The themes of nationalism and revolution occupy an important place in the study of post-1945 Asia. Nowhere is this more evident than in Vietnam: after all, the Resistance War against the French (1946–54), followed by the war against the Americans and their allies (1965–75), has shaped modern Vietnamese history. For the 1950s in particular, scholars of Vietnam have developed a view in which nationalistic communists in the north consolidate their grip on power, undergoing crises but emerging stronger. This view has obvious merit. Nonetheless, it can leave the observer with the sense that a monolithic Vietnamese communism, tempered by years of struggle, inevitably triumphs. Three features are left out of such accounts. First, they downplay the diversity of Vietnamese world-views in the 1940s and 1950s. Second, they often lack a sense of the contingent and the accidental. And third, readers today are often left unaware of how deeply the relationship between past and present is contested. The past itself was, and is, in dispute: the contestation in the 1950s, where polemics eventually triumphed over open debate, left behind a fragmentary and partial historical record. The present has been no less problematic: contemporary concerns have reshaped memories and structured our sense of the past.

According to official PRC reports, on the night of April 4, 1952, hundreds of small rodents fell from the skies over Gannan county. The next morning, villagers in this remote corner of western Heilongjiang province awoke to find sickly voles scattered in haystacks, piled on rooftops, and even squirming on kangs next to slumbering women and children. Government reports praise the inherent wisdom and decisiveness of the Gannan villagers. Well-versed in the natural flora and fauna of the region, they immediately suspected that these rat-like animals were an alien species, a form of biological weapon disseminated by American planes that had crossed the Yalu River from the Korean front. By noon the villagers had killed, burned, and buried every vole they could find (ISC 1952, 40–3).

On a visit to a northern province in the 1950s, Hô Chí Minh, who had spent many years during the war with the French living with upland peoples in northern Vietnam, asked local authorities how many ethnic groups were found within the province. Professor Đang Nghiêm Van, the doyen of ethnologists in Vietnam, has written that President Ho received the following response:

The “scientific” project of ethnic classification undertaken for political purposes in Vietnam beginning in 1958 was comparable directly (and not unrelated) to a similar project undertaken in China in the 1950s.

On june 30, 1990, between twenty-five and thirty thousand people took to the streets of downtown Kathmandu to protest the possibility that a new constitution, then being drafted, might reassert Nepal's official legal identity as a Hindu kingdom. Carrying banners and chanting slogans, they demanded the country's redefinition as a secular state. The march was arguably the largest demonstration in modern Nepali history, with protestors representing a range of religious, ethnic, political, and cultural groups. Even more significant, the marchers explicitly rejected the longstanding alliance between religion and the state in Nepal by challenging the interpolation of Brahmanical Hinduism into the country's political and civil institutions, and its centrality to Nepali nationalism as a collective identity.

T the great texts of the great traditions are in some sense unchanging, but as Milton Singet pointed out, the anthropologist's task is to “find fot these ideas a local habitation and leain how they operate in the lives of ordinary people” (1972, 39). What I wish to present here are the changing meanings of texts that are thought to form the core of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and the story of how their interpretations have altered as the South Asian community of Parsi Zoroastrian interpreters has changed. Much about this story echoes the experience of other South Asian communities: as the Btitish rose to dominance and their missionaries strove to teach Parsis that theirs was an inferior, weaker faith, Parsis began to represent their religion as similar to that of the Protestant Christians, even while steadfastly refusing (for the most part) to convett.

In recent years, a considerable change has taken place in the way in which analysts of economic development have come to understand the nature of the growth process in rural areas and the relations between agricultural and nonagricultural activity as industrialization takes place. Growing awareness of the significance of nonagricultural activities in rural areas, of rural industrialization, and of the “livelihood diversification strategies” adopted by rural households has prompted this shift in understanding (Ellis 1998, 1–2). The strict agriculture/industry divide of standard dual-economy models has been broken down, and scholars have recognized the implications, both theoretical and policy-related, of the existence and development of the “pluriactive” rural household that derives its income from a variety of sources alongside agriculture. Various ways of analyzing the nature and implications of agriculture/industry interaction within rural areas, and the economic activities of rural households that underlie them, have been developed, but central to much of the work on the issue has been a model of the “growth linkages” between agricultural and nonagricultural activity. This model seeks to demonstrate how backward and forward linkages between growth in agricultural output and the expansion of manufacturing activity in rural areas operate to produce a “virtuous circle” of expanding employment opportunities, rising and often quite equally distributed rural incomes, and improving standards of living.

“In the city,” says carl schorske, writing of Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century, “… the truth of industrial and commercial society had to be screened in the decent draperies of pre-industrial artistic styles. Science and law were modern truth, but beauty came from history” (1981, 45). Quotations from the past were equally the mark of architectural styles that were forged in colonial and postcolonial societies, as history became a resource for defining new ideals of beauty. If the retreat into (classical European) history was a striking feature of public architecture in colonial India (Evenson 1989, 99–109), an attempt to command a long and respectable lineage of authority equally marked the efforts of Indian nationalists in the early post-independence period.

The pacific war (1937–45) marked the most innovative period in the development of public welfare in Japan, comparable to the 1880s in Germany, the 1908–14 era in Britain, and the 1930s in the United States. Wartime welfare policy set precedents that shape many aspects of welfare provision in Japan to this day. It is a cruel paradox, but war, despite its immediate, catastrophic effects on human well-being, has played a major role in the evolution of the welfare state.

Research into the reunification of Korea has focused on the governmental policies of North and South Korea, as well as the policies of countries involved with them. The views expressed within Korean civil society about reunification have not been given much consideration. It is difficult, therefore, to gauge what the Korean people themselves think of reunification and how opinions differ among discrete sociopolitical groups in Korea, such as the conservatives, liberals, and radicals.

Until very recently, much of the literary scholarship on the eighteenth-century Chinese novel Honglou meng (The Story of the Stone or Dream of the Red Chamber) was centered on what was seen as the autobiographical nature of the work. Critics of the novel, especially those in China, tended to focus their attention on the life of the author, Cao Xueqin (d. 1763), believing the interpretation of the novel to be—to a large extent—hinged on a successful reconstruction of Cao Xueqin's familial relationships, especially with those members of the Cao clan such as Red Inkstone (Zhiyanzhai) who were the original audience of his manuscript. Yet, any literary work—even a truly autobiographical one—arises from its tradition. Its meaning will be better understood and its aesthetic values better appreciated when we consider it in relation to other works in that tradition. For our interpretation of Honglou meng, what is more pertinent is therefore not the author's personal ties to his relatives but the ties of the novel to its “relatives,” works that formed the literary context for its creation.

As part of the 1996–97 Fiftieth Jubilee celebrations, Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej published his version of the Mahajanaka Jataka, one of the many stories of the Buddha's former lives in the Theravada Buddhist tradition (Bhumibol 1996). The publication, in both English and Thai and complete with lavish illustrations, was heavily promoted by various agencies of the bureaucracy (especially in the media and the schools) and met with much public acclaim. Several editions of the book were published, including a cartoon version for younger readers (Bhumibol 1999). Tapes and CDs with readings of the story were released, and commemorative medallions were also available with purchases of the book. A musical version of the story was created and public performances held, with a number of the princesses involved in the production. The tale is of Prince Mahajanaka, who, though forced into exile, through his great perseverance (viriya parami) is able to return to his kingdom, claim his rightful throne, and bring prosperity to his subjects.

A generation of research on red guard politics has traced the origins of its debilitating factionalism to social and political divisions that were well established among students on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. These social interpretations impute political motives to student activists according to their positions in the pre-Cultural Revolution status quo. However, a closer examination of events in Beijing during the summer and early autumn of 1966—where the Red Guards and their factional divisions first emerged—suggests a different interpretation. Factions emerged when student activists from similar social backgrounds responded differently to ambiguous and rapidly changing political signals. These initial acts left students on opposite sides of an emerging political divide and exposed them to unforeseen risks as the movement took unpredictable turns. In this interpretation, student divisions are rooted in political interactions in the early phases of the conflict itself. Red Guard factions did not emerge in Beijing as expressions of opposed group interests based on preexisting social divisions, but as struggles to vindicate earlier actions and to avoid the harsh fate of political victims.

In recent analyses of nationalism in colonial South Asia, Partha Chatterjee and Tanika Sarkar, among others, have argued that as a result of colonial domination in the “public sphere”—the realm of the state and civil society—Indian male nationalists deployed the “private sphere”—the realm of the home—as the discursive site of anticolonial nationalist imaginaries. The internal space of the home was “the one sphere where improvement could be made through [Indian men's] own initiative, changes could be wrought, where education would bring forth concrete, manipulable, desired results” (Sarkar 1992, 224; Chatterjee 1989) and it therefore took on “compensatory significance” in the experience of modernity in India (Chakrabarty 2000, 215–18).

Is civil society gendered? What can the Korean women's movement tell us about the very notion and working of civil society and the 1990s history of democratization in South Korea? Students of democratization have overlooked these questions in their study of civil society as a vehicle of democratization and counterweight to the repressive state or the totalizing market (Silliman and Noble 1998; White 1996; Koo 1993; Cohen and Arato 1992; Gold 1990; Keane 1988). Recent criticisms of the celebration of civil society as the third path to societal democratization point out that such analyses tend to lapse into abstract discussions of relations between the state and civil society, devoid of a specific historical or social context (Fine 1997; Tempest 1997; Blaney and Pasha 1993). This absence of context can also lead to an inadequate view of civil society as a uniform and homogeneous space without social inequalities or divisions.

The fifth day of the Lunar New Year marks the beginning of six weeks of religious festivities in the rural area of Chaozhou, a distinct dialect region in Southeast China. Scheduled on separate dates, processions of local deities are staged by different villages. On the morning of the chosen day, villagers flock to the main village temple, where wooden statues of the divine occupants are congregated with those from other local temples. Each family sets up a table in the courtyard, lights incense and candles, and presents its offerings (of chicken, duck, goose, fish, rice, wine, fruits, cakes, and candies) to the statues. With paper money set on fire, worship and prayers begin.

During the fifteenth century, especially during its middle decades, “almost all parts of the then-known world [i.e., Europe, the Middle East, and the economically advanced regions of Asia] experienced a deep recession. By then, the ‘state of the world’ was at a much lower level than it had reached in the early fourteenth century. During the depression of the fifteenth century, the absolute level of inter-societal trade dropped, currencies were universally debased (a sure sign of decreased wealth and overall productivity), and the arts and crafts were degraded” (Abu-Lughod 1993, 85; see also Lopez and Miskimin 1962; Lopez, Miskimin, and Udovitch 1970; Postan 1973, 41–48; Wallerstein 1974, 21–38; Munro 1998, 38–39). In much of Eurasia, the worst years of this “depression” probably ended sometime during the 1460s or 1470s. Over the next six or seven decades, economic conditions in many parts of the world improved significantly, reflected in dramatic increases in agricultural and handicraft production; in the volume of interregional and international trade; and, except for the western hemisphere where Afro-Eurasian diseases decimated native populations during the early sixteenth century, in demographic growth.