The establishent of the Chinese rural people's commune in 1958 as a new political and economic organization has aroused considerable interest among observers. One important question in this regard has been the role the commune has played in China's modernization. Since China is committed to both “socialist transformation and construction,” modernization in China involves two tasks: revolution and development. As for China's rural problems, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regards the commune as the best organization for achieving these two goals during its transition to communism. Yet the commune has undergone a series of changes as a result of interactions between the Party's revolutionary goals and its development requirements, presenting a microcosm of Chinese communism. This article is an attempt to account for changes and continuities in the political economy of the commune.

A few weeks after the rice harvest of 1985, drums, song, and loud cries echoed through the headwaters of the Salu Mambi, celebrating the ambush of seven victims in regions downstream. Several bands of headhunters had returned with their bloodless trophies to renew the fertility of their terraces and the prosperity of their households. If such forays appear to be troubling anachronisms in Indonesia's aging New Order, they also display the surprising tenacity of those mythical realities that shape local history. What makes these annual headhunts so unusual and so instructive is the absence of real violence: no enemy actually is slain, no human head is taken. Instead, a village sends out a cohort of weaponless headhunters to get a surrogate head—;usually a coconut bought in a nearby market town. Upon the cohort's return, the community launches into a weeklong ceremony of music, feasting, and speechmaking to honor the headhunters and to glorify the village. Yet the ceremony also commemorates the past, especially with songs and liturgical chants that depict scenes from the ritual headhunts of an earlier era. In short, what takes place is not a headhunt, but something staged to look like one.

Partition, unquestionably a pivotal event of the South Asian twentieth century, has become a subject of great significance in its own right.1 Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it happened;2 they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and local roots of the drive to divide India;3 and the subject took a big step forward when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its bloody upheavals, the violence of “the burning plains of the Punjab” becoming a metaphor for partition itself.4

India's agrarian history has for the most part been cast within colonial and nationalist frameworks or in analyses of modernity and development in the South Asian historiography on both sides of the independence divide. This leaves plenty of space to discuss both the vast engagement of American actors with Indian elite formations and modifications to the agrarian projects contingent upon those interactions. A focus on the Americanist drive for agrarian modernization in India allows for exploring the distinct cultural location of modernization in a long-term perspective and its engagement with colonial “development.” A study of their mutual interaction gives insights into modernization's somewhat distinct itinerary on the subcontinent and provides specificity to the history of the otherwise spatially wider American intervention in global and inter-Asian contexts.

This article seeks to spark a conversation about shifting conceptualizations of disaster under modernizing states. It employs case studies of two major disasters, the North China Famine of 1876–79 and the Yellow River flood of 1938–47, to map changes and continuities in Chinese responses to disaster. State approaches to the late-Qing famine both drew on a millennium of Chinese thinking about disaster causation and anticipated new issues that would become increasingly important in twentieth-century China. The catastrophic Yellow River flood occurred when China's Nationalist government deliberately breached a major dike in a desperate attempt to “use water instead of soldiers” to slow the brutal Japanese invasion. The Nationalist state's technologization of disaster, its rejection of cosmological interpretations of calamity, and its depiction of flood victims as heroes sacrificing for the nation mark departures from late-imperial responses to disaster, but foreshadow features of the devastating Mao-era Great Leap Famine of 1958–62.

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.

Indian historians have tended in the past to explain the origins of nationalism and political activity in the subcontinent in terms of all-India organizations such as the Indian National Congress or in terms of the political thought and background of important national figures. As research on modern India accumulates, however, it is becoming apparent that this limited explanation of Indian political history is no longer adequate. The major regions had their own distinct social and political development which molded the response of local politicians to the larger political movements and which in turn had some effect on the speed and direction of the Indian nationalist movement. A fruitful approach to understanding the Congress would thus be to view it as an assembly of politicians who had regional political ties and who were strongly influenced by regional organizations. The significant role of the Arya Samaj in the politics of North India particularly supports such an interpretation. The revivalist Arya Samaj contributed to Hindu militancy and aggravated Hindu-Muslim relations. Although this aspect of Arya activity has yet to receive systematic treatment, the broad outline of the Samaj's part in hardening divisions between Hindus and Muslims is well known. The role of Aryas in provincial and national politics, on the other hand, has received little or no attention.

Religious conversions by Dalits in colonial India have largely been examined as mass movements to Christianity, with an implicit focus on men. However, why did Dalit women convert? Were they just guided by their men, family, and community? This paper explores the interrelationship between caste and gender in Dalit conversions afresh through the use of popular print culture, vernacular missionary literature, writings of Hindu publicists and caste ideologues, cartoons, and police reports from colonial north India. It particularly looks at the two sites of clothing and romance to mark representations of mass and individual conversions to Christianity and Islam. Through them, it reads conversions by Dalit women as acts that embodied a language of intimate rights, and were accounts of resistant materialities. These simultaneously produced deep anxieties and everyday violence among ideologues of the Arya Samaj and other such groups, where there was both an erasure and a representational heightening of Dalit female desire. However, they also provide one with avenues to recover in part Dalit women's aspirations in this period.

The Guptīs of Bhavnagar, India, represent an unexplored case of taqiyya, or precautionary dissimulation, and challenge traditional categories of religious identity in South Asia. Taqiyya is normally practiced by minority or otherwise disadvantaged groups of Muslims who fear negative repercussions should their real faith become known. Historically, the Shī‘a, whether Ithnā-‘asharī or Ismaili, have commonly dissimulated as Sunnīs, who form the dominant community. However, the Guptīs, who are followers of the Ismaili imam, and whose name means “secret” or “hidden ones,” dissimulate not as Sunnī Muslims, but as Hindus. The Guptī practice of taqiyya is exceptional for another reason: Hinduism is not simply a veil used to avoid harmful consequences, but forms an integral part of the Guptīs’ belief system and identity, and the basis of their conviction in the Aga Khan, not only as the imam, but as the avatāra of the current age.

By late December 2010, the truculence of brinkmanship between the two Koreas made it easy to forget that more auspicious signs of compromise had come as recently as this past autumn. The resumption of reunions among separated Korean families in late October and early November appeared to signal a modest improvement in inter-Korean cooperation, raising hopes that a program of cross-border family meetings would not only continue, but also expand. Yet, those hopes were dashed only weeks later when a military crisis escalated off the west coast of the Korean peninsula. On November 23 in a contested maritime zone, a South Korean military exercise was challenged by a North Korean artillery unit, which escalated the confrontation by shelling a South Korean island—killing four South Koreans including two civilians. In the artillery exchange that followed between the two sides, five North Korean soldiers were killed. The stark contrast between the pathos of the tearful family reunions and the panic and anger following the shelling of Yŏnp'yŏng Island, illustrated how quickly the inter-Korean situation had deteriorated. During the same month when South Korea hosted world leaders at the G-20 summit in Seoul to discuss the state of the global economy and the risks of a brewing “currency war,” the family reunions and deadly artillery attack served as sobering reminders that the Korean War, never formally ended, still continues.

Focusing on intersections of Asian area studies and U.S. ethnic studies, this article probes overlapping but hitherto neglected trajectories of Japanese colonialism and transpacific migrant experience and of modern Japanese history and Japanese American history. Constructed during the 1930s, expansionist orthodoxy of imperial Japan justified and idealized the agricultural colonization of Manchuria on the basis of historical precedence found in a contrived chronicle of Japanese “overseas development” in the American frontier. This study documents how Japanese intelligentsia, popular culture, and the state concertedly co-opted U.S. Japanese immigrant history in service of the policies of imperial expansion and national mobilization in Asia before the Pacific War. While involving conflicting agendas and interests between the colonial metropolis in imperial Japan and the expatriate society in the American West, the example of transnational history making elucidates borderless dimensions of prewar Japanese colonialism, which influenced, and was concurrently influenced by, the presence and practices of Japanese emigrants across the Pacific.

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

The anti-communist killings of 1965–66 comprised the single most traumatic political event in independent Indonesia, with a consensus estimate of approximately 500,000 deaths. However, these estimates, along with a geographic and political characterization of the killings, have been informed exclusively by anecdotal accounts. In this article, available census data are used in conjunction with demographic analysis to provide a comprehensive and systematic picture of the killings. Using East Java, one of the four hardest-hit Indonesian provinces, as an example, this article estimates and illustrates their impact and provides a geographic characterization of the killings with evidence about the relationship between their locations and local political milieux. While this study is not able to apportion degrees of agency or responsibility for the killings across the various perpetrators, including the Indonesian army and political opponents of the Communist Party of Indonesia, the patterns presented in this article parallel and build on prior research by anthropologists and historians.

Until 1530, sculptural images of Confucius and varying numbers of disciples and later followers received semiannual sacrifices in state-supported temples all over China. The icons' visual features were greatly influenced by the posthumous titles and ranks that emperors conferred on Confucius and his followers, the same as for deities in the Daoist and Buddhist pantheons. This convergence led to visual conflation and aroused objections from Neo-Confucian ritualists, culminating in the ritual reform of 1530, which replaced images with inscribed tablets and Confucius's kingly title with the designation Ultimate Sage and First Teacher. However, the ban on icons did not apply to the primordial temple of Confucius in Qufu, Shandong. Post-1530 gazetteers publicized the distinction by reproducing a line drawing of this temple's sculptural icon, and persistent replications of this image helped to popularize his cult. The same period saw a proliferation of non-godlike representations of Confucius, including his portrayal as a teacher, whose iconographic origins can be traced to a painted portrait handed down through generations of his descendants. In recent years, variations of this teacher image have become the basis for new sculptural representations, first in Taiwan, then in Hong Kong and the Chinese diaspora, and finally on the mainland. Now installed at sites around the world, statues of Confucius have become a contested symbol of Chinese civilization.

With these stirring lines Takekoshi Yosaburō opened the preface to the 1893 edition of his Shin Nihonshi {History of New Japan). It is difficult to imagine a more enthusiastic celebration of the Meiji Restoration than one likening it to the epochal founding of the Chou dynasty. Yet those who read beyond the confident affirmation of the preface soon encountered a rising note of anxiety, concern, even alarm in the pages that followed. For it was clear that however highly Takekoshi regarded the ideals of the “great revolution of the Restoration,” he also saw them in jeopardy. “Today,” he wrote, “slightly more than twenty years since the Restoration, the general public has begun to tread the path of unrighteousness. Ministers in power err in their policies, and those in opposition err in their views, and together both make pronouncements that give comfort only to themselves. That is why the author has taken up his brush in indignation to narrate a general outline of the changing times since the Restoration.” The revolution, in short, was a revolution betrayed, or at least unfulfilled.

This essay attempts to bring greater subtlety to our understanding of the role that print and newspapers play in the shaping of modern society. The essay begins by focusing on the centrality that Jürgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson give to print and newspapers and examines the applicability of their ideas to Kerala, India's most newspaper-consuming state, over the past 200 years. The essay suggests that by conceptualizing print and newspaper development in three stages, we arrive at a more accurate understanding of the impact of print consumption on societies and their politics.

Virtually all interpreters of Hinduism agree that the notions of samsara, karma, and moksa are central to nearly all varieties of Hinduism. That is, it is agreed that most Hindus assume continuing reincarnations (samsara), that a person's current incarnation and experiences are, at least in part, the fruit of past actions (karma), and that release or liberation (moksa) from this ongoing cycle is possible and desirable. As David Kinsley (1982:8) says, “certain underlying beliefs are accepted by most Hindus: karma, samsara, and moksa, for example.” J. L. Brockington (1981:5) notes, “Doctrines concerning … samsara, karma and moksa … may be regarded as axiomatic by most schools of Hindu philosophy.” Thomas Hopkins (1971:50) observes, “By the early sixth century B.C.E., transmigration and the “law of karma” had been generally accepted as basic facts of existence and were rarely challenged from that time on by any major Indian system of thought.” According to A. L. Basham (1989:42): “These [karma and samsara] are the beliefs of nearly all Indians, other than Muslims, Christians, and Parsis, down to the present day.”

We possess in ancient Tamil a large body of poetry which antedates for all intents and purposes the incursion of Sanskrit culture into Tamilnad. This poetry, found in the eight anthologies and the Pattuppāṭṭu, dates from the first and second centuries A.D. The culture which produced it was a continuation of the megalithic culture which dominated the Deccan for the millenium before Christ. The special importance of early Tamil poetry for cultural history is that it describes this civilization, which according to the Allchins was characterized by a very conservative and unchanging culture, before it was appreciably influenced by Sanskritic culture from the North. Thus a study of early Tamil reveals elements which were contributed to India by this culture and which were later assimilated by the rest of India. Other sources for this culture—the Sattasaī in Māhārāṣṭrī, for example—show the influence of Sanskrit culture, so that it is not possible to determine from them which elements belonged originally to the Deccan culture and which to the culture of the North.