bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Living Hadīth in the Tablīghī Jama'āt
Authors: Metcalf Barbara D.
Published: April 2006

The north indian movementof spiritual renewal widely known as the Tablīghī Jama'āt dates from the 1920s and exists today throughout the world. The movement's fundamental goal has beentablīgh: “conveying,” specifically conveyingsharī'ā-based guidance. To this end, it has consistently used vernacular works based on translations of the Qur'ān and, especially, hadīth in its quietistic work of inculcating correct and devoted religious practice among Muslims. In this use of the vernacular, primarily Urdu, the movement has been heir to over a century of translation and subsequent publication of religious works. These publications, often in inexpensive format, have been produced by the lithographic presses that became especially common in the late nineteenth century. As in the Indonesian cases considered in this symposium, the 1930s and early 1940s were a key period for translating and printing influential texts based largely on translation of hadith. In this period, the reformists' printed texts not only reached a larger number of people but were used in new settings as Tabligh institutions evolved. Texts were never meant to stand alone and have always been secondary to practice.
A Modernist Muslim Poetic: Irony and Social Critique in Gayo Islamic Verse
Authors: Bowen John R.
Published: April 2006

Muslim movementsin the twentieth century have sought to develop new reading and listening publics attuned to the messages of reform and renewal. Across Asia and the Middle East, scholars, poets, and activists have created distinctive vernacular genres intended to make the words of scripture widely available. Newspaper columns, quickly printed tracts, and popular poetry have been shaped to the task oftafsīr, the interpretation of scripture. International networks of printers, booksellers, and, more recently, television producers have extended the reformist's reach far beyond older networks of scholarship and communication (Metcalf 1990; Eickelman 1992). Often modernist writers have signaled their break with past scholarly traditions by writing in vernaculars, sometimes developing new vernaculars. They wrote in Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, or Indonesian, rather than the traditional religious and literary languages of Arabic, Persian, and Javanese (Anderson 1990; Freitag 1988; Mardin 1989).
Presidential Address: Questions About China's Early Modern Economic History That I Wish I Could Answer
Authors: Feuerwerker Albert
Published: April 2006

I am greatly honored to have had the opportunity to serve as president of the Association for Asian Studies during the past year, and I am cognizant of the distinction of this afternoon's occasion. This being Washington, where everything is “political”—even more so perhaps than in Beijing—my original thought was to deliver a political sermon on a theme something like “Bush in China.” In fact, I found a possible text for my homily: a book published in Philadelphia in 1865 by a Presbyterian minister, Charles P. Bush, entitledFive Years in China; or, The Factory Boy Made a Missionary: The Life and Observations of Rev. W. Aitchison. But the Reverend Mr. Bush's hagiographical account of the life of William Aitchison, once a missionary to heathen China, was of little help; and I quickly decided that my talents as a fabulist of this variety were exceedingly limited. Hence the quite different fables to which I shall expose you today.
Unraveling the Myth of the Subsistence Economy: Textile Production in Nineteenth-Century Northern Thailand
Authors: Bowie Katherine A.
Published: April 2006

For decades, scholarship on the Thai peasantry has proceeded as if the history of the peasantry were known. Scholars have luxuriated in tourist-brochure images of primeval abundance, reiterating unchallenged the famous adage from the thirteenth-century stele of King Ramkhamhaeng, “There is fish in the water and rice in the fields.” Little hyperbole exists in Thadeus Flood's statement, “For the past century much Western imperialist scholarship and Thai royalist scholarship has sought to perpetuate the image of benign Thai royalty ruling over a happy, carefree, and subservient populace dwelling in a land of sunshine and smiles” (1975:55). For observers of modern Thai society, demonstrations by discontented peasants and assassinations of their leaders have destroyed the myth of a rustic paradise. Nonetheless, the theme of self-sufficiency continues to dominate the literature on Thai history.
Electronic Pageantry and Japan's “Symbolic Emperor”
Authors: Fujitani Takashi
Published: April 2006

Early on the morning of February 24, 1989, my companion and I set out from our lodgings in central Tokyo for the Imperial Plaza. Though we knew that Emperor Shōwa's funeral procession would not be leaving the Palace until 9:35, we planned our arrival for 6:30 because a policeman had told us the day before that a huge crowd was expected. He suggested we arrive at 4:30, but 6:30 seemed early enough since we surmised that the rain and the near-freezing temperatures would keep the crowds away. Later, we would discover that the crowds that day were indeed smaller than had been expected—570,000 people along the funeral motorcade's route rather than the 870,000 spectators that the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had originally projected (Asahi jaanaru, March 10, 1989; Asahi shinbun, February 25, 1989)—but by around 7:30 people filled the area fronting the Palace's main gate.
The Sociological Imagination in China: Comments on the Thought of Chin Yao-chi (Ambrose Y. C. King)
Authors: Metzger Thomas A.
Published: April 2006

Chin Yao-Chi (Ambrose Y. C. King) is internationally known for the knowledgeability and fluency with which he uses many of the perspectives of Western social science to discuss Chinese culture, modern Chinese history, and current developments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Born in 1935, growing up in Shanghai, he obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh and today is Professor of Sociology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His life, however, has also been rooted in Taiwan, where he lived for many years after the fall of the mainland, and where he obtained both his B.A. and M.A. degrees. Long before the promise of the Republic of China's development became obvious, at least as early as 1966, he recognized it, astutely introduced Western modernization theory to analyze it, understood that pursuing it required not iconoclasm but a process of critically and creatively building on the inherited culture, and widely influenced Taiwan intellectuals as they tried to make sense out of their complicated, often distressing situation (Chin 1979, 1987, 1991). The publication of eleven of his articles written during the last decade (a few originally in English) by Oxford University Press (Chin 1992) rightly indicates that his views about Chinese modernization should be weighed by all those around the world concerned with this issue, not just by small scholarly circles. Yet just how insightful are his views? To what extent are they shaped by premises that have commonly informed much modern Chinese thought, and that many Western scholars could not easily accept? To what extent has Professor Chin himself “self-consciously” (tzu-chueh) identified any such premises and pondered their viability?
Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas
Authors: Hansen Chad
Published: April 2006

It began with the Phoenicians. Most written languages now use their invention— a phonetic alphabet. The invention of alphabetic writing escorted an influential theory of language onto the intellectual stage. Aristotle expressed the basic outline of that theory, which has since dominated Indo-European views of language:

Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of the spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of—affections in the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of— actual things-are also the same.
The Rebirth of Shiv Sena: The Symbiosis of Discursive and Organizational Power
Authors: Katzenstein Mary Fainsod , Mehta Uday Singh , Thakkar Usha
Published: April 2006

In rally upon rally over the last half-dozen years, Shiv Sena party supporters have been exhorted to intone, “Say with pride, that we are Hindu” (“Garva se kaho hum hindu hai”). In Hindi, not Marathi. This incantation as a centerpiece of Shiv Sena events would have been scarcely imaginable in the early years of Shiv Sena. Both the stress on a Hindu identity and the use of Hindi in political sloganeering are indicative of a major shift in the politics of regionalism in Western India.

This turn to Hinduism is what seemed to underly the outbreak of violence in Bombay on a scale never before witnessed in the city. In the winter of 1992–93, Bombay experienced the worst Hindu-Muslim conflagration the city has ever known. According to Human Rights Watch, over 1,000 people were killed, and tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands fled the city (1995, 26–27). It is a shift in which the once-local, nativist party in Bombay, the Shiv Sena, now finds itself the dominant political force in the state of Maharashtra, with a ready capacity to incite widespread violence, extract rents, and shape public policy and legislative initiatives (including the decision to first nullify and then renegotiate the Enron power project that recently captured global attention). This article attempts to understand the role of religious nationalism in the ascendancy of Shiv Sena.
Reflections on Community Conflicts and the State in India
Authors: Basu Amrita
Published: April 2006

One of the most important contributions of the recent wave of historical and anthropological scholarship on community identities is to analyze the complex manner in which identities are constructed and to study how such constructions influence their enactment. Similar arguments have been made about caste and “communal” categories and conflicts (see, for example, Dirks 1992; Pandey 1990 and 1992). Political theorists and philosophers have contributed to dismantling old categories by exploring the diverse meanings, possibilities, and limits of secularism in India (Bhargav 1994; Bilgrami 1994; Chatterjee 1994). Given these important methodological and theoretical developments, which focus on the construction of community identities, are there distinctive contributions that students of Indian politics can make to the study of community conflicts? The essays in this symposium provide several important responses to this question.
A Limited Forest Conservancy in Southwest Bengal, 1864–1912
Authors: Sivaramakrishnan K.
Published: April 2006

During the period from 1795 to 1850, the East India Company Raj in India viewed forests chiefly as limiting agriculture. In Bengal, forested lands, classified as wastelands, had been included inzamindari(landlord) estates (Ribbentrop 1900, 60). Colonial administrators of this period also tended to perceive forests as being inexhaustible. Much of the woody vegetation, however, was not timber quality, being the product of a landscape long under shifting cultivation. The East India Company continued Indian rulers’ practices of selling blocks of forests or individual trees to timber merchants for a fixed down payment that encouraged great destruction and wastage in their extraction (Stebbing 1922, 35, 61). No attempts to introduce conservancy were made in the North West Provinces (NWP) or Bengal until after the revolt of 1857, even though the value of NWP sal (shorea robusta) forests was known from the time of the Gurkha wars in 1814–16, and the reports of Dr. Wallich, Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens in 1825 (Stebbing 1922, 66–67, 201).
The Poetry and Autobiography of theBâbur-nâma
Authors: Dale Stephen F.
Published: April 2006

Literary biography is a difficult art to practice when the subject is a premodern Muslim poet. Even in the work of such explicitly autobiographical western writers as the twentieth-century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova the relationship between art and life can be tantalizingly ambiguous. In the case of most well-known classical Muslim poets, though, the connection between life and literature is usually indeterminable. To personalize the lyrics of the great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz is as problematic as trying to glean autobiographical details from Shakespeare's sonnets. The reasons are essentially the same. Little is known of these poets' lives, and their poems exemplify lyric and panegyric genres that were not intended to be autobiographical or idiosyncratic. Neither Hafiz nor Shakespeare were Romantics, and they did not write introspective or self-revealing poems.
“Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara
Authors: Wagoner Phillip B.
Published: April 2006

When Robert Sewell inaugurated the modern study of the South Indian state of Vijayanagara with his classicA Forgotten Empire(1900), he characterized the state as “a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests” (Sewell [1900] 1962, 1), thereby formulating one of the enduring axioms of Vijayanagara historiography. From their capital on the banks of the Tungabhadra river, the kings of Vijayanagara ruled over a territory of more than 140,000 square miles, and their state survived three changes of dynasty to endure for a period of nearly three hundred years, from the mid-fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries (Stein 1989, 1–2). According to Sewell, this achievement was to be understood as “the natural result of the persistent efforts made by the Muhammadans to conquer all India” ([1900] 1962, 1). Hindu kingdoms had exercised hegemony over South India for most of the previous millennium, but were divided among themselves when the Muslim forces of Muhammad bin Tughluq swept over the South in the early decades of the fourteenth century: “When these dreaded invaders reached the Krishna River the Hindus to their south, stricken with terror, combined, and gathered in haste to the new standard [of Vijayanagara] which alone seemed to offer some hope of protection. The decayed old states crumbled away into nothingness, and the fighting kings of Vijayanagar became the saviours of the south for two and a half centuries” (Sewell [1900] 1962, 1).
Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na'ou's Urban Shanghai Landscape
Authors: Shih Shu-Mei
Published: April 2006

In 1924 a half-Taiwanese, half-Japanese man travelled from Japan to Shanghai to study French at the Jesuit Université L'Aurore. He was young, flamboyant, and rich, and eventually used his own personal funds to found two bookstores and three journals in Shanghai. Despite his ambiguous national identity and lack of formal Chinese education, he also became the founder of a Chinese modernist literary movement called new sensationism (xinganjue pai), earned substantial notoriety, and attracted a host of followers. Murdered by an unidentified assassin in 1939, in his shorr life Liu Na'ou (1900–39) mirrored the literary movement that he created and that died with him. But this was not before he had published an intriguing collection of short stories entitledScène(his own French title, 1930a), which was in some measure to define what urban writing meant for Chinese writers in Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1927–37), as the quotation above suggests.
House/Daughter/Nation: Interiority, Architecture, and Historical Imagination in Janaki Majumdar's “Family History”
Authors: Burton Antoinette
Published: April 2006

My mother grew up in a small Punjabi village not far from Chandigarh. As she chopped onions for the evening meal or scrubbed the shine back onto a steel pan or watched the clouds of curds form in a bowl of slowly setting homemade yoghurt, any action with a rhythm, she would begin a mantra about her ancestral home. She would chant of a three-storeyed flat-roofed house, blinkered with carved wooden shutters around a dust yard where an old-fashioned pump stood under a mango tree.… In England, when all my mother's friends made the transition from relatives' spare rooms and furnished lodgings to homes of their own, they all looked for something ‘modern. ’ “It's really up to date, Daljit,” one of the Aunties would preen as she gave us the grand tour of her first proper home in England. “Look at the extra flush system … Can opener on the wall … Two minutes' walk to the local amenities …” But my mother knew what she wanted. When she stepped off the bus in Tollington, she did not see the outside lavvy or the apology for a garden or the medieval kitchen, she saw fields and trees, light and space, and a horizon that welcomed the sky which, on a warm night and through squinted eyes, could almost look something like home.
Corruption in Eighteenth-Century China
Authors: Park Nancy E.
Published: April 2006

Eighteenth-century chinese commentators were eloquent on the subject of official corruption, characterizing it as one of the greatest scourges on the Qing state and society. Xu Wenbi (n.d.), in an administrative handbook based on his experiences as magistrate of Yongchuan county in Sichuan province from 1764 to 1768, bemoaned the devastating effects of corruption on the Chinese populace, writing: “Wherever corruption manifests itself, there are a hundred stratagems to suck out the lifeblood of the people. How can one imagine that the wealth of the region would not be exhausted in the space of a few years?” (Xu n.d., 1:26a). Yin Huiyi (1691–1748), who served as Henan governor from 1737 to 1739, stated that avoiding corruption should be the primary goal of any provincial official. “An official who has been appointed to a post should, first and foremost, remain pure,” he wrote, adding, “No matter whether his rank is lofty or humble, in the end, incorruptibility should be his most precious jewel” (Yin 1940, 4–5). Using similarly strong language, the renowned official, essayist, and historian Qian Daxin (1728–1804) pronounced that “when a single individual is corrupt, an entire dynasty may erupt into chaos” (Qian n.d., 2:10a–11a, 1:124–25).
The Disintegrating Machinery of the Modern: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's Late Writings
Authors: Lippit Seiji M.
Published: April 2006

Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's suicide in July 1927, coming little more than half a year after the beginning of the Shōwa period, seemed to many at the time to signify the end of an era. A number of writers and critics, for example, interpreted his death as marking the defeat of an intellectual (or aestheticized) literary practice disengaged from historical and social reality. This point was particularly emphasized by several prominent Marxist critics, who read his personal crisis as “one aspect of a collapsing bourgeoisie” (Sekiguchi 1993, 4: 334). Miyamoto Kenji crystallized this sentiment in his landmark 1929 essay, “Haiboku no bungaku” (The Literature of Defeat), in which he wrote that Akutagawa's late writings and death constituted a warning to bourgeois intellectuals of the inevitable and disastrous result of their aestheticism and hermeticism (Sekiguchi 1993, 6: 222–46). Indeed, Akutagawa's expression of “vague anxiety” as the cause of his suicide, coupled with the turbulent and transitional character of the 1920s, transformed his death from a personal, private catastrophe into a general historical allegory, an empty vessel into which a variety of narrative interpretations could be projected. In this way, Akutagawa's suicide achieved the status of an eminently historical gesture.
Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre
Authors: Mallick Ross
Published: April 2006

While boating down the ganges delta on a visit to the Reserve Forest Tiger Sanctuary, I noticed on the bank some idols overlooking the river. When I asked about their significance, it was explained that a tiger had killed and carried off a girl; these idols were meant to ward off future attacks. Since I was on tour with a West Bengal government Secretary who had police bodyguards to protect him against pirates and tigers, we had none of the apprehensions locals experienced. As the launch continued downstream, the conversation among the government officials took an unexpected turn. They talked of a massacre in the area of Untouchable refugees who had illegally settled in the protected forest reserve: the killings were said to number in the thousands of families.
Presidential Address: “I Have Scinde”: Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse
Authors: Doniger Wendy
Published: April 2006

Let me begin with a story about General Sir Charles James Fox Napier, who was born in 1782 and in 1839 was made commander of Sind (or Scinde, as it was often spelled at that time, or Sindh), an area at the western tip of the Northwest quadrant of South Asia, directly above the Rann of Kutch and Gujurat; in 1947 it became part of Pakistan. In 1843, Napier maneuvered to provoke a resistance that he then crushed and used as a pretext to conquer the territory for the British Empire. The British press described this military operation at the time as “infamous” (the Whig Morning Chronicle, cited by Napier 1990, 197), a decade later as “harsh and barbarous” and a “tragedy,” while the Indian press (the Bombay Times, “without a shred of evidence”) accused Napier of perpetrating a mass rape of the women of Hyderabad (Napier 1990, xvi). The successful Annexation of Sind made Napier's name “a household word in England. He received £70,000 as his share of the spoils” (Mehra 1985, 496–97) and was knighted. In 1851 he quarrelled with James Ramsey, the Marquess of Dalhousie (governor general of India from 1847 to 1856), and left India. In 1844, the following item appeared in a British publication in London, under the title, “Foreign Affairs”:
Body, Discourse, and the Cultural Politics of Contemporary Chinese Qigong
Authors: Xu Jian
Published: April 2006

Many asian cultures have richtraditions of self-cultivation that exercise mind and body through physical and meditational training. Research and scholarship with respect to those traditions have focused fruitfully on how the body is cultivated to serve as an agent of resistance against various forms of social control. Of these many writings on this subject, I will here name only a suggestive few: Joseph Alter's study of Indian wrestling (1993), for example, tracks the wrestlers' self-conscious reappropriation of their bodies from the power of the state through a regimented discipline aimed at resisting docility. John Donohue's study of the Japanese martial artkarate(1993) explores how, in the West,karate'ssymbolic and ritual functions create a psychological dynamic that counters the prevalent fragmentation of urban life. Douglas Wile's research on Chinesetaiji quart(1996) similarly reconstructs the cultural/historical context in which this martial art was created. He shows that what motivated nineteenth-century literati to createtaijiquan was its representational function rather than its practical utility. That is,Taiji quan“may be seen as a psychological defense against Western cultural imperialism” (p. 26) insofar as it produced a secure sense of the national self that helped China adapt to a new international environment (p. 29). All of these studies place the body-in-cultivation in a specific historical context; they maintain that the individual, physical body both registers and reveals the national sociopolitical landscape.
The Value of Vulnerability: Sexual Coercion and the Nature of Love in Japanese Court Literature
Authors: Childs Margaret H.
Published: April 2006

While modern readers willingly acknowledge the virtues of informing themselves about the ways the cultural contexts of fiction of various times and places differ from their own and the ramifications this may have for interpretation, we tend to assume that the emotions depicted in the fiction of other cultures are essentially the same as those we find in our own hearts. Scholars of literature exert considerable effort to help readers understand such things as contemporary political systems, kinship structures, marriage practices, and norms of etiquette, but we have not wondered whether the smiles, tears, and frowns of characters of other times and places reflect the same feelings as our own. Love, hate, jealousy, anger, joy, and sadness are popularly taken to be universal human emotions. However, classroom experience teaching classical Japanese literature and close readings of texts have led me to the conclusion that there are subtle but significant differences between the nature of love as depicted in premodern Japanese literature and love as we expect to find it in American society today.
The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur
Authors: Chandra Kanchan
Published: April 2006

The politics of ethnicity—caste, religion, and language—has been central to politics in twentieth-century India. However, as the dominant Indian National Congress declines in favor of a number of smaller parties, the manner in which ethnic identities are being invoked in the political arena is being transformed. The key aspect of this transformation is not, as it is usually understood, the replacement of a single multiethnic party with a collection of monoethnic parties. Many of the smaller parties are in themselves multiethnic, although the coalitions that they seek to build are usually narrower than those built by Congress. Rather, the key aspect is the change in the type of ethnic politics that dominates the political arena. Congress plays a coded ethnic card, invoking ethnic identities quietly in its selection of candidates but not openly in its identification of issues; targets certain ethnic groups without openly excluding others; builds differentiated ethnic coalitions across constituencies and states; and courts the support of these ethnic coalitions through the distribution of patronage but never through the rhetoric of identity.
Managing the Truth of Sex in Imperial Japan
Authors: Frühstück Sabine
Published: April 2006

My lecture is a lecture on biology. Therefore we will not be dealing with venereal diseases or perversions but with perfectly normal sexual phenomena. From my experience during the past two semesters I know that most of my students, or about sixty percent, still live chaste lives. We will become familiar with many technical terms and foreign (European) words. On the one hand, using technical scientific terminology is unavoidable, and on the other, we use it to avoid making obscene associations … I expect you to be familiar with the textbooks in physics and naturalhistory and urge you to also take a look at the textbooks from girls' schools … I consider knowledge a product, lecturers like myself both the creators of knowledge and at the same time original researchers and brokers of knowledge.
Merit And Mothering: Women and Social Welfare in Taiwanese Buddhism
Authors: Julia Huang Chien-Yu , Weller Robert P.
Published: April 2006

Thirty years ago the buddhist compassion Relief Foundation (Ciji Gongdehui, hereafter Ciji) was virtually unknown. Lost in the backwater of Taiwan's eastern coast, the group began in 1966 with a nun, five disciples, and thirty housewives who contributed pin money of NT $0.50 each day (just over a penny at that time) to help supplement medical fees for the poor. The nuns sewed children's shoes to generate a little more income, and their monthly total of funds available for charity was under NT $1,200 (about US $30 at that time). Today Ciji is the largest civic organization in Taiwan, claiming 4 million members worldwide in 1994, and nearly 20 percent of Taiwan's population. It gives away well over US $20 million in chanty each year, runs a state-of-the-art hospital, and has branches in fourteen countries.
Special Issue: Geographies at Work in Asian History
Authors: Yonemoto Marcia , Winichakul Thongchai , Wigen Kären
Published: April 2006

The articles presented here grew out of a year-long discussion of the spatial dimensions of historical and cultural change in various parts of Asia during the early modern and modern periods. Each essay engages the ways in which geographies—here defined as visual and verbal discourses about space—perform political and cultural work. That is, we examine how geographies in Asia were deployed strategically, whether to map, narrate, frame, relocate, or dislocate particular places, regions, “homelands,” or nation-spaces. In recent centuries, these Asian geographies have necessarily coexisted with Western (principally European) geographies, whether in the colonial or postcolonial context. As these essays show, such coexistence has taken many forms, from conflict to emulation to apparent disinterest.
History at Land's End: Lemuria in Tamil Spatial Fables
Authors: Ramaswamy Sumathi
Published: April 2006

This paper seeks to address the theme of this volume by exploring the place of the fabulous in the imaginary geographies of a lost world in the Indian Ocean.

I begin with three enchanted flights of imagination that seek to convey a useful truth. All three are occasioned by travel to a real place—Kanyakumari, the “Cape Comorin” of colonial atlases, and the land's end of the Indian peninsula and of its Tamil-speaking region (“Tamil Nadu”).
China's Provincial Identities: Reviving Regionalism and Reinventing “Chineseness”
Authors: Oakes Tim
Published: April 2006

In His Science-Fiction NovelThe Diamond Age(1995), Neal Stephenson envisions a post—nation-state world of the future, where countless fragmentations of cultural identity differentiate humanity into spatially discrete tribal zones. Identity has become entirely spatialized, rendering its historical basis—that is, the experiences that generate a “collective memory” for a community—into a decontextualized montage of nostalgia. Stephenson writes a world where modernist notions of progress and development through linear time have been replaced by cultural differentiation across space: history has been conquered by geography. History has become little more than a resource for borrowed cultural traits that are mapped onto discrete territories, and identity is self-consciously constructed by adopting the ready-made form of a particular cultural group. As Stephenson allows us to observe the excesses of this kind of postmodern tribalism, China comes to represent the ultimate form of spatialized cultural identity. InThe Diamond Age, China is represented more as an organic cultural system than a historically progressing nation. But it is only China's interior that is represented as such. The People's Republic has been splintered into an extremely wealthy coastal strip—essentially one big export processing zone—and an increasingly impoverished interior, which, in a self-orientalizing twist, now calls itself the “Celestial Kingdom,” and is ruled not by a Communist Party leader (Marxism having long since been denounced as a Western plot to undermine Chinese values) but by a self-proclaimed “Chamberlain to the Throneless King,” that is, a minister representing Confucius himself. Whereas the coast has rich and cosmopolitan cities that are among the finest in the world, the interior claims a moral superiority that comes only from its assertion of cultural purity; the interior is the “true” organic China.
Monkeys on the Move: The Natural Symbolism of People-Macaque Conflict in Japan
Authors: Knight John
Published: April 2006

In the village of ukegawathere stood, until recently, a large chestnut tree up on the hillside in the garden of the village doctor's family. In the 1960s macaques started to descend from the mountains to feed on the tree every autumn. The old doctor, a kindly man with a well-known fondness for animals, at first indulged the little monkeys. The visitors from the forest also appealed to his curiosity in matters of science, and he even took the opportunity to observe them from the house as they fed. But as their numbers grew and their boldness increased, the doctor's attitude towards the monkeys began to change. His wife made clear her feelings to him about the monkeys stealing all the family's chestnuts, while all he could do was watch them with his binoculars! The doctor reacted by chasing the monkeys away.
The Diaspora of the Gods: Hindu Temples in the New World System 1640–1800
Authors: Waghorne Joanne Punzo
Published: April 2006

The proliferation of hindu templesnow spread over the North American religious landscape appear at first glance to be part of a new process of globalization for Hinduism in an era of transnational religions. South India, long a bastion of temple culture, is simultaneously in the midst of a new boom in temple construction. The present resurgence of “Hinduism” in north India, steeped in ideology, nonetheless is written in terms of the alleged destruction of thousands of temples in north India by Muslim rulers and calls for their reconstruction. “My gods are crying,” writes one “angry” Hindu; “They are demanding restatement in all their original glory” (quoted in Bhattacharya 1991, 127).
The Permanence of “Temporary” Migration: The “Structural Embeddedness” of Japanese-Brazilian Immigrant Workers in Japan
Authors: Tsuda Takeyuki
Published: April 2006

For many decades, Japan was the only advanced industrial country in the world that did not rely on unskilled foreign labor. For many observers, the Japanese case demonstrated that a country could fully industrialize and sustain high levels of economic growth without becoming dependent on large populations of immigrant workers. Instead of importing immigrants, Japan was able to meet its increasing demand for unskilled labor power by effectively mechanizing and rationalizing production and further utilizing untapped sources of labor (female and elderly workers). Because of the country's insistence on ethnic homogeneity and its refusal to accept unskilled foreign workers, Japan had been forced to optimize domestic labor productivity and supply, creating a highly efficient and competitive industrial system capable of economic expansion without immigration. This implicitly sustained a “myth of Japanese uniqueness”—the notion that Japan's economic system was unique because it was based on distinctive Japanese ethnocultural qualities.
SatiWorship and Marwari Public Identity in India
Authors: Hardgrove Anne
Published: April 2006

The legal debate in indiaover the worship and glorification ofsati(widow burning, previously spelled “suttee”) stands unresolved at present. After several years of controversy, the practice of worshippingsatiwas made illegal in 1987 after the death of a young Rajput woman named Roop Kanwar. At that time the Indian government revised the colonial legislation banning widow immolation to includesatiglorification and thereby outlawed ceremonies, processions, or functions that eulogize any historical person who has committedsati. The law furthermore prohibited the creation of trusts or fundraising to preserve the memory of such persons. This legal debate oversatiworship provides the context in which this essay examines the cultural politics of how Calcutta Marwaris, a wealthy business community, have been among the most vehement defenders ofsatiworship in the last several decades.
Presidential Address: Myths of Asian Womanhood
Authors: Mann Susan
Published: April 2006

Salman rushdie calls mythology “the family album or storehouse of a culture's childhood, containing [its] … future, codified as tales that are both poems and oracles” (1999, 83). Myths are, in his words, “the waking dreams our societies permit” that celebrate “the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks” (73). Of course, all societies have such waking dreams, but women as mythic figures loom rather larger in some cultures than in others. Chinese poets, painters, sculptors, librettists, essayists, commentators, philosophers, storytellers, puppeteers, illustrators, and historians made a veritable industry of myths of womanhood—an industry that, I shall argue today, far outstrips any of its counterparts elsewhere in Asia.
Migrant Rights and Activism in Malaysia: Opportunities and Constraints
Authors: Gurowitz Amy
Published: April 2006

We are currently witnessing two trends in Southeast Asia: first, an increase in what is often referred to as “civil society” activity including action by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); and second, an increase in various forms of migration, one of the key human rights concerns of the post-World War II era. This article reviews the convergence of these two trends by examining activism on behalf of migrant workers in the largest receiving state of migrants in Asia, Malaysia. With approximately 700,000 documented and over one million undocumented migrant workers, Malaysia has one of the highest percentages of foreign workers in the world (Migrant News [MN], November 1999). Like many other countries with labor shortages, Malaysia needs these workers, but does not want them. Both of these facts are clearly reflected in government policies. There are frequent attempts to get rid of migrant workers, either in response to public concern or because of economic downturn, but with almost every halt to migration there is a corresponding exception allowing workers to stay or continue coming. Throughout this process there is little if any attention paid to the rights of migrant workers by the Malaysian government, or often the migrant's home government. Since this increased migration is occurring at a time of a general increase in activism in Malaysia and regionally, it is reasonable to ask what of this civil society energy is being addressed to the increasingly important issue of migrant rights.
Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative
Authors: Gilmartin David
Published: April 2006

Few events have been more important to the history of modern South Asia than the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The coming of partition has cast a powerful shadow on historical reconstructions of the decades before 1947, while the ramifications of partition have continued to leave their mark on subcontinental politics fifty years after the event.

Yet, neither scholars of British India nor scholars of Indian nationalism have been able to find a compelling place for partition within their larger historical narratives (Pandey 1994, 204–5). For many British empire historians, partition has been treated as an illustration of the failure of the “modernizing” impact of colonial rule, an unpleasant blip on the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial worlds. For many nationalist Indian historians, it resulted from the distorting impact of colonialism itself on the transition to nationalism and modernity, “the unfortunate outcome of sectarian and separatist politics,” and “a tragic accompaniment to the exhilaration and promise of a freedom fought for with courage and valour” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 3).
Political Representation and South Korean Women
Authors: Park Kyung-Ae
Published: April 2006

In his 1955 book,The Political Role of Women, Maurice Duverger brought our attention to the lack of representation of women in politics. Since that time, the dismal underrepresentation of women in politics has not much improved. Few women rise to leadership positions in politics; as Jean Blondel found in a more recent cross-cultural comparison of political leaders, less than 0.005 percent of all leaders were women (1987, 116–17). Regarding women's political participation, political scientists used to assert that women tended to “limit attention to the superficial and irrelevant aspects of politics” (Lane 1959, 213). Many argued that women had a different political view than did men: they were apolitical, they personalized politics, and they adopted their husbands' political orientations. Accordingly, they became political leaders only by default, as substitutes for deceased husbands or fathers.
State Formation in Community Spaces? Decentralization of Control over Forests in the Kumaon Himalaya, India
Authors: Agrawal Arun
Published: April 2006

In the early part of this century, 1916 and 1921 were especially dry years in the Kumaon region of the Indian Himalaya. In each of these years, forest fires racked the countryside, burning beyond the power of the colonial British government to control or extinguish. It was not just the dry weather that was to blame. Villagers in Kumaon set the forest on fire; the dry weather merely helped their efforts along. The containment of this “planned incendiarism” was one of the main planks of the scientific forestry that the colonial state had begun to introduce in the hills in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and especially from around 1910.
“A Motley Throng:” Social Change on Southwest China's Early Modern Frontier, 1700–1880
Authors: Giersch C. Pat
Published: April 2006

Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eighteenth-century Yunnan Province. As a boy, he was sold to another Han family for the purpose of marrying one of the family's daughters. Although there is no record of his married life, it apparently was not a happy one. Shi left his wife in 1748, never to return, and drifted southwestward toward the Burmese frontier to engage in commerce between the booming Munai mining region and the Tai polity of Keng Tung (now part of Burma). Shi eventually remarried, this time to an indigenous woman who belonged to one of the local Tai or upland tribes. Thus far, Shi's story is unexceptional. By the mid-eighteenth century, as many as one hundred thousand Han lived in mining communities along the Yunnan frontier (ZPZZ, 1733–2, Zhang Yunsui QL 11/5/9). Han men often married indigenous women, to the consternation of Qing officials who feared the political ramifications of intermarriage (ZPZZ, 142–1, Fuhenget al.QL 35/1/19). Shi, however, emerged from obscurity in 1765 when he and his father-in-law, a petty local leader, sided with Burma during the frontier wars of 1765–70 and attacked Qing territory. Shi, the Han ally of the Burmese, was later captured by Cao Xiu, the son of an indigenous “native official” (tusi) whose militia was patrolling the frontier at the behest of the Qing state.
Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropological Nationalism in China
Authors: Sautman Barry
Published: April 2006

Much attention has been focused on the recrudescence of Chinese nationalism in the 1990s. The PRC government generally denies, but occasionally defends, the existence of nationalism within China (Xi 1996). Many Chinese scholars acknowledge the phenomenon and debate its impact, with most evincing a positive attitude toward nationalism (Zhang Xudong 1997; Xiao 1997; Sheng 1996; Wen 1996; Li 1995). Outside the PRC, Chinese nationalism is increasingly scrutinized (Zhao 1997; Zhu 1997, Gries 1999). Some hold that it is rational and manageable (Nathan and Ross 1997; Metzger and Myers 1998; Zheng 1999), while others speak in more premonitory tones (Chang 1998; Su 1997; Mosher 2000). All conclude that it is statesponsored, popular, and fills an “ideological vacuum” left by the waning of socialism (see, for example, Oksenberg 1997; Christensen 1996).
Representing Women: The Politics of MinangkabauAdatWritings
Authors: Blackwood Evelyn
Published: April 2006

Despite a large number of both historical and anthropological works on the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia, a number of questions remain concerning this matrilineal and Islamic society. In a recent study, historian Ken Young articulated a growing consensus that the received models of Minangkabau social life are suspect, including the “idealised categories ofnagari[village],adat[customs], matrilineal kinship, lineage property rights, and the autonomy of village communities governed bypanghulu[titled men, Minangkabau spelling]” (Young 1994, 12). Anthropologists have been equally perturbed by what they consider to be inconsistencies in Minangkabau life, such as the contradiction between Islamic law and matrilinealadat(customary laws, beliefs, and practices concerning matrilineal kinship and inheritance). The inconsistency that I address in this essay lies in the contradictory representations of elite men's and elite women's power in Minangkabau literature.
Peoples of the Gourd: Imagined Ethnicities in Highland Southeast Asia
Authors: Proschan Frank
Published: April 2006

Since its appearance in 1983, Benedict Anderson'sImagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalismhas taken on almost talismanic status, ritually invoked for its quasi-magical efficacy in thousands of scholarly discussions of nationalism and ethnicity. Anderson's book has given focus to a line of argument in which not only nationalism but also ethnicity are seen as reflexes of the Euroamerican colonial enterprise. Anderson proposes what we might call an “appendency theory” of ethnicity, holding that ethnicity is a phenomenon that is secondary to, contingent upon, and necessarily later than the modern nation, and that therefore it could not possibly have existed prior to the colonial conquest and the creation of nation-states. In this view, ethnicity itself is a recent product of modern history—of the colonial or postcolonial era, the age of the modern nation state and the capitalist world system.
The Marketplace and the Temple: Economic Metaphors and Religious Meanings in the Folk Songs of Colonial Bengal
Authors: Urban Hugh B.
Published: April 2006

The marketplace and the temple: traditionally, Western scholars have been nervous and ambivalent about bringing these two spheres into too close a proximity. On one side, historians of religions trained in the lineage of Joachim Wach or Mircea Eliade have long warned that “reductionism” is the cardinal sin in the study of religion, which is claimed to be asui generis, or irreducible phenomenon. Hence, “economic reductionism” or “vulgar economism” would be the most heinous crime of all (Wach 1958; Eliade 1958, xi). On the other side, those trained in Marxist and neo-Marxist traditions have typically wanted to explain religious myths and rituals either as ideological screens masking deeper material forces or as symbolic expressions of misrecognized social interests. As Pierre Bourdieu—one of the most sophisticated recent representatives of this tradition—explains his own method, he wishes to “utilize the economic model to extend materialist critique into the realm of religion and to uncover the specific interests of the protagonists of the religious game, priests, prophets and sorcerers” (1990, 107).
Sufism and the Indonesian Islamic Revival
Authors: Howell Julia Day
Published: April 2006

Like other parts of the muslim world, Indonesia has experienced an Islamic revival since the 1970s (cf. Hefner 1997; Jones 1980; Liddle 1996, 622–25; Muzaffar 1986; Schwarz 1994, 173–76; Tessler and Jesse 1996). To date, representations of Indonesia's Islamic revival have featured forms of religious practice and political activity concerned with what in the Sufi tradition is called the “outer” (lahir) expression of Islam: support for and observance of religious law (I.syariah, A.syari'at), including the practice of obligatory rituals. Thus commonly mentioned as evidence of a revival in Indonesia are such things as the growing numbers of mosques and prayer houses, the increasing popularity of head coverings (kerudung, jilbab) among Muslim women and school girls, the increasing usage of Islamic greetings, the more common sight of Muslims excusing themselves for daily prayers and attending services at their workplaces, the appearance of new forms of Islamic student activity on university campuses, strong popular agitation against government actions seen as prejudicial to the Muslim community, and the establishment in 1991 of an Islamic bank.