groups on the basis of their gross similarities and fixes a person's condition for life. Astrology treats individuals as distinguished by subtle differences and liable to momentary changes. The paper argues that caste ideology and astrology have a common vocabulary and logic, one which is genealogical and combinatory, and suggests in turn several conclusions about the relationship of individuals and society in South Asian cultures.

An early resolution of a conflict of values is necessary if a missionary religion is to find acceptance in the culture of the receiving society. In East Asia, under the influence of Confucianism, filial piety came to be seen as the principal personal and social moral value, which was to be given visible representation in the performance of ancestral rituals. Christian missions, Catholic and Protestant, faced a conflict between filial piety and ancestral rites on the one hand, and the proscription of the performance of idolatrous rites on the other hand. From the end of the nineteenth century, Korean Protestants have resolved this conflict by developing a Christian ritual that is a substitute for Confucian ancestral rites. Within a century, this rite has become the centerpiece of a complex of Confucian-based Christian death and funerary rituals.

The contested historiography of the 1857 rebellion and its importance in shaping the Indian nationalist imagination make it an excellent entry point into an investigation of nationalist pasts and their archival bases. This paper examines a concatenation of influential narratives of different genres that have become critical sources for a history of the rebel leader Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and for configuring her as an icon of heroic Indian womanhood. It places each of these sources, ranging from late nineteenth-century Marathi texts to mid-twentieth-century Hindi narratives, within their specific spatiotemporal setting and highlights the contradictory regional projects underlying apparently smooth nationalist narratives. Through a close examination of the making of the Lakshmibai archive, the author argues that a consideration of the editorial and textual practices that went into the making of reliable and usable archives for a modern historiography is critical to the unpacking of nationalist historiographies.

Spencer has been called the most widely read and possibly the most in fluential Western social and political thinker in Japan during the 1880's. Between 1877 and 1900, at least thirty-two translations and one critical study of Spencer's works were published, besides many articles in journals and magazines. The writings of John Stuart Mill ranked next in popularity. Other Western thinkers—such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Guizot, Haeckel, T. H. Huxley, Darwin, Bentham, and Bagehot—received much less public attention.