This article examines Buddhist nationalism as an effort to resist the intrusion of globalizing forces into local religious and cultural heritage. By analyzing the discourse, persona, and life of Venerable Gangodawila Soma (1948–2003), a renowned and controversial Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, the author demonstrates that Buddhist nationalism is largely a discursive formation that affirms an essential relationship between Buddhism and nation over against external forces that threaten their existence. A charismatic and skillful preacher, Venerable Soma employed a variety of media to reverse the perceived decline of Buddhism and the nation in the face of what he saw as immoral and hostile interests—including corrupt politicians, Tamil separatists, Evangelical Christians, and nongovernmental organizations. Venerable Soma's discourse, which privileges local forms of knowledge and morality, shows how globalization stimulates both new possibilities and new contradictions in contemporary forms of Buddhist nationalism.

The author reinterprets the phenomenon of qingyi (represented by members of the Qingliu and Emperor's party) as passing through five phases from 1875 to 1898, in the course of which it enlarged its scope of demands by lower- and middle-grade metropolitan officials for a broader distribution of political power and contributed to the formation of public opinion. This evolution was attended by the rise of analogous demands for political restructuring by men in two other environments: extrabureaucratic managerial and scholarly circles and the treaty ports. Militant patriotism mobilized and eventually united different groups, stimulating nationally conscious opinion that was alienated from the political leadership. The failure of government leaders to accommodate new political initiatives redirected qingyi into provincial movements and set the stage for the competition between centralizing bureaucratic and societally based programs for change that led to the 1911 revolution.

The field of Chinese internet studies is rich and diverse. Just this past year, exciting new books have been published on internet use among urban youth (Liu 2011), online videos (Voci 2010), online carnival (Herold and Marolt 2011), new media events (Qiu and Chan 2011), and cyber-nationalists (Shen and Breslin 2010).

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.

In 1881, the Japanese introduced the newspaper as a means of public communication into Korea. Publication of the Chōsen shinpō in the open port of Pusan is related to the political and economic circumstances in which the Japanese found themselves there. Elsewhere in East Asia, a comparable role was played by Westerners. In addition to viewing the Chōsen shinpō in the context of Japanese efforts to influence Korea's modernization, the author suggests studying this newspaper as a component of the comparative history of the press in East Asia.

The Zaibatsu are said to be reviving in Japan. In his widely-read Nippon Keizai Nyumon (Introduction to the Japanese Economy) Professor Nagasu wrote in 1959:

The Zaibatsu have steadily built their power and have revived. No, more than that. Before the war, the Zaibatsu had to share their hegemony with large landowners and were under the Emperor and the militarists, but now there are no militarists or large landowners. The Emperor, too, has become an accessory. The power of Japan now rests squarely in the hands of the Zaibatsu, the sponsors of the Conservative Party.

One of the topics of Chinese history that deserves greater attention is the nature and direction of the expansion of the Chinese people beyond the geographical confines of China. It is a subject which, for want of more information, is still so cloaked in generalities as to present the misleading impression that the Chinese have always been a landbound people oriented towards the land frontier of the north and northwest. A Western scholar, for example, has written: “China has never been a sea-power because nothing has ever induced her people to be otherwise than landmen, and landmen dependent on agriculture with the same habit and ways of thinking drilled into them through forty centuries.” In a recent work we find this statement: “Essentially a land people, the Chinese cannot be considered as having possessed seapower…. The attention of the Chinese through the centuries has been turned inward towards Central Asia rather than outward, and their knowledge of the seas which washed their coast was extremely small.”

Modern religious movements together with their saintly leaders in Hinduism constitute an area where-from little scholarly research appears, yet, in print. This study of the Sāi Bābā Movement attempts to show on the one hand that, regarding the saints in question (Sāi Bābā, Upasani Baba, Mata Godavari, and Sathya Sāi Bābā), one can trace their origins to ancient forms of religious life in India and on the odier that they display the effects of influences stemming from Muslim and later Hindu practices. Moreover, the interrelations of the members of the Movement appear to harmonize on the basis of common motifs whose origins are capable of the kind of reconstruction suggested above. The scholarly task in describing the phenomena of India's modern saints should focus on the relationship that obtains between the structural elements of Demonstration, Organization and Intention for the task of communicating one's understanding of the religious expression; hence, while this study provides substantive material concerning some modern Indian saints, it also proposes issues of a methodological nature in their regard.

People impatient to get out were pushing me from behind; people anxious to get in pulled me out. Somehow I landed on my feet on the dusty platform. I gathered the few packages and made my way out of the railway station through a crowd. The reasons for the crowds became clear: today was the day of the weekly market, and the “god” on his journey had reached this town to make a day's halt. My guide and I picked our way through heaps of millet and wheat and rice, through pots and pans, through bales of cloth and saris, toys and hand-mirrors, vegetables and sweets—everything displayed on both sides of the road. Farther on, there were amusements—the revolving cradles and merry-go-rounds, gramophones shrilling loudly, a snake-charmer, a troupe of tight-rope dancers.

The bharatiya dalit panthers is an organization of Maharashtrian Dalits (ex-Untouchables) who have converted to Buddhism and adopted as their long-range political goal the establishment of a democratic socialist state. The ideology of the Panthers, embodied in their texts and practices, synthesizes threads of Buddhist and Marxist philosophies. Longstanding debates about the supposed incompatibility of Buddhism and Marxism pose questions regarding the conjunction of religion and politics in popular movements, the role of popular texts in constituting ideologies of resistance, and the ways texts and beliefs become transformed into actions.

In the late 1930s, three groups of Sino-Muslims went on hajj trips to Mecca. Two of them represented the Republic of China, while one represented the puppet government in Japanese-occupied North China. Reflecting the political importance of the Muslim population in the Sino-Japanese struggle, each group engaged in propaganda efforts for its government. However the Sino-Muslims who participated in these missions were not merely the passive pawns of Chinese authorities. Rather, archival material and published sources in Chinese and Arabic show that Sino-Muslims actively used these missions to advance a vision of the Chinese nation in which Muslims would play an important role in domestic and foreign affairs. This vision was based on a particular understanding of global politics which allowed Sino-Muslim elites to reconcile the transnational characteristic of Islam with loyalty to the territorially bound “Chinese nation.”

India alone of the countries with great railway networks is unindustrialized. In the other leading railway powers—particularly the United States, Russia, Germany, though to a lesser extent in sparsely settled areas like Canada and Australia—the railway was the veritable dynamo of the Industrial Revolution. It has had no such effect in India, even though the country's network by 1947 was 40,500 miles long, counting only first-line main track, or 57,000 miles long, counting just about everything. I propose to sketch the setting in which railways were brought to India and then to review the 75 years of argument and experiment as to which form of enterprise (public, private, or some combination of the two) was best suited to India's railway development. I shall attempt to give a picture of the absolute and comparative magnitude of the Indian railway system as of 1947, and to discuss its economic and historical significance for Britain and for India.

This paper examines the role of language in nationalist attempts at decolonization. In the case of the Philippines, American colonial education imposed English as the sole medium of instruction. Native students were required to suppress their vernacular languages so that the classroom became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation. Nationalists have routinely denounced the continued use of English as a morbid symptom of colonial mentality. Yet, such a view was deeply tied to the colonial notion of the sheer instrumentality of language and the notion that translation was a means for the speaker to dominate language as such. However, other practices of translation existed based not on domination but play seen in the classroom and the streets. Popular practices of translation undercut colonial and nationalist ideas about language, providing us with an alternative understanding of translation in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context.

T the great texts of the great traditions are in some sense unchanging, but as Milton Singet pointed out, the anthropologist's task is to “find fot these ideas a local habitation and leain how they operate in the lives of ordinary people” (1972, 39). What I wish to present here are the changing meanings of texts that are thought to form the core of the ancient religion of Zoroastrianism and the story of how their interpretations have altered as the South Asian community of Parsi Zoroastrian interpreters has changed. Much about this story echoes the experience of other South Asian communities: as the Btitish rose to dominance and their missionaries strove to teach Parsis that theirs was an inferior, weaker faith, Parsis began to represent their religion as similar to that of the Protestant Christians, even while steadfastly refusing (for the most part) to convett.

The ethical values and norms which are to guide social behavior in Communist China are often conveyed through fables and stories. It thus might not be inappropriate to begin a discussion of these values with a story that is now perhaps as familiar to students of contemporary Chinese affairs as it is to the Chinese. The story is from traditional Chinese folklore, but it became a part of the Chinese Communist tradition when it was retold by Mao Tse-tung in his concluding speech to the Seventh National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in June of 1945:

“In ancient China there was a fable. ‘How Yu Kung Removed the Mountains.’ It is the story of an old man in North China in ancient times, by the name of Yu Kung of the North Mountain. His house faced south and its doorway was obstructed by two big mountains, Taihang and Wangwu. With great determination, he led his sons to dig up the mountains with pickaxes. Another old man, Chih Sho witnessed their attempts and laughed, saying: ‘What fools you are to attempt this! To dig up two huge mountains is utterly beyond your capacity.’ Yu Kung replied: ‘When I die, there are my sons; when they die there will be their own sons, and so on to infinity. As to these two mountains, high as they are, they cannot become higher but, on the contrary, with every bit dug away, they will become lower and lower. Why can't we dig them away?’ Mr. Yu Kung refuted Mr. Chih Sho's erroneous view and went on digging at the mountains day after day without interruption. God's heart was touched by such perseverance and he sent two celestial beings down to earth to carry away the mountains on their backs.”

In tokyo's fashionable roppongi crossing, just down the street from the Almond Cafe where urbanites converge to meet their dates, a sign over a Chinese restaurant bears two Chinese characters: Kō Hi (Xiang Fei).The establishment's menu and business cards display a portrait of a beautiful East Asian woman in Manchu dress; her expression is enigmatic. The restaurant's advertising describes a Chinese emperor's consort renowned for her miraculous fragrance, and promises equally aromatic culinary delights.

This paper attempts to redefine the nature and conditions of bondservants in the late Ming, particularly in the highly productive T'ai-hu basin. It proposes that the great economic and social differences among bondservants obliges us to treat bondservitude as a legal status, not as a class. It discusses the many causes of bondservitude and its highly varied conditions. Agricultural bondservants accounted for no more than one-fifth of the rural population and usually had to pay rent and perform specific manual duties for their master. Bondservant managers are seen to have acquired far more wealth and power than their legal status would suggest and, along with other “brazen servants,” participated in the bondservant uprisings in the T'ai-hu basin during the late Ming and early Ch'ing.

In a bookstore in delhi, a salesman, apprised of my interest in lower-caste politics, handed me a tome about the officially listed Dalit, or untouchable, groups, The Scheduled Castes (Singh 1995). The first thing to strike me was the cover, a glossy photograph of a presumably Scheduled Caste woman with her back against a tall stone wall, surrounded by her four grubby kids. She is beaming. The second thing to strike me was the title of this new series, of which this was the second volume. The series, by the central government's Anthropological Survey of India, was called the People of India, a name that had been used for several rather notorious colonial ethnographic projects. Intrigued, I began to examine this most recent avatar of the People of India.