The author reinterprets the phenomenon of qingyi (represented by members of the Qingliu and Emperor's party) as passing through five phases from 1875 to 1898, in the course of which it enlarged its scope of demands by lower- and middle-grade metropolitan officials for a broader distribution of political power and contributed to the formation of public opinion. This evolution was attended by the rise of analogous demands for political restructuring by men in two other environments: extrabureaucratic managerial and scholarly circles and the treaty ports. Militant patriotism mobilized and eventually united different groups, stimulating nationally conscious opinion that was alienated from the political leadership. The failure of government leaders to accommodate new political initiatives redirected qingyi into provincial movements and set the stage for the competition between centralizing bureaucratic and societally based programs for change that led to the 1911 revolution.

Tibet is the most numerically significant society practicing Vajrayana (Tantric) Buddhism. The unusual features of religion in Tibetan society are often understood in terms of differences between Vajrayana and other forms of Buddhism. The author suggests here that Tibet is not a “typical” Vajrayana society compared to the Newars or the Balinese, and that what is special about religion in Tibet is related to structural differences between Tibetan society and Buddhist states elsewhere in Asia. Tibet historically has been a region where a centralized state was barely achievable, and Tibetan political structures have more in common with stateless societies than with states. Buddhism in Tibetan society has analogies with Islam in structurally similar Islamic societies.

The current focus of attention on the “tongue-tied American” suggests that the field of foreign language pedagogy is in need of thorough scrutiny. Although pedagogical linguistics is a highly specialized field, all too frequently foreign language teaching is delegated to untrained native speakers of the target language or to specialists in other disciplines—particularly literature and theoretical linguistics—who “also teach language” without any relevant training or experience. In order to develop a meaningful relationship between language and area studies, there is a desperate need for trained pedagogical linguists who will coordinate their efforts with discipline specialists to offer programs of language study that are substantively, linguistically, and pedagogically sound and that simultaneously satisfy the increasing diversity of student interests.

This article examines a text containing the late eighteenth-century family history of a line of South Indian “little kings,” or pāḷaiyakārars. The text provides the basis for a discussion of the Maṟavar caste of the Tirunelvēli region in southern Tamil Nāṭu and the notions held by this and other related groups concerning royal appropriateness and sovereign authority, political and social relations, and kingly privileges and gifts. Further, the text is seen as a cultural form of “history” that has an integrity of its own. Indeed, a structural analysis of the text reveals that the text can not be separated into “fanciful” and “historical” sections, and that underlying assumptions about the past are revealed by the form as well as the content of the text. The results of this analysis are seen to have significance not only for understanding how the past is viewed from within, but also for how it must be analyzed from outside the cultural context. Thus, ethnohistory is asserted to be not simply one agenda for “history” but a way of setting the actual agenda of “history.”

The author reconstructs the religious idea and ritual that lie behind the “Songs of the Dead.” The three songs attributed to Empress Saimei in the Nihonshoki (nos. 119–121) are interpreted as sung by a dead person's spirit sailing to the nether world. They must have been handed down by the Asobi-be—shamans who appeased dead emperors' spirits—because these and other funeral songs in the Kojiki use similar verse forms. The Ryō no Shūge says that the Asobi-be's services involved two persons called Negi and Yoshi. Negi appeased the spirit who possessed Yoshi; the empress's songs must originally have been sung by Yoshi. The ritual behind the “Songs of the Dead” also helps us to understand the origins of Nō, especially of mugen nō, and to perceive the connection between Nō and the development of Kabuki in the early seventeenth century.

Śītalā, Goddess of Smallpox, is the preeminent tutelary deity of villages in southwestern Bengal, and a goddess of the same name has a prominent role in Hindu pantheons throughout northern India. Her rise to importance is closely related to the history of smallpox, which was not recognized, in Ayurvedic medical texts, as a serious or fatal disease before the seventh century A.D. There is no evidence of the Goddess of Smallpox before the tenth to twelfth centuries, and she appears to have attained her present special significance as goddess of the village in southwestern Bengal abruptly in the eighteenth century. Earlier Indian approaches to smallpox treatment were naturalistic; when Śītalā was added to the etiology of the disease, her worship was not seen as a replacement for the biologically based therapy, but as something different and complementary. The appearance of smallpox as an epidemic calamity, rather than as an ordinary disease, during a period of more general distress in rural Bengal, marked its goddess as a figure especially suitable for community worship.

The author demonstrates how a Buddhist pilgrimage tradition affected symbolic and social changes in early modern Japan. After exploring the history of the Saikoku pilgrimage and its practice in the Tokugawa period, he suggests that Victor Turner's theories of “communitas” and “liminality,” while adequately explaining the “social modality” of the pilgrimage, do not account for the religious and cultural paradigms encountered by the pilgrim. To understand these paradigms, eighteenth and nineteenth century pilgrim guides are analyzed to show how the semantic field of the pilgrim integrated the universal salvation of Buddhism with a distinctly national tradition.

Since 1978 dramatic changes have occurred in Chinese rural societal policies with respect to the three levels of collective agricultural production; the parameters for family sideline occupations and village markets; and the extension and allocation of private plots. In general, these changes reflected a distinct retreat from the former emphasis on collective production. The author describes the changes that have taken place in rural societal policies and discusses the difficulties that have arisen in implementing the new policies. He also comments on statements by the current leadership used to support and justify new policies.

Recent developments in Korean archaeology, especially the discovery of well-preserved rice grains in clear archaeological contexts, have caused a reassessment of the timing, distribution, causes, and effects of the beginning of rice agriculture in Korea. Kim puts the rice discoveries in historical perspective, discusses details of the recent evidence, and explores possible diffusion routes based on the new data. Choe focuses on semi-lunar knives—the agricultural tools believed to be associated with rice cultivation. The typology of the knives and the distribution and chronology of the types are used to propose a diffusion route directly into Korea from North China. Nelson examines the cultural changes from the preceding Chŭlmun period when rice grains and semi-lunar knives are found. Mechanisms to explain the change are proposed as hypotheses. Comments on the papers disclose an agreement on the likelihood of a northern diffusion route, but no consensus on the cultural processes.

This article delineates new approaches to the study of food and famine in Chinese history. Drawing primarily from the three other articles in the symposium, the author asks in what ways the Chinese state, primarily in the high Qing period, affected population growth, agricultural production, natural cycles, and food distribution, and what a historical perspective suggests about the People's Republic of China's efforts to feed its population.

Nomadic states in Inner Asia were generated by external relations with state societies. Because the Hsiung-nu state could not have supported itself by exploiting the relatively undifferentiated and extensive pastoral economy, the state hierarchy was financed by exploiting the resources available from outside of the steppe. The nomads on the steppe were organized into a powerful military force that was used to systematically exploit the Chinese economy. The Hsiung-nu raided the frontier directly and then used the disruptions they caused as a tool to extort trade and subsidies from the Han court, thus maintaining a monopoly on this flow of Han goods to the steppe, which gave it great economic power and stability. The imperial level of Hsiung-nu government was therefore primarily concerned with conducting foreign affairs, organizing military campaigns, and maintaining unity on the steppe, while it ceded power in domestic affairs to indigenous tribal leaders. This created an imperial confederacy that acted as an autocratically ruled state in its dealings with China but that remained federally structured internally. This form of organization proved remarkably stable and provided the model for later empires established by nomads on the steppe.

Our understanding of Cambodia/Kampuchea's immediate past is gradually being enlarged by recent works dealing with pre-1975 Cambodian society, the development and policies of the Communist Khmer Rouge, and local life during the beginning of the Vietnamese occupation. Research using a broad range of primary source material, including a growing number of interviews with refugees, provides a more detailed picture than previously available of the two successive Kampuchean regimes. There remains, however, a persistent problem in many writings: political/ideological biases that can lead to different perspectives on the Khmer Rouge and on Kampuchea under the Vietnamese.

Korea is a small peninsula with an area of 220,839 square kilometers. It is a mountainous land, with only one-fifth of the area available for cultivation. The peninsula belongs to the temperate zone, but the north is colder and more arid while the south is humid and hot in the summer, like the monsoon zone of southeast Asia and Japan. The south has a yearly rainfall of 800 to 1,000 millimeters, and 60 percent of the precipitation occurs in the summer months from June to early September.

Most of the books reviewed in this article deal with Indian philosophy, mythology, or the Vedas, but other recent publications are discussed. The author provides a general assessment of the present state of the art in classical Indology. In spite of the venerable antiquity of the subject, not all pertinent studies are esoteric or dull. There have been new and unexpected discoveries along with solid and original contributions that have wide-ranging implications. Many views that are commonly held are now seen to derive from misconceptions and to stand in need of revision. Topics treated are Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Tantrism, and Shamanism; contacts between India and Central Asia, and the Indianization of Asia; Soma and karma; ritual, epic, psychology, sex, and grammar.