It is remarkable how few commentators or analysts raised the alarm before the great financial crash of 2008. One who did was a journalist for the Financial Times called Gillian Tett. It may be germane to the understanding of why Gillian Tett perceived dangers in the reckless behavior of bankers that her colleagues did not, that she was educated not as an economist, but as a social anthropologist. In the course of earning her PhD in social anthropology, Tett spent a year milking goats in Tajikistan, an experience she insists helped her to understand the behavior of the bankers and other financial actors, and to predict the crisis, to widespread derision and hostility from bankers and treasury officials, two years before it happened.

Chin Yao-Chi (Ambrose Y. C. King) is internationally known for the knowledgeability and fluency with which he uses many of the perspectives of Western social science to discuss Chinese culture, modern Chinese history, and current developments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Born in 1935, growing up in Shanghai, he obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh and today is Professor of Sociology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His life, however, has also been rooted in Taiwan, where he lived for many years after the fall of the mainland, and where he obtained both his B.A. and M.A. degrees. Long before the promise of the Republic of China's development became obvious, at least as early as 1966, he recognized it, astutely introduced Western modernization theory to analyze it, understood that pursuing it required not iconoclasm but a process of critically and creatively building on the inherited culture, and widely influenced Taiwan intellectuals as they tried to make sense out of their complicated, often distressing situation (Chin 1979, 1987, 1991). The publication of eleven of his articles written during the last decade (a few originally in English) by Oxford University Press (Chin 1992) rightly indicates that his views about Chinese modernization should be weighed by all those around the world concerned with this issue, not just by small scholarly circles. Yet just how insightful are his views? To what extent are they shaped by premises that have commonly informed much modern Chinese thought, and that many Western scholars could not easily accept? To what extent has Professor Chin himself “self-consciously” (tzu-chueh) identified any such premises and pondered their viability?

In a long series of important and stimulating publications Georges Dumézil has for almost half a century not only re-established a complex of theories with regard to the comparative study of ancient Indo-European mythology, but also applied a modernized comparative method. In investigating the foundations of the Indo-European socio-religious conceptions he bases his arguments and conclusions, it is true, to a certain extent on linguistic data, but these are always amplified and corroborated by a thorough consideration of the social structure, religious beliefs and ritual institutions of the ancient Indians, Romans, Germans, Celts and Greeks. Especially these last thirty-five years his work is of great originality in that he has founded and developed the theory of the trois fonctions, of the “three fundamental activities which the groups of priests, warriors and producers must fulfil and assure in order to maintain their community”. In this theory it is not the tripartite social organization of the prehistoric Indo-Europeans that is emphasized, but the principle of classification, the ideology to which, in Dumézil's opinion, this organization has given rise. Being reflected in the groupings of, and mutual relations between, the divine powers and in the very structure of Indo-European mythology and view of the world it is here again the ideological rather than the strictly sociological aspects that invite the reader's attention.

This article examines the early development of South Korean intercountry adoption to Sweden. It focuses particularly on two disruptions in the movement of children between the two nations, drawing on archival sources in Sweden, South Korea, and Denmark. The article demonstrates that South Korean–Swedish adoption was deeply bound up in the shifting Cold War relations within and between the Korean peninsula and Scandinavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Further, state actions and strategies during this time reveal that both governments actively utilized their Cold War foreign policy and positionality to shape adoption to meet their respective national interests. This study extends US-centered adoption scholarship by revealing broader implications of Cold War geopolitics in cross-border adoptions to Scandinavia and, more importantly, significant ways in which intercountry adoption challenged, altered, and constituted the Cold War relations and nation-building projects of both sending and receiving states.

What is the catalytic element that brings about widespread participation in a mass campaign? Is it ideology? Self-interest? Emotional states of fear, hatred, or love? Taking into account the recent proliferation of sound studies approaches to the history of the People's Republic of China, this article explores this question through the sonic experience of the campaign. Previous studies of the soundscapes of the Mao era have focused upon state initiatives of sound-borne propaganda and their role in the transmission of revolutionary ideas. Using a case study of the Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist campaigns of 1956–58, I examine the reception of such propaganda with a focus on silence, sound, and voice and their affective qualities. Through the use of diaries, memoirs, contemporary newspapers, and interviews, I explore the extra-linguistic aspects of the campaign to ask what, outside of revolutionary words and emotions, brought the subjects of a campaign from silence to vocal participation.

The New Right movement that arose in the early 2000s in South Korea was a response to a change in ownership of Korean nationalist discourse during the preceding decades. Although nationalism was the preserve of the South Korean right wing from the trusteeship crisis in 1945 through the end of the Park Chung Hee regime, a historiographical revolt in the 1980s that emphasized the historical illegitimacy of the South Korean state allowed the Left to appropriate nationalism. With the loss of nationalism from its arsenal, the Right turned to postnationalist neoliberal discourse to blunt the effectiveness of leftist nationalist rhetoric. An examination of New Right historiography on the colonial and postliberation periods, however, shows that despite the recent change in conservatives’ stance on nationalism, a preoccupation with the legitimacy of the South Korean state remains at the center of right-wing historical narratives. The New Right represents old wine in new bottles.

This article analyzes interactions among the early twentieth-century Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds. The author first develops a general conceptualization of intra–East Asian literary contact nebulae. These were the ambiguous spaces, both physical and creative, where imperial Japanese, semicolonial Chinese, and colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers interacted with one another and transculturated (i.e., discussed, translated, and intertextualized) one another's writings. Among the most intriguing literary contact nebulae are Chinese and Korean transculturations of censored Japanese literature. The second half of the article explores two key examples of this phenomenon: colonial Korean translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Nakano Shigeharu's poem “Ame no furu Shinagawa eki” (Shinagawa Station in the Rain, February 1929) and wartime Chinese translation and intertextualization of the Japanese writer Ishikawa Tatsuzō's novella “Ikiteiru heitai” (Living Soldiers, March 1938). These transculturations embody multifaceted amalgams of (semi)colonial literary collaboration, acquiescence, and resistance vis-à-vis metropolitan imperial and cultural authority.

History, it seems, has to attain a degree of scientificity, resident in the truth-value of its narrative, before it can be called history, as distinguished from the purely literary or political. Invoking the work of Jacques Rancière and Hayden White, this essay investigates the manner in which history becomes a science through a detour that gives speech a regime of truth. It does this by exploring the nineteenth-century relationship of history to poetry and to truth in the context of the emerging discipline of history in Bengal. The question is discussed in relation to a patriotic poem, Palashir Yuddha (1875), accused of ahistoricality, as well as to a defense made by Bengal's first professional historian, Jadunath Sarkar, against a similar charge in the context of Bankimchandra Chatterjee's historical novels. That the relationship of creativity to history is a continuing preoccupation for the historian is finally explored through Ranajit Guha's invocation of Tagore in History at the Limit of World-History (2002).