A specter is haunting europe and, indeed, the rest of the world: not, of course the specter of Communism, but of that other big C—Culture. At the 1991 Conference of the International Association of Historians of Asia, Prof. Ying-Shih Yu of Princeton University argued in his keynote address that the most important current trend in historical studies was the recognition of “culture as a relatively autonomous force in history” (Yu 1991, 21). For too long, he suggested, historians have looked at the past through a narrow window shaped by the values of the west, and particularly by the all-powerful western notion of history as the pursuit of “scientific truth.” To break through this constricting frame we need to recognize “that the history of every society or people deserves to be studied not only as a part of world history but also on account of its intrinsic values” (Yu 1991, 26); we need, in other words, to accept Watanabe Hiroshi's notion that every society or region may be “‘particular’ in its own way like an individual” (quoted in Yu 1991, 23).

Following the end of the Second World War, Japanese and foreign scholars eagerly seized upon the concept of fascism as the basis of an analytic framework for explaining what had gone wrong in pre-war Japan and who, if anyone, could be held responsible. The literature on Japanese fascism is, as a result, quite extensive; some of it is richly insightful. The problem with such studies, however, is that fascism has never been satisfactorily defined, either logically or empirically. Recent studies have shown how difficult it is to find a definition that is at once broad enough to encompass the varieties of fascism across time and space and yet concrete enough to illumine distinctive characteristics. In this comment, some of the salient distinguishing features of the Japanese experience are alluded to, and a few important questions which studies of Japanese fascism have failed to address are identified. After nearly forty years' pursuit of the phantom of fascism, the time has come to direct our search toward alternative theoretical concepts which promise to throw new light and fresh perspective on what happened during the twenties and thirties, and why.

Here's a short version: The “-ism” we invoke when we posit things like “Daoism” was glimpsed for the first time by Sima Tan . (d. 110 b.c.e.), lord grand astrologer (taishigong) to the Han court. His essay “Yaozhi” (Essential points), included in the final chapter of his son Sima Qian's Taishigong, analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of six approaches to governance:

Yinyang ,

Ru (known to us as Confucians),

Mo (the Mohists),

Fajia (called Legalists),

Mingjia (called Sophists), and

Daojia (or Daode , the supposed Daoists).

In surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, a multiplicity of meanings is attached to the cult of the Rifa'i saint by different groups of Muslims, such as the holy man (pir) and his family, his lay followers, the Rifa'i faqirs, and the Tablighis (Reform Muslims who are the main opponents of the cult), as well as by Hindus. It is argued that none of these meanings have come to dominate and entirely marginalize the others. This article will describe a local arena in which debate about Muslim ritual practice is largely an “internal” one among Muslims about such Islamic issues as the relation between God and believer and the sources of authoritative knowledge and behavior. The concept of hereditary, saintly power is paramount in shaping the Rifa'i forms of celebration or “playing” on the saint's day. In discourse about Rifa'i ritual, it is contrasted with “praying” to God.

Semicolonialism, as jürgen osterhammel noted, is a label that has been generally applied to China “without much regard for its potential theoretical implications” (Osterhammel 1986, 296). The partial character of semicolonialism—as incomplete colonialism—poses the question of what difference it made that throughout the modern period China never in fact became a subject nation, but retained sovereignty over nearly all of its territory and was recognized as a sovereign nation by international law. The writings of twentieth-century Chinese nationalists and a recent profusion of theorizing about colonialism and “colonial modernity” in China, by emphasizing colonialism (Barlow 1997), have perhaps obscured rather than clarified the answer to this question. Moreover, semicolonialism in China, as a gradual accretion of phenomena associated with imperialism, varied substantially over time. Its significance for understanding nineteenth-century China, when the foreign presence within China was still quite limited, remains unclear. Several decades of research on imperialism in Shanghai have produced much debate, but no clear mapping of “where, when, how and to what effect did which extraneous forces impinge” on Chinese life (Osterhammel 1986, 295).

From the invention of imperial authority along the North-West Frontier of British India, subjects were divided between the “civilized” inhabitants populating the cultivated plains and the “wild tribes” living in the hills. The problem of governing this latter group, the “independent tribes,” proved a vexed one for the British Raj. The mechanism developed by imperial administrators to manage the frontier inhabitants was the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR), first promulgated in 1872 and still in effect today. The FCR was designed to exclude the Frontier's inhabitants from the colonial judiciary, and more broadly the colonial sphere, encapsulating them in their own colonially sanctioned “tradition.” Exploring the use of the FCR as an instrument of governance from its first inception into the twentieth century, this article argues that it was key to shaping the nature of frontier rule, which in turn shaped the very nature of the colonial state itself.

During the period from 1795 to 1850, the East India Company Raj in India viewed forests chiefly as limiting agriculture. In Bengal, forested lands, classified as wastelands, had been included in zamindari (landlord) estates (Ribbentrop 1900, 60). Colonial administrators of this period also tended to perceive forests as being inexhaustible. Much of the woody vegetation, however, was not timber quality, being the product of a landscape long under shifting cultivation. The East India Company continued Indian rulers’ practices of selling blocks of forests or individual trees to timber merchants for a fixed down payment that encouraged great destruction and wastage in their extraction (Stebbing 1922, 35, 61). No attempts to introduce conservancy were made in the North West Provinces (NWP) or Bengal until after the revolt of 1857, even though the value of NWP sal (shorea robusta) forests was known from the time of the Gurkha wars in 1814–16, and the reports of Dr. Wallich, Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens in 1825 (Stebbing 1922, 66–67, 201).

As the ethics of virtue, with a focus on cultivating admirable traits of character instead of commanding adherence to rigid rules, becomes increasingly popular in contemporary moral discourses, scholars have tried to find evidence of virtue ethics in such ancient traditions as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. This article explores the possibility of a virtue ethics in a tradition that has been largely neglected, Chinese Daoism, by focusing on one of the most important classics in this tradition, the Zhuangzi. Contrary to a common misconception of the Zhuangzi as skeptical, relativistic, and therefore empty of any guide to moral life, it presents a solid normative ethics through various stories, and this normative ethics is a virtue ethics. The most important trait of character in this Daoist virtue ethics is respect for different ways of life—a virtue not discussed in any familiar versions of virtue ethics in the West and yet most valuable to contemporary life in a global and pluralistic society.

From the 1960s to the present, scholars of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional literatures and cultures have spelled out their differences with either their Freudian or Foucauldian counterparts on the articulation of love, desire, and embodiment in these literatures (Alter 1997; Benton 2006; Dimock 1966; Doniger 1973; Doniger and Kakar 2002; Kakar 1989; Kakar and Ross 1986; Ramanujan 1981; Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994; Stoler Miller 1977; Sweet 2002; Wujastyk 2005, 2009; Zysk 2002). The subcontinent's textual cultures, they argue, interrogate Freudian notions of human personality as rooted in the “truth” of sexual desire. These scholars placed the study of erotica and the sciences pertaining to human bodies within structures of teaching-learning with very long historical pedigrees.

The vast majority of premodern chinese literature, certainly all of the most famous works of the classical tradition, were composed in one form or another of Literary Sinitic (hereafter LS, wen-yen[-wen], also often somewhat ambiguously called “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese”). Beginning in the medieval period, however, an undercurrent of written Vernacular Sinitic (hereafter VS, pai-hua[-wen]) started to develop. The written vernacular came to full maturity in China only with the May Fourth Movement of 1919, after the final collapse during the 1911 revolution of the dynastic, bureaucratic institutions that had governed China for more than two millennia. It must be pointed out that the difference between wen-yen and pai-hua is at least as great as that between Latin and Italian or between Sanskrit and Hindi. In my estimation, a thorough linguistical analysis would show that unadulterated wen-yen and pure pai-hua are actually far more dissimilar than are Latin and Italian or Sanskrit and Hindi. In fact, I believe that wen-yen and pai-hua belong to wholly different categories of language, the former being a sort of demicryptography largely divorced from speech and the latter sharing a close correspondence with spoken forms of living Sinitic.

If we can clear our minds of “Vietnameseness” as the object of our knowledge and instead look carefully at what the peoples we call Vietnamese were doing at particular times and places, then we begin to see that beneath the veneers of shared fields of sounds and marks, or of however one may refer to mutually intelligible languages and writings, lay quite different kinds of peoples whose views of themselves and of others was significantly grounded in the particular times and terrains where they dwelled and in the material and cultural exchanges available in those times and terrains. If we speak of these peoples as oriented toward the surfaces of their times and places rather than as oriented toward an imagined unifying depth, we will shift the effects of our ideological intent upon the archive away from the figurations both of univocal national narratives and of multivocal regional narratives contextualized by the nation. In this essay, I am interested in how the archive can be read to disperse the coherencies of Vietnamese histories as epistemological or hermeneutical categories, whether they be conceived as national histories or as regional histories. Rather than simply opposing regional histories to a dominant national narrative, I believe that regional and national narratives are “cofigured” in ways similar to how Naoki Sakai has written of desires for Japanese originality in realms of language, literature, and national identity being mimetically cofigured with desires for the West (Sakai 1997, 15-16, 21-22, 51-52). Posing a regional identity does not erase or diminish the potency of a national identity but rather mimetically reinforces it in a schema of cofiguration. I endeavor an orientation toward the surface of time and place as a way of thinking beyond histories of region and nation.

Accounting has been defined as “the art of classifying, recording, and reporting significant financial events to facilitate effective economic activity” (Davidson 1968:14). The description, terse as it is, evokes the image of accounting's role as overseer in the global formation of mercantile and industrial capitalism. According to the historical sociologists Werner Sombart and Max Weber, methodical accounting methods were basic attributes of the development of modern capitalism in the West, and in the West alone. Yet, as Gary Hamilton observes, “uniqueness is a comparative claim, as well as a presumption underlying much historical research” (1985:66–67). In other words, claims of singularity should be redocumented by sound historical comparisons, rather than continually inferred on the basis of conventional wisdom.

Language, culture, and society can be studied from various points of view. Classical Indology and Indian anthropology have different points of departure, but deal sometimes with the same material; the difference in background has generally prevented close collaboration. Classical Indologists tend to look upon Indian anthropologists as mainly interested in almost inaccessible hill tribes, in village superstition, and sometimes in contemporary affairs; moreover a synchronistic bias in methodology has often limited the potential richness of their studies. Anthropologists who study India, on the other hand, are often inclined to view classical Indologists as busy with case endings and etymological derivations, or as discussing obscure and long-forgotten doctrines. Yet neither field has been able to dispense with concepts traditionally handled by the other; for instance, anthropologists talk about language, and classical Indologists about culture. A recent example is the concept of Sanskritization, introduced by anthropologists with obvious reference to Sanskrit, the language to which the main attention of classical Indologists has always been directed. As a student of Sanskrit and classical Indology, I offer some reflections on Sanskritization with the hope that I am not altogether blind to the problems occupying anthropologists.

Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” of European imperial powers. This analysis deploys the alternative lens of grid electricity—the great macro-technology of the twentieth century—to reevaluate the dynamics of the Anthropocene outside the Anglozone. Histories of Asian electrification refute the notion of any simple relationship between colonialism and fossil capitalism. Instead, they point towards a postcolonial trend of fossil developmentalism. Especially in the context of late development, energy expansion became a state-led moral project. Cutting against fossil capitalism's logic of commodification, electricity provision was increasingly conceptualized as a national good and an entitlement, even if one honored in the breach. This trend transcended the distinction between market and planned economies, and extended beyond formal democracies. The (partial) democratization of consumption brought by fossil developmentalism is the hallmark of the “Great Acceleration” in human impacts on the environment since 1950.

Much attention has been focused on the recrudescence of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s. The PRC government generally denies, but occasionally defends, the existence of nationalism within China (Xi 1996). Many Chinese scholars acknowledge the phenomenon and debate its impact, with most evincing a positive attitude toward nationalism (Zhang Xudong 1997; Xiao 1997; Sheng 1996; Wen 1996; Li 1995). Outside the PRC, Chinese nationalism is increasingly scrutinized (Zhao 1997; Zhu 1997, Gries 1999). Some hold that it is rational and manageable (Nathan and Ross 1997; Metzger and Myers 1998; Zheng 1999), while others speak in more premonitory tones (Chang 1998; Su 1997; Mosher 2000). All conclude that it is statesponsored, popular, and fills an “ideological vacuum” left by the waning of socialism (see, for example, Oksenberg 1997; Christensen 1996).

Popular south Indian cinema is a highly melodramatic entertainment form, plotted around improbable twists of fate and set in exaggerated locales, filled with songs, dances, and fight scenes. Patronized primarily by the poor, it is typically dismissed by critics, who find its vast popularity either bemusing or indicative of viewers moral and intellectual degradation. Even more confounding for many observers has been cinema's critical role in state and national politics.

For architects of citizenship and nationhood, there is no shortage of conflicts and wars from which to build modern myths about submerging individual suffering and loss to greater causes. The grief, anger, and despair of individuals can be integrated over time into collectively shared assumptions about the indebtedness of the living to their heroic compatriots and ancestors. To remember these conflicts and those who (depending on the political context) either “lost” or “gave” their lives has been throughout recent history a vital act of citizenship, both “affirming the community at large and asserting its moral character” (Winter 1995, 85). Certainly from an American perspective, national identity remains “inexorably intertwined with the commemoration and memory of past wars” (Piehler 1995, 3). This observation applies even more intensely elsewhere in the world (e.g., Russia, China, France, Japan) where the loss of combatant and civilian life has been far greater.

In the literature on the process of socioeconomic transformation, a major debate centers on the questions of how and how much indigenous traditions, including kinship structures, are transformed by the larger political economic framework (Sahlins 1985, Hobsbawm 1983, Wolf 1982). Marxist theoretical analyses tend to emphasize the eventual demise of gender inequality and male-oriented (patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical) kinship systems—kinship systems within which gender relations are also embedded (cf. Engels 1972). The analytical literature on Vietnamese kinship and gender in the socialist era is certainly not an exception in this regard. It is pervaded with general propositions regarding the nuclearization of the family (Houtart and Lemercinier 1981, Werner 1981) and the political-economy-based transformation of the system toward a structure of egalitarian gender relations (e.g., Lê thḷ Nhâm-Tuyêt 1973).

Beliefs about ritual purity and ritual impurity form some of the most all-pervasive themes in Hindu culture. They are the basis of “orthoprax” Brahmanism in that only a ritually pure individual may approach the higher gods. Brahmanic concepts concerning pollution relate the Indian system of social stratification to the Hindu religious system. These concepts are applied to matters of personal conduct, health, and justice, and are fundamental to such well-known aspects of Indian culture as untouchability, limited access to wells, and the setting apart of a priestly caste. One of the important rationales for caste separatism (their refusal to intermarry, eat with one another, or touch one another) is that some castes are more ritually pure than others, and that impurity may be transmitted from one caste to another through these acts. But on the other hand, castes are also brought together and integrated into a system of ritual interdependence by the belief that they differ in the degree to which they are ritually pure or impure. Some actions are thought to be ritually too defiling for certain castes to perform, and some castes are thought to be too impure to perform certain other activities. These beliefs are basic to the concept of a division of labor by castes and to the ideal that each caste plays a part in a larger mutually interdependent system.