In the literature on the process of socioeconomic transformation, a major debate centers on the questions of how and how much indigenous traditions, including kinship structures, are transformed by the larger political economic framework (Sahlins 1985, Hobsbawm 1983, Wolf 1982). Marxist theoretical analyses tend to emphasize the eventual demise of gender inequality and male-oriented (patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical) kinship systems—kinship systems within which gender relations are also embedded (cf. Engels 1972). The analytical literature on Vietnamese kinship and gender in the socialist era is certainly not an exception in this regard. It is pervaded with general propositions regarding the nuclearization of the family (Houtart and Lemercinier 1981, Werner 1981) and the political-economy-based transformation of the system toward a structure of egalitarian gender relations (e.g., Lê thḷ Nhâm-Tuyêt 1973).

This essay provides a critical observation of the South Korean government's distinctive management of COVID-19 with particular reference to the state of emergency. It reveals that the success of South Korea's handling of the pandemic is largely attributed by a majority of Western media to the efficient deployment of both information and communication technologies and Confucian collectivism, two components that seem contradictory yet not incompatible under the rubric of techno-Orientalism. Analyzing the intensification of surveillance and the rapid datafication of society, this essay argues that the current state of emergency is not a breakdown of normality but a continuation of the state of crisis and disaster that rules a developing country like South Korea. In doing so, the essay seeks to facilitate a critical discussion about a new mode of democracy in the era of pandemic that increasingly grapples with tensions between individual freedom and public health.

For architects of citizenship and nationhood, there is no shortage of conflicts and wars from which to build modern myths about submerging individual suffering and loss to greater causes. The grief, anger, and despair of individuals can be integrated over time into collectively shared assumptions about the indebtedness of the living to their heroic compatriots and ancestors. To remember these conflicts and those who (depending on the political context) either “lost” or “gave” their lives has been throughout recent history a vital act of citizenship, both “affirming the community at large and asserting its moral character” (Winter 1995, 85). Certainly from an American perspective, national identity remains “inexorably intertwined with the commemoration and memory of past wars” (Piehler 1995, 3). This observation applies even more intensely elsewhere in the world (e.g., Russia, China, France, Japan) where the loss of combatant and civilian life has been far greater.

Beliefs about ritual purity and ritual impurity form some of the most all-pervasive themes in Hindu culture. They are the basis of “orthoprax” Brahmanism in that only a ritually pure individual may approach the higher gods. Brahmanic concepts concerning pollution relate the Indian system of social stratification to the Hindu religious system. These concepts are applied to matters of personal conduct, health, and justice, and are fundamental to such well-known aspects of Indian culture as untouchability, limited access to wells, and the setting apart of a priestly caste. One of the important rationales for caste separatism (their refusal to intermarry, eat with one another, or touch one another) is that some castes are more ritually pure than others, and that impurity may be transmitted from one caste to another through these acts. But on the other hand, castes are also brought together and integrated into a system of ritual interdependence by the belief that they differ in the degree to which they are ritually pure or impure. Some actions are thought to be ritually too defiling for certain castes to perform, and some castes are thought to be too impure to perform certain other activities. These beliefs are basic to the concept of a division of labor by castes and to the ideal that each caste plays a part in a larger mutually interdependent system.

This paper uses recent field research to challenge the widely held view that a “Dalit revolution” is occurring in North India. Drawing on two years' ethnographic research in a village in western Uttar Pradesh, the authors uncover the growing importance of a generation of local political activists among Dalits (former untouchables) while also showing that these young men have not been able to effect a broad structural transformation at the local level. The authors use this case to identify a need for further research on South Asian political change that links party political transformation to questions of local level social practice and subaltern consciousness.

The Ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka has aroused increasing international attention. The demands of the Sri Lankan Tamil ethnoregional movement for greater independence from the Sinhalese-dominated center developed through various stages into a call for a separate state in the mid-1970s. This was followed by an increase in the use of organized violence by both sides in the conflict. Most recently, the continued resistance of core Tamil militants to Indian attempts to institute a solution within a united SriLanka has emphasized the independent indigenous roots and powerful motivating vision of the call for a separate state.

The politics of ethnicity—caste, religion, and language—has been central to politics in twentieth-century India. However, as the dominant Indian National Congress declines in favor of a number of smaller parties, the manner in which ethnic identities are being invoked in the political arena is being transformed. The key aspect of this transformation is not, as it is usually understood, the replacement of a single multiethnic party with a collection of monoethnic parties. Many of the smaller parties are in themselves multiethnic, although the coalitions that they seek to build are usually narrower than those built by Congress. Rather, the key aspect is the change in the type of ethnic politics that dominates the political arena. Congress plays a coded ethnic card, invoking ethnic identities quietly in its selection of candidates but not openly in its identification of issues; targets certain ethnic groups without openly excluding others; builds differentiated ethnic coalitions across constituencies and states; and courts the support of these ethnic coalitions through the distribution of patronage but never through the rhetoric of identity.

The economic importance of Hindu temples in medieval South India has been commented upon by most students of South Indian history. Without exception, the temple is seen to have had a central place in the dominantly agrarian economy of South India prior to the extension of British control in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, beyond recognition of the significant economic functions of medieval South Indian temples, little attention has been given to the matter.

Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement (September–December 2014) represented a watershed in Hong Kong's political culture and self-understanding. Based on over 1,000 slogans and other textual and visual material documented during the movement, this study provides an overview of claims, which are oriented towards an assertion of agency, articulated at different levels: in a universalistic mode (“democracy”), in relation with a political community (Hong Kong autonomy and decolonization), and through concrete policy aims. At the same time, slogans mobilize diverse cultural and historical repertoires that attest the hybrid quality of Hong Kong identity and underscore the diversity of sources of political legitimacy. Finally, it will be argued that by establishing a system of contending discourses within the occupied public spaces, the movement strived to act out a type of discursive democracy. Despite the challenges that this discursive space encountered in interacting with the authorities and the public at large, it represented an unfinished attempt to build a new civic culture among Hong Kong's younger generation.

Focusing on colonial Calcutta in the later decades of the nineteenth century, this essay explores the evolution of a particular festival, the Durga Puja, to explore the ways in which religion negotiated its place in the ideological determinants of modernity. The essay surveys the evolution of the goddess Durga from premodern times and shows why and how the perception of both the deity (in gender terms) and the festival (in historical terms) had to be recalibrated following the imperatives of new classes and new discursive parameters. While the essay interrogates the development of new particular categories introduced by modernity, such as urban spatiality and the rhetoric of individual rights in colonial Calcutta, it also aligns these developments to answer the general paradigmatic question of the actual relationship between religion/faith and the modern moment.

Recent Research On The Emergence Of civil society in Asia has illustrated that a range of nonstate actors have begun exercising a demonstrable influence on the politics of many countries in the region. Whether it be such grand manifestations as urban white collar workers or students mobilizing in South Korea to end the rule of Chun Doo Hwan (Lee 1993, 351); the urban Thai middle class uniting in the spring of 1992 to end the authoritarian Suchinda regime (Paribatra 1993); the more assertively political groups such as nongovernmental organizations in Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan working to protect the environment (Lee 1993; Paribatra 1993; Weller and Hsiao 1998); or the more prosaic groups of Chinese factory workers, entrepreneurs, crime syndicates, or qigong devotees slowly reworking the state's boundaries (Chamberlain 1993; Madsen 1993; McCormick, Su and Xiao 1992; Perry 1993; Wank 1995), nonstate actors are challenging the state's control over political life and attempting to redefine the political realm in ways that accommodate their own needs and interests. In Viet Nam, as Carlyle Thayer notes, the development of civil society is at a “nascent” stage in which there is still “little scope for the organisation of activity independent of the party-led command structures” (Thayer 1992, 111). However, despite their relative organizational weakness, Vietnamese citizens have begun asserting their own voice in politics. Emboldened by the 1986 Renovation (Dô'i Mó'i) policy's agenda toward “‘broadening democracy’” (Turley 1993a, 263), many Vietnamese have taken advantage of this opportunity to participate more directly in the political process.

This paper reports on the economic and political consequences of reserving government and public-sector jobs for members of the Scheduled Tribes in the Indian State of Bihar. It also contributes to a more general debate on the system of compensatory discrimination that has existed in India since the 1940s, and which was made tangible for middle class Indians by the decision of the government of V. P. Singh (1989–90) to adopt some of the recommendations of the Second Backward Classes Commission (1979–80: chairman B. P. Mandal). The Mandal Commission report advised that a system of reserved jobs in central government could usefully be extended from the Scheduled Castes and Tribes of India (roughly 15 and 7.5 percent of the population, respectively) to embrace a broader collection of Socially and Economically Backward Classes.1 In August 1990 V. P. Singh found it expedient to act upon Mandal's suggestion that up to 49.5 percent of all jobs in central government services and public undertakings should be reserved for the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

Since its inception three years ago, Xi Jinping's anticorruption campaign has targeted some of China's biggest political and military figures and implicated tens of thousands of cadres. This article argues that the current campaign can be distinguished from the many others over the past thirty years not on account of its extensiveness, but rather in its systematic coupling with two other key moves: administrative reform and disciplinary regulation. Together, these three initiatives aim not only to clean up the malfeasance, graft, and bribery pervasive in Chinese political life today, but also to change the political culture. We demonstrate that the current leadership is forcing a shift in political norms and behaviors, and changing the shared assumptions and practices that inform the political dealings of the society, from the approval of permits to the promotion of judges.

An earlier generation of Mughal scholars used the British-Indian Empire of the late Imperial period (c. 1875–1914) as its model for interpreting the Mughal state. The highly structured military, judicial, and administrative systems of the British Raj provided the perspective from which they viewed the material on the Mughal state contained in the Persian sources. Unfortunately, the assumptions implicit in this approach caused both a misreading of the Persian texts and a misunderstanding of the Mughal state. This essay argues that the patrimonial bureaucratic empire, a model developed by Max Weber, better captures the true character of the Mughal polity. A close analysis of the major Persian text on Mughal government, the A'in-i Akbari of Abu al-Fazl, demonstrates the superiority and appropriateness of the patrimonial-bureaucratic empire as a model for understanding the Mughal state.

Sinology and the history of science have changed practically beyond recognition in the past half-century. Both have become academic specialisms, with their own departments, journals, and professional societies. Both have moved off in new directions, drawing on the tools and insights of several disciplines. Although some sinologists still honor no ambition beyond explicating primary texts, on many of the field's frontiers philology is no more than a tool. Similarly, many technical historians now explore issues for which anthropology or systems analysis is as indispensable as traditional historiography.

In Thai studies to date there has been little attempt to discuss the changes that took place during the nineteenth century in terms of what Western historiography would call intellectual history. The reasons for the scant attention paid to this subject are various, having as much to do with the infancy of the field of Thai studies as with the lack of speculative literature (in Siamese) that would attract the curiosity of intellectual historians. For example, we hardly know what books—especially what Western books—were read by the nineteenth-century Siamese elite, let alone how such books shaped its outlook and its perceptions of change. Because Siam has been a predominantly Buddhist state, it might be advisable to begin with Buddhist materials—in particular, with Buddhist cosmography and the Siamese reassessment of it that has taken place since the encounter with the West in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Ethnic conflict is said to be rampant today. To all those instances familiar to us from the recent past, we may add the latest explosions in Southern Russia, in Eastern Europe, and in India's Kashmir.

A great deal has been written on the historical antecedents of ethnic conflicts, and on the political, religious, economic, and social circumstances in which many of them have broken out. These accounts include the effects of global processes that stem from metropolitan centers upon satellite countries, the assumptions and the problems of nation-making, and the politics of ethnic and other group entitlement claims in plural societies.

Tamil country, in the southeastern portion of peninsular India, has been an identifiable cultural region for almost two millennia. Tamil literary productions dating from the early centuries of the Christian era to the present time speak of Tamilakam (the land, or the abode, of Tamils)—setting out its boundaries by reference to mountains, rivers, and the sea, but making few distinctions within this macroregion and not specifying what lay beyond it. This paper is an attempt at more precise definition of the nature and development of this cultural region and its changing structure, by means of consulting a variety of evidence and by using the concept of “circulation.”

Anyone Who Works in the Field of Area Studies knows from experience that cultures are different. Indeed, the effort to understand the distinctiveness of cultures in comparative perspective is a central undertaking of the modern humanities and social sciences, not only in Asian studies but in studies of other parts of the world. But works on the subject seldom discuss the conceptual and methodological issues involved. What do we mean by culture in the context of comparative statements? How can a culture's distinctiveness be conceptualized? What is required to demonstrate that such distinctiveness exists, what it consists of, and what influence it has on the performance of societies? In the case of Chinese studies, how far have we come in establishing that Chinese culture is distinctive, in what ways, and with what consequences?

It is helpful to discuss these issues in terms of two bodies of literature with different ways of conceptualizing culture and its distinctiveness, although I intend to blur the distinction at the end. Following Ying-shih Yü, I will label the two approaches hermeneutic and positivistic. I do not argue that one of the approaches is better than the other; each achieves goals that the other does not. The real problem is lack of clarity about the different logical statuses of the kinds of findings that typically emerge from the two approaches. This can lead to problems when insights are transposed from the hermeneutic approach into positivistic language or vice versa.