The dictionary says that a prolegomenon is “a learned preface or preamble, … introductory or preliminary observations on the subject of a book.” And indeed, the remarks I am about to make are preliminary to a volume on state formation that Lloyd Rudolph and I hope to produce one of these years. Such a prolegomenon is also a commitment to a path of action, a justification, a polemic in favor of what one proposes to do. Today, I want to speak for the domain of comparison.

This is the text, with a few verbal modifications, of a lecture delivered by T. N. Madan at the President's Panel in Honor of the Fulbright Fortieth Anniversary Program, on the occasion of the 1987 meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Boston. T. N. Madan has invigorated the social sciences in India for many years by his research, writing, and teaching. As an author he has written on such themes as Hindu culture, culture and development, ethnic pluralism, family and kinship, and the professions. As editor of Contributions to Indian Sociology, he has attracted to its pages distinguished research and writing from an international pool of contributors. This achievement is related to his capacity to combine discriminating intellectual taste with a friendly capacity to insinuate the journal into the publishing program of outstanding social scientists. It is also related to the fact that his anthropological understanding is combined with a wide-ranging methodological sympathy for other social sciences as well as the humanities.

During the Qianlong period (1736–95) in China, knowledge of Manchu origins, much of which had been of a folk or informal character, was given documentary institutionalization—that is, incorporation into the Qing (1636–1912) imperial cultural mosaic by the act of writing something official about it. Much but by no means all of Manchu civilization was derived from Jurchen culture (tenth–seventeenth centuries), which was primarily a folk culture in which oral tradition, shamanic ritual, and clan custom were the mainstays of orderly social life. Inseparable from those folk traditions were elements of tribal rule that affected political life in many ways in the Later Jin (1616–35) and early Qing periods. To the extent that Manchu society retained the archaic forms through the Qing era, the folk heritage was brought into conflict with the political institutions and classical traditions of conquered China, especially the emperorship. The history of the Qing court and its relation to the Manchus may be viewed as the aggregate of the processes by which the dynasty attempted to resolve this conflict through formalization of the old culture. In its political aspects this meant the progressive bureaucratization, regulation, and depersonalization of the state in displacement of the personal, diffused authority that had once been vested by tradition in the clans and confederations. In its cultural and ideological facets, it meant the documentation of descent, myth, clan history, and shamanic practice; what had once been various and mystically obscure was now made visible, manageable, and standard.

The Tamil country of South India experienced a flowering of political, economic, and cultural forces during the Chola period (849–1279). The environments supporting this expansion were nucleated settlements focused on temples, surrounded by verdant paddy fields with artificial irrigation networks. This article is a study of the sacred sites and nucleated settlements that were the heart of this medieval civilization. The purposes of the study are two: first, to portray the dynamics of early urbanism during a crucial period of regional integration in South Asia, and especially to portray the geography of early centers; second, to provide the basis for a comparative study of early South Indian urbanism and premodern urbanism in other world areas.

The popularization of Japanese Buddhism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is generally equated with the development of independent religious movements such as the Pure Land and Lotus schools, which emphasized salvation by faith and simple invocations. Although these movements were indeed at the heart of Buddhism's transformation from an aristocratic to a popular religion, there are problems with an approach that focuses on them alone. To begin with, such an approach ignores the considerable contribution of the older schools—Tendai, Shingon, and those centered in Nara—to the popularization of Buddhism. In addition, it becomes tempting to see the spread of Buddhism as only the result of innovations in doctrine and religious practice, the most obvious differences between new schools and old, and to ignore the role played by monasteries as social and economic institutions.

These three excellent documentaries have received both high honors from the film world and an appreciative welcome from Asia scholars eager to make use of them in the classroom. Students and non-China specialists seeing them for the first time generally praise them for “humanizing” life in rural China, for providing an “intimate” look at “real” Chinese people as they are but rarely glimpsed in the West. When students have first been primed with readings from William Hinton's two classic prose documentaries of life in Long Bow Village (Fanshen [1968] and Shenfan [1984]), the films may be especially rewarding. They put faces to a few familiar names and give us images—of donkeycarts rattling over the tired earth, of bundled babies in bare adobe courtyards—that validate the village Hinton's books have already brought to life in our minds. But for viewers who have not done any background reading on Long Bow's special history under Communist land-reform and collectivization policies or on the village's past complex patterns of religious conflict and gender politics, these films will stand on their own. They succeed well in their “intimate" and “humanizing” endeavor not because we already know something about Long Bow villagers and what they have been through but because the filmmakers have skillfully kept narration to a minimum, allowing village people themselves to do most of the communicating. In their words, their gestures, their laughter, and their eyes, we recognize again and again that familiar, perhaps uniquely human, emotion—ambivalence.

The contemporary study of Chinese painting history varies considerably according to cultural locus, be it mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, or the West, making broad generalization about the state of the field quite difficult. Where the intellectual and social context of traditional East Asian culture remains most intact, the study of painting has perpetuated the concerns and modes of the thousandplus years of traditional historiography, yet this has become increasingly rare. In the People's Republic, innovation has come largely through Marxist influence, bringing a focus on social aspects of the art, but no systematic Marxist analysis has ever emerged and the influence of ideology is now noticeably on the wane. In the West, where most of those who study Chinese painting cannot themselves paint, do more than dabble in calligraphy, or lay claim to being part of the Chinese cultural elite, and where an understanding of the Chinese context cannot be taken for granted, the need for cross-cultural explanation has generated studies unique in character, blending sinology with Eurocentric art-historical questions and methods. This Western approach, with its skeptical analysis and egalitarian perspective, has provided new techniques of stylistic analysis for reevaluating the traditional dates and attributions of paintings and yielded a new, more objective basis for examining the theory, content, and sociocultural basis of Chinese painting.