In Pakistan Muslim shrines have traditionally been maintained by hereditary saints (pirs), who often command a large following. Leaders of Pakistan have felt that the organization of the shrines has been incompatible with their political and religious goals. This article examines how the governments of Ayub Khan and his successors not only have established an administrative policy aimed at direct control of the shrines and a diminution of the power of the hereditary saints; they have also attempted to present a coherent ideology concerning the significance of the saints, which, though drawing on the Sufi tradition, diverges sharply from many popular beliefs. Despite a basic continuity of policy toward the shrines, however, each administration has also had its own central symbols and has drawn on Islam in different ways. These differences are reflected in the changing significance of the saints from one administration to the next.

Scholarly discussion of Javanese society has consistently linked variation in Islamic orthodoxy to differences of socioeconomic class, political behavior, and social conflict. In the most widely known sociological formula, Clifford Geertz distinguished three varieties of Javanese Islam and correlated each with a particular social class. Abangan, or Javanist Muslim, tradition was described as a syncretic blend of animist, Hindu-Buddhist, and Islamic elements that was predominant among the mass of rural Javanese. Santri tradition was identified as a more orthodox variant of Islam, especially widespread among merchants and wealthier peasants. Finally, priyayi tradition was identified as an elite heritage strongly influenced by the Hindu-Buddhist values of earlier Javanese courts and linked to Java's traditional gentry and the administrative bureaucracy that replaced it in the modern era (Geertz 1956; Geertz 1960:5–6).

In the first millennium A.D. mainland Southeast Asia's first great states arise, but then in the span of a few centuries these Indianized realms collapse and their Pyu, Mon, Khmer, and Cham peoples decline. In their place Burmese, Tai, and Vietnamese states arise and go on to rule the mainland as their peoples come to dominate the second millennium. Case by case these shifts appear to be ethnic and political successions wherein the strong displace the weak, but seen together regionally the similarities suggest an agricultural change whereby an irrigated wet rice specialization from upland valleys displaced gardening and farming complexes native to the lowlands.

This essay examines the transformation from undifferentiated frontier to geographic region of that part of northeast Asia controversially referred to as Manchuria. This transition—from space to place, as it were—long has tended to be seen primarily in terms of the extension of colonial interests into China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, as I shall argue, the invention of this place began much earlier, in the seventeenth century, and owed substantially to the efforts of China's Manchu rulers, who claimed it as their homeland, the terre natale of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Even as the area was joined to the larger empire, Qing emperors took care to invest what I define as “Greater Mukden” with a unique identity.

Debate can advance scholarly discussion, and I am grateful to JAS for the chance to do so here. As much as possible, I would like to move forward by introducing additional arguments and evidence. However, some recapitulation of the book under discussion is inevitable, as is some review of debates related to Philip Huang's book on a related topic. Some return to previously plowed ground is further necessitated by the nature of his review. First, he has fundamentally misunderstood what my book claims, as well as the support for some of those claims. I will not correct all of these errors here, but I will need to go over some of the major examples. Second, a central contention of his review is that his 1990 book, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 remains the best framework for understanding the delta's economy over that entire period. Huang is; of course, entitled to that view: but in reasserting that book's thesis he ignores rather than responds to the critiques ofthat book (see Wong 1990; Myers 1991; Wong 1992). He also ignores plentiful new research on both Asia and Europe that suggests there were more paths to modernity than we once realized, most of them perfectly viable in spite of relying on more labor-intensive kinds of production than England's (especially in agriculture) during their early phases.

When the united states embarked on a campaign of overseas colonial conquest a century ago, it was for some Americans an unquestionably righteous venture in political tutelage. “[God] has made [the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples] adept in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples,” proclaimed Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge. “And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world” (Snyder 1962). The largest and most important U.S. colony was of course the Philippines, where a campaign of military conquest began in 1898 and continued into the early years of the new century.

Complexity has characterized the Thai religious system since at least 1292, when the well-known inscription of Rama Kamhaeng was composed. This inscription not only celebrates the devotion of his people of Sukhothai to Theravada Buddhism but also notes a special relationship between the prosperity of the kingdom and reverence for Phra Khaphung, a “spirit-deity” living in a nearby mountain. Phra Khaphung is characterized as a phī-thewadā, combining phī (an indigenous Thai form meaning “spirit,” “ghost”) with thewadā (a form derived from Hindu-Buddhist cosmology and meaning “deity”). This classification of Phra Khaphung suggests that a process of merging two once-distinct religious traditions had already begun.

Although there has been great interest in how properly to conceptualize the person in Indian culture, few have explored Indian perceptions of leadership, achievement, and agency as valued features of individuality (Singer 1972; Mines 1988; Fox 1989). Indeed, since Dumont (1970a,b) forcefully argued that the values of equality and liberty that support the Western notion of the individual were absent from Indian society, the important roles that personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement play in Indian history have been largely overlooked or understated. This paper reconsiders an Indian sense of these roles by examining the south Indian concept of the “big-man” (periyar, periyavar), a notion of individuality and instrumentality that is central to the politics of south India and crucial to an understanding of the dynamic relationship that exists between action and organization in Indian society (cf., Fox 1989).

Pre-Han philosophical tradition did not address issues for which the concept of truth was central. Classical Chinese philosophy had virtually no metaphysical theory. The theory of language was mainly pragmatic. The semantic doctrines that were developed focused on terms rather than sentences or sententials. The Chinese theory of knowledge was primarily a theory of know-how and was not based on contrast between knowledge and belief. Chinese philosophy of mind treated heart-mind as a cluster of dispositional attitudes to make distinctions and to act upon, not as a repository of cognitive content about the world. Discussions of inference and semantic paradoxes used explicitly pragmatic terms rather than semantic ones. These differences can be partially explained by features of classical Chinese language in which compositional sentencehood is not important or syntactically obvious, and in which the counterparts of propositional attitudes take terms rather than sentences as objects.

Buddhism in Thailand has been both subjected to integrative policies advanced by the Thai government and manipulated as an instrument for promoting national integration. As a result of reforms instituted at the end of the nineteenth century, several different traditions of Therevada Buddhism were united into a national religious system. In recent years, the Thai government has attempted to involve the Buddhist Sangha in efforts to promote economic development among the Thai peasantry and assimilation of tribal peoples into Thai society. While the policies designed to integrate Buddhism within Thailand were successful, the efforts to use Thai Buddhism as instrument of national policy could prove deleterious rather than advantageous to the attainment of national goals.

Accounts of the various local, congressional, and national elections held in the Philippines since 1986 have highlighted three enduring features of Philippine democracy in the post-Marcos era. First of all, large numbers of politicians who held office for many years in the Marcos and pre-Marcos periods have won reelection, as have numerous other members of long-entrenched political families (Soriano 1987; Gutierrez 1992). Secondly, most of these politicians and clans have been known to enjoy not only political longevity but also economic preeminence within their respective municipal, congressional, or provincial bailiwicks, through landownership, commercial networks, logging or mining concessions, transportation companies, or control over illegal economies (Gutierrez 1994). Finally, evidence that fraud, vote-buying, and violence have decisively shaped the conduct and outcome of these elections (Tancangco 1992) has led some commentators to conclude that the celebrated transition from “authoritarianism” to “democracy” in Manila has been less than complete in its local manifestations (Kerkvliet and Mojares 1991, 5). With the revival of electoral politics in 1987, analysts thus began to offer evocative descriptions of, and various explanations for, the distinctive nature of Philippine democracy, with references to political clans, dynasties, caciques, warlords, and bosses appearing with great frequency in journalistic and scholarly accounts, and terms like cacique democracy, mafia democracy, feudalism, warlordism, and bossism gaining considerable currency.

Two approaches have dominated the study of Chinese industrial history. Work of the kind Professor Joseph Needham has done in his Science and Civilization in China attempts to trace the history of Chinese scientific and technological achievement from the earliest times. Recently some interesting investigations have also been made of industrialization along modern Western lines since 1800. Needham has collected valuable data about all periods but neglects the relation of technology to general economic history. From the other work we get a more or less comprehensive view of nineteenth century economic development, but this tells us nothing about an earlier era of significant growth and change. The purpose of this article is to outline the importance of iron and coal during the remarkable economic and industrial expansion which took place in the 166 years from 960 to the Jurchen conquest of North China in 1126 A.D.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “caste” organizations and “caste” polemics were, to a greater extent than has been appreciated, responses to foreign definitions of Indian society. The most important stimulus toward caste-cluster consciousness released by the British presence was neither their advanced technology (which revolutionized the means of communication and transportation) nor their military prowess and administrative skill (which obliterated “the territorial limitations inherent in the pre-British political systems” and “brought a new administrative unity to India in the establishment of a centralized bureaucratic government”—both of which are commonly noted. Rather, the growth of caste-cluster consciousness was largely an unintended but direct consequence of the fact that the foreigners engaged in a continuous attempt to describe, define, interpret, and categorize the social complexity that India presented to them—a society so puzzlingly different from their own.

Large portions of East and Southeast Asia are in the throes of a historically unprecedented upsurge in religious observance and association. Many of the new varieties of religiosity are more popular, voluntary, and laity based than the religions of yesteryear. Many are also marked by the heightened participation of women, and an emphasis on inner-worldly well-being as well as otherworldly transcendence. Focusing on Southeast Asia, but with references to developments in China, this article examines the social and moral genealogy of eastern Asia's religious vitalization. Many analysts have emphasized the influence of postcolonial secularisms, neoliberal disciplines, and ascendant civil societies in the religious resurgence. Although these factors have indeed played a role, the macro-narratives of the state, capital, and democratization often give insufficient attention to the micro- and meso-passions of self, family, and neighborhood, all of which have contributed to the popularization and proximatization of once restricted spiritual disciplines.

For many decades, Japan was the only advanced industrial country in the world that did not rely on unskilled foreign labor. For many observers, the Japanese case demonstrated that a country could fully industrialize and sustain high levels of economic growth without becoming dependent on large populations of immigrant workers. Instead of importing immigrants, Japan was able to meet its increasing demand for unskilled labor power by effectively mechanizing and rationalizing production and further utilizing untapped sources of labor (female and elderly workers). Because of the country's insistence on ethnic homogeneity and its refusal to accept unskilled foreign workers, Japan had been forced to optimize domestic labor productivity and supply, creating a highly efficient and competitive industrial system capable of economic expansion without immigration. This implicitly sustained a “myth of Japanese uniqueness”—the notion that Japan's economic system was unique because it was based on distinctive Japanese ethnocultural qualities.

Between 1250 and 1850 the population of Southwest China increased from 3 to 20 million people. In this essay, the author delineates two periods of population growth—a small one from 1250 to 1600 and a large one from 1700 to 1850—and relates their spatial and temporal characteristics to agricultural production. His conclusions challenge the popular assumption that frontier populations in China grew because of improved agricultural techniques or increased arable land. In the Southwest, between 1250 and 1600, population doubled because of the government investment in agriculture, but, between 1700 and 1850, population quadrupled because of the development of local mining industry. In Qing China, as elsewhere in the early modern world, major increases in population were often a consequence of early industrialization.

The five books discussed in this review article deal either with famine or with related issues concerning access to food in South Asia. Famine is a powerful but distorting lens through which to look at any society. Both the causes and the consequences of famine reveal important social and cultural facts about parts of South Asia at particular times. More important, the analysis of famine is inseparable from the problems of agricultural technology, inequality, and dependence in normal times. The underlying argument of this article is that famines raise questions about the changing relationship between the structures of enfranchisement and the realities of entitlement in the societies in which they occur.

This article analyzes the changes in the representation of non-Han peoples in textbooks of premodern Chinese history published in China since the establishment of the People's Republic. Whereas in the early 1950s, these peoples were treated as non-Chinese others and were even referred to as “foreigners,” by the beginning of the twenty-first century, they were totally incorporated into the Chinese historical self through a new narrative claiming that they had always been Chinese. Simultaneously, the textbooks exhibit a clear shift from a Han-exclusivist vision of Chinese history to a more inclusive and multi-ethnic one. Based on an analysis of the content, language, and organization of textbooks and other related materials, the article proposes that although the incorporation of non-Han peoples into the Chinese historical subject was gradual, this process accelerated dramatically as a result of a planned reform launched in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article explains the reasons for the reform and its timing, and examines its implications for the Chinese nation-state and China's ethnic minorities.

This essay proposes that the study of Asia, thought of as an Inter-Asian space, can provide concepts that shed light on the social shapes of societies that are mobile, spatially expansive, and interactive with one other. Inter-Asia, an old world crisscrossed by interactions between parts that have known and recognized one another for centuries, provides an unmatched depth and breadth of mobile experience and material. Such material can be recognized if seen through concepts designed to bring out the shapes of mobile societies, and to analyze their dynamics. These concepts include mobility, disaggregation-reaggregation, connection, circulation, partial societies, transregional axis/intermediate scale, and outside-in analysis. They are offered in the spirit of philosophical housekeeping, to clarify and crystalize what is innovative about recent Asian studies that move beyond globalization, and to further those efforts. They are ways out of the box of classical social theory's internalist, constitutionalist paradigms that hamper the Inter-Asia venture.