A map is a peculiar kind of visual text. It seems a mere instrument of utility, showing us where to go and how to put things in place. Invisible ingredients, however, render every map a Pandora's box. Emotions are undoubtedly the most potent of all of the invisible elements in maps. The cartographic passions that make the headlines may be national ones, but in cities, towns, and villages, people have strong feelings about local maps. Street gangs, real estate developers, insurance companies, zoning boards, planners, and electorates invest maps with local politics. Landowners love their property lines. Universities map their campus identity. The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) signifies itself succinctly in its logo, a map of Asia. Such territorial attachments and many others have striking similarities: they infuse boundaries with iconic significance, tinged with feelings of security, belonging, possessiveness, enclosure, entitlement, and exclusion.

The qing court had a love-hate relationship with popular drama. From the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–95) to the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), several Qing rulers were renowned for their doting patronage of popular opera, yet the state was far from sanguine about drama's social effects, viewing public theaters with great suspicion. Theaters, in the eyes of the authorities, were notorious hangouts for ruffians, slackers, gamblers, and insurgents, providing these roustabouts with the ideal environment in which to scheme and swindle. In addition to waging campaigns to censor and weed out “seditious passages” from popular dramas (Guy 1987, 92), emperors throughout the Qing dynasty issued dozens of edicts regulating the construction, location, and clientele of commercial theaters. In rural areas, especially in times of unrest, local authorities often canceled scheduled performances for fear that such occasions offered gangs and secret societies prime opportunities for stirring up trouble (Mackerras 1972, 37). Urban theaters were no safer. According to popular lore, even the Kangxi emperor was cheated by hoodlums when he ventured into a public theater during one of his legendary outings disguised as a commoner (Liao 1997, 80). Yet in spite of their reputation for breeding disorder and moral vice, commercial theaters—commonly known as teahouses (chayuan)—increasingly thrived, and in this new social space, the genre of Peking opera came into full flower during the last century of the Qing dynasty.

In the early years of mass nationalism in colonial South Asia, Mohandas Gandhi inaugurated a swadeshi (indigenous goods) movement, which aimed to achieve swaraj, or “home rule,” by establishing India's economic self-sufficiency from Britain. Invoking an earlier movement of the same name, Gandhi created a new form of swadeshi politics that encouraged the production and exclusive consumption of hand-spun, hand-woven cloth called khadi. The campaign to popularize this movement took many forms, including the organization of exhibitions that demonstrated cloth production and sold khadi goods. On the occasion of one such exhibition in 1927, Gandhi explained the significance of exhibitions for the movement:

[The exhibition] is designed to be really a study for those who want to understand what this khadi movement stands for, and what it has been able to do. It is not a mere ocular demonstration to be dismissed out of our minds immediately. … It is not a cinema. It is actually a nursery where a student, a lover of humanity, a lover of his own country may come and see things for himself.

(“The Exhibition,” Young India, 14 July 1927)

As katherine verdery notes, dead bodies have had political lives in virtually every civilization since antiquity. They frequently emerge as powerful metaphors of change, especially after a time of crisis when the meaning of political symbols is redefined. This is vividly exemplified by what happened to the exhumed bodies of various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia (Verdery 1999, 1–22). Postwar discourse is another site in which dead bodies frequently emerge as metaphors. Some of the most unforgettable sights concerning World War II are pictures of huge piles of exhumed human bodies from the mass graves of Jews. We know that these are not skeletons of those who have died natural deaths because these images have often been shown along with the pictures of inmates of the concentration and death camps, emaciated to the point of nonrecognition as living human beings. Through this process, the pictures have acquired an independent status as encoded language: they signify unbelievable evil committed against humanity, and they display the moral weakness of the rest of humanity that failed to resist and end such atrocities.

On 19 may 1856, qing officials in kunming, the capital of the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, systematically carried out a three-day massacre of the city's Hui (Muslim Yunnanese). Han townspeople, the local militia, and imperial officials methodically slaughtered between four and seven thousand Yunnan Hui—men, women, and children—burned the city's mosques to the ground, and posted orders to exterminate the Hui in every prefecture, department, and district in Yunnan (QPHF 1968, 6:20a, 8:4a; Gui 1953, 73). This massacre and the widespread attacks that followed signaled the beginning of the eighteen-year Hui-led Panthay Rebellion (1856–73).

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).

In the last two decades of the Qing dynasty, installment publication became the dominant mode of presentation for Chinese fiction, as it had been for European and Japanese literature for more than half a century. Whether printed daily as one feature in a newspaper, weekly in literary supplements, or monthly in the fiction journals that took off in the early 1900s, Chinese vernacular fiction of this period appeared in parts over time, just as the works of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Jippensha Ikku, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and even Henry James did (Link 1981; Lee and Nathan 1985; Chen 1988). As early as 1892, Shanghai author Han Bangqing praised the installment form for heightening suspense and forcing the reader to imagine what might happen next; by 1910 “addiction” to installment fiction could be understood as an aesthetic experience, and the popularity of the format would only increase in the decades to follow. This article seeks to trace the rise of the installment form in late Qing and early Republican China, investigate its ties with the contemporaneous cultural production of Shanghai as a metropolitan media center, and demonstrate the effects of its associated aesthetic.

For architects of citizenship and nationhood, there is no shortage of conflicts and wars from which to build modern myths about submerging individual suffering and loss to greater causes. The grief, anger, and despair of individuals can be integrated over time into collectively shared assumptions about the indebtedness of the living to their heroic compatriots and ancestors. To remember these conflicts and those who (depending on the political context) either “lost” or “gave” their lives has been throughout recent history a vital act of citizenship, both “affirming the community at large and asserting its moral character” (Winter 1995, 85). Certainly from an American perspective, national identity remains “inexorably intertwined with the commemoration and memory of past wars” (Piehler 1995, 3). This observation applies even more intensely elsewhere in the world (e.g., Russia, China, France, Japan) where the loss of combatant and civilian life has been far greater.

When the philippines returned to democratic rule in 1986, two images emerged of the new democracy that were vastly different and often hard to reconcile with each other. On the one hand, many observers commented on the great extent to which the new democracy appeared merely to restore the country's previous democratic regime from between 1946 and the establishment of martial law in 1972 (Anderson 1988; McCoy 1994, 19; Wurfel 1988, 323). In this earlier democratic period, traditional political clans dominated the country's policy-making institutions and successfully blocked equity-enhancing reforms. Over the course of these decades, elite-dominated parties mastered the politics of clientelism, in which local power brokers delivered vote blocs to national politicians in exchange for the granting of particularistic favors and the blocking of progressive legislation. Fears of a restoration in the mid-1980s appeared well founded, both in the significant presence in the reopened legislature of the country's most powerful economic elites and in the resistance to agrarian and other reforms by the new president, Corazon Aquino, herself a member of a prominent land-owning family. In many respects, democratization in the 1980s marked the return to power of traditional politicians, or trapos, as they are popularly called, a word that also means “dishrag” in the Tagalog language.

The opium-smuggling trade that britain pursued on the eastern seacoast of China has become the symbol of China's century-long descent into political and social chaos. In the standard historical narratives of both China and Euro-America, opium is the primary medium through which the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) encountered the modern economic, social, and political institutions of the West. Consequently, opium and the Western powers' advent on the Chinese coast have become almost inextricably linked. Opium, however, was not simply a Sino-British problem geographically confined to southeastern China. It was, rather, a transimperial crisis that spread among an ethnically diverse populace and created regionally distinct problems of control for the Qing state.

By definition, the cold war was understood on both sides of the conflict to be a global struggle that stopped short of direct military engagement between the superpowers (the U.S. and the USSR). In Europe, the putative center ofthat struggle, the geopolitical battle lines were fixed after the early 1950s, or they at least could not be altered by normal military means without provoking World War III—which would result in mutual annihilation. Therefore, each side hoped to make gains over the other by using more subtle, political, and often clandestine methods, winning the “hearts and minds” of people in the other bloc (as well as maintaining potentially wayward support in one's own bloc), hoping to subvert the other side from within. The cold war was an enormous campaign of propaganda and psychological warfare on both sides. A vast range of cultural resources, from propaganda posters and radio broadcasts to sophisticated literary magazines, jazz bands, ballet troupes, and symphony orchestras, were weapons in what has recently come to be called the “Cultural Cold War” (Saunders 1999). Studies of the cultural cold war have proliferated since the late 1990s, most of which focus on U.S. cultural policy and are concerned with the European “theater” of this conflict (Hixson 1997; Fehrenbach and Poiger 2000; Poiger 2000; Berghahn 2001).

Much of the work in the relatively new field of Theravāda Buddhist ethics has been directed toward critiquing the Weberian characterization of Buddhism as primarily “mystical” and oriented away from social, political, and domestic attention toward the world. Ancient Buddhism, Max Weber wrote, “is a specifically unpolitical and anti-political-status religion, more precisely, a religious ‘technology’ of wandering and of intellectually-schooled mendicant monks” (1996, 206). It is a tradition lacking “a concept of neighborly love,” a sense of social responsibility or “any bridge to any actively conceptualized ‘social’ conduct,” and “almost all beginnings of a methodical lay morality” (208, 213, 218). Even though Buddhism developed some formulations of a lay-oriented social ethics in order to accommodate the sponsorship of rulers beginning with Aśoka, Weber argued, it remained in its various forms throughout Asia a fundamentally mystical and magical (or nonrational) religious tradition, exhibiting a “devaluation of the world” characteristic of mysticism (330–43).

In a bookstore in delhi, a salesman, apprised of my interest in lower-caste politics, handed me a tome about the officially listed Dalit, or untouchable, groups, The Scheduled Castes (Singh 1995). The first thing to strike me was the cover, a glossy photograph of a presumably Scheduled Caste woman with her back against a tall stone wall, surrounded by her four grubby kids. She is beaming. The second thing to strike me was the title of this new series, of which this was the second volume. The series, by the central government's Anthropological Survey of India, was called the People of India, a name that had been used for several rather notorious colonial ethnographic projects. Intrigued, I began to examine this most recent avatar of the People of India.

The communis opinio of historians is that early modern, or precolonial, states in Southeast Asia tended to lead precarious existences. The states were volatile in the sense that the size of individual states changed quickly, a ruler forced by circumstances moved his state capital, the death of a ruler was followed by a dynastic struggle, or a local subordinate head either ignored or took over the central state power; in short, states went through short cycles of rise and decline. Perhaps nobody has helped establish this opinion more than Clifford Geertz (1980) with his powerful metaphor of the “theatre state.” Many scholars have preceded and followed him in their assessment of the shakiness of the state (see, for example, Andaya 1992, 419; Bentley 1986, 292; Bronson 1977, 51; Hagesteijn 1986, 106; Milner 1982, 7; Nagtegaal 1996, 35, 51; Reid 1993, 202; Ricklefs 1991, 17; Schulte Nordholt 1996, 143–48). The instability itself was an enduring phenomenon. Most polities existed in a state of flux, oscillating between integration and disintegration, a phenomenon which was first analyzed for mainland Southeast Asia by Edmund Leach (1954) in his seminal work on the Kachin chiefdoms. This alternation of state formation and the breaking up of kingdoms has been called the “ebb and flow of power” and the “rhythm” of Malay history (Andaya and Andaya 1982, 35). In this article, I will probe into the causes of the volatility of the Southeast Asian states, using material from Sumatra to make my case.

Two and a half thousand years ago, long before Lakshman Sena ruled Bengal, there was a monster who came out of its cave every night and ate people. The people could not kill him because they feared him so much. They finally put a plan together and made a mirror. When the monster came out that night and saw his reflection, he was so startled to see another creature as big and powerful as himself that he lashed out at the mirror, shattering the glass. But, each broken piece reflected himself back at him. As he turned, these creatures seemed to surround him. He felt they had multiplied. So in his fear and rage, he hit his head and wept himself to death. The people came back the next morning and saw the splintered glass and the dead monster. Now, how to tell all the other villages the news that they could live without fear? So, the same man who had come up with the scheme to kill the monster was asked to devise a second plan. A big leaf was used to paint the picture of the monster. This image was circulated from village to village, and the man was packed off to tell the story. Wherever he told the tale, they gave him rice and, of course, food to eat. Soon it transformed his livelihood. He no longer cultivated land. Then they wanted new stories, so he went to the Ramayana and Mahabharata and added songs to storytelling and pictures on cloth.

Xuanwei, a county-level municipality (xianji shi) located in the northeastern corner of Yunnan province, has nothing remarkable to boast. It is, of course, one of the largest counties in China and “home of the Yunnan ham.” Xuanwei is even the native place of Zhuo Lin, wife of the late Deng Xiaoping. Such trivia apart, Xuanwei's vital statistics read as a microcosm of interior China that moreover cover a wide variety of ecological and socioeconomic regimes. For mainly this reason, Stig Thøgersen of Aarhus University and I decided in 1998 that Xuanwei's unremarkable status made it the ideal rural inland fieldwork site that we sought for European researchers.