This essay is an exploration of one aspect of the politics of gender representation in Thailand, namely, how the portrayals of Siamese women in Thai popular histories form part of the present-day shaping of gender relations. I argue that moving in tandem with developments in academic historiography, popular history since the 1980s has become a battleground for cultural hegemony.

Hitherto the preserve of antiquarians, popular history has caught the interest of the emergent middle class, who are intent on inscribing their reading of the past on the Thai cultural landscape. Where gender relations are concerned, the middle class has worked out a modern rationale for the traditional view that women are subordinate to men. However, critical scholars, alert to what they see as the perpetuation of the historical subordination of women through the medium of popular history, have sought to stem the tide by addressing their critiques of the middle-class interpretations to a popular audience.

The intensity of cultural investment that South Asian societies have channeled into their languages and literatures, whether gauged in a globally comparative perspective or in absolute terms, is truly remarkable. The intellectual energies poured into linguistic and aesthetic expositions, the assiduous maintenance and temporal depth of written and oral traditions, or the complexity and consequence of sociolinguistic relations, both locally and in interactions of regional diversity, would each suffice on its own to underscore South Asia's marked preoccupation with language. Their combined effect, however, has at times produced a civilizational sphere whose very self-definition rested with foundational claims to achievement in language. Yet despite the richness of this linguistic and literary history (or, perhaps, because of it), relatively few studies combine substantive textual analyses with theoretical agenda adequate to a treatment of the multiplex roles and articulations of specific languages and their interactions in the constitution of particular South Asian societies.

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.

In the industrialized democratic world, broadcasting news monopolies and oligopolies have all but disappeared. Whereas public broadcasters in Western Europe in the earlier postwar period had a monopoly or duopoly on televised news, today there is a more diverse market with competition from other public and commercial broadcasters, often carried by new technology such as satellites. In the United States, the oligopoly of the three networks in news has been broken by both CNN on cable and, to a lesser extent, PBS in its program “News Hour.” Thus the new competition introduced into broadcasting systems has been the result of either changed government policy or new technological mediums, or in certain instances both.

One bright winter afternoon in 1992, in the mountains of Yunnan Province, China, Li Yong told me a story. Li Yong and I were crowded into a courtyard in his largely Yi (or Lòlop'ò) village, at a mortuary ritual for one of his affines. In the courtyard's center, where the corpse had lain in its coffin seven days before, a crude trough had been scratched into the earth, with a shallow hole at the end where the corpse's mouth had been. The dead woman's daughter, her husband's sisters and their daughters, and some of their female friends sat on benches on either side, singing formal poetic laments about labor and pain. To accompany her tears, the daughter ladled water from a bucket into the hole in front of her. The water overflowed into the trough and gradually turned the lower surface of the courtyard to mud. Women from the dead woman's son's family moved about the courtyard pouring alcohol for the hundreds of guests, who drank while squatting, sitting or standing, their feet in the mud.

Throughout southern asia at different times Starting around 1000, but in most places by 1500, writers turned to the use of local languages for literary expression in preference to the translocal language that had dominated literary expression for the previous thousand years. This development constitutes at the level of culture the single most significant transformation in the region between the creation of one cosmopolitan order at the beginning of the first millennium and another and far different one—through colonialism and globalization—at the end of the second.

On october 15, 1991, Haji Muhammad Soeharto, President of Indonesia, became the first official calligrapher for the Al-Qur'an Mushaf Istiqlal—The National Independence Illuminated Qur'an—by inking in the initial letter of the Basmallah in the opening sura (Al-Fatihah, the prologue; see Fig. 1). Four years later, just after commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence, he put the finishing touch to the closing sura of the Qur'an (An-Naas, or “Humanity,” Suta 114), signed the completed manuscript, and presented it to the people of Indonesia and to the Muslim world community. Although he is adept at using or reciting the Qur'anic Arabic needed for daily prayer, the profession of faith, and the verbal exchanges that bond Muslims with each other, Soeharto is a decidedly unpracticed calligrapher when it comes to Arabic orthography.

With the publication of Kaze no Uta o Kike (Hear the Wind Sing; 1979), Murakami Haruki (b. 1949) found himself more or less at odds with well-known members of the Japanese literary establishment. If one takes Murakami at his word, this was not the result of conscious effort on his part, but rather a matter of his own individualism, a certain indifference (feigned or not) toward the conventions and opinions of professional critics in Japan's literary community. He commented to journalist Kawamoto Saburō in a 1985 interview that “[i]t never occurred to me to resist the paradigms of existing ‘pure’ literature, or to offer some kind of antithesis to it…. I don't think I worried about whether existing types of works would go on existing, so long as I could write what I wanted, how I wanted” (Kawamoto 1985, 39–40). Such a statement might be taken as a reflection of the author's anxiety not to be labeled “anti-bundan“or otherwise standing against the proliferation of so called “pure“literature, or junbungaku. And yet, given the general trend of Japanese literature from 1980 onward, beginning perhaps with Tanaka Yasuo's plotless novel Nantonaku, Kurisutaru (Somehow, Crystal; 1980), Murakami appears to belong to a growing new set of contemporary authors who do precisely that: resist the concepts and definitions of “pure“literature, redefining the term to suit their own needs.

The Chinese Teahouse was one of a few traditional institutions of sociability whose wider social and cultural appeal overshadowed its primary business. Historically, it was closely woven into the fabric of Chinese life. In many communities the teahouse served as a center of information, a locus of leisure and social gatherings, an occasional office and marketplace for many practitioners, and an arena where various social forces competed for status and influence. Urbanization in the late Qing dynasty further contributed to the growth of teahouses, especially in the Yangzi River region (Suzuki 1982; Yan 1997, 17). However, while teahouses continued to flourish in the early Republic, teahouse culture became a target—a constant target in some areas— of social critics. Why this tempest over teapots?

This paper addresses the problematic birth of the Malayalam language of Kerala in medieval South India. I say “problematic” because, of course, languages are never really born. Indeed, the dominant tradition of language genesis in India long asserted that all languages there only gradually arose by degenerate mutation out of the primordially beginningless Sanskrit. If there is a general truth to be found here, it is that since there are no human communities without speech, novel forms of language must always be emergent from earlier forms. Language genesis is thus always a matter of linguistic differentiation, away from some standard and towards another. But the sustained contrivance of these particular claims for Sanskrit also reflects another linguistic truth: that languages and their constituent elements are routinely shaped, conditioned, and ideologically figured by being themselves made into objects of discourse. In terms of language differentiation, this means the continuum of transformations that may at some point coalesce into a claim for linguistic separateness is always modeled and monitored in and through language itself. The reflexive or metalinguistic nature of this process, however, is always contextually oriented to the social fields in which it operates, so that the ideological positions and interests in those fields tend to carry over into the discursive products of a language and its literature. This study will attempt to highlight the web of relations among language varieties, ideologies, social contexts, and identities, as documented in a treatise on the language of medieval Kerala when that region first raised its claims for a distinctive linguistic identity.

Thirty years ago the buddhist compassion Relief Foundation (Ciji Gongdehui, hereafter Ciji) was virtually unknown. Lost in the backwater of Taiwan's eastern coast, the group began in 1966 with a nun, five disciples, and thirty housewives who contributed pin money of NT $0.50 each day (just over a penny at that time) to help supplement medical fees for the poor. The nuns sewed children's shoes to generate a little more income, and their monthly total of funds available for charity was under NT $1,200 (about US $30 at that time). Today Ciji is the largest civic organization in Taiwan, claiming 4 million members worldwide in 1994, and nearly 20 percent of Taiwan's population. It gives away well over US $20 million in chanty each year, runs a state-of-the-art hospital, and has branches in fourteen countries.

Ever since malthus, it has been conventional to cast the Chinese and European preindustrial demographic systems as opposing archetypes—Europe as a model of demographic restraint, China as demographic profligate. Europe's moderate population growth, fertility control keyed to economic conditions, and favorable living standards are contrasted with China's rapid growth, periodic mortality crises, and precarious balance of population and resources. Although there is some variation in approaches and vocabularies reflecting disciplinary divisions, and recognition of the substantial variability of institutions within Europe and China, this stylized contrast continues to flourish in the demographic and historical literatures. Its persistence is important because Malthusian dynamics underlie a popular and persuasive set of explanations for the divergent paths of Chinese and European economies and societies in the industrial era. In this article we challenge this conventional dichotomy and its empirical underpinnings.

Once upon a time, long before the rise of the modern nation, a language named Tamil wandered about in a world inhabited by divinities and extraordinary beings. This was an enchanted world of miraculous events and wondrous deeds, where the dead were brought back to life, and deserts transformed into fragrant groves; and where verses in Tamil cured fevers, stopped floods, and impaled enemies. It was a world in which poets, because of their mastery of Tamil, lorded over the gods themselves, and in which celestials vied with each other to win the affections of the language. There were even those who insisted that devotees of Tamil could look forward to a life amongst the gods, while its enemies were destined to languish in hell.

From past to present all is but talk, and all talk is but laughs. The birth of yin and yang from the original chaos, the voluntary abdication and forceful overthrow of the sage kings-who's ever witnessed this sort of thing? It's nothing more than talk. Future generations will talk about our generation, just as our generation talks about past generations. To talk about something and doubt it is laughable; to talk about something and believe it is even more laughable. Classics, philosophy, and histories are nonsensical talk, and people compete to transmit them. Poetry, rhapsody, and prose are preposterous talk, and people compete to perfect them. Praise or sneer, advocacy or suppression-these are whimsical talk, and people compete to respond to them. Sometimes we laugh at others; some other times we are laughed at. Those who laugh at others are in turn laughed at by others. The Treasury of Laughs is a collection of jokes. With all its thirteen chapters, some may still say it's a thin book. If you read it and are delighted by it, please don't be. If you read it and are enraged by it, please don't be. The world from past to present is an immense treasury of laughs; you and I are all in there as laughingstocks. Without talk there're no human beings. Without laughs there's no talk. Without laughs and talk there's no world. Cloth-Sack Monk, you're my master, you're my master!

As early as the han dynasty, exegetes of the texts in the Confucian canon were preparing written commentary on them, and by the dynasty's end they were interspersing their glosses in the body of these texts as interlinear, running commentary. From this time on, few Chinese would have read any classic from the canon without commentarial companion. And, as Confucianism came to be identified over the course of the imperial period with the Chinese cultural tradition par excellence, the writing of interlinear commentary on the canon of texts became a standard, even dominant, mode of scholarly and philosophical discourse for Chinese literati. It was in commentary that these men would offer their reflections on the meaning of Confucian doctrine as it had evolved through the centuries and attempt to construct a philosophical or moral vision meaningful in a world far removed from that of the classical age.

In the lowlands of nainital district in northwestern Uttar Pradesh, occupying discrete and adjacent territories, live two ethnic groups known as the Tharu and the Buxa.1 Both are indigenous to the area. They have much in common, in their dress, language, and ritual practices, and their origin myths even posit a shared ancestry for both groups (Hasan 1979). Despite these similarities, the two groups consider themselves to be distinct peoples or jāt (Stewart 1865, 148; Hasan 1979); they do not intermarry, although elopements (socially disapproved unions) are not uncommon. Both are listed as Scheduled Tribes in the Indian Constitution, a status that entitles them to special protection and benefit in education and government service. The Buxas live in the westernmost part of the district, while the Rana Tharu to their east also live in large numbers in the adjacent Nepali district of Kanchanpur.