Like other parts of the muslim world, Indonesia has experienced an Islamic revival since the 1970s (cf. Hefner 1997; Jones 1980; Liddle 1996, 622–25; Muzaffar 1986; Schwarz 1994, 173–76; Tessler and Jesse 1996). To date, representations of Indonesia's Islamic revival have featured forms of religious practice and political activity concerned with what in the Sufi tradition is called the “outer” (lahir) expression of Islam: support for and observance of religious law (I. syariah, A. syari'at), including the practice of obligatory rituals. Thus commonly mentioned as evidence of a revival in Indonesia are such things as the growing numbers of mosques and prayer houses, the increasing popularity of head coverings (kerudung, jilbab) among Muslim women and school girls, the increasing usage of Islamic greetings, the more common sight of Muslims excusing themselves for daily prayers and attending services at their workplaces, the appearance of new forms of Islamic student activity on university campuses, strong popular agitation against government actions seen as prejudicial to the Muslim community, and the establishment in 1991 of an Islamic bank.

The classic model of Chinese kinship organization, with its complementary emphases on patrilineality, patrilocality, and patriarchy, continues as a framework for research on Chinese social organization despite accumulating evidence of alternative models or of disjunctures within the elite model. This model has come under critical scrutiny from a variety of perspectives, most notably anthropologically informed historical research (Watson 1982; Watson 1985) that has led to a questioning of the lineage model (Freedman 1965) and field-based research that has drawn attention to the prevalence of uxorilocal and “small daughter-in-law” (tongyangxi) marriage and to the nurturing of uterine families (Wolf and Huang 1980; Wolf 1972). My purpose is to contribute to this reassessment with a discussion of customary practices of postmarital dual residence for women and continuing ties between married women and their natal families. These practices and ties cannot be accounted for within the framework of the structural-functionalist model and require an adaptation of practiceoriented theory. This may illuminate the specific structuring patterns and disjunctures described below as well as suggest possibly fruitful lines of analysis for other societies in which lineages are salient. The contribution of this article is to identify and explore a significant dimension of structuring practices in informal kinship relations in rural China.

Our central assumption in the foregoing analysis is that cultures are integrated; therefore, the view that peasant cultures are compounded of empirically and conceptually separable great and little traditions is unfounded. We recognize the utility of the terms “great tradition” and “great community”; these abstractions are useful for describing the intellectual thought and interests of civilizations, and groups of individuals who promote and further these interests. The little tradition by contrast, we agree with Dumont and Pocock, is the whole culture of the little community or peasant society. Peasant cultures are “wholes”; but we agree with Redfield that they are not isolates. Peasant cultures or little traditions are linked with the great tradition through a common cultural idiom, which establishes channels of communication between the two traditions and sets up standards of mutual reference and influence. There are common sets of concepts and a common terminology. Though the substantive content of the terminology and the emphases given may be different in each tradition, there is a core of shared meanings associated with the terminology which facilitates movement between the two traditions. This is because the common idiom is derived historically from a great tradition, though refashioned to fit the peasant world view. The common idiom not only links the little tradition with the great, but also links the little traditions with one another. This represents an important aspect of the cultural unity of a civilization: a shared commonality of meanings which define the central values of the people and constitute their governing ethos.

This article examines how recent books by academics and public intellectuals are reshaping the discourse of the rise of China. While earlier trends argued that China was being socialized into the norms of international society, many texts now proclaim that due to its unique civilization, China will follow its own path to modernity. Such books thus look to the past—China's imperial history—for clues to not only China's future, but also the world's future. This discourse, which could be called “Sino-speak,” presents an essentialized Chinese civilization that is culturally determined to rule Asia, if not the world. The article notes that nuanced readings of China's historical relations with its East Asian neighbors provide a critical entry into a more sophisticated analysis of popular declarations of “Chinese exceptionalism.” But it concludes that this critical analysis is largely overwhelmed by the wave of Sino-speak.

Until a century ago, China's foreign relations were suzerain-vassal relations conducted through the ancient forms of the tributary system. This traditional Chinese basis for diplomacy was finally turned upside down by the “unequal” treaties of the period 1842–1858, but vestiges of the old Chinese way of dealing with the barbarians survived much longer and today still form a considerable though latent portion of the heritage of Chinese diplomats. It is of course a truism that tribute was not exactly what it seemed, and that both diplomacy and international trade were conducted within the tributary framework. The following essay offers a preliminary interpretation of the origin, function, and significance of this great Chinese institution.

On February 19, 1934, Chiang Kai-shek inaugurated the New Life Movement in Nanchang, Kiangsi, with the express goal of “revolutionizing” Chinese life. The Kuomintang leadership, holding the material and spiritual “degeneration” of the people responsible for China's continued crisis, decided at this time to launch a movement for hygienic and behavioral reform to revitalize the country. The movement was to signal the start of a new phase of Chinese history, one that was to be both conserving and revolutionary in spirit. It would achieve the most fundamental goals of the Chinese revolution without sacrificing native traditions. Nevertheless, the stress on the revival of native morality was the most striking aspect of the movement with its historical context, and endowed it with an aura of conservatism that overshadowed its revolutionary claims and has dominated its image since then. This image is somewhat misleading in its implication that the New Life Movement was the expression of a traditionalist upsurge in the Kuomintang during the Nanking Decade (1928–1937). The present study attempts a close analysis of New Life ideology—used here in the sense of a world view that underlay conceptions of politics and society—to demonstrate that the conservatism and the revolutionary claims of the New Life Movement must be taken equally seriously. The movement was conservative, but conservative in a very specific sense: far from being a reaffirmation of traditional Chinese political conceptions, it was fashioned by and in response to the twentieth-century Chinese revolution. Its underlying spirit had greater affinity with modern counterrevolutionary movements than with political attitudes inherited from China's past. It was, in short, not a traditional but a modern response to a modern problem.

Sri lanka's inability to contain ethnic violence as it escalated from sporadic terrorism to mob violence to civil war in recent years has disheartened observers who had looked to the nation as a success story of social and political development. In retrospect, Sri Lanka lacked effective local institutions to integrate the society, and the Sinhalese elite relied on welfare and preferential policies for the Sinhalese majority to maintain power. These alienated the minorities and resulted in Tamil demands for a separate state. This article documents one of the more intractable areas in which ethnic conflict has arisen, land “colonization.” Both major parties competed for the votes of the Sinhalese, but the creation of agricultural settlements in the undeveloped interior of the island, or colonization, is associated primarily with the United National Party (UNP). During the UNP government of recently retired President Junius Richard Jayewardene (1977–88), both the level of violence and the pace of colonization in the Dry Zone between the Sinhalese and Tamil majority areas increased.

“Say goodbye to Taiwan,” wrote political scientist John Mearsheimer in a widely read article in the March-April 2014 issue of The National Interest. Threatened by China's rising economic might and abandoned by a weakening United States, one of Asia's most vibrant democracies was facing, in his “realist” analysis, an almost inevitable annexation via economic if not military force. “Time,” he wrote, “is running out for the little island coveted by its gigantic, growing neighbor.” But only days after publication, on March 18, activists and armchair analysts alike said hello to a new reality.

Theoretical Considerations

In this paper I am concerned with the explanation of a type of religious phenomenon I shall refer to as millennialism. I would, at the outset, underline the religious character of this phenomenon, since millennialism (also known under a variety of other names) is often viewed as a projection of psychological, economic, or political crisis experiences. I do not view religion merely as a projective system; rather I hold with Clifford Geertz that it is a “cultural system” which serves as both a “model of” and a “model for” reality. That is to say, I see religion serving both as a set of symbols that makes human experience ultimately meaningful, and as a set of symbols that provides an ultimate basis for human action.

In this article the author examines what he terms an “institutional culture of authority” that has come to characterize postrevolution Chinese industrial enterprises. This institutional culture is shaped by a pattern of organized dependency that is inherent in the economic relationship of employees to enterprises, and also in systems of reward and control that link the opportunities of employees to their behavior and attitudes. This institutional culture is manifested in widespread ritualism in political meetings, low exercise of voice by subordinates, the creation of patron-client networks linking the Party to selected employees, and the everyday cultivation of personal connections for individual gain.

While boating down the ganges delta on a visit to the Reserve Forest Tiger Sanctuary, I noticed on the bank some idols overlooking the river. When I asked about their significance, it was explained that a tiger had killed and carried off a girl; these idols were meant to ward off future attacks. Since I was on tour with a West Bengal government Secretary who had police bodyguards to protect him against pirates and tigers, we had none of the apprehensions locals experienced. As the launch continued downstream, the conversation among the government officials took an unexpected turn. They talked of a massacre in the area of Untouchable refugees who had illegally settled in the protected forest reserve: the killings were said to number in the thousands of families.

For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, China's student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications. Their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachev's visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe. As we write in mid-1990, the movement and its bloody suppression have already produced an enormous body of literature—from eyewitness accounts by journalists (Morrison 1989; Zhaoqiang, Gejing and Siyuan 1989) and special issues of scholarly journals (Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs Nos. 23, 24; The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 14.4), to pictorial histories (Turnley and Turnley 1989) and documentary collections (Han 1990; Wu 1989), and, most recently, textbook chapters (Spence 1990) and analytical works (Feigon 1990; Nathan 1990)—tracing the development of China's crisis. Despite a flood of material too massive to review in the present context, we still lack a convincing interpretive framework that places the events within the context of China's modern political evolution, and also provides a way to compare China's experience to that of Eastern Europe. Such an interpretation should help us to understand why massive public demonstrations spurred an evolution toward democratic governance in Eastern Europe, but in China led only to the massacre of June 3–4 and the present era of political repression.

In the late 1990s, a marketplace trader in Hồ Chí Minh City reported being plagued by wandering ghosts. The postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently without descendents to honor them, but the trader's wandering ghosts were living: male market officials who demanded that merchants, most of them women, pay a fee for use rights to their stalls. Examining the conflict that ensued, this article argues that the wandering ghosts metaphor aptly captures the bitter struggles over resources and status that have accompanied late socialist economic reforms. More subtly, the metaphor also alludes to lingering wartime animosities. Market officials supported the victors, whereas many traders sided with the losers. Although daily interactions have intersubjectively reworked these tensions so that they seem instead to reflect gender differences, “ghosts” inevitably emerge: odd fragments of memory that wander homeless in the wake of social and individual efforts to render the past coherent.

This article offers a critical analysis of the growing emphasis on security in South Asia through an ethnographic study of Operation Sadbhavna, an Indian military initiative that was launched in 2001 after the Kargil War between India and Pakistan. It demonstrates how a renewed emphasis placed on security requirements through the adoption of the development paradigm and discourses of peace building and human security further legitimizes the military's role in governance and civil society in postcolonial democratic states such as India. The data for this article derive from the project's application in the Ladakh region of the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The ways in which the official objectives of the project were interpreted and incorporated into the political, cultural, and economic aspirations of communities in Ladakh reveal both the coercive and ambiguous nature of democracy and state power in South Asia today.

North china heretofore has been only minimally involved in the modern anthropological analysis of Chinese patrilineal kinship. In this region, lineage organization prior to the Communist era comprised a social structure, symbolism, and arrangement of ritual that call into question the line of anthropological inquiry that has focused almost exclusively on the linkages between a lineage's corporate resources and its social cohesion. The characteristics of lineages in Yangmansa, a village approximately seventy-five kilometers south of Beijing, appear to have been typical of this broader north China pattern considerably different from those associated with the southeastern Chinese model that has dominated the anthropological literature. Although many elements of northern lineage organization are found also in the southeast and elsewhere in China, they are combined in the north into a distinctive arrangement of cemeteries, graves, ancestral scrolls, ancestral tablets, and corporate groups linked to a characteristic annual ritual cycle. I deal first with the expression in Yangmansa of key features of the north China pattern, but also draw on other sources to fill out the picture and establish its broader regional relevance.

Emphasis on descent and kinship in analysis of traditional Chinese corporations, a legacy of structural-functional theory, mistakes the analyst's theoretical categories for native culture. In this paper, the author attempts to sort out some of the resulting conceptual muddles, and he proposes a more rigorous analytical framework for discussing the range of organizational variation in traditional Chinese corporations. Analysis of ten representative cases from Ta-ch'i, Taiwan, reveals greater flexibility of corporate form and function than structural-functional theories would predict. Close attention to the cases also reveals the absence of any compelling reason to treat the “Chinese lineage” as analytically or culturally distinct from the entire range of Chinese formal associations (hui). To understand what is uniquely Chinese in Chinese corporations, past emphasis on differences in formal group-membership requirements must be complemented by attention to the cultural values and norms of operation that transcend such differences.

Is civil society gendered? What can the Korean women's movement tell us about the very notion and working of civil society and the 1990s history of democratization in South Korea? Students of democratization have overlooked these questions in their study of civil society as a vehicle of democratization and counterweight to the repressive state or the totalizing market (Silliman and Noble 1998; White 1996; Koo 1993; Cohen and Arato 1992; Gold 1990; Keane 1988). Recent criticisms of the celebration of civil society as the third path to societal democratization point out that such analyses tend to lapse into abstract discussions of relations between the state and civil society, devoid of a specific historical or social context (Fine 1997; Tempest 1997; Blaney and Pasha 1993). This absence of context can also lead to an inadequate view of civil society as a uniform and homogeneous space without social inequalities or divisions.