This essay explores the ritual dimension of the formation of Confucian orthodoxy in China from around the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Recent scholarship on orthodoxy has shown how the civil service examination system bound together hundreds of thousands of educated men with the court in pedagogical practices that effectively regulated what constituted acceptable knowledge of the classics used to legitimate the imperial regime and its policies. Without questioning the central importance of the examinations in the propagation of orthodoxy, in this essay I expand the scope of this problem to consider the role of ritual in reproducing orthodoxy by focusing on the uneasy convergence of the state cult of Kongzi—known in the West as Confucius—with the family cult of his flesh-and-blood descendants.

Sets of narrative pictures portraying the life of Confucius (Fig. 1; all figures appear at the end of the text) first appeared in considerable numbers in the late Ming period, typically under the title Sheng-chi t'u (Pictures of the Sage's Traces; hereafter SCT) or some close variant. Produced at varying levels of expense, these illustrated biographies or hagiographies were made in a variety of media, such as woodblock prints, paintings on silk, and incised stone tablets. The various examples also exhibit a wide range of artistic quality. These differences in quality and form suggest that pictorial biographies were made for multiple purposes and for diverse audiences. Furthermore, the pictorial biographies differ in total numbers of scenes and in specific episodes selected for inclusion. These differences in content imply disparate conceptions of Confucius and the significance of his life.

On june 30, 1989, at around one-thirty in the afternoon, a young woman made an emotional descent from the uneven steps of a Soviet passenger airliner towards a crowd of well-wishers who had gathered together to welcome her to Pyŏngyang, North Korea. Rising just above them, in bold neon letters, an anachronistic sign, which served as a reception banner of sorts, read:

Let the world's youth and students unite firmly under the banner of anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship.

Thirty years ago, Association for Asian Studies President Ho Ping-ti summarized the state of Qing studies in his address, “The Significance of the Ch'ing Period in Chinese History” (Ho 1967). Since that time, there have been major shifts in scholarly perceptions of the nature and significance of Qing rule that bear directly on contemporary issues of nationalism and ethnicity. I will survey the recent secondary literature, compare current formulations of Qing history with those enunciated by Professor Ho, and appraise their implications for our understanding of China.

When Robert Sewell inaugurated the modern study of the South Indian state of Vijayanagara with his classic A Forgotten Empire (1900), he characterized the state as “a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests” (Sewell [1900] 1962, 1), thereby formulating one of the enduring axioms of Vijayanagara historiography. From their capital on the banks of the Tungabhadra river, the kings of Vijayanagara ruled over a territory of more than 140,000 square miles, and their state survived three changes of dynasty to endure for a period of nearly three hundred years, from the mid-fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries (Stein 1989, 1–2). According to Sewell, this achievement was to be understood as “the natural result of the persistent efforts made by the Muhammadans to conquer all India” ([1900] 1962, 1). Hindu kingdoms had exercised hegemony over South India for most of the previous millennium, but were divided among themselves when the Muslim forces of Muhammad bin Tughluq swept over the South in the early decades of the fourteenth century: “When these dreaded invaders reached the Krishna River the Hindus to their south, stricken with terror, combined, and gathered in haste to the new standard [of Vijayanagara] which alone seemed to offer some hope of protection. The decayed old states crumbled away into nothingness, and the fighting kings of Vijayanagar became the saviours of the south for two and a half centuries” (Sewell [1900] 1962, 1).

My tale is an eloquent one, with heroes and villains, crises and angst, passion and fury. What it lacks in resolution it more than makes up for in dramatic tension. It is a story set in Britain and India in the 1890s, a time of intense polarities. This was the decade in which Oscar Wilde, Britain's most lionized playwright, was imprisoned for homosexuality; in which the spark of “new unionism” flared and then fizzled; in which Britain competed in the “scramble for Africa,” adding new colonial possessions to its already ample stockpile. It was the decade of imperial budgets, of mounting tension in South Africa, of the call for tariff reform, of the “new Woman,” and of that curious political hybrid, Liberal-Unionism.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of scholarly works which have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi's epic life and work from numerous angles. In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something of an enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in which Truth and biology were equally implicated. As he put it, “morals are closely linked with health. A perfectly moral person alone can achieve perfect health” (CW 2:50). Following a statement such as this, my purpose in this essay is to work toward an analysis of Gandhi's genius by focusing on that which appears most enigmatic about his program of sociopolitical action: his somatic concerns and what I am calling his faith in the biomoral imperative of public health.

As Coale notes, over the long run human societies have been successful at maintaining a balance between population growth rates and economic resources. This has not been easy: some societies became extinct through overwhelming mortality or by failing to reproduce themselves, while others have burgeoned and outstripped their territories. Even at the end of the twentieth century, a hundred years after the onset of the demographic transition in Europe which transformed human birth and death rates forever, achieving the balance which creates homeostasis remains problematic. In east Asia alone, while the People's Republic of China is trying to bring the expected number of births per woman below 2.0, Japan is attempting the opposite, to raise the total fertility rate above its current level of 1.6. The same contests are being played out in developing and developed societies throughout the world. Thus creating a balance between birth and death rates and linking it to economic conditions so that a society neither outruns its economic resources nor fails to exploit them is a perduring human problem.

In this article, I argue that the ‘mandala’ and other spatialized concepts associated with the ‘cosmic polity’ in Southeast Asia (such as ‘exemplary center’ and ‘sinking status’, ‘galactic polity’, ‘concentric circles’, ‘nested emboxment’, etc.) are key concepts with a similar form that have dominated theories of premodern Southeast Asian political and social structure. I claim that previous approaches to the mandala polity have been defined from the perspective of dominant political groups, and thus are top-down or center-out models. As a result, theorists have inadvertently reified this perspective in a set of analytical concepts that reaffirm existing power structures. As such, they have skewed our understandings of the mandala away from that of a socially enacted set of spatial codes that communicate and index hierarchical status between individuals and groups, both dominant and nondominant.

Change, or impending change, can often inspire the creation of myths, for it both threatens and promises. It threatens the security of the established, while providing hope to the disestablished. Change thus produces anxiety and discomfort on the one hand, euphoria and optimism on the other. Those in a position to be harmed by the change often create “negative” myths about the potential implications of that change; those not, glorify it. To misquote Claude Levi-Strauss, myths are created to control the present, hence, by implication, also the future (Levi-Strauss 1979).

In December 1995, the Association of Indonesian Muslim Intellectuals, ICMI (Ikatan Cendekiawan Muslim se-Indonesia), held its second national congress in Jakarta (Kompas, December 4–10, 1995; Republika, December 4–10, 1995; Gatra, December 9 and 16, 1995; Forum Keadilan, January 1, 1996; Ummat, December 11, 1995). Twelve hundred delegates, representing 42,000 members from all Indonesian provinces and from many Indonesian Islamic communities abroad, participated. Minister of Research and Technology B. J. Habibie, generally considered President Suharto's favorite cabinet member, was chosen for a second five-year term as national chair. Sixteen ministers, nearly half the cabinet, were elected to leadership positions, and the president himself was designated ICMI's “Protector” (Pelindung).

A renaissance in literature and art took place in the People's Republic of China from the late 1970s through the 1980s. In poetry, the outburst of vitality first showed itself in 1978–80 in the underground Today (Jintian) group, which included cofounders and editors Bei Dao (b. 1949) and Mang Ke (b. 1951), and such contributors as Jiang He (b. 1949), Shu Ting (b. 1952), Gu Cheng (1956–93), and Yang Lian (b. 1955), to name only a few of the best-known in the West. Today lent momentum to the flourish of Menglongshi, commonly translated as “Obscure Poetry” or “Misty Poetry,” in the early 1980s and became the major source of inspiration—no less than the target of criticism and revolt—to post-Menglong poetry in the second half of the decade. Like Menglongsbi, post-Menglong poetry is a term of inevitable, even misleading, simplification, since it refers to a wide range of varying styles and modes of writing. Rather than being unified by a set of formal and stylistic characteristics, it is marked by a radical openness to experimentation. The multiplicity of experiments in poetry since the mid-1980s may be more broadly and appropriately referred to as avant-garde poetry or experimental poetry (Yeh 1992). This paper will focus on an interesting—and unique in today's world—phenomenon that I call the “cult of poetry.” I will first examine the “cult” by defining its salient features and then present a critical analysis of the diverse historical and psychological forces that contribute to such a literary phenomenon.

From the 1920s to the late 1960s, Tamil nationalism in India was characterized by elements of radical innovation which made the Dravidian movement a mobilization for cultural revolution, in Tamil terms, as well as for the defense of Tamil interests vis-à-vis the central government. In the last twenty years concern for the ordinary person has manifested itself in extravagant displays of state largess and the encouragement of personality cults directed toward Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. I delineate below major ideological themes of the nationalist cultural revolution and argue that these ideological elements, while representing change in Tamil political culture, were in many ways deeply anchored in prerevolutionary political concerns supported by institutions and symbolic systems with precolonial antecedents. I link these ideological elements to the dissolution of radicalism in Tamil nationalism and to the emergence of a style of governance which has undermined standards of public administration.

Literary biography is a difficult art to practice when the subject is a premodern Muslim poet. Even in the work of such explicitly autobiographical western writers as the twentieth-century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova the relationship between art and life can be tantalizingly ambiguous. In the case of most well-known classical Muslim poets, though, the connection between life and literature is usually indeterminable. To personalize the lyrics of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz is as problematic as trying to glean autobiographical details from Shakespeare's sonnets. The reasons are essentially the same. Little is known of these poets' lives, and their poems exemplify lyric and panegyric genres that were not intended to be autobiographical or idiosyncratic. Neither Hafiz nor Shakespeare were Romantics, and they did not write introspective or self-revealing poems.

The death of Emperor Hirohito on 7 January 1989, followed more recently by the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II, has indeed incited a degree of historical awareness among Japanese from all walks of life. In the wake of an enigmatic period of social self-restraint (jishuku) during the final months of the Shōwa period (1926–89), fettered reflections of Shōwa Japan inundated the media. Despite a few outspoken critics at the margins, retrospectives appearing on Japanese television and in mainstream print media after Hirohito's death have largely glossed over touchy subjects such as war atrocities, war responsibility, and the continued existence of the emperor system in the postwar era. No doubt that threats of right-wing terrorism aimed at even the mildest of critics of Japan's involvement in the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45) have done their share in encouraging such self-censorship. By most accounts, such efforts have proved effective in diffusing critical public opinion and in pruning public memory. Yet, the ending of the era has provided an extra impetus and a rhetorical rationale for a reckoning of everyday life in Shōwa Japan by the masses whose lives coincided with it: it is over, so now we can tell its story.

In general, readers, commentators, translators, and reviewers are bound to see shadows of themselves or of their own concerns in a poem. A poem is, in fact, a “patch” between desire and reality. Like a dream, a poem can be viewed as “reality encoded” (Skura 1981, 126). The issue is not what is actually on the page, what critic Harold Bloom calls the “manifest text” (Bloom 1987, 3). The poem is really what exists in that misty place between “writing” and “reading,” the “latent text,” the poem that lives in symbol or emblem. Though a poem certainly has a static life on a page, the actual events of reading, interpretation, and commentary are what give a poem a vital historical life. We are fortunate that over a millennium and a half of Sanskrit scholarship has yielded up to us actual records of historical moments of reading. And, since these recorded “moments” have become traditionally attached to various types of printed text, many of these commentaries have become as vital as the text itself. In some instances they have even superseded the text, as is true, I believe, in the case of Abhinavagupta's commentary on Ānandavardhana's Dhvanyāloka.