The great urban diversity of Mumbai has given rise to a range of religious mobilizations that are not only shaped by a history of communalism along religious lines but also driven by intra-religious rivalry and competition in their urban environment. Against the backdrop of a global megacity, contemporary Shi‘ite religious activism in Mumbai provides evidence of the importance of global processes of religious mobilization, while also showing its entanglement with state regulation of religion. An advertising campaign by a Shi‘ite media center illustrates that such religious activism with global ramifications can only be understood if one also takes its intersection with state-sponsored regimes of religious diversity into account. Media practices of Indian Muslims as a vulnerable minority are especially responsive to normative discourses and images of religious diversity, and mobilize alternative strands of Indian secularism in order to counteract the fragility of their citizenship.

K. C. Chang's Shang Civilization is an invaluable, encyclopaedic guide to the archaeology, anthropology, and culture of East Asia's first historical dynasty. After a summary of the book's scope and a sampling of its interpretations, the review discusses six of Chang's major themes: (1) the acceptance of the “longer” rather than “shorter” dynastic chronology; (2) the identification of Cheng-chou as a Shang capital; (3) the hypothesis that two major groups held royal power in alternategenerations; (4) the extent to which the states surrounding the Shang enjoyed cultural and ethnic unity; (5) the existence of numerous walled towns; and (6) the relation between bronze tools and agricultural productivity.

There are several reasons why the legal institution of dien . (generally, but, as will be shown, erroneously rendered in English as “mortgage”) should be of interest to the student of Chinese and Vietnamese law. First of all, it merits attention on account of its very wide use, a fact which has been recognized by its incorporation, in a modified form, into the Chinese Civil Code. Then again it affords a striking example of an attempt by the Chinese government in Imperial times to develop by legislation the scope and purpose of an institution of private customary law, and of the way in which customary law asserted its vitality in face of the legislator by surviving unchanged into modern times. And lastly it illustrates, by the erroneous interpretations that for 150 years have been put upon it by European lawyers, the pitfalls that lie in the way of anyone who tries to explain Far Eastern legal concepts in European terms.

For most of the twentieth century, geography has been pushed so far into the background in the English-language corpus on early modern Japan as to be rendered virtually invisible. To the extent that it has been noticed, geography is typically seen precisely as background: the passive (if sometimes predestining) stage on which the historical drama is acted out. While attention is ritually paid to Japan's location and topography, most historians' analyses of Tokugawa development have until recently been couched in essentially aspatial terms.

The current Chinese language reform movement is of the most profound cultural and political importance in China itself as well as to foreign students of the area. Its goal is within a relatively short period to standardize the basic northern dialect as the common national language of China and to replace traditional Chinese characters with a phonetic script. As Mao Tse-tung stated in 1951: “The written language must be reformed; it should follow the common direction of phoneticization which has been taken by the world's languages.”

The Sarnyukta Gauḍa Sārasvata Brāhmaṇa [GSB] Parisad was founded in 1910 A by members of several historically related subcastes in western India. The association represented an attempt by men experiencing the insecurities of urban middle class life to obtain the presumed benefits of caste for themselves and their families through reintegration within a single structurally unified caste. They experimented also with the idea of caste as a means to mobilize rural kin and caste fellows in the quest for modernity. Although efforts to structurally amalgamate the subcastes through intermarriage and related ritual acts proved fruitless, the members of the Parisad did stimulate development of educational and economic institutions which supported their middle class aspirations. The problems of recruitment and the content of Parisad proceedings reveal considerable social and economic disparities among the GSB. This illustrates the inaccuracies of characterizing castes by reference only to those members who hold elite positions in public affairs. The Parisad ultimately atrophied after 1917 although its related institutions have survived. Though the structural unity of caste was not obtained, a sense of GSB corporate identity did develop which ascribed to all members the achievement-oriented virtues of adaptivity and excellence.

To use a word from the K'ai-feng dialect, a title like mine must seem a classic expression of chutzpah. “Will Sinology do?” indeed! What could possibly excuse the pursed lips, the nanny-ish condescension to his betters, on the part of someone who has not even gone through the Sinological mill? I should say at the start, then, that “Sinology,” in my reading, is something of a straw man. He is not Maspero. He is not Fritz Mote. But I am not sure (mumbling) that he is not Paul Pelliot, in some of his work. The Sinology that means control of texts is a wonderful means but a weak end. It was a healthy corrective to free-floating literary chinoiserie. Yet, if we may now take the professional standing of the Chinese field as granted, the time is past for texts to be used for spiritual athletics, ascetic proofs of honesty, and thoroughness in the abstract. We need to be honest and thorough not in marching and counter-marching through the literature “because it is there,” but because it relates to intellectual problems, to more than methodology.

This essay examines the changes in hairstyles that have become overdetermined signs of Japan's transition to modernity in histories of the Meiji era (1868–1912). It demonstrates that Japanese men's adoption of short styles, relentlessly cited as a key example of modernization (understood as Westernization), was a much longer and more complex process than most accounts suggest. It explores the politics of pervasive assumptions about how and why men and women cut their hair in the 1870s, and concludes that knowledge about daily life must be understood not simply as concrete facts but also as politically charged representations of social life that have served diverse agendas both during the Meiji era and since.

It has often been stated that the core of Japan's social structure is the family system. Research on any aspect of Japanese life is likely to lead to that subject sooner or later, because of its importance. The Japanese themselves, particularly the conservative groups, understand this fact more clearly than do most Westerners. They find in the family system the essence of Japanism, contrasting it to individualism, which forms the basis of Western culture. In more recent times, individualism was presented as a menace to Japan's “national polity” and as a “dangerous thought.” It became the ideological whipping boy of Japanese nationalists. The term “individualism” itself assumed the abhorrent qualities which the words “nihilism” or “anarchism” had in Europe at the turn of the century. Even today “individualism” means hardly more to many Japanese than selfishness and an antisocial attitude.

In his Jungian-inspired utopianism, Joseph Campbell (1988, 32) once declared that the famous “Blue Marble” shot of earth from space (see figure 1) could potentially become a symbol of a new mythology that celebrated our common humanity. Of course, much as Jung and other universalizing theorists have been laid to rest over the last quarter-century by poststructural, postmodern, and postcolonial thought, so too apparently has any new mythology of our common humanity (much less its actualization). Nevertheless, one can certainly wonder whether Campbell would not have interpreted the Anthropocene as the perfect myth for forging a new vision of our shared humanity.

Nationalist struggles are invariably civil as well as anticolonial wars. The processes of popular politicization are shaped as much by internal contests as by mobilized sentiments against foreign rule. Political engagement by the rural poor is typically influenced by local power struggles, ethnic conflicts, and class tensions that may deflect the poor's stakes in and concern for national liberation. To discover the quotidian contours of revolution, we must turn to these sorts of relationships and constraints. To understand the conditions that foster or discourage the active participation of subordinate groups in revolution, we must appreciate the local relations under which people labor as much as the political context in which they fight.

“Myanmar is telling Asia ‘we are coming back!’ This is the time. Watch out! We are coming back. After the SEA Games, we will host ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations]. Big things are happening in our country.” “Kyaw,” an amiable rig coordinator in his early thirties, was relaxing on the ground drinking beer with his wife, passing the time prior to Myanmar's opening men's football match of the 2013 Southeast Asian or SEA Games. Fifteen days later—after a glorious opening ceremony, a slew of gold medals, and a celebratory closing ceremony—his assessment seemed prescient. The government newspaper, The New Light of Myanmar, boasted: “With the honor of hosting the Games that returned to the country after a 44-year long wait, Myanmar successfully hosted the biggest regional sporting event.” Thailand's Nation concurred: “The country failed to overhaul Thailand as overall winners, but its symbolic triumph as host was far more important.” “Myanmar has basked in its host status and a rare moment in the international limelight after years in isolation under military rule,” declared Agence France-Presse in a widely syndicated article. “Some local and international observers thought Myanmar could not host the SEA Games. They were wrong,” boasted triumphant presidential spokesman U Ye Htut.

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

In Yadgiri Tahsil, an administrative subdivision of Mysore State, many villages stage annual fairs or festivals in honor of local deities. These festivals, known locally as “jātras,” usually involve the enactment of ritual, competition between villages, public entertainment, commercial activities, and feasting and celebrating. Description of the jātra as an “interlocal festival” emphasizes its distinguishing feature, the entertainment of reified guest villages by an equally reified host village. Participants in a jātra consist of guests representing neighboring villages and of hosts representing the village where the jātra is held. Comparison of the jātra with such cultural features as the American county fair, the Creek Indian ball game, the Olympic games, the Mexican fiesta, Pueblo Indian ceremonials, and medieval European tournaments may well, at a later date, make possible the establishment of the concept of interlocal festivals as a basis for cross-cultural generalizations. For the present, four jātras held in Yadgiri Tahsil will be described and some of their possible functions suggested.

Contemporary Japan has been consistently portrayed as a highly integrated society. Countless sociological works have argued that its mechanism of value consensus and social solidarity works efficiently and extensively. According to Ezra Vogel, for example, Japan is essentially a society where rapid transition has taken place in an orderly manner without much social disorganization. For Nakane Chie, Japanese society is composed of internally cohesive and vertically structured groups which tend to stabilize its system.

At the conclusion of the war in 1895, Japan acquired two territories from China: Liaotung Peninsula and Taiwan, including the islands of Penghu. (Hereafter Taiwan will denote the main island of Taiwan and the Penghus.) It is easy to understand why Japan annexed Liaotung: because of its proximity to Korea. But why was she interested in annexing Taiwan, located more than a thousand miles away from the principal battlefield and more than half of it controlled by headhunting aboriginal tribes? According to the conventional interpretation, Japan's decision on the annexation was based on consideration of two factors: (1) the island's potential as a new market, and as a supplier of food and raw materials for the rapidly expanding Japanese capitalism and labor forces and (2) its military value as a stepping-stone for future expansion in south China and southeast Asia. Implicit in such views is the assumption that Japan had planned the annexation long before the war—perhaps as early as 1874, when a Japanese expeditionary force briefly occupied a part of the island.

When teaching Tokugawa intellectual history, I consistently encounter a question that is at once deceptively simple yet so difficult to respond to in a convincing and substantial way. Why do Japanese historians argue that Confucianism had an important impact on Tokugawa society, when geographical, political, and ethical realities in Japan were so vastly different from those in China? There is, of course, good reason to be perplexed, I reply, and offer a generalization or two. Tokugawa society clearly was not “Sinified” as is sometimes implied; but, on the other hand, the imprint of Confucianism on Tokugawa thought and culture was undeniably deep. Although the picture is sometimes overdrawn, Japanese historians constantly refer to Confucianism as the “rationalizing” force that transformed Japan from a religious and ascetic culture to a bureaucratic and secular one. The same historians continue to debate the intellectual merit of Tokugawa Confucianism in Japan's modern culture, for while the precise ramifications are still controversial, there is little doubt as to the depth of the Tokugawa intellectual engagement with Confucian thought and of the profound legacy of that engagement for the modern history of Japan. Unfortunately, these generalizations, although helpful, do not add up to convincing historical instruction, a realization that has invariably left me searching for more cogent lines of interpretation and more detailed characterizations of Tokugawa thought.

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.

Hanumān, the ancient monkey-divinity of India: for many, he represents the force of life in man's struggle to exist. He is most famous for his devotion to the god-king Rāma, and for his exploits as leader of the monkey army that helped save Rāma's princess from the demon-king of Laṅkā. Yet in the Bhojpurī-speaking area of western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, Hanumān is a god of great importance in his own right. There he is worshiped as the epitome of strength and vitality; popular legends associate him not so much with the self-restrained Rāma as with Śiva, possessor of creative and destructive energy.

Historians of the modern Far East have usually assumed that in spite of the founding of the Tsungli-yamen and the launching of the self-strengthening movement of the 1860's, Chinese foreign policy remained weak, inept, and uninformed. Typically, China's handling of the Korean problem is contrasted with the swift and sure diplomacy of the new Japan to show how little Chinese statesmen understood of changing world conditions or of the altered character of the threat from Japan. China's failure to prevent Korea from slipping out of the tributary system is held to offer such obvious proof of the inadaptability of Ch'ing diplomacy as to make the issue scarcely worth discussing.