The theme of this paper, a theme close to the heart of the geographer, was in a slightly varied form the title of an international symposium organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research in 1955. This symposium on “Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” provided ample opportunity for fruitful dialogues between scholars representing the full range of disciplines from the natural sciences through the humanities to the social sciences. In this truly interdisciplinary symposium of some seventy-five scholars, no less than thirty percent represented the discipline of geography.

In his trail-blazing book, Escape from Predicament, Thomas Metzger opens up new vistas on both Neo-Confucianism and modern Chinese thought. In this article I intend to engage not so much in a critique of his book as in a dialogue that he and I have carried on for a number of years.

The enigmatic images contained in the Book of Changes (Yijing or Zhouyi) have been interpreted, since shortly after the final redaction of the text, to refer to universal themes, transforming a text that was originally used in divination into a repository of wisdom for the ages. While this tradition continues strong more than twenty-five-hundred years after its first emergence, it has been challenged in the present century by a new historiographical approach that has attempted to return ancient Chinese texts to the immediate historical contexts of their composition and to interpret their language within the strictures of that context.

In 1876 Baba Tatsui, then a young twenty-six year old man who had just completed two years' study of English law in London, published a booklet there called The Treaty Between Japan and England. It was a remarkable work in that it was destined to become the source most frequently cited by many Meiji publicists and later historians who attacked the inequity of the extraterritorial regime in Japan. In this work Baba wrote that it was evidently to the interest of British consuls in Japan “to protect their countrymen rather than to prosecute or convict them,” and that the majority of the English residents in Japan had “strong prejudices against the natives of the country … and … against the native government. …” These facts alone, Baba went on to say, “show that the judges of the consular courts are not impartial, and therefore it is difficult to see how justice can be done in a court of justice where the judges have so much interest for the one and prejudice against the other.” In a similar vein in 1893 the Kaishintō Tōhō, a bi-monthly periodical published by the Kaishintō, commented: “Injustice is the general rule in these [British and American consular] tribunals: justice is rare. Nevertheless, when they render just judgments we applaud their justice, hoping thereby to encourage them in the exercise of that quality.” Thus arose in the late nineteenth century the farreaching generalization that the Western consular tribunals in Japan were so partial—toward Westerners and against Japanese—that they seldom rendered even-handed justice.

The history of British rule in the Indian Himalaya exemplifies the mutual enforcement of social identities and political cultures in modern South Asia. For the Khas ethnic majority of the Himachal Pradesh–Uttarakhand borderland, the colonial power's differentiation between “secular” and “religious” authorities engendered the division of substantially commensurable groups into “caste Hindu” and “tribal” societies. In demarcating borders along the “natural barrier” between the states, the British had severed a politically potent grassroots theocracy from its underlings, consolidated the fragmentation of the Shimla Hill States, and ultimately encouraged the development of a composite political cultures that complemented Khas traditions with Brahmanical creeds from the plains.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Japan experienced a surge in the evocation of the word “mottainai,” most simply translated as “wasteful.” Children's literature, mass-market nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, songs, government ministries, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations deliberately used and defined the term as they took up the question of what was to be deemed wasteful. This essay examines how discourses that were ostensibly about wastefulness constituted an articulation of values, a search for meaning and identity, and a certain conception of affluence in millennial Japan. It suggests that this idea of mottainai reflected wide-ranging principles and beliefs that were thought to define what it meant to be Japanese in the twenty-first century, at a time when there settled in an uneasy acceptance of economic stagnation and a desire to find meaning in an economically anemic, yet still affluent, Japan.

A number of nations have instituted group-specific institutions or “enclaves” for women. The assumption underpinning such bodies—physically distinct, autonomous units in which constituent members belong entirely to a particular group—is that the segregation of female administrators will better serve the interests of women by isolating them from patriarchal norms and practices. I scrutinize this assumption by examining India's experience with all-women police stations, and carry out eight months of ethnographic research in and around police stations across the states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. I find that while all-women police stations allow complainants to speak freely, they may also diminish capacity for female administrators working in law enforcement, create hurdles for victims of violence, and, in some ways, marginalize gender issues from the mainstream.

When people build cities—and particularly planned cities—they intend more and do more than simply meet their practical needs. The cities they build and the cities they leave behind in archeological remains and in the pages of history dramatize for us their social order—both actual and ideal—their view of the cosmos and their place in it, their hierarchy of values. Thus, for example, Akbar's palace city of Fatehpur Sikri is more than a vainglorious display of newly-won power; its subtle blending of Hindu and Islamic elements symbolizes Akbar's dream of an ecumenical Indian order informed with tolerance and mutual respect.

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

The Vietnamese story about the arrival of Buddhism and the building of the first Buddhist temples in what is now northern Vietnam contains no distinctively Buddhist content, but rather is a tale of thaumaturgy, the worship of trees and of rocks, and rainmaking. This essay analyzes the textual history of the story, which is dated in the early third century CE. It examines the names of the two major protagonists of the story and, although the names were later absorbed into the Sinitic literary tradition, this study proposes a Tamil Hindu origin for them. One is reminded of the trade route that connected India and China along the coasts of Southeast Asia at that time; the evidence of Brahmans from India in early Southeast Asia, including northern Vietnam; and evidence of Hindu elements in Vietnamese texts.

This essay examines Japanese-Chinese arranged cross-border marriages and investigates the ways in which participants legitimate and render such marriages comprehensible in light of national and local histories. Marriageability in this context is produced not through conceptions of “exotic difference” but instead distinct discourses of “familiarity.” On the one hand, Chinese participants tactically narrate “blood ties” (xueyuan guanxi 血缘关系) to interpret current marriage migration as following relational bonds and thus a “natural” phenomenon. On the other hand, Japanese participants stress Chinese women's “familiarity” (shinkin kan 親近感) with Japan, a familiarity that is claimed to stem from positive historical ties forged by colonialism, and thus effaces Japanese wartime culpability. In short, multiple layered notions of familiarity, shaped by the colonial legacy in East Asia, are at work in rendering these transnational intimate relations possible.

The rural credit system in traditional agrarian societies has long been associated with “usury,” and therefore often considered a hindrance to rural development. Three aspects of the traditional rural credit system are used to substantiate this assertion. First, traditional rural credit often entailed interest rates above the ceiling set by law. As early as 1790 b.c., the Laws of Hammurabi established annual interest ceilings of 33.3 percent for grain loans and 20 percent for cash loans. Any loan charging interest beyond the ceiling was illegal (Sowards 1983, 5). To many contemporary scholars, even a ceiling of 20 to 30 percent seems exorbitant: given the low return of traditional farming, peasants could hardly afford to borrow at such high interest rates. Second, from a socioeconomic perspective, high interest rates suggest unequal relations between debtors and creditors. According to Rao, the origin of this unequal relationship lies in market imperfection, or so-called “connectedness”—the link between wealth inequality and the failure-of-markets mechanism (1986). A fragmented and noncompetitive market, this view maintains, facilitates personalized credit transactions which not only extract surplus but also perpetuate peasants' credit dependency on the landlord. This credit dependency, in turn, creates a situation in which compulsive indebtedness gradually deprives the peasantry of the means of production (Bhaduri 1983, chaps. 4, 5). Finally, it is asserted, traditional rural credit had little to do with production. Most peasants used rural credit for consumption purposes, which had destructive effects on agricultural production. Rural credit, in these views, is a siphon that draws resources out of the rural sector, locks peasants into a vicious cycle of debt, creates rural inequality, and hinders production. Scholars who have studied the Chinese peasant economy agree, by and large, that that was the nature of Chinese rural credit system.

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).

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.

The year 2012 was fascinating for domestic politics and international relations in Northeast Asia. Perhaps most notably, every country in the region experienced a change of leadership. China, Russia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan all saw new leaders begin their tenure. In addition, regional relations took a turn for the worse, with numerous countries engaging in territorial and maritime disputes, disagreeing over interpretations of their shared histories.

The ubiquitous experience of wartime collaboration in East Asia has not yet undergone the analysis that its counterpart in Europe has received. The difficulty has to do with the political legacies that the denunciation of collaboration legitimized, as well as the continuing hegemony of the discourse of nationalism. Both inhibitors encourage the condemnation of collaboration rather than its historicization. Reflecting briefly on the 1946 trial of Liang Hongzhi, China's first head of state under the Japanese, this essay argues that the historian's task is not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject. In the face of the natural impulse to render judgment, this essay argues for the wisdom of hesitation.