For the authors of these papers, as is true for many of us, there is a special urgency associated with the acceleration of environmental degradation and its negative impact on individual human lives to which we bear witness in Asia and elsewhere. While truly “natural” disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis are strikingly devastating, it is the destruction of environments from anthropogenic sources that are often the most frustrating. That is, we believe that because human beings caused the problems, we should be able to fix them, and, indeed, as humanists it is axiomatic that we are committed to improving the human condition. Over the past few decades, however, there has been a growing awareness that human interaction with the natural environment may be creating a world, for the most part, unfit for human habitation. It is out of this awareness that the term “Anthropocene” has emerged, describing that epoch during which human activity has reached such a level of intensity that it has had a discernable impact on the earth itself. Thus, as these writers suggest, it is imperative for us as regional specialists to engage in conversations across disciplines and geographic areas that provide opportunities to increase our understanding of the Anthropocene in Asia in all of its local and global dimensions.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the geography classroom as a crucible of nationalist ideology. In the past decade, scholars from around the world have exposed the chauvinism of national atlases (Black 1997; Fahlbusch, Rossler, and Siegrist 1989), assessed the citizenship models implicit in social-studies readers (Bailly 1998; Soysal 1998), traced the institutional linkages between geography and imperialism (Bell, Butlin, and Heffernan 1995; Godlewska and Smith 1994; Livingstone 1992), and explored the role of spatial images and metaphors in shaping national identities (Hooson 1994; Thongchai 1994).

The non-cooperation movement of 1920–1922 was a significant landmark in the development of nation-wide political activities by the Indian National Congress. At the same time, because it took place within very different regional contexts, the nature of the movement and the response which it provoked derived a good deal from regional ingredients. In the United Provinces (the present day Uttar Pradesh), an agricultural region with a largely rural population, it was the agrarian system which molded the character of the non-cooperation and “anti-non-cooperation” movements. Non-cooperation there coincided with unrest among the peasantry and, for a time at least, it assumed the appearance of a revolutionary upsurge. The British Government of the province, therefore, had to meet this revolutionary movement as well as the Congress-led political movement. The Government turned to the landed aristocracy, whose influence in the countryside it had depended upon in the past, to provide the basis for an anti-revolutionary front. Initially, then, the non-cooperation movement served to refurbish the province's traditional landlord-based political system. It went further, however; and at one stage it appeared likely that the moderate-nationalist politicians, usually critical of the government, would be prepared to ally themselves with both the government and the landlords because of their concern over the dangers of revolution within the province. “Anti-non-cooperation,” it seemed, might create a new use for traditional methods of political control, as well as the source of important new lines of political development in the province. It is the creation of this situation, and its working out within the framework of the Government's efforts to counter both revolution and disorder, which is traced here.

Put simply, hair and clothing make a difference. To phrase the matter another way, the presence of these material and visual forms, or alternatively their absence from the human body, embodies potent cultural meanings and has concrete effects in the social world. To be sure, more-hidden body parts may lurk below the surface that signal our membership in certain social categories—gender, to give a prime example. In practical terms, however, when we see strangers walking toward us from a distance, we are in the habit of assuming they are a man or a woman not because we have observed their genitalia (it would be strange indeed if that were the case) but rather because we recognize and extract meaning from a more readily visible set of identity markers—primarily clothing-related (sartorial) and hair-related (tonsorial)—whose semiotic rules must be learned culturally and which vary across space and time.

Embedded in early twentieth-century discourses on modernity, feminism, and nationalism, and written for the newly emerging woman reader, Rameshwari Nehru's Hindi account of Burmese women was an experiment in ethnographic writing. Along with the speeches she delivered in Burma (all reprinted in the Hindi women's periodical Stri Darpan), she also used the ethnography to call for the social and political mobilization of Burmese and Indian women. Nehru revisited the relationship between India and Burma in the gendered and elite terms of Indian (mostly Hindu) nationalism and social feminism. In describing a supposed intact social structure found in Burma, her motive was to portray a woman subject that was not modeled on prevalent conceptions of “the Western woman,” but that originated in the neighborhood of the colonial present. In the process, as this paper argues, Nehru appropriated colonial discourses on Indian and Burmese womanhood, while she also absorbed Burma into her vision of Indian nationhood and imagined sisterhood.

Drawing on archival sources in Britain, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States, this article explores late-colonial anxieties about the influence of Chinese nationalism in Malaya (and especially among students in Chinese-medium schools) in the lead up to self-government in 1957. It demonstrates that the colonial fear of communism in Malaya was not always synonymous with the fear of cultural influence from “new China” and that the “rise of China” in the mid-1950s was viewed as a challenge to colonially sanctioned programs for “Malayanization.” More importantly, in exploring some of the ways in which the colonial state mobilized anti-communist cultural workers from Hong Kong to help counter the perceived threat from China, the article argues that more focus should be placed on the role of colonial agency in shaping “Sinophone” cultural expression in Southeast Asia during this period.

This article explores the contradictory history of lower castes converting out of Hinduism yet not out of lowliness or casteism in early twentieth-century Panjab. It begins by contextualizing what B. R. Ambedkar's undelivered 1936 Lahore speech on annihilating caste might have meant to an audience of largely landless agricultural laborers. Next it examines the changing constellation of caste names and occupational designations for these groups amid the emergence of the Ad Dharm movement and its struggle to impart equality, dignity, and community to Panjabi Dalits. To situate this new sense of identity in the context of actual labor practices, the article then analyzes the fraught relationship between landholding cultivators and landless laborers working side-by-side while continuing to be separate and unequal. That a large proportion of lower castes could adopt religions other than Hinduism or even start their own and yet remain excluded and exploited reveals the limits of a politics centered on conversion, as well as a different horizon for emancipation.

Sun Yat-sen is well known as the founder of the Hsing-chung hui (Revive China Society), but few realize the significant role played by Yang Ch'ü-yün who, for almost five years, was the first chairman of that revolutionary organization. According to one source, it was Yang who insisted on the establishment of a republican government in what is now known as the “first revolutionary attempt of Sun Yat-sen.” This article is a study of the interplay of their leadership and the Chinese revolutionary movement from 1895 to 1900.

The scholarly narrative of spoken Chinese studies in Tokugawa Japan is dominated by Ogyū Sorai, who founded a translation society in 1711 and urged Japanese intellectuals to learn contemporary spoken Chinese in order to draw closer to the language of the Chinese classics. This article explores the decades prior to this, when Sorai served the powerful daimyo Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. By investigating Yoshiyasu's contact with Chinese monks and the surprising but previously untested claim that he could understand spoken Chinese, I explore the cultivation of spoken Chinese learning and the patronage of Chinese émigrés by members of Japan’s warrior elite in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Prior to the scholarly interest in vernacular Chinese and the popularity of Ming and Qing literature in Japan from the Kyōhō period (1716–35) onwards, Chinese orality served as a tangible link to the Chinese tradition for Yoshiyasu and other powerful daimyo, functioning as a sign of their fitness for power in East Asia.

In the Japanese empire in 1938, an imperial-language theatrical adaptation of a folktale from colonial Korea, The Tale of Spring Fragrance (Ch'unhyang chŏn) opened to rave reviews in major metropolitan cities throughout Japan. The performance's popularity ignited an encore run later the same year throughout colonial Korea. The play was commissioned by Murayama Tomoyoshi and his Shinkyō Theater Troupe in Japan. The script was penned in Japanese by Chang Hyǒkchu, a bilingual writer from the colony. This article examines a forgotten moment of colonial “collaboration” between Korea and Japan when the two countries’ literary histories converged in a widely publicized performance across the empire. By reading the tensions between parallel yet unbridgeable nostalgic desires between Japan and Korea, and measuring the gap between the consumption of the tale as trendy “colonial kitsch” and timeless “national tradition,” the performance can be read not as the embodiment of harmonious imperial assimilation as touted at the time, but as performing its anxieties and breakdown. This article further considers the significance of the failed collaboration and translation across colonial divides for postcolonial relations.

In order to understand the current crisis in native affairs on Guam we need some knowledge of the changes that have taken place on the island since its discovery by Magellan in 1521. In the four centuries which have elapsed since discovery this small island of only 225 square miles has been the meeting place of many diverse influences from the Old World, the Americas, the Orient and the Pacific. It became a port of call for early European trans-Pacific voyagers, for the Manila galleon, and for whalers in the nineteenth century. Thus, due to certain accidents of history, we have been able to assemble a documented account of culture history and change on Guam across several hundred years, and this record is fraught with meaning as regards current problems on the island.

There has always been a sizeable gap between public and national interests and needs and the capacities of a society's educational system to respond adequately thereto. Both teaching and scholarship are by their very nature conserving disciplines heavily involved with the preservation, elaboration, and passing on of a heritage of experience and knowledge acquired over great lengths of time. When one considers the degree to which our own national intellectual heritage is derived from the classical and Judaeo-Christian traditions, therefore, it is not at all surprising that our educational system should be profoundly Eurocentric in both form and content. But if it should persist in so confining a bias at a time when the central tendencies of the major technological, economic, and political developments of the past several centuries have been the compacting of global space, the convergence of cultures, and the emergence to positions of increasing salience and importance of an ever-expanding array of non-Western people, states, and interests, is this not cause for serious national concern?

When the Taiping Rebellion broke out in 1850, Tseng Kuo-fan (1811–1872) had been residing in Peking for more than a decade. He earned a distinguished scholarly reputation as a member of the Hanlin Academy, and between 1847 and 1852 he was a high official of the metropolitan administration; he was Acting Senior Vice-president of the Board of Civil Appointments when he left the capital in 1852. Particularly in the three years 1850–1852, his official duties gave him many opportunities to express himself on the urgent problems of his time. While Tseng's later career is well known and while studies have been done on his scholarship and philosophy, his early political ideas have so far not been analyzed in detail. Yet surely Tseng's views on government before he became involved in the campaigns against the Taiping Rebellion would have a bearing on his remarkable performance as military and administrative leader after he became so involved.

It should be emphasized at the outset that Georges Dumézil does not consider himself to be a social theorist of any sort, least of all a “structuralist.” Indeed, his opinion of the structuralist movement, to say nothing of the extent to which others have attempted to associate him with the origin and development of that movement, is less than enthusiastic; and in the Introduction to Mythe et épopée III he has explicitly denied any connection whatsoever with structuralism per se and, implicitly, with the theories and methods of the leader of the movement, Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Depuis quelques années, le mot “structure” est devenu ambigu. Tout en gardant sa valeur précise, ancienne—lorsqu'il est question, par exemple, de la structure d'une démonstration, d'un roman, d'un État—, il a pris un emploi technique beaucoup plus ambitieux dans un système philosophique aujourd'hui fort en vogue, auquel il a même donné son nom.