bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Symbolic Patterning in Angkola Batak Adat Ritual
Authors: Rodgers Susan
Published: April 2006

In Sumatra's Angkola Batak culture, rituals celebrating major kinship-related events such as marriage have many layers of social and symbolic meaning; they have political, kinship, musical, mythic, and philosophical dimensions as lengthy, oratory-filled ceremonies that unite wife-giving lineages with wife-receivers. This article examines several ways that the interpretive approach that is discussed in the introduction can help students of Indonesian ritual grasp diverse aspects of Batak marriage rituals such as their hidden symbolic organization and their practical political implications. The article deals with a short sequence ofadatdance staged for anthropological research purposes. (Adat, once translated as customary law, roughly means Angkola ceremonial life, kinship norms, and political thought;adatis eminently flexible, redefined by each Batak generation.) The choreography of the dance (wife-receivers dancing with wife-givers), songs, clothing, the political biographies of the participants, and the fact that the event was staged render the ceremony open to both structural and social contextual inquiry.
Interpretive Approaches: A Psycholinguistic Perspective
Authors: Harwood Dane L.
Published: April 2006

An interpretive approach to studying human activity is a potentially powerful set of procedures for the social sciences. The proponents of this methodology focus on levels of “discourse constraints” that give meaning to public behavior in their attempt to link the “explanation” of texts to an “understanding” of context. The argument can be extended to the search by cognitive scientists and psycholinguists for constraints on the “discourse of thought,” including the interrelationship of thought and the context within which thinking takes place.

The “texts” of human behavior, linguistic or otherwise, seem to cohere. Discovering how the principles of coherence are acquired by individuals as they develop, and how this “tacit knowledge” informs “public action,” will require joint effort by many social scientists, including psychologists. A rigorous interpretive approach also requires that we acknowledge how, as researchers, we add layers of meaning to the activities we observe.
Domesticating the Cosmos: History and Structure in a Folktale from India
Authors: Blackburn Stuart H.
Published: April 2006

A folktale about two sisters who make a wager on the color of a white horse has been told in India for at least three thousand years; it is recorded in the oldest Vedic texts, and it is still sung today in a Tamil oral tradition. A survey of this historical depth shows that the major variants of the tale reflect developments in Hindu religious thought. But more interesting is the relation between the embedded folktale and its frame text in classical mythology. In each case, the tale echoes the themes of the frame text but reorients them, bringing the cosmic concerns of gods and demons within the compass of human kinship, within the home, even the bedroom. These observations lead to a discussion of general relations between folklore and classical traditions in India.
On the Political Construction of Tradition:Gotong Royongin Indonesia
Authors: Bowen John R.
Published: April 2006

The idea of “mutual assistance” (gotong royong) in Indonesia has been the basis for political discourse concerning the nature of authority, the characteristics of village society, and the legitimacy of demands for labor by the state. This article traces the way in which both changing political ideologies and state-village relations have been mediated by the termgotong royong, and suggests that its multiple meanings have been central to its semantic, political, and economic roles. Local interpretations of national doctrine and reactions to state policy are examined in two cases: East Java and Gayo (Aceh). The wide variety of local strategies is perceived as depending on preexisting political traditions and power relations vis-à-vis the state.
Presidential Address: Cause for Concern in the Philippines
Authors: Golay Frank H.
Published: April 2006

This paper focuses on the administration of Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippine Islands, 1965–1986, with particular emphasis on economic policy, fiscal abuse and monopolization during a period of martial law. The paper traces the resultant grave social consequences for the impoverished country, the consternation of the international banking community, and the eventual election to the presidency of Corazon Aquino in February, 1986.
Rural Distress in Southeast Asia During the World Depression of the Early 1930s: A Preliminary Reexamination
Authors: Brown Ian
Published: April 2006

This article is a preliminary exploration of the impact of the world depression of the early 1930s on the rural populations of Southeast Asia. The first section of the essay considers some of the statistical evidence relating to living standards and economic welfare in rural Southeast Asia during the depression. The second section examines a number of factors—the alleged coercive power of the colonial state to secure its tax revenues and of rural capitalists to enforce debt and rent payments during a period of severe deflation—which would have had a major direct influence on levels of peasant consumption in the region in that period. The final section considers three indirect indications of changes in economic welfare in Southeast Asia during the depression: Indian immigration and repatriation rates; the import level of cotton piece goods; and mortality rates. The author advances two principal arguments: the sharp deflation of the early 1930s brought varying degrees of economic distress in the major export-oriented rural districts of Southeast Asia; but that even in those districts more severely affected by the crisis the decline in peasant welfare was markedly more modest than has hitherto been widely accepted.
Concepts of Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infancy in Ch'ing Dynasty China
Authors: Furth Charlotte
Published: April 2006

I deas about gender organize the social relations between men and women. They gain their power because they seem to be the products of a natural order of things, deeper than any social conventions. Reproductive processes, like eating and drinking, sickness and death, appear as part of the biological substratum of human experience, operating according to universal laws that apply to all human beings and to other living creatures as well. Older practitioners of the history of science, when confronted with the bewildering variety of customs, rituals, and medical aids surrounding childbirth in remote times and places, usually recorded these as superstition or the products of naive empiricism. The consequent interpretation of the history of medicine as the gradual replacement of error by science retains its positivist appeal even today.
The State and Ideology in Meiji Japan—A Review Article
Authors: Hirai Atsuko
Published: April 2006

In his presidential address at the 1977 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Marius Jansen pointed out that the relationship between monarchy and modernization in Japan is a significant subject of research for Western scholars specializing in Japanese studies. Specifically, Jansen emphasized the need to investigate the popular perceptions of the monarch usually overlooked by Japanese historians. He noted that a study of Japanese mentalité must cover a vast area, including “imagery, iconography, and ritual.” Until we “get at” this level of the social and cultural history of modern Japan, Jansen feared, we will fail to gain “a better understanding of modernization, of Japan, in world history” (1977:612–22).
Vernacular and Classical Ritual in Taoism
Authors: Schipper Kristofer
Published: April 2006

Rituals that accompany community celebrations in China come in two kinds: vernacular and classical. The reason why these two forms exist is not easily explained. To the two forms of liturgy correspond two kinds of specialists: thetao-shi(Taoist dignitary) and thefa-shih(Master of rites). Both are commonly called “master,” and their practices are often confused by laymen. In fact, the two traditions are opposite and rivaling, but they are also largely complementary. This article, which is mainly based on fieldwork in southern Taiwan during the 1960s, explores both traditions, but emphasizes the lesser known vernacular one. An attempt is made to assess how widespread this situation was in China, and how far back in history it can be traced. The story of Hsu Chia, Lao-tzu's illiterate servant, which is considered the origin of the vernacular tradition, is studied in detail.
Politics and Social Indentity: Introduction
Authors: Hefner Robert W.
Published: April 2006

In the first years of the postcolonial era, students of politics in the new nation- states often assumed that “primordial” ties of kinship, language, ethnicity, and religion would gradually give way to a more encompassing sense of national political community. The emergence of such an expanded civic sense, it was hoped, would be paralleled by the development of economic, educational, and even religious institutions similarly premised on a broader, more socially accommodative, and self-consciously sustained concept of community. The expansion of political and economic opportunities made possible by the departure of European nationals, of course, might result in momentary incidents of communal competition. Ultimately, however, the social bases of conflict and solidarity would shift from their earlier organization to newly created bonds of class and profession, and the potential political divisiveness of these would be constrained by an overarching allegiance to national community and common interests. Although Marxist students of nation building rejected the integrative optimism of this model, they tended to assume that, in Asia as in Europe in earlier centuries, regional, ethnic, and religious allegiances would eventually give way to those of class and economic interest. Politics and social identity in Asia's new states were, in a word, “posttraditional,” and posttraditionalism was, almost by definition, political community in search of a new self.
The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia: An Analysis of Census Classifications
Authors: Hirschman Charles
Published: April 2006

In Peninsular Malaysia, the conventional ethnic divisions are “Malay,” “Chinese,” “Indian,” and “Other.” At first glance, this classification seems to represent the popular conception of “race” (the everyday term) as well as the “official” definition. According to the Malaysian constitution, a Malay is a person who was born locally, habitually speaks Malay, follows Malay custom, and professes Islam (Mohammed Suffian bin Hashim 1976:291). The Chinese and Indian communities are supposed to consist of the descendants of immigrants from China and the Indian subcontinent. “Other” is a catchall category for the small number of Eurasians, Thais, Europeans, and other persons who do not fit into the three major categories.
The Post-Mao Reforms in Historical Perspective
Authors: Cohen Paul A.
Published: April 2006

Academic writing on the post-Mao reforms—as indeed on almost every other aspect of China since 1949—has been largely in the hands of social scientists. Much of this writing, moreover, has been done either explicitly or implicitly from a systemic perspective. That is, it seeks to understand the reform process as unfolding within a particular kind of social, economic, and political system and to infer from other reform attempts in comparable systems something about the course the Chinese reforms are likely to take. When Chalmers Johnson (1982) applies the “Leninist government paradigm” to the Chinese case and makes certain observations about the potential for “peaceful structural change” within societies that conform to this paradigm, he is operating from the systemic perspective.
Government Famine Relief in Bengal, 1943
Authors: Brennan Lance
Published: April 2006

An estimated seven and a half million people died of starvation and related diseases in China, Vietnam, and India during the last half of the Second World War. This death toll reflected the severity with which the poor were affected by the combination of natural disaster, military imperative, political conflict, economic dislocation, and corruption that caused these famines. But famine mortality is also a function of the effectiveness of the relief system. The famines in China and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam, occurred in times of administrative disruption. During the Bengal famine of 1943, however, the central and provincial administrations were intact, if under strain, as the Japanese army tested the eastern defenses of India. Moreover, the Bengal government had recently revised the instructions for bringing relief to those affected by famine. The possibility of an ordered administrative response to the crisis means that the analysis of this operation provides an opportunity to make a contribution to the general understanding of famine relief.
Presidential Address: State Formation in Asia—Prolegomenon to a Comparative Study
Authors: Rudolph Susanne Hoeber
Published: April 2006

The dictionary says that a prolegomenon is “a learned preface or preamble, … introductory or preliminary observations on the subject of a book.” And indeed, the remarks I am about to make are preliminary to a volume on state formation that Lloyd Rudolph and I hope to produce one of these years. Such a prolegomenon is also a commitment to a path of action, a justification, a polemic in favor of what one proposes to do. Today, I want to speak for the domain of comparison.
Manzhou yuanliu kao and the Formalization of the Manchu Heritage
Authors: Crossley Pamela Kyle
Published: April 2006

During the Qianlong period (1736–95) in China, knowledge of Manchu origins, much of which had been of a folk or informal character, was given documentary institutionalization—that is, incorporation into the Qing (1636–1912) imperial cultural mosaic by the act of writing something official about it. Much but by no means all of Manchu civilization was derived from Jurchen culture (tenth–seventeenth centuries), which was primarily a folk culture in which oral tradition, shamanic ritual, and clan custom were the mainstays of orderly social life. Inseparable from those folk traditions were elements of tribal rule that affected political life in many ways in the Later Jin (1616–35) and early Qing periods. To the extent that Manchu society retained the archaic forms through the Qing era, the folk heritage was brought into conflict with the political institutions and classical traditions of conquered China, especially the emperorship. The history of the Qing court and its relation to the Manchus may be viewed as the aggregate of the processes by which the dynasty attempted to resolve this conflict through formalization of the old culture. In its political aspects this meant the progressive bureaucratization, regulation, and depersonalization of the state in displacement of the personal, diffused authority that had once been vested by tradition in the clans and confederations. In its cultural and ideological facets, it meant the documentation of descent, myth, clan history, and shamanic practice; what had once been various and mystically obscure was now made visible, manageable, and standard.
Temple Urbanism in Medieval South India
Authors: Heitzman James
Published: April 2006

The Tamil country of South India experienced a flowering of political, economic, and cultural forces during the Chola period (849–1279). The environments supporting this expansion were nucleated settlements focused on temples, surrounded by verdant paddy fields with artificial irrigation networks. This article is a study of the sacred sites and nucleated settlements that were the heart of this medieval civilization. The purposes of the study are two: first, to portray the dynamics of early urbanism during a crucial period of regional integration in South Asia, and especially to portray the geography of early centers; second, to provide the basis for a comparative study of early South Indian urbanism and premodern urbanism in other world areas.
Alms for Kasagi Temple
Authors: Goodwin Janet R.
Published: April 2006

The popularization of Japanese Buddhism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is generally equated with the development of independent religious movements such as the Pure Land and Lotus schools, which emphasized salvation by faith and simple invocations. Although these movements were indeed at the heart of Buddhism's transformation from an aristocratic to a popular religion, there are problems with an approach that focuses on them alone. To begin with, such an approach ignores the considerable contribution of the older schools—Tendai, Shingon, and those centered in Nara—to the popularization of Buddhism. In addition, it becomes tempting to see the spread of Buddhism as only the result of innovations in doctrine and religious practice, the most obvious differences between new schools and old, and to ignore the role played by monasteries as social and economic institutions.
Individualism in Taishō Japan
Authors: Nolte Sharon Hamilton
Published: April 2006

The author identifies three meanings of individualism (kojinshugi) in Japanese journalism during the Taishō period. They were: first, individual character and talent should be cultivated for the purpose of strengthening the state and fostering the active commitment of individuals to state policies; second, personal autonomy and self-expression were legitimate within a restricted “private” sphere that coexisted uneasily with the dominant values of the “public” sphere; and third, the development of free, autonomous individuals was the most fundamental value by which state and society should be judged. Proponents of individualism were unable to alter the state structure established by the Meiji Constitution or the state ideology of submission; their innovative thinking did serve as a leavening agent within state structure by demanding new relationships between elite and masses and by sustaining a high degree of elite pluralism.
Bashō as Bat: Wayfaring and Antistructure in the Journals of Matsuo Bashō
Authors: Barnhill David L.
Published: April 2006

The japanese writer Matsuo Bashō (1644–94) is known in the West primarily as a haiku poet. But he was also a master of Japanese prose, bothhaibun(short pieces of poetic prose) andkikō(travel literature). It is in his prose, particularly his travel journals, that Bashō portrays a vision and a way of life that is profoundly religious.
Desire and the Prince: New Work on Genji monogatari—A Review Article
Authors: Morris Mark
Published: April 2006

Toward the end of a diary entry for Sunday, June 14, 1925, the writer reminds herself to “answer Gerald Brenan, & read the Genji; for tomorrow I make a second £20 from Vogue.” For a short review of a long book, £20 was worth a bit of excitement: advertisements in the London press that summer indicate that the yearly wages of a cook or housemaid ranged from £28 to £45. For someone in search of a Bloomsbury flat of one's own, £20 could keep you in modest, furnished comfort on Gordon Square for ten weeks.
Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century China
Authors: Duara Prasenjit
Published: April 2006

Ever since the enlightenment—the dawn of the modern era—historical understanding has been much concerned with the passage to modernity. In our present century, questions and dilemmas of the transition to modernity and the evaluation of “tradition” in the non-Western world have been central to the historical problematique the world over. I have chosen to analyze the modernist understanding of this historical transition in China not only among professional historians in the West, but among Chinese advocates of modernity. Specifically, I will examine the campaigns attacking popular religion during the first three decades of this century. As a movement advocating the establishment of a rational society, these campaigns offer a view of the understanding of this transition, not just in theory and historiography, but in practice.
Research Themes in Ming-Qing Socioeconomic History—The State of the Field
Authors: Rawski Evelyn S.
Published: April 2006

China's political “opening to the West” in 1979–89 directly affected historical scholarship on Ming and Qing socioeconomic history. Some PRC scholars were able to travel abroad, others met foreign specialists at international conferences held in China, and many more were introduced to foreign scholarship through Chinese translations of articles and books published in Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and North America. Foreign scholars, also, profited from new access to archival sources for research; a few anthropologists and historians even were able to reside in the countryside and interview villagers. While increased access and scholarly exchange have enriched research, they have not erased national differences in interpretation and approach.
Modes of Thinking and Modes of Discourse in the Sung: Some Thoughts on theYü-lu(“Recorded Conversations”) Texts
Authors: Gardner Daniel K.
Published: April 2006

In studying the ideas of Sung Neo-Confucians, scholars have made much use of the so-calledyü-lutexts, or “records of conversations.” Disciples, sitting in the presence of their master, would record his exchanges with them; less frequently they would jot them down later from memory. The ideas of many of the foremost thinkers of the Sung dynasty (960–1279) are better known to us as a result of the stenographic efforts of their disciples: the teachings of Chang Tsai (1020–1077), Cheng I (1032–1107), Cheng Hao (1032–1085), Hsieh Liang-tso (1050–1103), Yang Shih (1053–1135), Lu Hsiang-shan (1139–1193), and Chu Hsi (1130–1200), to name but a few, were transmitted to later generations inyü-lu, recorded and edited by devoted followers.
How Did the Modern Chinese Economy Develop? —A Review Article
Authors: Myers Ramon H.
Published: April 2006

Unsurprisingly, writings on the economic history of nineteenth and twentieth century China have been confusing and full of controversy. A major question is whether the Chinese economy experienced per capita output growth, stagnated, or declined between 1870 and World War II. Studies prior to 1937 usually claimed that the rural economy's output per capita declined, with only modest expansion of a small, modern sector restricted to railroads and manufacturing firms, and that this modern sector declined during the great world depression of the 1930s (Myers 1970:13–18; Ozaki 1939; Tawney 1932). A few studies of the 1960s and 1970s generally confirmed this view (Eastman 1974:chap. 5; Paauw 1952:3–26). Various theories attempted to explain this continuing or deepening poverty in China, including some, such as Ch'en Han-seng's, that emphasized exploitation or the misdistribution of wealth (Myers 1970).
A Reply to Ramon Myers
Authors: Huang Philip C. C.
Published: April 2006

The central theme of my book, reviewed in the previous article by Ramon Myers, is that, contrary to the expectations of the classical models of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, commercialization does not necessarily bring modern development to the countryside. China before 1950 saw six centuries of vigorous and protracted commercialization, but rural underdevelopment persisted, so that the great majority of the population remained tied to the land and to bare-subsistence food production (down to the 1980s). In spite of fairly vigorous expansion of urban industrial production after the 1890s (and accelerated development after 1950), the countryside remained poor, with per capita incomes hovering around subsistence. The classical vision of market-driven capitalist development, with mutually reinforcing and spiraling urban and rural development, simply did not occur in China. What happened instead were commercialization without rural development and urban industrialization without rural development—combinations of empirical phenomena that appear paradoxical to us from the standpoint of Western-derived expectations.
“True” Views: Taiga'sShinkeizuand the Evolution of Literati Painting Theory in Japan
Authors: Takeuchi Melinda
Published: April 2006

Few cultures had as rich a vocabulary for pictures of specific places as did eighteenth-century Japan. Why then did yet another word,shinkeizu(literally “true-view pictures”), come into being in the late eighteenth century? The answer is that none of the existing terms satisfactorily articulated the ideological essence of a new kind of painting advocated by a group of artists who sought to incorporate into their work styles and concepts associated with the art of the Chinese literatus. These Japanese masters came to constitute a school known as Nanga (the Japanese interpretation of the Chinese “Southern school” of painting; it was also calledbunjinga, “literati painting”). For a picture (zu) of a given scene (kei) to be profound, argued the connoisseurs of Nanga, the artist must experience the vista at first hand and then absorb and transmit its essential reality (shin). It was in the circle of the brilliant literati artist Ike Taiga (1723–76) that the concept ofshinkeizubecame the integral element of the new Japanese conception of depictions of actual scenes.
Japanese Harlequin Romances as Transcultural Woman's Fiction
Authors: Mulhern Chieko Irie
Published: April 2006

My country “is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women,” goes one of the most frequently quoted gender-related adages. Japanologists might be tempted to attribute this uncourtly utterance to a learned nobleman of Heian Japan (794–1185) embittered by the outpouring of vernacular narratives from women's writing brushes that were eclipsing male endeavors to emulate Chinese classics, or to an exasperated modern Japanese novelist in reference to the neo-Heian phenomenon, namely, the renaissance of women's literature in postwar Japan. Actually it was Nathaniel Hawthorne (1855:141) who made the now infamous sexist remark in chagrin at American women who were churning out best-sellers in force. Thereafter, this phenomenon abated for a full century, but since the 1960s, Western women writers have made a glorious resurgence, marked by unprecedented degrees of output and worldwide market domination in a genre known as the romance fiction. The title of the first romance series and the name of its publisher, Harlequin, has become something like a generic term with multiple signification.
Ritual Drama and Moral Order: Interpreting the Gods' Festival Troupes of Southern Taiwan
Authors: Sutton Donald S.
Published: April 2006

The procession troupes at the gods' festivals so common today in southern Taiwan, as on the China mainland in the past, perform a kind of ritual drama. The processions themselves occur on god's birthdays, in great ceremonies of renewal (jiao) or, in a more abbreviated form, at pilgrimage sites. The troupes (zbentou) are dramatic elements in the procession in that the performers dress up, portray a story, and try to entertain. What they do may be classified as ritual: forms and content are stereotyped, repetitive, condensed, and conventionalized (Tambiah 1985). The performances are for divine as well as for human enjoyment, and vary little as the troupes parade from temple to temple.
Traditional Painting in New China:Guohuaand the Anti-Rightist Campaign
Authors: Andrews Julia F.
Published: April 2006

The anti-rightist campaign of 1957 and 1958 had dire consequences for many of China's artists, just as it did for hundreds of thousands of China's intellectuals (Link 1984:11–14). A sculpture instructor and Communist Party member at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, for example, refused to testify against the artist Jiang Feng, the academy's director and a man to whom he felt personal loyalty. The sculptor was declared an “extreme rightist” and sent to a labor camp at Xingkai Lake in Heilongjiang on the Soviet border. His entire sculptural output for the following years, 1958 to 1979, was a small box filled with crudely carved tree roots, work conducted in secret without professional tools or materials (interview with A 1986).
Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of Guandi, Chinese God of War
Authors: Duara Prasenjit
Published: April 2006

Historical studies of how myths and symbols change have only recently begun to emerge. They tend to stress the layered and historically stratified nature of myths, each stratum reflecting the concerns of an epoch or a particular group. Marina Warner (1982) has shown how the image of Joan of Arc has been differently interpreted by Nazis, nationalists, and feminists, among many others, and Jacques Le Goff (1980) has demonstrated how ecclesiastical and popular images of Saint Marcellus of Paris came to resemble each other but ultimately always remained apart. James Watson's stimulating study (1985) of Tian Hou, or the empress of heaven, argues that the outwardly unitary symbolic character of the goddess Tian Hou concealed important differences in what various social groups believed about her. Pioneering as they are, these works are only the start of efforts to probe the enormously complex relationship between change in the symbolic realm and historical change among social groups and institutions.
Proto-Industrial Origins of Japanese Capitalism
Authors: Howell David L.
Published: April 2006

Proto-Industrialization has been defined as a transitional phase on the way to modern, factory industrialization, characterized by “the development of rural regions in which a large part of the population lived entirely or to a considerable extent from industrial mass production for inter-regional and international markets” (Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm [KMS] 1981:6). This article will use protoindustrialization as a lens through which to reexamine a number of issues in early modern Japanese history, including the relationship between commercial agriculture and rural industry, the role of the state in economic development, and the economic geography of the late Tokugawa period. Perhaps most importantly, I hope by looking at proto-industrialization to reach a better understanding of the transition from the feudalism of the Tokugawa era to the capitalist development of the Meiji period and beyond.
The State, Modernity, and the Fate of Liberalism in Prewar Japan
Authors: Hoston Germaine A.
Published: April 2006

The Political Histories of Western Europe and the United States over the past three hundred years illustrate powerfully how the evolution of fully functioning liberal democratic politics has been linked intimately to the presence of vigorous thinkers and activists dedicated to the pursuit of a liberal polity. The social contract theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the constitutionalism of Baron Charles de Montesquieu, the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, and the reflections of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton on the challenges of competitive politics all helped to lay the groundwork for the achievement of liberal democratic politics in France, England, and the United States. Particular strains of political thought found in these and other thinkers help to account for the similarities and differences among the world's historic experiments in bourgeois democracy. French liberalism, which had no Thomas Hobbes seeking eloquently to defend monarchical absolutism, ultimately could not accommodate royal prerogative to democratic politics; and, lacking an Adam Smith to assert the primacy of economic laissez-faire, it showed no fundamental antipathy to the centralized state in its political practice. A more dramatic contrast is afforded by the fragile and short-lived democracy of Weimar Germany, nurtured in soil where G. W. F. Hegel's organic conception of the state and the doctrines of state sovereignty that legitimated the regime of Otto von Bismarck overwhelmed the contributions of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt to liberal theory. In the final analysis, to be sure, the presence or absence of absolutism and its defenders, of laissez-faire economics and its rationalizers is attributable to other factors deep in the history and culture of each society. Yet, in all these cases, the historical relationship between thought and politics is clear and striking.
Vietnamese Kinship: Structural Principles and the Socialist Transformation in Northern Vietnam
Authors: van Luong Hy
Published: April 2006

In the literature on the process of socioeconomic transformation, a major debate centers on the questions of how and how much indigenous traditions, including kinship structures, are transformed by the larger political economic framework (Sahlins 1985, Hobsbawm 1983, Wolf 1982). Marxist theoretical analyses tend to emphasize the eventual demise of gender inequality and male-oriented (patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical) kinship systems—kinship systems within which gender relations are also embedded (cf. Engels 1972). The analytical literature on Vietnamese kinship and gender in the socialist era is certainly not an exception in this regard. It is pervaded with general propositions regarding the nuclearization of the family (Houtart and Lemercinier 1981, Werner 1981) and the political-economy-based transformation of the system toward a structure of egalitarian gender relations (e.g., Lê thḷ Nhâm-Tuyêt 1973).
The Once and Future Yogi: Sentiments and Signs in the Tale of a Renouncer-King
Authors: Gold Ann Grodzins
Published: April 2006

The Pervasive Presence in Asia of ascetic practitioners—whether sedate, shorn, and robed monks or fierce, ash-smeared, naked yogis—has long fascinated Western observers and certainly nourished stereotypes of a mysterious, otherworldly, and impenetrable East. In India especially, the ascetic's figure has fueled the speculations of scholars, artists, tourists, and religious seekers for centuries (Oman 1905; Narayan 1988). Most depictions of Indian culture, whether indigenous or foreign, evocative or analytic, include portraits or analyses of world-renouncers.1 And yet with the notable exception of numerous fictional explorations (e.g., Bhattacharya 1978; Markandaya 1963; R K. Narayan 1980), the renouncer remains a figure whose existence comments on the human predicament but whose human thoughts and feelings remain opaque.
The Political Economy of Post-Independence India—A Review Article
Authors: Gupta Akhil
Published: April 2006

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.
Leadership and Individuality in South Asia: The Case of the South Indian Big-man
Authors: Mines Mattison , Gourishankar Vijayalakshmi
Published: April 2006

Although there has been great interest in how properly to conceptualize the person in Indian culture, few have explored Indian perceptions of leadership, achievement, and agency as valued features of individuality (Singer 1972; Mines 1988; Fox 1989). Indeed, since Dumont (1970a,b) forcefully argued that the values of equality and liberty that support the Western notion of the individual were absent from Indian society, the important roles that personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement play in Indian history have been largely overlooked or understated. This paper reconsiders an Indian sense of these roles by examining the south Indian concept of the “big-man”(periyar, periyavar), a notion of individuality and instrumentality that is central to the politics of south India and crucial to an understanding of the dynamic relationship that exists between action and organization in Indian society (cf., Fox 1989).
Chinese Demography: The State of the Field
Authors: Lavely William , Lee James , Feng Wang
Published: April 2006

As recently as one decade ago, there was no “field” of Chinese demography. There were virtually no demographers of China and little available data. It is fair to say that China was at once the largest and the least known of any human population.

The change has been sudden. New sources of data now place China among the better-documented national populations. Publications on Chinese population have boomed. In consequence, we can now speak of a field of Chinese demography, although it is hardly in a steady “state.” We can only outline the explosion of demographic research that is continually expanding and refining our understanding of Chinese population today and in the past. This outpouring of data and knowledge provides unprecedented opportunities for the study of Chinese society and offers unusual challenges to our understanding of comparative population dynamics.
Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China
Authors: Esherick Joseph W. , Wasserstrom Jeffrey N.
Published: April 2006

For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, China's student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications. Their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachev's visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe. As we write in mid-1990, the movement and its bloody suppression have already produced an enormous body of literature—from eyewitness accounts by journalists (Morrison 1989; Zhaoqiang, Gejing and Siyuan 1989) and special issues of scholarly journals (Australian Journal of Chinese AffairsNos. 23, 24;The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs14.4), to pictorial histories (Turnley and Turnley 1989) and documentary collections (Han 1990; Wu 1989), and, most recently, textbook chapters (Spence 1990) and analytical works (Feigon 1990; Nathan 1990)—tracing the development of China's crisis. Despite a flood of material too massive to review in the present context, we still lack a convincing interpretive framework that places the events within the context of China's modern political evolution, and also provides a way to compare China's experience to that of Eastern Europe. Such an interpretation should help us to understand why massive public demonstrations spurred an evolution toward democratic governance in Eastern Europe, but in China led only to the massacre of June 3–4 and the present era of political repression.
Constructing the Japanese Ethnography of Modernity
Authors: Silverberg Miriam
Published: April 2006

One afternoon in tokyo in the summer of 1921, ten Waseda University students visited the home of Gonda Yasunosuke, the critic of Japanese popular culture. Each was writing a dissertation on popular entertainment (minsbū goraku). Tell us, they asked Gonda, what were the authoritative texts they could find at Maruzen, the emporium specializing in foreign books? They wanted the real thing—Western language theoretical sources. “Forget it,” replied Gonda, “there aren't any in the Maruzen catalog. Go to Asakusa—Asakusa's your text.” The young men wanted an imported, printed master text, but Gonda would not comply. Instead, he demanded personal experience that would give them an understanding of cultural forms that a reading of printed texts (and, moreover, of imported printed texts) could not yield. He directed them to do on-site fieldwork in Asakusa Park where female and male laborers from large- and small-scale industries, artisans, and white-collar middleclass nouveaux riches mingled to play (Gonda 1922a [GYS 1:291–92]).
The Contested Past: The Boxers as History and Myth
Authors: Cohen Paul A.
Published: April 2006

The mythologized past is the past that predominates in the minds of most people. Therefore, even as historians strive to counter it, it behooves us to study it with care. Although any aspect of the past has the potential to live on as myth in the present, certain events and persons, because they resonate with themes of broader historical scope and importance, have this potential to an especially high degree. Thus, in American history, where racism has been such a pervasive historical pattern, figures like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King who helped to ameliorate the condition of blacks are often treated in larger-than-life terms. To take a more complex case, in China in the twentieth century, where the West has been by turns hated as an imperialist aggressor and admired for its mastery of the secrets of wealth and power, the Boxers, because they attacked both the West and its modern secrets, have been alternately praised and reviled.
Institutional Change and Economic Growth in China: The View from the Villages
Authors: Nee Victor , Sijin Su
Published: April 2006

The maoist era of egalitarian collectivism has decidedly come to an end. Although some villages persist in developing cooperative enterprises, the collective is being transformed from a dominant organizational form to one that plays a subsidiary role to the private household sector. In effect, the collective has been relegated to the position formerly held by the private sector. Everywhere the emphasis is on economic growth based on household production and marketlike forces. What is the relationship between these institutional changes and economic growth?
Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka
Authors: Peebles Patrick
Published: April 2006

Sri lanka's inability to contain ethnic violence as it escalated from sporadic terrorism to mob violence to civil war in recent years has disheartened observers who had looked to the nation as a success story of social and political development. In retrospect, Sri Lanka lacked effective local institutions to integrate the society, and the Sinhalese elite relied on welfare and preferential policies for the Sinhalese majority to maintain power. These alienated the minorities and resulted in Tamil demands for a separate state. This article documents one of the more intractable areas in which ethnic conflict has arisen, land “colonization.” Both major parties competed for the votes of the Sinhalese, but the creation of agricultural settlements in the undeveloped interior of the island, or colonization, is associated primarily with the United National Party (UNP). During the UNP government of recently retired President Junius Richard Jayewardene (1977–88), both the level of violence and the pace of colonization in the Dry Zone between the Sinhalese and Tamil majority areas increased.
The Political Construction of Defensive Nationalism: The 1968 Temple-Entry Crisis in Northern Sri Lanka
Authors: Pfaffenberger Bryan
Published: April 2006

In the same year (1968) that students blockaded the streets of Paris, the formerly somnolent Jaffna Peninsula—the center of Tamil culture in Sri Lanka—was rocked by its own version of civil unrest. Led by an activist affiliated with the “Peking wing” of the Ceylon Communist party, several hundred “Minority Tamils” (mainly of the traditionally “untouchable” Paḷḷar and Naḻavar castes) sat in nonviolent protest (satyagrãha) before the gates of Jaffna's most orthodox Hindu temple, the temple of Lord Kandacami (Skanda) in the village called Maviddapuram. Hindus believe this large and beautiful structure represents the very ideal of the reformed Śaivite temple advocated by Arumuka Navalar (1822–79), Jaffna's champion Hindu reformer. Traditionally closed to untouchables, the Brahman-owned temple provided the setting for a two-week campaign to gain admittance that was timed to coincide with the temple's summer festival. After days of tense but peaceful confrontation, the demonstration turned violent as dozens of self-styled “Defenders of Saivism,” Hindus of high-caste rank (Veḷḷāḷars and their domestic servants, the Kōviyars), beat back the Minority Tamils with iron rods and sand-filled bottles. Feelings ran very high throughout the peninsula, and there were many incidents of violence, some lethal. To many Tamils and outside observers, it seemed as though Jaffna was poised on the brink of an all-out war between the castes (see, for example, Fontgalland 1968). Yet the conflict abated, and although there were temple-entry skirmishes in Jaffna as late as 1978, the Maviddapuram fracas was followed by a process of political unification as the Tamil community—Veḷḷāḷars and Minority Tamils alike—joined hands to contest the declining fortunes of Tamils in a country dominated by Sinhalese.
Approaches to the Politics of Economic Growth in Southeast Asia
Authors: Doner Richard F.
Published: April 2006

The pacific rim's record of impressive economic growth over the past twenty years is now well known. While most obvious in Japan, this expansion has been striking in the East Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs): Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan. But it has also occurred to varying degrees in four of the original members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. In addition to increases in overall output, each of these four economies has achieved a considerable degree of restructuring in favor of manufacturing and away from commodity production since the 1970s (e.g., Lee and Naya 1988:S134).
The Transition to Export-led Growth in South Korea: 1954–1966
Authors: Haggard Stephan , Kim Byung-Kook , Moon Chung-in
Published: April 2006

Two basic positions have framed recent debates about South Korea's remarkable economic growth. The neoclassical position traces South Korea's take-off to a set of policy reforms in 1964 and 1965 that launched the country on the path toward export-led growth (Frank, Kim, and Westphal 1975; Kuznets 1977; Krueger 1979). Policy was far from laissez-faire, but on the whole, the reforms moved Korea in a more market-oriented direction that sought to exploit Korea's comparative advantage. The “statists,” by contrast, detail the pervasive intervention of the Korean government in the economy, even after the shift toward an outward-oriented strategy. Moreover, they argue that such intervention promoted rapid economic growth (Leudde-Neurath 1985; Jones and Sakong 1980; Amsden 1989).