It should be emphasized at the outset that Georges Dumézil does not consider himself to be a social theorist of any sort, least of all a “structuralist.” Indeed, his opinion of the structuralist movement, to say nothing of the extent to which others have attempted to associate him with the origin and development of that movement, is less than enthusiastic; and in the Introduction to Mythe et épopée III he has explicitly denied any connection whatsoever with structuralism per se and, implicitly, with the theories and methods of the leader of the movement, Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Depuis quelques années, le mot “structure” est devenu ambigu. Tout en gardant sa valeur précise, ancienne—lorsqu'il est question, par exemple, de la structure d'une démonstration, d'un roman, d'un État—, il a pris un emploi technique beaucoup plus ambitieux dans un système philosophique aujourd'hui fort en vogue, auquel il a même donné son nom.

The scholarly narrative of spoken Chinese studies in Tokugawa Japan is dominated by Ogyū Sorai, who founded a translation society in 1711 and urged Japanese intellectuals to learn contemporary spoken Chinese in order to draw closer to the language of the Chinese classics. This article explores the decades prior to this, when Sorai served the powerful daimyo Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. By investigating Yoshiyasu's contact with Chinese monks and the surprising but previously untested claim that he could understand spoken Chinese, I explore the cultivation of spoken Chinese learning and the patronage of Chinese émigrés by members of Japan’s warrior elite in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Prior to the scholarly interest in vernacular Chinese and the popularity of Ming and Qing literature in Japan from the Kyōhō period (1716–35) onwards, Chinese orality served as a tangible link to the Chinese tradition for Yoshiyasu and other powerful daimyo, functioning as a sign of their fitness for power in East Asia.

The Seventh Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI), which was held between November 22 and December 16, 1926, principally to consider the Chinese question, met at a crucial period in the history of the Chinese Communist movement. During the previous summer, Chiang Kai-shek had launched his famous Northern Expedition against northern militarists and the legal government in Peking. His Communist allies had participated by arousing peasant discontent behind enemy lines and by infiltration of northern armies. It was now feared that the Communists might soon become the victims of their own success. Chiang had already given evidence of his displeasure of Communist activities. In March he had staged a “coup” against his Russian advisers and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but a reconciliation had been effected. In October Stalin had telegraphed instructions to the CCP directing them to restrain the peasant movement in order to avoid antagonizing the officer corps of the Kuomintang army, which was largely recruited from the landholding class.

In a democratic country with a single dominant party the distribution of power within the party is of critical importance to the maintenance of democratic processes and political responsibility. The implications of such a system are particularly acute in the new nations of Asia and Africa where the dominant party has grown out of a nationalist movement and where problems of national unity have resulted frequendy in a tendency to view the party and the state as synonymous. In such cases, opposition to the policy objectives of the party, when it is in power, is often looked upon as criticism of the state itself. As a result legitimate partisan criticism may be regarded as anti-nationalist or subversive.

Sun Yat-sen is well known as the founder of the Hsing-chung hui (Revive China Society), but few realize the significant role played by Yang Ch'ü-yün who, for almost five years, was the first chairman of that revolutionary organization. According to one source, it was Yang who insisted on the establishment of a republican government in what is now known as the “first revolutionary attempt of Sun Yat-sen.” This article is a study of the interplay of their leadership and the Chinese revolutionary movement from 1895 to 1900.

This article examines the writings of the nineteenth-century Indian essayist Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay. Locating the writer within the history of colonial Bengal and a wider world of racial anxieties, it excavates the foundations of Indian conservatism outside the familiar terrain of anti-Muslim ressentiment. It argues that “traditionalist” conservatism in India was a transformative project that sought to intervene in the racial nature of a colonized people, focusing on the reordering of familiality, education, and health. Simultaneously liberating and constraining the individual subject, the interventions were expected to produce a population that, through engaging in a tense dialogue with Europe, could redefine its distinctive body of custom and also repair its perceived degenerative condition.

Statements on Democracy Wall in Beijing and in posters and underground publications throughout China, especially in 1978 and 1979, document in depth for the first time the arguments of Chinese dissidents. The dissidents maintain that without “the Fifth Modernization” of guaranteed personal freedoms and “true socialist democracy,” the four modernizations cannot succeed and China cannot become a “great socialist country.” Recent publications, some of which are reviewed in this article, give a fair sampling of these arguments and must be taken into account in future evaluations of the Chinese Revolution.

At first sight, the last fifteen years has been the most creative—as certainly it has been the most productive—period in the history of the study of why the Mughal empire in India declined. The succession of magisterial publications from the Department of History at the University of Aligarh—Satish Chandra's Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court 1707–1740 (1959), Irfan Habib's The Agrarian System of the Mughal.Empire (1556–1707) (1963), M. Athar Ali's The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), and Noman Ahmad Siddiqi's Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals (1700–1730) (1970)—have, taken together, offered formulae for the understanding of the growing weakness of the empire from the later seventeenth century almost Newtonian in their force and simplicity.

It is often said that the nationalism of the 1930's was more “narrow,” more “parochial,” more “isolationist,” and more “pathological” than the nationalism of Meiji. In the earlier period, men like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Ōi Kentarō, who had ingested the liberalism of the late Victorian West, defined Japan's identity and role in the world in cosmopolitan, even revolutionary terms. By contrast, it is said, the nationalists of the 1930's were “frogs at the bottom of a well,” whose vision of the nation was clouded by folkish myths of national superiority or who were moved at most by narrow concern for national self-interest. The men of Shōwa, unlike those of Meiji, lacked a conception of Japan's role in the world which admitted the claims of higher goal or value than the nation itself.

On April 25, 2015, central Nepal was struck by a magnitude 7.8 earthquake that killed over 9,000 people and displaced 2.8 million. The image of the Dharahara, a nineteenth-century minaret that collapsed during the quake, quickly became for many Nepalis an iconic representation not only of the disaster but also of a national determination to recover and rebuild. Drawing upon media and literary discourse in the Nepali language, this article asks why the Dharahara tower, rather than the country's severely damaged World Heritage sites, loomed so large in the Nepali imagination in the immediate aftermath of the April 2015 earthquake, and why it became a rallying point for a resurgence of Nepali hill nationalism.

Rice was first introduced from China 1122 B.C., but millet had already been grown there for many centuries.” When Hulbert (1906:15) wrote these words in the early years of this century, he presumably followed some written or oral tradition regarding Kija's (Chi-tzu), the legendary agnate of the last Shang king, bringing rice to Korea. It is interesting that there was a tradition that millet cultivation preceded rice, which came from northern China at approximately 1100 B.C. Seventy-five years after Hulbert recorded the tradition in English, archaeological research has demonstrated that millet did precede rice in Korea, and that the timing of the introduction of rice at the end of the Shang dynasty is probably too late rather than too early.

Over the past millennium and across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have been burning paper replicas of the material world to send to their deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of imaginary beings. The paper replicas, which include all types of goods and treasures, mostly old and new forms of money, is commonly referred to as the paper money custom. Studies of the paper money custom have neglected the native opposition to it, especially that of the contemporary intelligentsia, one form of which consists of news reports and human interest stories in the popular press that lampoon the practice of burning paper money. Many stories lampoon the paper money custom by showing how it burlesques traditional virtues such as filial piety. One of the interesting maneuvers in this criticism is how it employs the old and newer kinds of paper monies to shape the response of the readers.

There is a sense in which urbanization recapitulates civilization. More than seventy per cent of Bombay's people came from outside the city, most of them probably from rural villages. When they arrived, they found their old affiliations and loyalties supplemented, sometimes challenged, by new ones. The important village affiliations—it would be misleading to call them memberships or associations—were made at birth and sanctioned by ritual and long usage. Urban affiliations, including the vital ones of job, union, and “brotherhood” (for men without families sharing the same tenement room), are made by choice and derive their rightness not from faith but from their serviceability to the city dweller. Traditionally, it has been the intrinsic problem as well as the opportunity of cities to bring hitherto isolated tribes, religions, and trades into interaction. Both V. Gordon Childe and Ralph Turner declare that the resolution of this problem yields civilization. In a limited sense, it is always being solved in big cities: one can study it in caste interplay in the managing agencies of the Bombay textile industry, in the system of the Catholic church, or in the precinct organization of Boston. In this study, I will call this aspect of urbanization the competition of loyalties.

The most often mentioned impediments to the development of private enterprise in underdeveloped countries are: (i) shortage of capital; (2) deficient economic setting such as poor infrastructure, small market and inadequate credit facilities; and (3) shortage of the right kind of entrepreneurs, sometimes presented within a broader context of the low level of awareness of and responsiveness to economic opportunities.

It is said that the best European scholars are after their deaths given chairs at American universities. The saying holds true, at any rate, for Max Weber: many of his most important writings have been translated into English only in recent years, making it possible for his theories to gain a broader acceptance in English-speaking countries.

It would probably be an exaggeration to mention the young Dutchman Jacob Cornelis van Leur among the best European scholars. Killed in the battle of the Java Sea in 1942 at the age of 34 after having worked as a civil servant in the Netherlands East Indies, Dr. van Leur was not in his lifetime to hold a university post in either the Netherlands or the Indies, let alone the United States.

Sui-tang luoyang, built IN 605–6 as the eastern capital of the Sui dynasty and subsequently the eastern capital of the Tang dynasty, was one of the great cities of medieval China. Almost as soon as it was built to the taste of Emperor Sui Yangdi (r. 604–17), Luoyang became the second largest city in China, surpassed only by Daxingcheng-Chang'an, the first capital, which had been built by Yangdi's father. Both cities were objects of scholarly interest as early as the eighth century when, in 722, Wei Shu completed his Liangjing xinji [A new record of the two capitals] (Fukuyama Toshio).