bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Religious Aspect of the Bāul Songs of Bengal
Authors: Datta Rajeshwari
Published: April 2006

The socio-religious songs composed in village Bengal by the adherents of the mystical sect known as the Bāuls are of great interest to students of folk music and poetry, but they are of no less interest to a student of the history of the religions of Bengal. In his songs, the Bāul expresses his religious beliefs and experience, his view of life and of the world, his thoughts and emotions. They are his only form of worship; there is no treatise embodying the doctrines and practices of this sect. It is only in his songs that we can get a glimpse of what a Bāul is and what he believes in. Famous for their spontaneity of expression and charm of melody, their rustic language and imagery, these songs clearly bring out the various themes that together form the general body of Bāul thought. And there are threads of many religious traditions: tantric; Sahajiyā—both Buddhist and Vaiṣṇava; and Ṣūfī.
The Fire-Walkers of Kataragama: The Rise ofBhaktiReligiosity in Buddhist Sri Lanka
Authors: Obeyesekere Gananath
Published: April 2006

At the tip of southeastern Sri Lanka is the shrine of Kataragama, sacred to Skanda, the son of Śiva. There, every year in the Sinhala monthäsala(July/August), devotees walk the length of a pit containing a thick layer of red-hot coals. Many Buddhists and Hindus, the fire-walkers as well as ordinary devotees, believe that this custom of the annual fire-walking ritual comes from mythic times and commemorates Skanda's victory over theasuras(titans). In fact, the present form of fire-walking in Buddhist Sri Lanka dates not from theasurawar, but from World War II. Furthermore, those who walk the fire are not members of a hoary ancient ritual lineage; rather, they are modern urban people, uprooted from traditional Sinhala Buddhist peasant culture. Fire-walking is a new phenomenon, and it is a product of recent social change.
Rebellion and Revolution: The Study of Popular Movements in Chinese History
Authors: Wakeman Frederick
Published: April 2006

During the past twenty-five years, hundreds of studies of Chinese peasant rebellions have appeared in print. Most of these were published in the People's Republic of China, where they represented an effort to create a new revolutionary history of class struggle, intended to replace the elite history written by Confucian historiographers under the empire. Embodying Mao Tse-tung's belief that “the ruthless economic exploitations and political oppression of the peasantry by the landlord class forced the peasants to rise repeatedly in revolt against its rule” (Mao 1961, Vol. III, p. 75), these studies of popular uprisings describe a bewildering variety of social phenomena.
Symposium: Religion and Society in Thailand
Authors: Kirsch A. Thomas
Published: April 2006

The four articles on Thai religion and society published here are revisions of papers originally prepared for panels at the 1972 and 1973 annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, held in New York and Chicago, respectively. Contributions were solicited from scholars representing a number of disciplines and regional interests, to survey the variety of approaches being followed and the research being done on “Religious and Social Change in Southeast Asia.” Various circumstances have made it impossible to publish the entire set of panel papers together, as was originally planned; but a list of the participants in the two panels and the topics their papers addressed will reflect the range of religious and social changes underway in Southeast Asia, as well as the diversity of disciplinary interests.
Buddhism, Belonging and Detachment—Some Paradoxes of Chinese Ethnicity in Thailand
Authors: Tobias Stephen F.
Published: April 2006

It can be argued that full assimilation of Chinese immigrants into an alien society has proceeded longer and on a larger scale in Thailand than anywhere else. It was Chinese potters who built the first kilns at Sukhothai and Sawankhalok; Thai tradition says that King Ram Kamhaeng, who threw off Khmer domination and invented the Thai script, personally went to China to bring back five hundred artisans. And Chinese traders at Ayutthaya contributed decisively toward its becoming very large and very rich. Then, and later at Thonburi and Bangkok, Chinese skill and labor were crucial; successful immigrants were given great responsibilities and corresponding rewards as servants of the throne, and at all levels of the social scale were welcomed as husbands and sons-in-law. Though greatly altered by modern nationalisms on both sides, the mutual openness of Thai and Chinese has persisted, perhaps more strongly than contemporary observers have appreciated.
Early Chinese History: The State of the Field
Authors: Hsu Cho-yun
Published: April 2006

In this essay, I will survey recent scholarship on several major issues in the political, social, and economic history of ancient China, from the beginning of the Shang Dynasty to the end of the Han Dynasty. Archaeological aspects will be discussed only when their historical significance requires it, since the archaeological discoveries of recent decades have already been the subject of Professor Kwang-chih Chang's state-of-the-field article inThe Journal of Asian Studies.
Wallerstein's World-Economy: How Seriously Should We Take It?
Authors: McDonald Angus
Published: April 2006

Since well before the symposium on Sinology and the Social Sciences, carried in this journal more than a decade ago, modernization theory has provided a key theoretical orientation for many Western students of China. Immanuel Wallerstein has launched a major frontal attack on modernization theory and has proposed an alternative of considerable interest to those of us studying late imperial and modern China. Indeed, “Wallersteinism” is becoming something of a major academic growth industry. Wallerstein's perspective is not without problems, but his views deserve fuller exposure in the China field because of their implications for the study of change in Chinese society.
English-Language Studies of Medieval Japan: An Assessment
Authors: Totman Conrad
Published: April 2006

A number of English-language scholarly studies of medieval Japanese institutional history have appeared in print in the past few years. This seems a fitting time to appraise their contribution to our understanding of Japanese history from late Heian through the Muromachi period, ca. A.D. 1100 to 1600. I do not intend to evaluate the works as individual monographs, but rather to consider their larger cumulative historiographical significance. After summarizing the main interpretive constructs used by scholars writing in English I will discuss ways in which the recent works have and have not enriched these constructs or suggested helpful new ones.
The Role ofSasanaReform in Burmese History: Economic Dimensions of a Religious Purification
Authors: Thwin Michael Aung
Published: April 2006

Throughout Burmese history people donated money, land, and labor to thesanghain the hope of acquiring merit and ensuring rebirth in a better existence. Each dynasty was confronted with the flow of wealth from state properties and taxable public holdings to tax-freesanghikaestates. Since all religious donations were given in perpetuity, and so were cumulative, the pattern had serious economic consequences. It also posed an ideological dilemma for the monarch: while he was supposed to be the major benefactor of the Religion, the state needed these essential resources for its own survival. In order to halt this trend temporarily, or reverse it within the confines of legitimate Buddhist kingship, Burmese kings usedsasanareform, a religious ritual for purifying thesangha; sasanareform was structurally related to economic factors. Although this paper is concerned primarily with Burma, evidence is provided to suggest that similar economic pressures may have been responsible forsasanareform in India, Ceylon, and Thailand.
Varṇas in Angkor and the Indian Caste System
Authors: Mabbett I. W.
Published: April 2006

“In order to decide whether one can speak of a caste system in a society, one must ask: are status and power completely dissociated, can one find the equivalent of a Brahman/Ksatriya relationship? This question, though it may appear improper, has the virtue of immediately fixing a limit to Indian influence in South-East Asia. Important as this influence has been from the cultural and even social point of view, it would seem, roughly speaking, that nowhere in Indochina and Indonesia has the king been dispossessed of his religious prerogatives.”

This claim concerns the important question of the degree to which the Indian caste system can be, or has been, exported—a question that elicits deep-rooted and contentious problems inhering in our understanding of the nature of the caste system itself. Two propositions may here be identified and distinguished. The first is that, in India, kings—however powerful politically—did not formally possess religious or ritual authority; whereas in Indochina, however weak they were, kings formally possessed religious as well as political prerogatives. This is the contention cited above. The second is that, the first being true, it is also true that in Indochina kings possessed and exercised a degree of real control over social organization, by virtue of their ritual position (which was foreign to India): they were social engineers. In brief, they were oriental despots. The first proposition does not entail the second, but the two tend to go together; many writers have shown an inclination to accept the second, sometimes on the evidence of the first, sometimes on the evidence of facts about Indochinese kingdoms.
Maruyama's Achievement: Two Views
Authors: Harootunian H. D.
Published: April 2006

The long-awaited English-language publication of Maruyama's famous study is a major event for scholars of Tokugawa Japan. Those of us engaged in teaching Toku-gawa intellectual history have often known a malaise and even frustration which this work will ease considerably. Faced with English-language material that is sparse and often of limited usability, communicating the richness or simply a sense of the vitality and development of Tokugawa thought to students who know no Japanese often becomes a problem. This work, however, opens for them the possibility of new levels of sophisticated analysis and discussion.

For over three decades now this seminal work, consisting of three long essays written between 1940 and 1944, has dominated Tokugawa intellectual studies. As the translator, Mikiso Hane, rightly suggests, Maruyama's stature in this field is comparable to the place occupied in Tokugawa thought by the main figure of his work, Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728). Just as Sorai is seen as the “discoverer of politics,” Ma-ruyama can be regarded as the pioneer of intellectual history in Japan, especially of political thought.
Religion and Psychosocial Development in Sinhalese Buddhism
Authors: Halverson John
Published: April 2006

Even under the best of circumstances, “religion” can be a slippery term. In Buddhist Sri Lanka (Ceylon), it is especially so. Anthropologists recognize a religious complex that includes spirit exorcism as well as orthodox Buddhism; yet in Sinhalese usage, the word for religion,agama, applies to the latter but specifically excludes the former. On the other hand, from a Western perspective, orthodox “doctrinal” Buddhism—rationalistic, atheistic, non-supernatural—hardly seems to qualify as religion by any ordinary definition of the English word or its European equivalents. Indeed, that has, historically, been one of the strong appeals of Buddhism to the West. However, the terminological problem is not a vital one. Though it is well to keep in mind the indigenous distinctions, the various beliefs and practices of Sinhalese Buddhists so blend into one another and are so overtly connected, ritually and ideologically, that they present themselves as an identifiable complex that has been conventionally and justifiably called “religious.”
Colonial Perceptions of Indian Society and the Emergence of Caste(s) Associations
Authors: Carroll Lucy
Published: April 2006

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “caste” organizations and “caste” polemics were, to a greater extent than has been appreciated, responses to foreign definitions of Indian society. The most important stimulus toward caste-cluster consciousness released by the British presence was neither their advanced technology (which revolutionized the means of communication and transportation) nor their military prowess and administrative skill (which obliterated “the territorial limitations inherent in the pre-British political systems” and “brought a new administrative unity to India in the establishment of a centralized bureaucratic government”—both of which are commonly noted. Rather, the growth of caste-cluster consciousness was largely an unintended but direct consequence of the fact that the foreigners engaged in a continuous attempt to describe, define, interpret, and categorize the social complexity that India presented to them—a society so puzzlingly different from their own.
Political Participation and Political Elites in Early Republican China: The Parliament of 1913–1914
Authors: Chang P'eng-Yüan
Published: April 2006

The expansion of political participation is generally recognized as an essential aspect of modernization. China's twentieth-century experience certainly fits this model. Yet we are far from understanding the processes by which participation expanded in China—especially in the early twentieth century, when complex patterns of social change and institutional reform brought new groups to political awareness. Who comprised the newly participant strata in the first decades of this century? How large and powerful were they? How did their members participate? Who were their leaders?
Presidential Address Dictionaries and Dictionary Making: Malay and Indonesian
Authors: Echols John M.
Published: April 2006

Fifteenyears ago, or halfway to this year's thirtieth anniversary, in his presidential address to this association, Earl Pritchard began by saying: “In accordance with tradition, it now becomes my duty to perform a time-honored rite—to inflict on you the Presidential Address. I will try to do this as painlessly and as quickly as my own inadequacies will permit.… It is … customary, according to the unwritten rules governing the rituals of the present occasion, for the president to review in some way or other the state of the profession or of the discipline to which he belongs, or to present some general theory which interests him, or to discuss the direction that studies in the profession are taking or should take.…” Like Pritchard I have no inclination to depart sharply from this pattern, and I hope here merely to review briefly the past and present state of Malay and Indonesian lexicography. I have chosen this topic because it has been of great and abiding interest to me and because I have, in a modest way, tried to contribute to its furtherance.
Yü Chi and His Mongol Sovereign: The Scholar as Apologist
Authors: Langlois John D.
Published: April 2006

This paper, a study of the career of Yii Chi (1272–1348), explores the nature of Chinese literati support of Mongol rulers during the Yiian period. Yii Chi served as the leading apologist for the usurper Tugh Temiir (Wen-tsung, r. 1328 and 1329–1332). The most prominent court scholar of his time, Yii Chi devoted himself to the enhancement of Tugh Temiir's prestige, authority, and legitimacy. The paper explores Yii's activities in detail and speculates on his motivations in serving his Mongol emperor. In particular, it suggests that Yii Chi's ultimate aim in bolstering the usurper's claims to the throne, as well as in encouraging imperial support of Chinese cultural symbols and values, was to make Mongol rule more predictable and stable and thus to benefit the Mongols' Chinese subjects.
Neo-Confucian Moral Thought and Its Modern Legacy
Authors: Chang Hao
Published: April 2006

In his trail-blazing book, Escape from Predicament, Thomas Metzger opens up new vistas on both Neo-Confucianism and modern Chinese thought. In this article I intend to engage not so much in a critique of his book as in a dialogue that he and I have carried on for a number of years.
Baniyas in the Indian Agrarian Economy: A Case of Stagnant Entrepreneurship
Authors: Michie Barry H.
Published: April 2006

Baniyas (moneylender/traders) have a bad reputation. Though the functions they perform are similar, they in no way enjoy the respectability and admiration accorded bankers and businessmen, their brethren in spirit. They are castigated by villager and scholar alike as shylocks, parasites who—if given half a chance—squeeze clients dry through exorbitant interest rates on loans and on goods-on-credit. In an Indian village, one quickly becomes aware of the sometimes fearful respect they command. One approaches them for credit as a supplicant; for the defaultor, there is no more distressing sight than the Baniya at the door demanding to go over accounts. Baniyas are far from lovable; their popular image as fawning, cowardly, greedy sorts who take undue advantage of the weak while ingratiating themselves with the powerful appears singularly well deserved.
Hanumān: The Power-Dispensing Monkey in North Indian Folk Religion
Authors: Wolcott Leonard T.
Published: April 2006

Hanumān, the ancient monkey-divinity of India: for many, he represents the force of life in man's struggle to exist. He is most famous for his devotion to the god-king Rāma, and for his exploits as leader of the monkey army that helped save Rāma's princess from the demon-king of Laṅkā. Yet in the Bhojpurī-speaking area of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Hanumān is a god of great importance in his own right. There he is worshiped as the epitome of strength and vitality; popular legends associate him not so much with the self-restrained Rāma as with Śiva, possessor of creative and destructive energy.
Fukuzawa Reconsidered:Gakumon no susumeand Its Audience
Authors: Kinmonth Earl H.
Published: April 2006

Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) is quite possibly the best-known, most widely studied, and most frequently quoted writer of the early Meiji period. More of his writings have been translated into English than those of any other nonliterary Meiji writer. So much attention is given to Fukuzawa that he often appears astheMeiji intellectual. One recent textbook describes him as nothing less than “the most influential man in Meiji Japan outside government service.” In another description he is portrayed as “one of the most remarkable” of men, one of that small number of men who move history through their own personal power, and “the man who above all others” explained Western material and spiritual culture to Meiji Japanese. Overall, scholars have been only slightly more reticent in describing Fukuzawa's importance than he himself was. In his own view, the reforms undertaken in the early Meiji period were influenced by himself to such a degree that it was appropriate to say “If I did not chiefly initiate them, I think I may have been indirectly influential in bringing them about.”
Chinese Archaeology since 1949
Authors: Chang K. C.
Published: April 2006

The second half of the twentieth century may be remembered by Chinese archaeologists as the Golden Age of their discipline. A unique combination of factors and circumstances has produced, and will probably continue to produce for a time, enormous amounts of new material for the study of Chinese prehistory and history. These factors and circumstances include a deep-rooted interest of the Chinese people in their past, not only for its own sake but also for guidance, as lesson; the introduction, in the first half of the century, of Western archaeological science; systematic, large-scale, and sustained national projects to construct roads, canals, reservoirs, and buildings throughout China; and a conscious and conscientious effort to include archaeology as an important part of the political education of the people. This sudden flood of new data—most hitherto unknown, and many unexpected and almost unimaginable—provides unprecedented opportunities for gaining new and much richer knowledge of China's past. China scholars will be busy coping with the new materials for decades to come. They should count themselves extremely lucky, for such opportunities are not likely to arise again after the present century; archaeological relics are a limited resource, even in China.
The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution
Authors: Dirlik Arif
Published: April 2006

On February 19, 1934, Chiang Kai-shek inaugurated the New Life Movement in Nanchang, Kiangsi, with the express goal of “revolutionizing” Chinese life. The Kuomintang leadership, holding the material and spiritual “degeneration” of the people responsible for China's continued crisis, decided at this time to launch a movement for hygienic and behavioral reform to revitalize the country. The movement was to signal the start of a new phase of Chinese history, one that was to be both conserving and revolutionary in spirit. It would achieve the most fundamental goals of the Chinese revolution without sacrificing native traditions. Nevertheless, the stress on the revival of native morality was the most striking aspect of the movement with its historical context, and endowed it with an aura of conservatism that overshadowed its revolutionary claims and has dominated its image since then. This image is somewhat misleading in its implication that the New Life Movement was the expression of a traditionalist upsurge in the Kuomintang during the Nanking Decade (1928–1937). The present study attempts a close analysis of New Life ideology—used here in the sense of a world view that underlay conceptions of politics and society—to demonstrate that the conservatism and the revolutionary claims of the New Life Movement must be taken equally seriously. The movement was conservative, but conservative in a very specific sense: far from being a reaffirmation of traditional Chinese political conceptions, it was fashioned by and in response to the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. Its underlying spirit had greater affinity with modern counterrevolutionary movements than with political attitudes inherited from China's past. It was, in short, not a traditional but a modern response to a modern problem.
“5,000 Years of Korean Art”: History and Art History—A Review Article
Authors: Best Jonathan W.
Published: April 2006

Korea's historical roles as a cultural intermediary and military buffer between China and Japan have been frequently noted, yet as the exhibition “5,000 Years of Korean Art” makes apparent, Korea is also a nation whose distinctive social history Korea's historical roles as a cultural intermediary and military buffer between China and Japan have been frequently noted, yet as the exhibition “5,000 Years of Korean Art” makes apparent, Korea is also a nation whose distinctive social history fostered an equally distinctive art history. Although Korea's arts have repeatedly incorporated influences emanating from China and elsewhere, these influences have always been modified by the unique historical conditions prevailing on the peninsula. It follows, therefore, that the objects appearing in the exhibit—and in its comprehensively illustrated catalogue—can fruitfully be viewed both as lessons in history and essays in art.
Community and Kinship in Southeastern China: The View from the Multilineage Villages of Hong Kong
Authors: Strauch Judith
Published: April 2006

The role of patrilineal ideology in Chinese village social organization varies more widely than the orthodox paradigm would predict. In minor multilineage communities closely interspersed among dominant elite lineages, interlineage rivalry and competition may indeed prevail. But in the many similar villages somewhat removed from the pressures of dominant lineage expansionism, lineage solidarity may coexist harmoniously with community solidarity, legitimized through a liberal extension of the kinship idiom. This article reviews several village studies and describes in detail a multilineage alliance that complements rather than supplants lineage unity, suggesting that principles of segmentary opposition and solidarity can provide positive means of integration among separate lineages in a shared territory as effectively as among branches of a single lineage.
Hsün Tzu on the Mind: His Attempted Synthesis of Confucianism and Taoism
Authors: Yearley Lee H.
Published: April 2006

Using contemporary Western philosophic ideas, this essay examines Hsün Tzu's view of the mind as both a director of action and a spectator of action. In analyzing the mind as director, Hsün Tzu argues against Mencius's idea that the mind simply extends one's natural tendencies. Hsün Tzu's presentation of the mind as spectator— an idea developed chiefly in his discussion of obsession—accepts Chuang Tzu's stress on the importance of detachment, but argues that such detachment need not necessitate withdrawal from normal action. Hsün Tzu's two views of the mind can be reconciled by examining the mind's relationship to desires and to moral judgments. That examination also leads to the conclusion that Hsün Tzu thinks moral judgments have only a conventional and not a universal basis.
Orientalism and the Study of Japan
Authors: Minear Richard H.
Published: April 2006

In his autobiography Loren Eiseley wrote: “One exists in a universe convincingly real, where the lines are sharply drawn in black and white. It is only later, if at all, that one realizes the lines were never there in the first place. But they are necessary in every human culture, like a drill sergeant's commands, something not to be questioned.” We who are non-Japanese students of Japan form a culture of our own, and Edward Said's Orientalism helps us to see, perhaps for the first time, the “drill sergeant's commands” to which we respons.
Moral Economy or Political Economy? The Peasants are Always Rational
Authors: Brocheux Pierre
Published: April 2006

James Scott's and Samuel Popkin's theories must undergo the test of historical facts. The author considers three points: the village community; the individuals and the spirit of enterprise; and the peasant protest movements in Vietnam. Having not worked in exactly the same fields (South or Central Vietnam) or on the same periods (colonial or postcolonial eras), both, Scott and Popkin have generalized their own experiences. In fact, the Vietnamese peasants cling to “moral economy” or engage themselves in “political economy” according to the general situation and to what is at stake for them. Thus, the two explanatory schemes—Scott's moral economy and Popkin's political economy—cannot be used separately or one against the other but must be used together to permit an adequate consideration of the transformations of the Vietnamese peasantry.
The Moral Economy of the Kiangsi Soviet (1928–1934)
Authors: Polachek James M.
Published: April 2006

The Kiangsi Soviet marked the first systematic attempt by the Chinese Communist party to use existing peasant models of collective action for purposes of building an independent military apparatus. The history of that attempt is here examined against the background of the moral economy school's claim that revolutionary movements in twentieth-century Asia have successfully wedded themselves to such traditional patterns of action in order to achieve larger political purposes. This analysis of the politics of mobilization inside the soviet area finds that peasant society was traditionally too stratified and too divided against itself to offer unified resistance to threatening external forces, and emphasizes that mobilization tended to engage collective competitive instincts, setting groups of peasants against each other, rather than against hated representatives of post-traditional authority in the countryside. This finding is in turn used as a point of departure for raising some larger questions about the model of revolutionary legitimacy postulated by James C. Scott and the moral economists.
Faction Behavior and Cultural Codes: India and Japan
Authors: Hoffmann Steven A.
Published: April 2006

The typical internal structure of factions in a particular culture strongly influences the ability of factions to resolve conflict among themselves. This hypothesis is verified by examination of faction structure in India as contrasted to that in Japan. The argument draws on material from the broad range of contemporary studies of Indian and Japanese party politics and some studies of their bureaucracies as well. The major implication of the findings is that the “political culture” concept can be given a sounder empirical base when related to overt political behavior than when viewed as a matter of political psychology.
What is Happening in Classical Indology?—A Review Article
Authors: Staal Frits
Published: April 2006

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 andkarma; ritual, epic, psychology, sex, and grammar.
Reform and Segmentation in Monastic Fraternities in Low Country Sri Lanka
Authors: Kemper Steven
Published: April 2006

The Buddhist monkhood in each of the Theravāda countries of Southern Asia—Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka—is segmented into smaller fraternities(nikāyas). In Sri Lanka these fraternities have proliferated since the early nineteenth century. This proliferation has been interpreted as evidence of a Buddhist reform or return to orthodoxy and portrayed against the background of Sinhalese society as a whole. In this essay I argue that the establishment of twenty-five suchnikāyasin the Low Country of Sri Lanka can be better understood both as serving a variety of interests (of which reform is one) and in terms of regional groups of monks and lay people.
A Political History of the Taiwanese Communist Party, 1928–1931
Authors: Hsiao Frank S. T. , Sullivan Lawrence R.
Published: April 2006

The Taiwanese Communist Party (TCP) was founded in April 1928 as a “Nationality Branch of the Japanese Communist Party” (JCP) by a small group of intellectuals trained in Japan and China. In its three years of existence, the small party confronted enormous difficulties in organizing a communist-led movement on the tightly controlled island. But the failure of the TCP to survive reflected more than just the efficiency of the Japanese police. Among the leadership of Xie Xuehong, Lin Rigao, Su Xin, and others, there was an incessant factionalism that was rooted in their own diverse political origins and in the often contradictory influence of Comintern, JCP, and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policies. By 1931, the party was disbanded, but, in its two “Political Theses,” the TCP had laid out a revolutionary strategy and a set of political goals that expressed the nationalistic aspirations of many of its leaders.
Excommunication as Everyday Event and Ultimate Sanction: The Nature of Suspension from an Indian Caste
Authors: Hayden Robert M.
Published: April 2006

The standard view of excommunication as severe, unusual punishment in India is shown to be inaccurate regarding a caste in Maharashtra. An alternative concept, centering on suspension from caste as an inevitable response to the pollution always incurred with any violation of caste rules, fits the particular caste in question and also fits the published descriptions of outcasting as well as or better than the standard view. By applying the alternative concept, it can be seen that panchayats are not like Western courts in the nature of the tasks they perform and that to view them as analogous to courts is seriously misleading.
Foundation Myths of the Two Denominations of Vīraśaivism: Viraktas and Gurusthalins
Authors: Michael R. Blake
Published: April 2006

Vīraśaivism is usually presented as a unified, sectarian, reformation movement founded in the twelfth century by Basava. But within Virasaivism there are actually two, separate denominations—viraktas and gurusthalins. For the former, the beliefs and practices reflected in the Basava legend serve as norms for their sectarian-type religious organization. In contrast, gurusthalins derive norms for their basically ecclesiastical organization from the timeless myths of five great gurus. Hence the two accounts of origins serve as legitimizing and normative etiologies for competitive denominations divided by fundamentally different visions of how Virasaivism should be organized and what ideals it should propagate.
The Political Significance of Religious Wealth in Burmese History: Some Further Thoughts
Authors: Lieberman Victor B.
Published: April 2006

This article examines the recent assertion by a scholar of Burmese history that extensive landholding by the Buddhist monkhood helped to undermine every dynasty between the ninth and nineteenth century. It argues that religious wealth, possibly before the fifteenth century and certainly after that period, was less significant than has been suggested, and that the institutional relation between throne and monkhood was by no means static. During the later dynasties, secular elites represented the principal threat to the centralization of resources. Further, in certain instances, royal purification of the Religion sought not to deprive the monkhood of wealth, but to strengthen both the Religion and the crown at the expense of private lay interests.
The Songs of the Dead: Poetry, Drama, and Ancient Death Rituals of Japan
Authors: Akima Toshio
Published: April 2006

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.
The Diffusion Route and Chronology of Korean Plant Domestication
Authors: Choe Chong-pil
Published: April 2006

Problems concerning the emergence and geographical diffusion of food production in East Asia have long interested archaeologists and historians. However, attempts to reconstruct the chronology and diffusion routes from the so-called nuclear zones of both North and South China through the Korean peninsula and Japan have been less than convincing. In North China, the crops involved were millet (Setaria italica) and kaoliang (Sorghum vulgare); in South China, rice (Oryza sativa japonicaandindica).
Shang China is Coming of Age—A Review Article
Authors: Keightley David N.
Published: April 2006

K. C. Chang's Shang Civilization is an invaluable, encyclopaedic guide to the archaeology, anthropology, and culture of East Asia's first historical dynasty. After a summary of the book's scope and a sampling of its interpretations, the review discusses six of Chang's major themes: (1) the acceptance of the “longer” rather than “shorter” dynastic chronology; (2) the identification of Cheng-chou as a Shang capital; (3) the hypothesis that two major groups held royal power in alternate
generations; (4) the extent to which the states surrounding the Shang enjoyed cultural and ethnic unity; (5) the existence of numerous walled towns; and (6) the relation between bronze tools and agricultural productivity.
Conceptions of the Family in the Sung Dynasty
Authors: Ebrey Patricia
Published: April 2006

The values and premises underlying the Chinese family system can be seen as an amalgam of several partially contradictory strains of thought, each with its own history and vocabulary. While ideas tied to the classical tsung model remained at the level of high ideals, seldom even emulated, notions related to the family (chid) and the continuity of the patriline were highly pervasive and would seem to account for much of the uniformity in Chinese family practices. In this article the ways these strains of thought reinforced or countered each other is examined through an analysis of texts written in the Sung (960–1279) period, a time of social and intellectual ferment when it was common to write on family matters with considerable candor.
The Gandhi Revival—A Review Article
Authors: Juergensmeyer Mark
Published: April 2006

The film Gandhi is one of several events that have recently brought Gandhi's ideas to public attention in India and the West. In this review of the field of Gandhian studies, the author looks at the literature that probes beneath the popular images of the man. The author identifies some of the landmark works in the field and assesses recent publications. He finds that in India, especially, the emphasis is on the application of Gandhian ideas to movements for social and economic change.
Korean Development and Korean Studies—A Review Article
Authors: Moskowitz Karl
Published: April 2006

This article critiques the HIID-KDI eight-volume Studies in the Modernization of the Republic of Korea from the perspective of Korean studies. The Studies' critical contributions to the field are the comprehensiveness of treatment, wealth of data, and disciplinary sophistication of the analyses they present of the principal economic and demographic phenomena of Korea's development after the Korean War and especially after 1961. The overall weakness of the Studies is their inadequate treatment of Korean history, culture, and society in relation to development, despite their great emphasis on the developmental importance of certain cultural phenomena in Korea. Their usefulness, both from the perspective of development studies and from the perspective of Korean studies, would have been enhanced by examining additional questions concerning industrial organization, labor, and the role of the military, as well as by more thorough and knowledgeable analysis of the historical, cultural, and social basis of Korea's modern development.
Food Supply and Population Growth in Southwest China, 1250–1850
Authors: Lee James
Published: April 2006

Between 1250 and 1850 the population of Southwest China increased from 3 to 20 million people. In this essay, the author delineates two periods of population growth—a small one from 1250 to 1600 and a large one from 1700 to 1850—and relates their spatial and temporal characteristics to agricultural production. His conclusions challenge the popular assumption that frontier populations in China grew because of improved agricultural techniques or increased arable land. In the Southwest, between 1250 and 1600, population doubled because of the government investment in agriculture, but, between 1700 and 1850, population quadrupled because of the development of local mining industry. In Qing China, as elsewhere in the early modern world, major increases in population were often a consequence of early industrialization.
Water Control in the Dongting Lake Region during the Ming and Qing Periods
Authors: Perdue Peter C.
Published: April 2006

Both the population and agricultural production of the Dongting Lake region in Hunan and Hubei provinces developed rapidly from the late Ming period through the mid-Qing period. During this period, the interests of local dike builders in clearing more land increasingly came into conflict with the efforts of Qing officials to prevent floods by supervising dike repairs and preventing overbuilding of dikes. Although local landowners accepted state subsidies to restore damaged dikes in the early Qing period, their power to resist state authority over water control increased through the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, official prohibitions on dike building were ignored, and a series of disastrous floods occurred.
Institutional Barriers, Marginality, and Adaptation Among the American-Japanese Mixed Bloods in Japan
Authors: Burkhardt William R.
Published: April 2006

Guided by the perspective of marginality theory, the author examines the problems that have faced the mixed-blood progeny of Japanese women and American military servicemen who were reared in father-absent homes and institutions in Japan. The group has experienced discrimination according to racial, class, and family background characteristics and has encountered barriers in the areas of education, employment, marriage, and citizenship or legal status. Although culturally Japanese, mixed bloods are often stereotyped by Japanese as cultural oddities or aliens. Black Japanese have been especially victimized by discrimination and negative stereotypes. Although most American-Japanese have accepted their marginal situation with a fate-orientation common among Japanese, some have responded maladaptively with deviant patterns of aggressive or self-destructive behavior. Others have sought emigration, and a few may have "passed" into Japanese society. The author places these findings in the context of existing research on the Burakumin and Korean minorities in Japan, Korean Amerasians, and Eurasians in East and South Asia.
Presidential Address: Language and Area Studies—In Search of a Meaningful Relationship
Authors: Jorden Eleanor Harz
Published: April 2006

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.
Modernization and Democratic Reform in China
Authors: Womack Brantly
Published: April 2006

The new materialism underlying economic modernization in post-Mao China rests on the principles of the primacy of productivity over ideology, use of incentives based on material interests, and acknowledgment of economic and social complexity. An impressive array of political reforms has accompanied the vast changes in economic policies that these principles have inspired. These include legal and constitutional reform, a decrease in public interference in the private lives of citizens, an increase in mass voice in most organizations, and a strengthening of the people's congress system. The reforms are intended to contribute to modernization by institutionalizing orderly participation by intellectuals and the masses. The capacity of such reforms to limit arbitrary power through institutional and electoral checks is rendered ambiguous by the continued hegemony of the Chinese Communist Party.
Themes in the Socioeconomic History of China, 1840–1949—A Review Article
Authors: Buck David D.
Published: April 2006

This article discusses two collections (seventy-seven titles) of reprints edited by Ramon H. Myers. He does not provide an interpretative essay for either collection; his choices for inclusion are reviewed in terms of the opinions that he has expressed in a textbook and in other works. The choices reveal that Myers, along with other specialists, views 1895 to 1937 as a key period in which the old socioeconomic order disintegrated and a new order took shape. Scholarly interest concerning those years has focused on the nature of the agrarian crisis, the impact of foreign trade and investment, the contribution of the Chinese bourgeoisie, and the role of the new Nationalist government. The author discusses the views of Myers and others on these topics, and, in addition, the author points out that these collections suggest that another topic—the expanded control of foreign governments over the economic affairs of the Chinese state—is worthy of investigation.
The Sociopolitical Effects of Ideological Change: The Buddhist Conversion of Maharashtrian Untouchables
Authors: Gokhale Jayashree B.
Published: April 2006

The conversion of the Mahars to Buddhism in October 1956 was an ambitious attempt to construct a new ideology fundamentally opposed to the traditional Hindu system of beliefs, which had been destructive for the individual psyches as well as for the collective existence of Untouchables. The conversion was intended to transform the consciousness, both individual and collective, of the Mahar-Buddhists through the creation of new institutions and new modes of social interaction. The conversion was effective in inculcating a new ideology and relationships among the Mahar-Buddhists, and it did serve to make the community more cohesive and self-confident than it had been. Yet, because of the intrusion of the reservation issue and the ambiguous constitutional status of the Buddhists, they became more isolated from Untouchable communities than they had been. The conversion also had unexpected effects that ultimately reinforced divisions and class tensions both among Untouchable communities and within wider Maharashtrian society.
Presidential Address: The Structure of Chinese History
Authors: Skinner G. William
Published: April 2006

Abstracts

The developmental trajectories of North China and the Southeast Coast during the middle and late imperial periods are surveyed to illustrate the recurrence of regional macrocycles of development and decline and to show that such cycles may be unsynchronized as between regions. These cases provide a basis for arguing that economic macrocycles are a systemic property—not of provinces or of the empire as a whole but of regional economies viewed as internally differentiated and interdependent systems of human interaction. An exploration of the relation between regional developmental cycles and the Chinese dynastic cycle concludes that the latter was mediated by the former. It is suggested that regional developmental cycles are cycles not only of economic prosperity and depression but also of population growth and decline, of social development and devolution, and of peace and disorder. China's historical structure, then, is seen as an internested hierarchy of local and regional histories whose scope in each case is grounded in the spatial patterning of human interaction, and whose critical temporal structures are successive cyclical episodes. The uses of such an historiographic model are briefly explored.