The conventional views of road construction in late developing countries are not very positive. Scholars of provincial Thai politics, in particular, dismiss road-building projects as dirty pork-barrel politics. Using the case of Suphanburi Province, this essay argues that roads can constitute sources of collective prestige and pride. Suphanburi was once a remote province, and Suphanburians spoke pitifully of its backwardness. At present, however, Suphanburi boasts many roads of unmatched quality, thanks to massive road construction projects that Banharn Silpa-archa, Suphanburi's member of Parliament (1976–present), has channeled from the central state. In a global context that attaches a social stigma to backwardness, the appearance of these roads symbolizes Suphanburi's “modernity,” which non-Suphanburians admire, envy, and resent. Consequently, Suphanburians have come to take immense pride in their province. To understand why Banharn commands fervent local-level support, we must understand how he has transformed Suphanburians' social identity.

The privilege of addressing this audience is one I never expected to have. That it contains so many of my teachers and students, as well as past, present, and perhaps future colleagues, makes the occasion a particularly happy one for me. Something of a summing up seems in order. I shall make it brief.

Whether the story about the Ch'ên Kuang-jui, the father of Tripitaka, belongs to the “original” version of the Hsi-yu chi (chapter 9 in modern editions of the novel) is a problem which has occupied the attention of scholars and editors for at least two and a half centuries. If we accept the conclusions of Professor Glen Dudbridge, who has done in recent years the most intensive and impressive examination of the novel's textual history, it would appear that the best textual support is lacking for this segment of the Hsi-yu chi to be considered authentic, as it is not found in the earliest known version of the hundred-chapter novel: the edition published by Shih-tê-t'ang of Chin-ling in 1592. The numerous clashes of details between this version and later ones, most notably the glaring inconsistency found in the later editions which put Ch‘ên Kuang-jui’s assumption of his public career in the thirteenth year of the reign of the T'ang Emperor, T'ai-tsung, the same year when Ch‘ên’s son, Hsiian-tsang, was to have been commissioned to begin his westward journey, further evidence editorial changes and faulty re-arrangements. In the judgment of Dudbridge, chapter nine of the novel may well have been introduced by the late Ming compilerfrom Canton, Chu Ting-ch'ên.

The article examines the spatial turn in the contestations between the Indian nation and the British empire, as manifested in the creation and annulment of a new province at the turn of the twentieth century. The province, Eastern Bengal and Assam, was a culmination of the British Indian empire's eastern gaze since the early nineteenth century across northeastern India, Burma, and southern China. While the new province was expected to facilitate the empire's eastward transregional engagements, the national resistance to the scheme was influenced more by the comfort zone of the agro-ecological regime of the plains of the Bengal Delta, imagined to be capable of sustaining the Bengali nation in decline. The province was dismantled within six years in the face of the razing national movement, but a century later its legacy returns as India looks east.

Japanese literature of the war years (1941–45) has hardly been discussed abroad, and in Japan the tendency, until very recently, was to dismiss the entire production as “sterile,” or even to deny that any existed. Obviously more than strictly literary criteria have occasioned this reluctance to consider a most important though painful period in modern Japanese writing. Foreign scholars have hesitated to uncover dirty linen; the Japanese, embarrassed by old remembrances, naturally prefer to allude to the war in terms of its suffering, rather than in terms of the joy which most people had experienced when sharing certain ideals. On occasion, polemicists have attempted to discredit an opponent by quoting his wartime publications, but the sting of their attacks is dulled by the unspoken awareness that almost everybody was involved and, if guilty, equally so.

The use of oral histories is embedded in the interplay of archival limitations and shifting historiographical questions. This essay begins with a preliminary historiography of oral history usage in Asia, exploring its contrasting usages among scholars of China, Japan, India, and Thailand. However, more than filling in archival gaps, oral histories can challenge broader historiographies. Arrested multiple times, Kruba Srivichai (1878–1939) is northern Thailand's most famous monk. Illustrating a pointillist approach that draws upon hundreds of oral histories and dividing the palimpsest of Srivichai's controversial life into four time periods, this essay shows how oral histories challenge four corresponding paradigms and thereby force a reengagement with the overall narrative of Thai nation-state formation. This essay argues for the importance of oral history, not merely in “filling in gaps” in archival sources, but in challenging hegemonic historiographical paradigms.

How can crisis, breakdown, violence, and collapse be explained in the social sciences? This paper engages with this broad question by studying an extraordinary episode of mass tension and anxiety in postwar Sri Lanka caused by a mystery male predator known as the “grease devil.” Reports of widespread attacks on women in mid-2011 by this shadowy, ubiquitous, and powerful being led to heightened levels of vigilance and fear across large parts of rural and peri-urban Sri Lanka. It had a particularly strong impact on the formerly war-torn northeastern part of the island, where it led to violent confrontations between affected communities and the police and military. Drawing on primary research and by engaging with a range of literatures across the historical and social science literature, this paper attempts to reconstruct and understand the grease devil crisis. In doing so, it identifies and evaluates the different ways in which the crisis could be explained and the extent to which these approaches produce analytically relevant insights.

In 1984 two publications appeared that were designed to make available little known source material—archaeological and paleographic in one case, textual in the other—important for the historiography of the eastern Islamic world over the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. These publications are based on relics from port cities on the northern and southern shores of this world—Quanzhou (Zaitun) on the China coast, Semarang and Cirebon on the north coast of Java. Along with many other emporia old and new, these cities were incorporated into an extensive and thriving network of maritime exchange in the fields of commerce, religion, and civilization. The continued development of this network was threatened and ultimately forestalled by the antagonism of the conservative inland states of both Java and China on the one hand and the hostility of European maritime power on the other. But its legacy is not a trivial one.

The problem of ethnic identification is an important but neglected theme in Southeast Asian history. Historians of the region are indebted to Leach, Lehman, and Moerman for their pioneering work on the nature and history of upland societies in Southeast Asia. In Political Systems of Highland Burma, Leach demonstrates that culture and ethnic identity are not necessarily synonymous. He points out that the process of identification among tribal people like the Kachin is never simple; it entails migration, intermarriage, barter trade relations, warfare, interpenetrating political systems, and values and beliefs shared with non-Kachin. Manifest in the work of all these anthropologists is a conscious effort to define the nature of social categories applied to ethnic groups in Southeast Asia across time. Their work has led to a more complete understanding of the nature of ethnic groups and the processes responsible for “accomplishing ethnicity” among upland peoples in Southeast Asia.

In Chinese history, few reformers have been merchants and, prior to Cheng Kuan-ying, none of them was a merchant working for foreigners. In the late Ch'ing, the rise of the merchant class was remarkable and the reformers came from varying social backgrounds. Yet Cheng Kuan-ying (1842–ca. 1923) was the only noted merchant-reformer in this period. Due to his association with the foreign merchants, he was probably the first reformer in modern China who mastered a Western language. This fact made his reform proposals unique in many ways, although his understanding of the West as a whole was limited. The significance of Cheng Kuan-ying as a reformer lies in the fact that he implicitly challenged the programs of the self-strengthening movement by pointing out the necessity of institutional change.

Dream of the red chamber has been analyzed and reanalyzed by thousands of Chinese commentators in the more than two centuries since it was written (e.g., Yu 1923; Hu 1940; Zhou 1953; He 1956; Liu 1956; Jiang 1959; Wu 1961; Wang 1983). Indeed, entire journals are devoted exclusively to the novel's analysis, and strictly original contributions to this vast literature are rare. However, Meng Zhang's comparison of the genealogical relations of the principal characters of the novel with Eugene Cooper's ethnographic data on twentieth-century Zhejiang, and the joint analysis of the results are informed by an anthropological consciousness uncommon to previous commentators. The analysis not only takes note of patterns of cousin marriage recognized by earlier commentators (e.g., Yu 1923; Zhou 1953; Wu 1961), but also discovers instances of several of the more obscure patterns noted by Cooper in his Zhejiang materials (Cooper, in press).

In the thirty years since the appearance of K. S. Latourette's A History of Christian Missions in China the published materials in this vast field have been accumulating at a good pace, and an increasing number of mission-society archives have been opened to research. However, very little such research has been done. While Professor Latourette's work provides a matchless foundation for further contributions, few aspects of the subject have received thorough monographic treatment.

The link between global sports brands and the violation of workers' rights in Asia has been a mainstream issue for many years. A ceaseless flow of news reports on the infringement of workers' rights in Asia suggests that neocolonialist dependencies and the ruthless exploitation of sweatshop labor are endemic in the industry. However, Asian corporations standing in the shadow of global brands have recently taken the lead in coordinating global sports commodity chains. Asia's rise within the industry is having manifold impacts on development opportunities for workers, companies, and countries, first of all in the Asian region, but also beyond. Putting these transformations into the historical perspective of industrialization, this essay questions the taken-for-granted assumption about agency and compliance behind the new international division of labor.

In this article, I interrogate the exhaustive “inbetweenness” through which Bhutan is understood and located on a map (“inbetween India and China”). I argue that this understanding naturalizes a contemporary geopolitics with little depth about how this inbetweenness has shifted over the centuries, thereby constructing a timeless, obscure, and remote Bhutan that is “naturally” oriented southward. I trace how the construction of Bhutan's asymmetrical inbetweenness is nested in the larger story of the formation and consolidation of imperial British India and its dissolution, and the emergence of post-colonial India as a successor state. I identify and analyze the key economic dynamics of three phases marked by commercial, production, and security interests, through which this asymmetrical inbetweenness was consolidated. Bringing together sources from different disciplines and archival work, this account also challenges some of the dominant historical scholarship on Bhutan in each phase. I conclude by emphasizing that critical work at the intersection of geographical/political/historical contingencies is important to the subalternizing of geopolitics, which recognizes the myriad ways in which dominant powers have shaped both the geopolitical environment as well as knowledge-making that has constrained small states.

Periodic gatherings of Orientalists are fully meaningful only when they serve as forums for the discussion of important developments in the major fields of their professional concern: Oriental languages, literature and ideas, history and institutions. Having worked for decades in the latter fields with China as a starting point and the comparison of institutions as a central target, I would like to discuss here some of the problems connected with the power structure that Montesquieu, the men of the Enlightenment, and Marx and Engels called “Oriental despotism.”

For a variety of reasons, there has been a growing interest in the institutional conditions of the “Orient.” Hence any significant change in the interpretation of these conditions is bound to affect a growing number of Orientalists—and of social scientists who, although not Orientalists, deal with Oriental institutions.

One of the most recurrent themes in the descriptions and analyses of political development in Japan during the Meiji period (1868–1912) is the emergence of the genrō as the primary decision and policy-making group. Surprisingly, however, while a great deal has been written by both Japanese and Western scholars concerning the individual members of the genrō, very few attempts have been made to explain the origins of the group and especially the form which it took. A major obstacle to the analysis of this problem appears to be the failure to distinguish clearly between the genrō as an informal collegial decision and policy-making body and membership or participation in the organization. Failure to view membership and organizational structure as two separate aspects of the development of the genrō has had serious consequences for those attempting to explain the place of the genrō in Japanese political development. The emphasis placed on the nine men who are usually designated as the genrō has diverted attention from the more important problem, from the viewpoint of political development, of why the genrō as a decision-making structure emerged at a particular time and took a particular form. Absence of serious concern over the origins of the genrō structure on the part of historians has led them to ignore the question completely or to assign the informal collegial character of the genrō to the general tendency in Japanese society to make decisions through group consensus. The latter is too general an explanation since it does not tell us why consensus in this case should be arrived at through an informal collegial body rather than through some other structural form.