Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into the field of death ritual in an Yi community in Yunnan Province, China. Most Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples in Southwest China abandoned cremation in favor of burial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following a loss of political autonomy and a massive influx of immigrants from the interior. Inscriptions on stones, erected over buried corpses, shifted textual agency from skilled readers to knowledgeable or powerful writers and created links between state authority and the bodies of the dead. Stones became replacements for corpses, doors to the underworld, narratives of lives, and textual diagrams of kinship relations. Yi used stones to create new ways of conceptualizing and reaffirming social relations among living descendants. And they made much of the connection of writing with state authority, inserting their dead into the national time of revolution as the state's beneficiaries or victims.

In a particularly influential paper in the critique of development literature in anthropology, Arturo Escobar once suggested that an underlying cause of the “crisis in developmentalist discourse” is our inability to imagine an alternative (1992, 21). The problem, he explains, is not a shortage of critics but, rather, a plethora who are content to operate within the “epistemological and cultural space” defined by the development discourse itself. Yet, he goes on in a subsequent work, “[t]he alternative is, in a sense, always there” (1995, 223), if not in the work of development professionals and critics, then in hybridizations constructed by local people to protect and to improve themselves (218–19). This paper is about such hybridized alternatives as they have developed over the past century among a group of pottery makers in rural Sri Lanka. These are not, however, the mass social movements to which Escobar was referring. Rather, they are everyday and, more important, ongoing refashionings of economic and social assistance programs as these local people select from, remake, and reject opportunities that come their way. While Escobar describes grassroots resistance to the very discourse of “Third World development,” the Sri Lankan potters neither resist consistently nor accept consistently the developers' views of the world and the development gifts on offer. Instead, the potters work toward their own goals and make choices accordingly, both influenced by and influencing the shifting external discourses in which they participate (Woost 2000, 769).

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.

Change, or impending change, can often inspire the creation of myths, for it both threatens and promises. It threatens the security of the established, while providing hope to the disestablished. Change thus produces anxiety and discomfort on the one hand, euphoria and optimism on the other. Those in a position to be harmed by the change often create “negative” myths about the potential implications of that change; those not, glorify it. To misquote Claude Levi-Strauss, myths are created to control the present, hence, by implication, also the future (Levi-Strauss 1979).

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.

Peasant movement studies based solely on economic and political data may miss important social and cultural elements in the constellation of forces that generate those movements. The process of leadership entry—that is, the legitimation of the outside organizers to the peasants—has seldom been a subject of systematic investigation. However, I suggest that examination of what makes peasants accept as leaders persons who are in many respects different from themselves may yield important insights into the nature of the problems of organizing peasants.

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.

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.

Located immediately north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen is China's most successful special economic zone (SEZ). Commonly known as the “social laboratory” of reform and opening, Shenzhen was the foremost frontier for the People's Republic of China's adoption of market principles and entrance into the world economy in the late 1970s. This article looks at prototypes of the SEZ in Bao'an County, the precursor to Shenzhen during the Mao era (1949–76). Between 1949 and 1978, Bao'an was a liminal space where state endeavors to establish a socialist economy were challenged by capitalist influences from the adjacent British Crown colony of Hong Kong. To create an enclave of exception to socialism, Communist cadres in Bao'an promoted individualized, duty-free cross-border trade and informal foreign investment schemes as early as 1961. Although beholden to the inward-looking planned economy and stymied by radical leftist campaigns, these local improvisations formed the foundation for the SEZ—the hallmark of Deng Xiaoping's economic statecraft.

In response to US plans to withdraw troops from South Korea in the 1970s, the Park Chung Hee administration (1961–79) leveraged all defense-related civilian industries to build an independent system of weapons production. In keeping with Park's advancement of military modernization driven by strong private-sector growth, an agenda that he promoted with his banner slogan “rich nation, strong military,” large Korean companies known as chaebŏl were transformed to serve as government contractors that drove both national economic development and military modernization. A case study of one such company, Hanwha, illustrates how the state's hyper-militarization of Korean industries determined the distinct course and character of South Korea's national development. The study highlights the dynamic interplay that occurred between state actors and private-sector CEOs, managers, and laborers in shaping the chaebŏl-centered economic and defense industrialization.

Few events have made a more profound impact on political developments in modern Ceylon than an outbreak of riots between Buddhists and Muslims in 1915 and the reaction of British colonial officials to the disorders. The Ceylonese view was that the authorities responded with unjustifiably harsh repression and executed or imprisoned persons who had no responsibility for the outbreak. To many ceylonese, the government's actions illustrated a basic failing of colonial rule and starkly demonstrated the need for self-government. The handling of the riots galvanized nationalist sentiment and led to the appearance of an organized national independence movement. Although few constitutional changes had occurred in the preceding eighty years, progress came rapidly after 1915, culminating in independence thirty-three years later. The three articles in this symposium constitute a major examination and reassessment of the 1915 riots and their causes and consequences.

Patrimonial politics and administration in princely India from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century are the subjects of this essay. The bureaucratic lineage, exemplified here by three related families, is our unit of analysis for understanding elite formation and conflict. The period of the lineage's historical ascendency, a century spanning four generations, is sufficiently long to capture processes of conflict and change as well as more visible and easily accessible features of integration and stability.

Four recent studies of the modern Chinese economy show how the disciplines of economics and history have produced different judgments about the economic changes of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. These differences are overridden, however, by shared disciplinary concerns with problems of inequality and the growth of the modern state. Economists have demonstrated statistically that regional variations (particularly urban-rural differences), coupled with the size of the Chinese polity, continue to pose many of the same administrative problems for the modern state that they posed during the late empire and in turn have produced some similar strategies for ruling. These enduring problems are located squarely in the order of production in China's agrarian peasant communities and in the logistical problems of distributing what is produced there through an integrated political and economic system.

Each upsurge of Hindu-Muslim tension in India brings in its wake scholarly and journalistic articles that highlight the frustrations of Indian Muslims and that raise serious questions about their commitment to India's secular democracy. The philosophical and empirical bases of these accounts are challenged by findings that suggest that region, poverty, illiteracy, and the working-class position of Indian Muslims are more significant in shaping their political outlook than religion. In contrast with the “orientalist” orthodoxy, this study finds the views of Indian Muslims to be diverse, complex, and well-integrated into the political perspectives of the linguistic regions in which they reside.

This essay is an attempt to reassess the role played by Wu San-kuei during the crucial year of 1644.1 Traditionally ignored by historians or relegated to a minor role, the conventional wisdom has instead preserved the following now well established account of Wu's place in the Manchu conquest of China. When the rebel Li Tzu-ch'eng was marching eastward and advancing toward Peking, Emperor Ch'ung chen finally realized the danger of the threat. In early April he conferred upon Wu San-kuei and other able generals the title of earl; Wu was designated P'ing-hsi po (Earl who Pacified the West). The emperor further ordered Wu both to abandon the land east of the Shan-hai pass and to move the troops back to Peking to meet the threat posed by Li's advance toward Peking. Nevertheless, Wu temporarily ignored the order and delayed his march. When his troops eventually marched halfway to Feng-jun, on the 26th of April, Peking had already fallen into the hands of the rebels. Consequently, he marched back to the Shan-hai-kuan, a vital strategic town located at a pass at the east end of the Great Wall, to contemplate the next move. Meanwhile, Li Tzu-ch'eng sent a delegate to demand Wu's surrender, holding his father, the retired commander Wu Hsiang, as hostage. Wu considered complying with the demand but changed his mind upon learning that his favorite concubine, Ch'en Yüan-yüan, had also been seized. Outraged, he surrendered to the Manchus and invited them to suppress the rebellion.

Modernization is a word that has been widely and rather loosely used for some time to characterize the fundamental changes that have been taking place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries among non-Western peoples. It was first used in this sense to describe developments in Japan, China and Turkey, but with the multiplication of newly independent nations in Asia and Africa since World War II die term has been applied to them, also.

En chine, depuis les seconds Han (25–220 A.D.), en Corée, depuis le VIe siècle, au Japon, depuis Shōtoku (593), le Bouddhisme est partout: doctrines, systèmes croyances, institutions politiques, architecture, sculpture, peinture, sur tous les domaines il est un facteur capital; sans lui, rien ne s'explique; autour de lui, tout s'éclaire et s'ordonne.”—Sylvain Lévi.

One of the problems recurring in the Buddhist Pali Texts is the question of what it is that transmigrates. Buddhism accepts as axiomatic the doctrine of rebirth, a process of “renewal of becomings” until the attainment of complete knowledge, whereupon the process terminates. At the same time, the Pali texts are committed to the doctrine that there is no soul. The two doctrines, held simultaneously, presented a difficulty of which the Buddhist monks were well aware. If there is no soul, no Ego, no self, and yet rebirth is a fact, what is reborn?