It is the events of the late 1890s in China which represent the most notorious example of a ‘scramble’ or ‘battle’ for concessions in the era of Western imperialism. The five years following her defeat in her war with Japan of 1894–95 seemed to reduce China to chaos and the brink of dismemberment, when the so-called ‘Boxer Rebellion’ was crushed by an international army comprised mainly of Russian and Japanese troops. But the powers could not agree on how to extend the concessions they had previously secured, and the ‘open door’, championed by Britain, the United States and initially Japan, prevailed. The ultimate blow to Western imperial expansion on a world scale was then delivered by Japan against Russia in the war of 1904–05, and a mere six years later, the Chinese launched out on their own revolutionary path which was to culminate in the Communist victory of 1949.

The substantive aim of this essay is to document popular attitudes towards the forest and its biotic resources through time as I have encountered these in the northernmost areas of the modern Indian state of Kerala. The interviews and folk-lore I have drawn upon in the present, however, are very much a legacy of Kerala's past. And since, sadly, most of the forests themselves have become a rapidly fading memory, my approach must be not only anthropological, but also folkloric and ethnohistorical.

Similar to the romanticized images that Manchuria would evoke with Japanese citizens looking for a better life in the 1930s, but on a larger geographical scale and over a longer chronological period, the Nan'yô, or South Seas, conjured up a multiple of idyllic visions within the imaginations of many Japanese. In Japanese perception over the course of the Meiji and Taishô periods, the Nan'yô became a region as diverse and as expansive as the interests and energies of those who directed their attention toward it. To disenfranchised ex-samurai, it was a warm tropical paradise, a territory in which to gain personal achievements and fulfill a sense of adventure. Politicians, journalists, and patriots hoping to plant the Japanese flag for national glory mistakenly viewed the South Seas as the one area untouched by Western imperialists and thus the optimal place for the new nation of Japan to acquire territories. On the other hand, certain entrepreneurs came to view the South Seas as a resource-rich economic treasure house, an area waiting to be exploited through commerce and industry.

. . . according to Manu, for slandering a Vaisya or a Shudra the fines are only twenty-five or twelve panas, respectively. For members of the lower orders who slander their betters the penalties are much more severe . . . the equality of the law was never admitted in ancient India, and was quite contrary to most Indian thought. (A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, 1954: 120).

The 1895 riot at Kalugumalai in the Tirunelveli District of Madras Presidency, South India, pitted the local Nadar community, then newly-converted to Roman Catholicism, against the main Hindu castes of Kalugumalai, particularly those associated with its Hindu temple and the Ettaiyapuram zamindari estate within which the town lay. It was the violent climax to a long-running dispute over the Nadars' right to take processions through the main streets, and one of the bloodiest episodes in a conflict which posed a severe threat to public order throughout South India in the late nineteenth century.

The image of the apex of the Japanese legal system, as portrayed by file video clips on NHK evening news, has remained amazingly consistent over the years: poker-faced judges sit motionless in high-backed chairs, as if waiting to be taken to Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum. With such a stodgy and foreboding appearance, it is hard for us to imagine that exciting events might transpire within those solemn chambers. And yet occasionally a specific case does demand our attention, especially when the controversy at hand is thought to embody, represent, or challenge some of the most fundamental principles ordering the way society goes about its business.

This is an essay in the sociology of knowledge. It aims to demonstrate, firstly, how development institutions construct rural society in terms of organizational imperatives, and secondly, how these ‘constructions’ come to be underpinned by social theory. The focus is on irrigation in south India and colonial and contemporary state policy initiatives to promote local institutions for the community management of decentralized resource systems. The essay presents the social and historical origin of an important and powerful set of contemporary policy ideas. The significance of this lies in the continuing misperception of local institutions of resource management, and in particular the systematic isolation of resource management from its particular social and historical context.

Although the Thai electronic media remain subject to considerable state control, newspapers in Thailand have gained some latitude to report and comment on political developments. The Thai press is one of the freest and most outspoken in Pacific Asia. In particular, the Thai language press frequently engages in antagonistic exchanges with political office-holders, and has often been credited with contributing to major upheavals. Most recently, the press was involved in the downfall of the Democrat-led government coalition over a land reform scandal in May 1995. Traditionally, however, Thai newspapers have been regarded as platforms for articulating the political views of their owners. Politicians have typically cultivated close personal ties to newspaper editors and columnists in order to further their own objectives. In recent years, the character of some Thai newspapers has changed. Whereas old-style newspapers such as Thai Rath and Daily News remain private family companies, newspapers such as Matichon, Phujatkarn, and Siam Post are part of larger corporate entities.

‘The influence of William Morris, even here.’

Stephen Potter, One-Upmanship

Introduction

In 1978 the village of Kukulewa, in the North Central Province of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), was selected for development under the Gam Udava (Village Awakening) program launched by the recently elected UNP (United National Party) government. Five years later, in 1983, I spent nine months in Kukulewa, studying the changes that had taken place since I had first done ethnographic research there from 1968 to 1970. As I examined the local impact of the Village Awakening project, in the broader context of escalating ethnic violence, I was repeatedly struck by the official priority given to the task of revitalizing the village community, not just in programs of rural development, but in the discourse of Sinhala nationalism more generally (Brow 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1992, 1996; cf. Moore 1989, 1992; Woost 1993, 1994).

. . . the people of India love and venerate Sanskrit with a feeling which is next only to that of patriotism towards Mother India.

Report of the Sanskrit Commission, 1956–57

This essay raises the language question in its relationship to the wider problematic of the nationalization of pasts by focusing on the curious and puzzling status accorded to Sanskrit in the nationalization of the Indian past in this century. I use the words ‘curious’ and ‘puzzling’ deliberately, for the Sanskrit issue unsettles many well-entrenched assumptions about language and nationalism that circulate in scholarly circles and popular imagination. Just as crucially, Sanskrit's (mis)adventures in the past century or so, draw our attention to the troubling linguistic turns taken by the nationalization process in India with its disquieting complicity with colonial categories and certitudes. The concerns of this paper have thus been shaped by three related issues pertaining to language, nationalism, and modernity.

More than most of humanity, scholars are prone to sinking their feet into the quagmire of definition. Words are unpacked, nuances of meaning are debated, and discourses are interrogated. Post-developmentalists have been at the forefront of a re-examination of the languages of development and developmentalism. Arturo Escobar, for example, states that his desire is to analyze ‘regimes of discourse and representation’ (1995: 10). Jonathan Crush is similarly concerned with the so-styled discourse of development, and expresses the desire to make the ‘self-evident problematical’ (1995: 3). He highlights work in the humanities and social sciences which concerns itself with textual issues of writing and representation through which this discourse has been framed. Crush suggests that such textual analysis offers ‘new ways of understanding what development is and does, and why it seems so difficult to think beyond it’. He goes on to argue that ‘we need to not only understand why the language of development can be so evasive, even misleading, but also why so many people in so many parts of the world seem to need to believe it and have done so for so long’ (1995: 4).

In the middle years of the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty, temples dedicated to the Fourth Son Golden Dragon Great King (jin long si da wang) began to appear on dikes and in administrative centers along the Yellow River and the Grand Canal. The Golden Dragon cult originated as an ancestral cult dedicated to an apotheosized Southern Song (1127–1280) patriot from the Hangzhou area. It later became popular with boatmen and merchants who travelled on the Grand Canal. Beginning in the sixteenth century, hydraulic officials promoted the cult as an adjunct to their administration of the Canal and the Yellow River.

In seeking to explain the social, political and economic development of South Korea since liberation in 1945, many scholars have begun paying increasing attention to the significance of Korea’s colonial past. Most of these scholars have, for very good reasons, focused on fundamental—even revolutionary—changes in Korea's institutional structure, which for centuries had been dominated by a landed aristocracy ‘intent upon the preservation of its social, economic, and political privileges.’ Colonialism, to be more specific, replaced the factionalized and conflict-ridden institutions of aristocracy (and dynastic rule) with a modern, highly centralized, and extremely capable state apparatus, one which was used to reshape Korean society in any number of ways during Japan's 35 years of domination. The ‘strong state’ is, in fact, an enduring and undeniably powerful legacy of colonialism.

Upon inquiring into a boundary dispute between Tooringi and the Dutch-owned village of Jagannaikpuram, Leveston G. K. Murray asked generally of inhabitants ‘how far they supposed their ground extended’. But on that day in April 1795, and to Murray's dismay, he ‘received no other answer than that they did not know’. L. G. K. Murray and Mr Topander, both East India Company officials based in Masulipatam on the Teluga-speaking Andhra Coast of Southeast India, then tried a different approach, and showed those gathered a ‘Gentoo Paper’ containing a Dutch account of the nature of the boundary between the two villages. The consensus among the Telugu-speaking onlookers, in fact, was that the document was in order. No one proposed any problems with its authenticity to those Company officers.

In the late 1970s, a modest scholarly clash took place between James C. Scott and Michael Adas over the extent to which, if at all, the British administration in Burma had granted tax remissions to the rural population of the province during the economic crisis of the early 1930s. This formed an important part of their wider debate on the causes of the major rebellion—the Hsaya San rebellion—which erupted in Lower Burma in the closing days of 1930. First into the arena was Scott, in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, published in 1976. On this issue, Scott's starting point was the observation that the colonial world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a very marked increase in the capacity of the state to extract tax revenues from rural populations. The decisive strength of colonial administrations in this respect lay in paperwork, in ‘the inexorable progress of cadastral surveys, settlement reports for land revenue, censuses, the issuance of land titles and licences, identity cards, tax rolls and receipts . . .’, in other words, in the creation of ‘nets of finer and finer official weave’ that trapped rural taxpayers with increasing thoroughness.

This paper examines the sexual composition of the hero (yingxiong) in traditional China and how this sexuality is projected onto the political plane. Existing scholarship on the Chinese hero has provided Sinology with excellent material on a number of issues, from those which link the hero with Chinese concepts of chivalry, to those which discuss the hero as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘mass-based’. One of the major lacunae in all of these studies, however, has been an analysis of the importance of sexuality to the successful construction of a ‘hero’. Before Chinese studies drew on more recent methodologies, such as those developed by feminist criticism, the yingxiong's sexuality was often casually dismissed. It was asserted that, in contrast to Western chivalric romances, where love is often the most important inspiration for heroic deeds, love (and by implication sex) in traditional Chinese chivalric tales ‘plays no such important part’.

Recent years have brought a spate of serials centred on the theme of Urdu ghazal to the Indian television screens. The image of the ghazal in these serials is one of a kind of rhymed verse sung by courtesans in their ‘kothas’ (residence-cum-performance locales), under the appreciative eye of the poet, and often lustful eye of a decrepit zamindar whose purse is heavy but judgement is light. The singing is accompanied by some dancing, a few musical instruments being played by the courtesan's hangers-on, and unceasing rounds of liquor. The ambience in which the performance is enveloped is meant to convey what modern sensibilities would construe as decadence.

The Mahabodhi Temple at Bodh Gaya represented to the British, in the nineteenth century, a conveniently ruined Indian past which could be protected, recovered and restored as both a duty and a validation of legitimacy. However, for the temple's Hindu proprietors, the shrine—aside from being a valuable estate in purely financial terms—functioned as a symbol of the triumph of ‘orthodox’ Hinduism over ‘heterodox’ Buddhism. Finally, for the Burmese Buddhists who undertook their own ‘restoration’ mission in 1874, the Mahabodhi Temple marked the site where, according to Buddhist tradition, Gautama Buddha first achieved enlightenment and thereby began the career of the religion that bears his name.

In the literature on plantation development in Asia, the issue of ‘free’ versus ‘unfree’ labour has been very much debated. To start with, a first group of scholars argues that from the workers' point of view the decision to work on the plantations seems to have been a rational and conscious choice (see for example: Galenson 1984; Emmer 1986). They stress that a high degree of social differentiation in the various Asian societies has made low-class people leave their areas whenever an improvement in their position seemed possible. Most plantation workers came from areas where they had only limited or no access to the means of production and where many of them were indebted to local landlords and/or moneylenders. For low-caste Indian labourers, the opportunity to work on plantations meant a way out of their depressed conditions in their caste-ridden villages.

Since the 1930s shipping and trade in Southeast Asia during the early modern period have attracted much attention from historians. The pioneer in this field was the Dutch scholar, J. C. van Leur, whose original work was translated into English during the 1950s (Van Leur 1955). Van Leur's interest was heavily weighted toward what he labelled ‘old Asian trade,’ and as such he was one of the first who called for an Asia-centric perspective. He drew attention to the fact that the maritime sector of Southeast Asia had its own dynamics. In the 1960s, M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz carried on the work of analyzing the indigenous maritime sector as well as the effects of the Portuguese and Dutch onslaughts on it up to the 1630s (Meilink-Roelofsz 1962). Limiting our perspective to the Malayo-Indonesian Archipelago, in the last decade several regional case studies have further enhanced our knowledge of the subject, such as those on Sulu (Warren 1981), Batavia (Blussé 1986), Amboina (Knaap 1987), Central and East Java (Nagtegaal 1988), and the Straits of Malacca (Vos 1993). Furthermore, Anthony Reid has recently tried to create a synthesis for the entire region of Southeast Asia up to 1680 (Reid 1993).