Marx's writings on Asia do not bulk large in the corpus of work he published in his lifetime: several articles for Charles Dana's Daily Tribune; scattered references in his Critique of Political Economy, Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value; and (more precise and analytic than the aforementioned) the statements in the Grundrisse. Obviously, his overriding interest lay in the description of capitalist society in western Europe. Nevertheless, what he studied about Asia significantly affected his understanding of capitalism, communism, and dialectical naturalism. Though he never wrote in an extended manner on Asia, the Orient was implicitly present in, and had profound influence on, his western-centered scholarly work. It is impossible to grasp the central meaning of communism and the dialectic without comprehending Marx's attitude toward Asiatic history. Failure to correctly appreciate Marx's writing on Asia has led many scholars to distortions in their evaluations of Marx and their projections about a communist society. Karl Wittfogel is a case in point; because he misconstrued what Marx thought of Asia, he was led to make invalid judgments about the nature of communism and the course of communist revolution in the twentieth century.

The Chinese are changing,” we heard this said many times even before the last war. Numerous books, mainly popular in nature, have been written on this very theme. Most of us often fail to realize that it is largely an assumption. Unlike other assumptions about the Chinese it has, however, rarely been seriously questioned. To what extent have the Chinese changed? What are the most important factors responsible for their change? What are some of the directions of their change? These and other questions have been variously asked, but have usually been given answers so full of generality that few students of science found them useful.

This article examines the emergence of a new emphasis on contemporary specialized knowledge in sixteenth-century China. During this period, sources of authority such as antiquity and the court came to lose their elevated status. As a result, scholars increasingly saw the expertise of a contemporary disciplinary community as a superior standard for validating knowledge. This trend appeared in scholarly collaboration and the citation of contemporaries, as well as new kinds of paratextual materials such as lists of works cited and literature reviews. These findings on new intellectual communities in the sixteenth century call for a reassessment of the better-documented shifts in East Asian intellectual culture from the mid-eighteenth century to the present.

In early 2013, India's then comptroller and auditor general (CAG), Vinod Rai, while delivering a speech at Harvard University's Kennedy School, wondered whether his office should be confined to being “mere accountants.” That this question could be raised in a public forum, and that too outside India, spoke to the transformation in recent times of Rai's stature and the office that he held. The winds of change were reflected in the Indian Supreme Court's rejection in 2013 of a public interest litigation challenging the authority of the auditor general, who is a constitutional authority, to conduct performance audits of the government. Significantly, the Court ruled, the “CAG is not a munim [accountant] to go into the balance-sheets. The CAG is a constitutional authority entitled to review and conduct performance audit on revenue allocations . . . and examine matters relating to the economy and how the government uses its resources.”

Historicalscholarship in postwar Japan has exhibited a renewed interest in the origins of dynastic rule in Yamato, and the process leading to the establishment of the Yamato rulers as sovereigns of an imperial polity in the seventh century. New theories of dynastic origins have led to new controversies, and many of the most basic assuptions of prewar historians are now being abandoned. Among these, the previously sacrosanct idea of unbroken dynastic continuity, usually expressed by the slogan bansei ikkei, has been effectively challenged. This idea, an important element of state ritual from the seventh century onward, does not antedate that century. It follows that during the previous three hundred years, which witnessed the successive establishment of at least three different dynastic regimes in Yamato, the prevailing political structures and ideologies differed radically from those represented in the traditional histories, which were not completed until the early eighth century. The bases of royal legitimacy and the nature of the kingship itself very probably changed drastically in the process of development.

Since the Communist Chinese take-over of Tibet, climaxed by the Tibetan revolt and the subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama, increased interest in that land and its culture has called attention to the meagerness of information concerning details of Tibetan daily life, economy, and politics. In a series of interviews widi members of the Sakya ruling house undertaken by the authors, it has been possible to secure considerable data concerning die administration of what is perhaps Tibet's most ambitious irrigation project, and the role the Sakya government played in that administration.

Louis Dumont has the unique advantage of combining field experience, large ideas, and a basic knowledge of Sanskrit. The patience to master a difficult archaic language, no longer the spoken vehicle of current thoughts in any defined society, is very rare in a scholar devoted to analysis of actual social groups, real people. Dumont is the only person to acquaint himself with traditional societies in India and with the cultural continuity within which they, and their neighbors, are intelligible as a unit. The large and daunting literate past of India is open to him; and there are few who can compete with this combination of skills. Nevertheless his study of the relationship between king and brahmin in traditional and (so far as is relevant) modern Indian society—a study found principally in one essay—impressed me in two ways, which, in association, did not sustain admiration. His ideas need to be placed alongside another interpretation of the facts, in order that a clearer perspective may be obtained. It is not the case that his reading of archaic and ambiguous materials is wrong; we do not yet know enough about the history of India to say that. But there is a real chance that the talent to generalize from the particular (which is one of the strengths of anthropologists) has here run a little ahead of itself. My aim is not to discourage the use of Sanskritic materials, still less to imply that there are “real experts” in competition with whom the anthropologist who emulates Dumont's efforts must remain silent. I value the stimulus Dumont's ideas have offered; and I know they will continue to excite response and encourage further research, even when they arouse suspicion. Let us attempt a new evaluation of the facts, and set that beside Dumont's findings.

In november 1841 a young Englishman named Thomas Taylor Meadows, who had spent some three years studying chemistry and mathematics in Germany, happened to attend Professor Karl Friedrich Neumann's lectures on the Chinese language at the University of Munich. The young man “almost immediately gave up every other study” and prepared for the British service in China. Hardly more than a year later, at the beginning of 1843, Meadows arrived at the new crown colony of Hongkong. When George Tradescant Lay opened the first British consulate at Canton on July 23, Meadows was Senior Assistant and a year later became Interpreter. This made him, in modern parlance, the chief British intelligence officer at the leading treaty port. After a stretch of seven and one-half years at Canton, during which he reported the beginning in Kwangsi of the great domestic uprising later known as the Taiping Rebellion, Meadows became Interpreter at Shanghai (Jan. 1, 1852), and by the time the Taiping horde erupted down the Yangtze from Wuhan to Nanking in early 1853, he was well prepared to study them at first hand.

There has been much speculation as to the degree to which the Indonesian revolt reflects Japanese war-time propaganda. There has been much less mention in this connection of the one and a quarter million Chinese residents in the Indies. Yet, ten years ago many Netherlands colonial officials regarded this community as a fecund source of discontent. They were not altogether inconsistent when they complained, on the one hand, of Chinese “imperialism” and, on the other, of Chinese communism. Evidence of the former they saw, more especially, in the activities of the Chinese Bureau for Overseas Affairs in Nanking. These activities were intended, of course, to strengthen the loyalty of nationals abroad and to give them that protection of the motherland which they had been lacking for centuries. But it was inevitable that they should reflect, and to some extent feed, the resentment over the discriminations experienced by these nationals in every part of the Nan Yang (South Seas). The pamphlets distributed in the 'thirties by the Bureau harped on the “unequal treatment” of Chinese abroad, on the cruelty of many of the immigration laws–including those of the Indies. They did not go in for theoretical discussions and did not advocate socialism. Neither did the textbooks used in many Chinese schools or the subsidized Chinese newspapers, though some of the Shanghai-trained teachers may have been communists.

Louis Charles Jean Dumont has been Directeur d'Etudes in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris since 1955. From 1951 until 1955 he was Lecturer in Indian Sociology at the University of Oxford. He began field research in India—among a single Tamil-speaking caste—in 1949, when the post-war generation of Anglo-American anthropologists was undertaking fieldwork on Indian villages. He had been trained in indology, Sanskrit and Dravidian studies; reared in the heritage of French sociology descended from Emile Durkheim through Marcel Mauss; and influenced by those intellectual currents that later took the name of structuralism. Thus, his perspective on India was different from that of his colleagues in the English-speaking world, and the results of his research were initially puzzling to them. There is no doubt that his work is now increasingly well understood outside France, especially since the appearance in 1970 of an English translation of his Homo Hierarchies: An Essay on the Caste System, originally published in 1967 in Paris. However, a great deal of uncertainty about the meaning and significance of much of what Dumont has written continues to be expressed in both anthropology and Asian studies. This symposium was organized in the hope that aspects of his thought might be clarified for a wide scholarly audience and some assessment made of his contribution to comparative sociology.