The Moros are those natives of the Philippines who are Mohammedans. They did not give themselves this name, nor do they use it among themselves; but they recognize it when applied to them by others.

Misnomers are often validated by time or history. The ancient Romans took a small community of the Hellenes for the whole population and called them Greeks. A Mediterranean sailor thought the New World was India and called its people Indians. In extreme western Europe the Christian Iberians, in seven bitter centuries, drove their Mohammedanized Berber cousins back to their native Mauretania, and in the process made Mohammedan a synonym for Moro, or Mauretanian. And so, although the appearance of the Iberians two-fifths of the world around in the extreme fringes of eastern Asia in the 16th Century was a remarkable feat, it was not strange that they called the Mohammedans they found here, Moros.

Since the end of World War II there has been a nation-wide burgeoning of academic interest in South Asia, that is to say, in India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Nepal. The pioneering teaching and research program in South Asian Studies was established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947 with substantial support from the Carnegie Corporation. This program comprised a balance of humanistic and social science studies supported by the teaching of the appropriate classical and modern languages of South Asia as tools of research. Concerted efforts were early made to acquire adequate library materials to support all aspects of the program. These efforts which involved direct contact with the highly disorganized Indian book trade were initially frustrating but eventually met with success. Problems of processing and cataloging followed on those of acquiring the books but by the end of the first decade Pennsylvania had what seemed then to be quite adequate library support for its pioneer program in South Asian studies.

Independence was an old question in Philippine-American relations, free trade a middle-aged one, and sugar production a very young one when all three converged in 1929. They remained tangled until an independence bill, a redefinition of Philippine-American trade, and the combined limitation and allocation of Philippine sugar production straightened them out again by 1935. The struggles of the intervening years involved every phase of American colonial policy and every phase of Philippine public life. Here I single out for examination the Philippine place in America's sugar market and the place of sugar in the Philippine political economy.

The historian and the philologist who study the written record of China's past in different ways and to different ends both face the problem of intractable Chinese texts. The mutual sympathy that this engenders is not unmixed with complacent condescension on the part of each toward the way the other goes about solving questions that are the concern of both, especially in the realm of translation. The historian's habit of translating the names of offices functionally (Imperial Chancery rather than Sanctum of Penetralian Scriptures for chung-shu sheng) and of simply not translating such terms as era names (nien-hao) outrages spirited philologues, who declare that the characters of which these era names are composed are words with “very transparent meanings” which can and should be captured in translation. Some years ago, having been impressed with this argument, I decided to try to translate the name of an era I was studying. What happened was that my search led me to a philologically sound, but, as it turned out, entirely erroneous interpretation.

The interconnected body of stories about Ch'un-ch'iu-Warring States times, known to most Chinese and embodied in a wide variety of verbal forms both oral and written, was a secular mythology—secular because it concerned men acting in the datable past, mythology because it was invested with a special authority for the culture at large. In my study of the sources and transmission of one small part of this mythology, the matter of Wu Tzu-hsii, I conclude that in the period down to the Former Han regional epics and hero stories were important vehicles for the transmission of Wu Tzu-hsü's story and of other stories like it. This part of Chinese verbal culture underwent a profound transformation during the imposition of centralized national rule in Ch'in and Han times. The epic tradition gradually disappeared and the old stories that survived were infused with a new meaning by historians who were driven by what can only be called a didactic imperative. Thus, epic was overwhelmed by history—China's secular scripture. The early literary versions of the matter of Wu Tzu-hsü provide compelling evidence of this.

The four articles in this “Catastrophic Asia” collection, while showcasing distinct disciplinary approaches to the subject of what anthropologist George E. Marcus (1994) might identify as “technopolitical” catastrophes, are united in the attempt to uncover the sociopolitical resonances of “manmade” damage in what we take to be regional Asia. In his book Technoscientific Imaginaries, Marcus recognizes that science is deeply political and already embedded in events. In this special section of JAS, anthropologists join with scholars in the physical and natural sciences to apply this idea to catastrophic phenomena, continuing a transdisciplinary conversation that began in April 2014 at the Catastrophic Asia Symposium at the University of Colorado. Here, I contribute to this transdisciplinary enthusiasm by sharing with readers of an Asia-focused journal my own perspectives on catastrophe as a scholar of Brazil and a cultural anthropologist interested in medical anthropology and critical science studies. Specifically, I consider how experts working on issues related to the Angra dos Reis nuclear energy plant in Brazil—the site of my current research—viewed and discussed the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown of 2011. By reading the current articles through the lens of my own research, I seek to situate catastrophe within a broader anthropological literature on environmental toxicity.

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

China's trade and financial surpluses, exchange rate, and currency reserves make headlines, daily, around the world. As such, it is more imperative than ever to understand the inner workings of currency policy in China. Yet the exercise of power and decision making in these areas has received surprisingly little attention in Chinese politics, political economy, and, arguably, economics.

In 1981 Bangladesh celebrated its first decade of independence. This milestone was marked by a sharp increase in publications about the new nation. Authors are fascinated and not a little surprised that the “international basketcase” of 1971 has survived a vast array of economic, social, and political afflictions. The authors are also concerned about the continuing survival of Bangladesh. Current writing is concentrated on either its political history or problems of economic development and represents a major contribution to filling gaps in our knowledge of Bangladesh. Unfortunately, although most contemporary authors have limited experience in Bangladesh, they do have well-developed theoretical perspectives that guide their constructions of Bangladeshi reality. Current writing proffers Weberian, neoclassical economic, and Marxist interpretations of Bangladesh. Little fresh, in-depth, culturally sensitive, representative reporting of Bangladeshis' own interpretations of the present and aspirations for the future is being done. Academia is failing the majority of Bangladeshis by not taking seriously their ideas, aspirations, and abilities.

The history of the discoveries of Early Man in Indonesia has been marked by bold speculations and surprising successes alternating with frustrated hopes and discouraging lulls from the time when the first explorer in search of his remains set foot on Java's soil. This explorer was Eugène Dubois. He came to the island in 1889 for the outspoken purpose of finding the “missing link” and—he found it. What particular considerations induced him to seek after such a creature—at this time rather an idea than á substantiality—on this seemingly forlorn outpost of the Asiatic continent, we do not know. Dubois never told what prompted, him to look for such a phantom in Indonesia. But the fact is that he quit his position at the Department of Anatomy of the University of Amsterdam and entered the military service of the Dutch colonies as a health officer. In April 1889, he was delegated to “extend his studies to the tertiary and diluvial fauna of Java.” From that year until 1895 Dubois explored all the localities known from earlier investigations to be particularly rich in fossil remains, and assembled from them a large collection of plants and animals.

Jainism is well known as a radically ascetic strategy for achieving liberation from the world''s bondage. It is less well known as a system of religious belief and practice embedded in social life. This article will examine Jainism as a symbolism of social identity. At the center of my inquiry is a puzzling cultural fact, the seemingly paradoxical claim by many nonviolent Jains to be descended from warlike Rājpūts. Despite its extreme emphasis on ascetic withdrawal from the world, Jainism is, as I hope to show, deeply implicated in the worldly identity of certain social groups and even can function as a kind of origin myth for these groups. Understanding how this is possible requires a considerable departure from the usual perspective on Jainism. The ascetic is normally the center of attention in Jain studies. This article, however, will give equal attention to a figure less frequently considered. This is the warrior-king.

This essay studies the practice of cultural translation in colonial Taiwanese cinematic space. Just as the Japanese translation of Western cinema brings into play traces of Japanese otherness, the Taiwanese translation of the Japanese translation disrupts the Japanese monopoly on the meaning of cinematic experience in colonial Taiwan. A key figure in this complex cultural translation was the benshi, a translator who performed alongside the screen to interpret the film for the audience. This study argues that an overemphasis on the interventional power of the benshi's word does not do justice to the complex role of the benshi as a translator. In spite of its inscription of the cultural specific in the cinematic space, the presence of the benshi is also a reminder of an unfulfilled desire: the desire for the (foreign) image and the desire for the other. Insofar as the act of translation is a critical engagement with the challenges posed by the other, a simplistic celebration of local resistance does not help us fully address the complexity of cultural translation that defines the mediascape of the modern age.

This paper examines the problem of theodicy as seen by the medieval Tamil poet, Kampaṉ. God appears throughout Kampaṉ's retelling of the Rāmāyaṋa as the ideal man, Rāma, an incarnation of the great god Viṣṋu, the source of the moral law and universal order (dharma). But in the famous episode in which Rāma slays Vālin, the king of the monkeys, Kampaṉ challenges the assumption of the deity's righteousness and freedom from evil. Kampaṉ's treatment of this issue is unusual among South Indian devotional texts because of its clarity and boldness; the answers suggested by the poet lead the devotee to a recognition of the relativity of dharma and to an acceptance of a basic dimension of evil within the deity. This conclusion is seen to be consistent with the positive attitude of the South Indian theistic traditions toward mundane reality—an attitude that contrasts markedly with important elements of the classical Sanskritic tradition.

It is now more than twenty years ago that I was first introduced to the Urdu ghazal —the classical Urdu lyric—and found with something like dismay that there was almost nothing about it which I understood and liked. This was not because I had not an adequate command of the language. I had begun speaking Urdu in 1942, and from about 1945 had acquired some competence in the language of prose literature. Nor was it because I was not moderately well read in the love poetry of various cultures and civilizations, from Sappho and Catullus to Shakespeare and Burns, not to speak of later poets. But this was a new, strange experience. From that day to this I have been convinced that to understand and appreciate the ghazal is the most difficult task that confronts the modern Western student of Urdu literature; and as my own understanding increased I have become equally convinced that this is a task which, once accomplished, brings the greatest reward. Such conclusions of my own about the ghazal as I have put into writing fall short of a comprehensive study of the form, and I have never entirely ceased to hope that others more knowledgeable than I would, either in Urdu or in English, write something in which one would find at least most of the answers to the major problems which the ghazal presents to us who study it with the values of the modern West. Hitherto this hope has not been realized, and for that reason I now attempt to set out my own views—spurred on, I should confess, by Muhammad Sadiq's judgement in his History of Urdu Literature (Oxford University Press, 1964)—the latest, longest, and (so far) best history in English—that the ghazal stands “very low in the hierarchy of literary forms” (p. 19). This judgment could hardly be more completely opposed to my own.

I Am the joker in the pack—not simply for the obvious reason that I am not an American, but also, and much more significantly, because I have no right to sit on a platform with people learned in Sinology. That I have been invited to join them says a great deal about American broadmindedness and something too about the underdeveloped state of Chinese studies in my own country. But in a way my disabilities qualify me: I am doubly an outsider (maybe that was why I was asked) and can therefore be relied on to be biased. Prejudice is a condition for argument.

Narendranath Bhattacharya, later known as M. N. Roy, was in his youth a devoted revolutionary and lieutenant to a famous Bengali revolutionary leader, Jatin Mukherjee. A description of the revolutionary career of Roy is useful and appropriate for several reasons. First, Roy is one of the few revolutionary Bengalis about whom interesting data is available. Second, Roy followed a pattern oft-repeated among Bengali political workers during the twentieth century: from terrorist and insurrectionary activity to Communism and then open Congress work. Third, both the data collected about Roy and some of his own writings give graphic pictures of two important features of Bengali revolutionary politics: the dal or faction and the dādā or leader of such a group.