As regionalism has become a politically and economically advantageous policy across much of Asia, vernacular popular music has concomitantly become an important arena for articulating and codifying shared regionalist sentiment. This article explores the reasons for the emergence of subnational regionalism within post-independence India, and its more recent resurgence since the 1990s, arguing that expansion and diversification of popular music (in combination with other media) industries have been central to these processes. Examining the case of the protest song “Nauchami Narayana” from the Uttarakhand Himalayas, the article then investigates how vernacular popular music can blend local signs of devotion and cultural identity in order to effect political change and articulate a space of regional belonging.

The theme of this paper, a theme close to the heart of the geographer, was in a slightly varied form the title of an international symposium organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1955. This symposium on “Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” provided ample opportunity for fruitful dialogues between scholars representing the full range of disciplines from the natural sciences through the humanities to the social sciences. In this truly interdisciplinary symposium of some seventy-five scholars, no less than thirty percent represented the discipline of geography.

When people build cities—and particularly planned cities—they intend more and do more than simply meet their practical needs. The cities they build and the cities they leave behind in archeological remains and in the pages of history dramatize for us their social order—both actual and ideal—their view of the cosmos and their place in it, their hierarchy of values. Thus, for example, Akbar's palace city of Fatehpur Sikri is more than a vainglorious display of newly-won power; its subtle blending of Hindu and Islamic elements symbolizes Akbar's dream of an ecumenical Indian order informed with tolerance and mutual respect.

In 1876 Baba Tatsui, then a young twenty-six year old man who had just completed two years' study of English law in London, published a booklet there called The Treaty Between Japan and England. It was a remarkable work in that it was destined to become the source most frequently cited by many Meiji publicists and later historians who attacked the inequity of the extraterritorial regime in Japan. In this work Baba wrote that it was evidently to the interest of British consuls in Japan “to protect their countrymen rather than to prosecute or convict them,” and that the majority of the English residents in Japan had “strong prejudices against the natives of the country … and … against the native government. …” These facts alone, Baba went on to say, “show that the judges of the consular courts are not impartial, and therefore it is difficult to see how justice can be done in a court of justice where the judges have so much interest for the one and prejudice against the other.” In a similar vein in 1893 the Kaishintō Tōhō, a bi-monthly periodical published by the Kaishintō, commented: “Injustice is the general rule in these [British and American consular] tribunals: justice is rare. Nevertheless, when they render just judgments we applaud their justice, hoping thereby to encourage them in the exercise of that quality.” Thus arose in the late nineteenth century the farreaching generalization that the Western consular tribunals in Japan were so partial—toward Westerners and against Japanese—that they seldom rendered even-handed justice.

The enigmatic images contained in the Book of Changes (Yijing or Zhouyi) have been interpreted, since shortly after the final redaction of the text, to refer to universal themes, transforming a text that was originally used in divination into a repository of wisdom for the ages. While this tradition continues strong more than twenty-five-hundred years after its first emergence, it has been challenged in the present century by a new historiographical approach that has attempted to return ancient Chinese texts to the immediate historical contexts of their composition and to interpret their language within the strictures of that context.

After four years of rising tensions over China's construction of military bases in the South China Sea, in July 2016 the Permanent Court of Arbitration issued a landmark decision layered with meaning, academic as well as diplomatic. “China's claims to historic rights, or other sovereign rights or jurisdiction,” wrote the panel of five judges, “with respect to the maritime areas … encompassed by the relevant part of the ‘nine-dash line’ are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect.” Writing with unambiguous clarity, the court ruled that China's dredging of these artificial islands for military bases gave it no right whatsoever to the surrounding seas and rebuked Beijing for infringing on waters that the Philippines should rightly control. China's claims to most of the South China Sea within that nine-dash line, which Beijing first published on maps at the height of the Cold War in 1953 and has pursued ever since, “were extinguished,” the court said, by the UN Convention (Gao and Jia 2013, 103–4; New York Times 2016; Permanent Court of Arbitration 2016, 68–77, 116–17).

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Japan experienced a surge in the evocation of the word “mottainai,” most simply translated as “wasteful.” Children's literature, mass-market nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, songs, government ministries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations deliberately used and defined the term as they took up the question of what was to be deemed wasteful. This essay examines how discourses that were ostensibly about wastefulness constituted an articulation of values, a search for meaning and identity, and a certain conception of affluence in millennial Japan. It suggests that this idea of mottainai reflected wide-ranging principles and beliefs that were thought to define what it meant to be Japanese in the twenty-first century, at a time when there settled in an uneasy acceptance of economic stagnation and a desire to find meaning in an economically anemic, yet still affluent, Japan.

The Vietnamese story about the arrival of Buddhism and the building of the first Buddhist temples in what is now northern Vietnam contains no distinctively Buddhist content, but rather is a tale of thaumaturgy, the worship of trees and of rocks, and rainmaking. This essay analyzes the textual history of the story, which is dated in the early third century CE. It examines the names of the two major protagonists of the story and, although the names were later absorbed into the Sinitic literary tradition, this study proposes a Tamil Hindu origin for them. One is reminded of the trade route that connected India and China along the coasts of Southeast Asia at that time; the evidence of Brahmans from India in early Southeast Asia, including northern Vietnam; and evidence of Hindu elements in Vietnamese texts.

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

A number of nations have instituted group-specific institutions or “enclaves” for women. The assumption underpinning such bodies—physically distinct, autonomous units in which constituent members belong entirely to a particular group—is that the segregation of female administrators will better serve the interests of women by isolating them from patriarchal norms and practices. I scrutinize this assumption by examining India's experience with all-women police stations, and carry out eight months of ethnographic research in and around police stations across the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. I find that while all-women police stations allow complainants to speak freely, they may also diminish capacity for female administrators working in law enforcement, create hurdles for victims of violence, and, in some ways, marginalize gender issues from the mainstream.

The anthropologist Victor Turner has proposed a new theory of religious pilgrimage, holding that people on pilgrimage have entered into a social modality that contrasts sharply with the one they ordinarily experience at home; roles, ranks, and social hierarchy have all been left behind, and what Turner calls communitas has come into being en route. Studies in Japanese by Eiki Hoshino confirm the cross-cultural applicability of Turner's theory, and show that it most adequately explains an ancient and famous pilgrimage tradition in Japan, that to the eighty-eight sites on Shikoku. It especially helps us account for the unusual tensions between pilgrims and government during the Tokugawa era. These materials and analyses are used, then, to suggest that in his study of the Kataragama pilgrimage, Bryan Pfaffenberger has misinterpreted Turner's theory and has overlooked ways in which it does, in fact, explain the materials from Sri Lanka.

The notion that democracy, as the West understands democracy, is meeting a crucial test in the conflict of ideas that agitate the minds and emotions of Indians, is everywhere receiving greater attention. It is a notion as commonly understood by the Indian intellectual as it is popularly appreciated by those who would observe the process from the West. That the Indian view of China plays a significant role in this process is readily apparent.

The institutional foundations of the Tokugawa daimyo have been obscured by the lack of insight which historians have traditionally shown into the history of the Ashikaga period and, in particular, into the late Ashikaga, or Sengoku, age. Like the Dark Ages in Europe, this chapter of Japanese history has been accepted in historiography as a dark and formless era of war and trouble. Japanese historians have dismissed the Sengoku period as a time of ge-koku-jō when the political order was capriciously turned upside down by unworthy leaders. The colorful Western historian, James Murdoch, has heaped his most caustic invectives upon the main figures in Ashikaga history. Of the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate he claimed, “Takauji may indeed have been the greatest man of his time, but that is not saying very much, for the middle of the fourteenth century in Japan was the golden age, not merely of turncoats, but of mediocrities.”1 To Murdoch the Sengoku period was a “vile” age when the Japanese people showed, as he put it, a “lust for war and slaughter … utterly beyond human control,” and only the timely arrival of the “great trio” of daimyo, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, saved the day for Japan.

In the years that followed the overthrow of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1911, China was ruled by military men who set up virtually independent governments in the various provinces. This inquiry into the policies of Yen Hsi-shan, governor of die north-western province of Shansi between 1911 and 1930, has been undertaken in the hope that a study of one of these warlords will result in a broader understanding of war-lordism as a political phenomenon and in this way illuminate further the whole subject of regional government in China during the early decades of the twentieth century.

The rural credit system in traditional agrarian societies has long been associated with “usury,” and therefore often considered a hindrance to rural development. Three aspects of the traditional rural credit system are used to substantiate this assertion. First, traditional rural credit often entailed interest rates above the ceiling set by law. As early as 1790 b.c., the Laws of Hammurabi established annual interest ceilings of 33.3 percent for grain loans and 20 percent for cash loans. Any loan charging interest beyond the ceiling was illegal (Sowards 1983, 5). To many contemporary scholars, even a ceiling of 20 to 30 percent seems exorbitant: given the low return of traditional farming, peasants could hardly afford to borrow at such high interest rates. Second, from a socioeconomic perspective, high interest rates suggest unequal relations between debtors and creditors. According to Rao, the origin of this unequal relationship lies in market imperfection, or so-called “connectedness”—the link between wealth inequality and the failure-of-markets mechanism (1986). A fragmented and noncompetitive market, this view maintains, facilitates personalized credit transactions which not only extract surplus but also perpetuate peasants' credit dependency on the landlord. This credit dependency, in turn, creates a situation in which compulsive indebtedness gradually deprives the peasantry of the means of production (Bhaduri 1983, chaps. 4, 5). Finally, it is asserted, traditional rural credit had little to do with production. Most peasants used rural credit for consumption purposes, which had destructive effects on agricultural production. Rural credit, in these views, is a siphon that draws resources out of the rural sector, locks peasants into a vicious cycle of debt, creates rural inequality, and hinders production. Scholars who have studied the Chinese peasant economy agree, by and large, that that was the nature of Chinese rural credit system.

Through a study of the corpus of contemporary literary depictions of the early medieval/medieval king of Bengal, Lakṣmaṇasena, in the works of the royal literary salon, this essay defines a cluster of poetic elements inseparable from the monarch. It suggests that this official poetic projects its proximity to the contemporary Turkish invasion (ca. 1205 ce), and the attendant crisis and restructuring of the Sena state. Some idiosyncratic poems, however, evince a historical dynamic that is both distinct and inseparable from the official poetic: the proud assertion of a Sanskrit literary provincialism in the context of a shrinking and threatened state. By correlating a pattern of poetic representation with a discrete period and locality, the present inquiry brings into focus the mutually constitutive relationship between literary interpretation and political historical interpretation for the study of early South Asia. And by tracing what was relatively peculiar and singular to this literary world, it strives to erode established scholarly visions of the endless uniformity of premodern literary-political life.

In popular Buddhist practice in rural northern Vietnam, moral personhood does not merely belong to the self but is embedded in the intersubjective relationship among individuals, the gods, and the community. The inner moral person, characterized as heart/mind (tâm), is constituted in the very process of becoming visible in the social world through virtuous action (đức) subject to the intentional acts of being witnessed for (chứng cho) by the gods and one's peers. Drawing upon popular Buddhist practice of the female followers of a ritual specialist in Bathing Buffalo Village, this article argues that the act of being witnessed for bridges the gap between the invisible and deeply felt experience of moral selfhood and the visible manifestation of that self in the social realm through acts of altruism and filial piety and reveals the inherently social nature of moral personhood.