The discovery in Hunan in 1973 of silk manuscripts over two thousand years old opened a new field of Chinese studies. The find is of considerable value and importance to students of Chinese archaeology, palaeography, textual criticism, history, and philosophy. The Silk Manuscripts of Ma-wang-tui, containing around 120,000 characters, include two hitherto unknown versions of the Lao Tzu and probably the lost “Four Scriptures of the Yellow Emperor.” A preliminary investigation of these texts indicates that they represent a mode of thinking referred to in the Historical Records as the “thought of Huang-Lao,” that was prevalent in China in the second century B.C. and that may have originated in the ancient state of Ch'u. This paper proposes that the thought of Huang-Lao, as a fusion of Taoist and Legalist ideas, articulates a coherent political philosophy that emphasizes the inseparability of the metaphysical foundations of politics and the art of government as a daily routine.

As anyone who has written a book can tell you, when you finally finish wrestling with it and it is confined between covers, or tucked away in e-book form, it goes on to have an afterlife, sometimes quite a complicated one, which the author may glimpse only in intermittent and fragmentary form. An original and provocative book such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble will travel to places its author never anticipated and become embroiled in conversations the author may not overhear. A book's influence on another field far from its point of origin is not best assessed by a citation index—though Gender Trouble's numbers are massive. To take the measure of the work that Gender Trouble has done for scholars working in Asian studies (itself a constructed and constantly morphing category, like gender), we should ask how the book traveled. Which pieces were taken up by scholars of Asia, and what conversations and challenges did the book enable, not as a blueprint but as an incubator of locally grounded thinking? How has it been adapted, pruned down to one or two insights, or expanded into new domains?

Indian philosophical thought has always attempted to deal with opposite or binary values. However, when faced with contradictions, social scientists try to analyze the form, meaning and function of opposed values in real social situations. The problem of opposed values becomes difficult and anomalous when the culture, at different levels, not only permits oppositions, but simultaneously sanctions them. The data on meat-eating among the Kanya-Kubja brahmans of Katyayan gotra (primarily an exogamous group composed of several lineages) present this type of problem to the social anthropologist.

It was from the Jesuits that the intelligentsia of Europe learned of the philosophy of Confucius. Many years before their sinophile propaganda had begun to affect the thinking of European scholars the members of the Society of Jesus had determined their attitude towards Chinese thought. It was, in fact, the simplification, to suit their own needs, of an ancient, complex and effective system of religion, ethics, and social philosophy. Faced with the coalescence of religious and moral teachings represented by the son chiao or three cults (of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism) the Jesuit missionaries found it expedient to oppose the social philosophy of Confucianism to the esoteric teachings of Buddhism and the mystico-magical thought of Taoism—creating a purely imaginary dualism in which the two latter were labelled heathen cults and the former was exalted to the position of a noble philosophic system, rivalling, if not surpassing, that of Greece and Rome.

More than one third of Asia is dry. From the Red Sea almost to the Pacific are a series of deserts and semideserts, the product of continentality, mountain patterns, and atmospheric circulation. Two areas of extreme aridity are present in die Rub al Khali of southern Arabia and the Takla Makan of western China, both essentially rainless and lifeless. Elsewhere, aridity fades off into subhumid lands with marginal potentials for settlement.

An oft-overlooked part of the Global Sixties, the seminal event of April 19th (1960) set the foundation for South Korea's combative, youth-driven democratization struggles between the years 1960 and 1987. This article turns to the eve of the eight-week protest movement in order to examine the production of students as a nationwide social organization of youths well-versed in nationalist discourse and conversant in patriotic practices. Throughout the heady weeks of February, March, and April 1960, youthful protestors drew on elements of this ideological training in an unlikely fashion to employ them in protests against the state. Taking full advantage of the privileged position of students in nationalist discourse, the protestors of April 19th cemented the importance of the upright student demonstration in South Korea's emerging postcolonial, Cold War political landscape.

The following two articles constitute the partial results of a project in comparative coordinated research in Southeast Asia. Prior to undertaking field research in Burma and Thailand in 1959–60, the authors developed a research design to ensure the collection of comparable data for description and analysis in the areas of social structure and economics. The original plan was modified in the field during an exchange of visits to the Burmese and Thai peasant communities eventually selected for study.

Among the eclecticism and diversity of the intellectual marketplace in 1960s Saigon, frequent discussions of existentialism stand out. In popular scholarly journals and literary reviews, such as Bách khoa and Đại học, intellectuals, such as Nguyễn Văn Trung and Trần Thái Đỉnh, analyzed the relevance of the works of Malraux, Camus, and Sartre to Buddhism and to the situation of war-torn Vietnam. This article considers two possible reasons why existentialism appealed to intellectuals in South Du's Vietnam. First, it examines whether Vietnamese existentialists were searching for equivalency with Western nations. Second, it discusses how these authors saw existentialism as a useful way to refuse both capitalist and communist political positions.

Due to the inadequacies of the surviving sources, this study of the highly controversial issue of Sung land tenure focuses on variations in land tenure practices in six regions of South China during the Southern Sung. It finds that large private landholdings predominated in only a few areas of South China, that they usually did not possess the contiguity and size some have attributed to a supposed Sung manorial order, and that most peasant households owned some land. Of those who worked another's land, three types are studied in detail—the land guest, the field servant, and the tenant guest. Normally the land guest was bound to the land, the field servant hired as a temporary indentured servant, and the tenant guest obliged to provide little more than rent. Working conditions south of the Yangtze generally grew less subservient the closer the area was located to the Lower Yangtze Valley.

In October 2007, Malaysia celebrated sending its first astronaut into space, as part of a cooperative venture on board a Russian space mission. As Malaysia's first astronaut was a Muslim, the Malaysian government commissioned, through its Department of Islamic Development, a project to create a definitive set of guidelines for the practice of Islam in outer space, specifically on board the International Space Station. What may on the surface appear to be a practical exercise in clarifying religious practice reveals upon closer examination to be a complex restructuring of Malaysia's domestic and international politics, with the role of Islam as the catalytic and somewhat controversial centerpiece.

Courtesy reveals fundamental judgments about who merits respect. Traditional Chinese courtesy rests on lifelong hierarchical bonds that are too clear to require constant verbal reinforcement. But strangers, women, peasants, migrant workers, and others often do not merit face work because they lack status, fall outside the network of insiders, or are politically taboo. Until very recently, European-style equivalents of “hello,” “please,” “thanks,” “sorry,” or “goodbye” existed only in impersonal-sounding translations restricted to brief contacts with foreigners. As Beijing steps back from the socialist revolution, it is promoting these “five courteous phrases” (ni hao, qing, dui bu qi, xiexie, zai jian) to expand courtesy to universal, reciprocal greetings. Popular acceptance of this “verbal hygiene” is spreading via rapid, urban service encounters in which one's connections are unknown. In this way, China's self-identity as an “advanced civilization” is being retooled in international terms.

To situate today's social assistance program conceptually and historically, this paper presents three ideal-typical stances states may adopt in welfare provision, especially for indigent populations: (1) extend assistance to accord with social citizenship rights—or to fulfill the Confucian concept of the rite of benevolence; (2) offer subsidies to attain support or to pacify anger and silence demands from the poor; or (3) grant benefits (education, health care) to enhance the nation's productivity. The intended beneficiaries of these projects are, respectively, individuals, society and the state, and politicians. This categorization can distinguish, in broad-brush fashion, official handouts at diverse historical moments; the models are meant not so much to characterize entire eras as to illustrate differential styles of allocation. Moreover, each era justifies its practice with reference to Confucian dicta. In this comparative context, today's political elite bestows financial aid—but just a conditional kind—mainly to preempt disturbances and prevent “instability,” in line with the third of the types.

This article is an against-the-grain reading of the highly publicized failure of the 2004 India Shining campaign. Aimed at the Indian publics, this mega-publicity spectacle sought to communicate the success of neoliberal reforms in transforming India from a developing nation to a lucrative emerging market in the global economy. Rather than uplift the mood of the nation, the campaign brought to the surface the underlying acrimony and exclusion experienced by a vast majority of the population. I argue that the discourse of India Shining's failure misreads the electoral defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party as the failure of the neoliberal project of economic reforms. In fact, the India Shining images helped popularize the reforms at an unprecedented mass scale that until then had largely been limited to elite policy debates and reform packages. Instead, the discontent accrued by those excluded from the good times seemingly ushered in by the reforms, and not the reforms per se. The India Shining controversy also allows us to witness a new form of investor-citizenship shaped around the language and logic of loss and profits. The very edifice of failure makes apparent the shift to a capitalist dream world and the withering away of the old order in post-reform India.

When Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 andwas thereby rocketed into international prominence, the literary and theological worlds were afflicted with a rash of speculation as to whether or not his ideas were basically Christian. “The God of Gitanjali is no impersonal, imperturbable absolute of Hindu philosophy, but…whether He be explicitly Christ or not, He is at least a Christ-like God, and the experience of His suppliant and lover is one with the deepest core of all Christian experience.” “The ideas of Rabindranath, like those of so many thinkers of modern India, have often been quite wrongly assigned to Indian sources.” “In Rabindranath we get a glimpse of what the Christianity of India will be like….”

When village communities exist in the context of a larger political system, understanding of the system of control at the village level requires analysis both of the system of control imposed on the village by the state and also of that which has evolved within the community through centuries of its existence. These two systems, of course, cannot operate altogether independently of each other but must somehow be articulated with one another. The specific ways in which the two systems articulate differ from society to society. Nonetheless a perusal of the literature suggests a solution to the problem of articulation which is common to many societies. The solution apparently is to maintain a relatively autonomous village community over which the higher authority exercises limited control through certain key agents or agencies, as is, for example, the case with Imperial China, Thailand, Ceylon, and Greece. And this was indeed the solution for Japanese villages of the Tokugawa period, in spite of the tight and rigid control of the military government over the peasantry which historians make much of. (Since our discussion will proceed at a general level at which differences in administration between the Shogunate and daimiate governments are minor, both types of government will be simply referred to as “the government” or “governments” without distinction.)

For Western scholars, occupied Japan remains something of an anomaly: too remote (1945–1952) for most economists and political scientists, still uncomfortably close for historians. Americanists seem intimidated by the exotic hieroglyphics on the other side, while Japan specialists shy away in fear of losing their assumed thoroughbred image should their footnotes betray too much English. Buried under a veritable mountain of grist for research, as these two recent bibliographies attest, there is as yet no single scholarly overview of the subject in English. Such neglect is unfortunate, for the problems and potential insights involved are substantial.

Komori is a generic term that consists of a noun, ko (a child), and a verb, moru (to protect or to take care of); Japanese use it to refer to any person, male or female, old or young, who takes care of children. This article will focus on the young girls, hired by families in need of child care in the so-called modern Imperial period (1868–1945), who were called komori. Like their European counterparts, nursemaids and nannies, komori began to appear in what Michel Foucault has called the “discourse of power” in the late nineteenth century, i.e., in the formative period of the Japanese modern nation state. The komori's appearance in Japan's discourse of power corresponded to the emergence of a subculture among the komori that is the focus of my analysis in this article.

A unique feature of traditional Chinese law was the provision by statute that an offender who voluntarily surrendered and confessed before discovery and who made full restitution was entitled to remsision of punishment. Offenders who physically harmed their victims or offended against die state itself by commiting treason or escaping across borders were not entitled to remission, but could receive a reduction of punishment. Under the Republic this provision, known as tzu-shou, was continued in name but materially changed in substance under the influence of Western law as introduced through Japan. In general, the rewards for voluntary surrender and confession were reduced to mere reduction of punishment, but the scope was broadened to include crimes such as homicide, for which restitution was impossible. When the Chinese Communists first began developing a legal system in the 1930's, they too adopted tzu-shou. However, under them it became primarily an instrument of political control and social and ideological reform. It has remained an important aspect of Communist law even to the present though its application has ceased to have any strict legal significance.

This is a brief bibliographical essay which surveys the literature published in Japanese during the past decade on various aspects of the Tokugawa economy. The purpose of the essay is twofold: the first is to present an annotated bibliography of selected books and a list of relevant articles for the convenience of scholars interested in sources relating to economic changes in Tokugawa Japan. The second is to present in summary form what appears to the authors to be the newly emerging consensus in the interpretation of these changes.

The emerging consensus is an acceptance of the hypothesis that the Tokugawa economy and its institutions steadily developed, resulting in a rise in the standard of living for most of the population during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. A majority of Japanese economic historians now seem to agree that the peasant class also benefitted from the economic growth, and numerous scholars through exacting case studies have produced evidence to show that agricultural productivity was rising faster than effective tax rates. Other research has documented the rapid development of economic institutions, including the market, credit mechanisms, and guilds. The old theme of stagnation and demise for the late Tokugawa economy has been discharged in favor of a new theme of continuous growth and development.