In the late 1990s, a marketplace trader in Hồ Chí Minh City reported being plagued by wandering ghosts. The postwar Vietnamese landscape teems with angry spirits who died violently without descendents to honor them, but the trader's wandering ghosts were living: male market officials who demanded that merchants, most of them women, pay a fee for use rights to their stalls. Examining the conflict that ensued, this article argues that the wandering ghosts metaphor aptly captures the bitter struggles over resources and status that have accompanied late socialist economic reforms. More subtly, the metaphor also alludes to lingering wartime animosities. Market officials supported the victors, whereas many traders sided with the losers. Although daily interactions have intersubjectively reworked these tensions so that they seem instead to reflect gender differences, “ghosts” inevitably emerge: odd fragments of memory that wander homeless in the wake of social and individual efforts to render the past coherent.

The claim that Vietnamese inheritance patterns were bilateral and indicative of wider patterns of Southeast Asian women's autonomy or Vietnamese protonational uniqueness reflect major themes in the historiography on Vieệtnam. Past scholarship suggests that lawmakers of the Lê (1427–1783) and Mạc (1527–60) dynasties codified bilateral succession practices, attesting to the relative autonomy that Vietnamese women shared with their Southeast Asian counterparts. This essay challenges the claims of bilateralism and argues that Lê dynasty law, local custom, and legal practice preserved the principles of patrilineal succession. Though the language and adjudication of the law limited daughters' succession rights, ironically, these restrictions on their private rights enabled women to carve out spaces of authority in village economic and religious life. To avoid the transfer of their property to male relatives, some women instead transferred property to local institutions in order to lay claim over their personal property and to ensure the maintenance of their ancestral rites in perpetuity. In effect, rather than a system that elevated women's status, the property regime served as a site of contestation in which women could claim large economic and religious roles in local settings.

This article examines Buddhist nationalism as an effort to resist the intrusion of globalizing forces into local religious and cultural heritage. By analyzing the discourse, persona, and life of Venerable Gangodawila Soma (1948–2003), a renowned and controversial Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, the author demonstrates that Buddhist nationalism is largely a discursive formation that affirms an essential relationship between Buddhism and nation over against external forces that threaten their existence. A charismatic and skillful preacher, Venerable Soma employed a variety of media to reverse the perceived decline of Buddhism and the nation in the face of what he saw as immoral and hostile interests—including corrupt politicians, Tamil separatists, Evangelical Christians, and nongovernmental organizations. Venerable Soma's discourse, which privileges local forms of knowledge and morality, shows how globalization stimulates both new possibilities and new contradictions in contemporary forms of Buddhist nationalism.

Over the last thirty years or so, there has been a broad consensus about what constitutes modern forms of Theravāda Buddhism. “Buddhist modernism,” as it has been called, has been marked by an understanding of the Buddha's thought as in accord with scientific rationalism; increased lay participation, particularly in meditation practice and leadership of the Buddhist community; and increased participation by women in the leadership of the Sangha. In this paper, I call into question the universality of these forms by examining a contemporary Theravāda Buddhist community in southwest China, where Buddhism is best understood within the context of the modern governance practices of the Chinese state. Buddhists of the region describe their knowledge and practices not in terms of scientific rationality, for example, but within the ethnic categories of the Chinese state. I suggest that instead of understanding modern forms of Buddhism as a natural response to modernity, scholars should pay attention to how Buddhist institutions shift within the context of modern forms of state power.

This article explores factors contributing to a boom in Buddhist temple construction in contemporary mainland China. In contrast to recent studies focusing on struggles between religious believers and the state over the revival of local temples and churches, this article examines the culture of merit making and morality building that leads clergy and lay practitioners to form translocal networks with the aim of constructing temples in rural areas where they have few or any cultural ties. The author explores how temple building is driven by differing moral visions within the urban Buddhist community, but with little consideration for the culture and history of the people in the localities where the temples are constructed.

Before the founding of the state of Afghanistan in the eighteenth century, the main centers of political and cultural gravity for the Pashtuns lay in India, where numerous Pashtuns migrated in pursuit of commerce and soldiery. Amid the cosmopolitan pressures of India and its alternative models of self-knowledge and affiliation, Pashtun elites elaborated a distinct idiom of “Afghan” identity. With the Afghans' absorption into the Mughal Empire, earlier patterns of accommodation to the Indian environment were overturned through the writing of history, whereby the Afghan past and present were carefully mapped through the organizing principle of genealogy. While the Afghan religious world was being reshaped by the impact of empire, in response, tales of expressly Afghan saints served to tribalize the ties of Islam. With the decline of Mughal power, the collective “Afghan” identity of the diaspora was transmitted to the new Afghan state, where the relationship of this tribal template of Afghan authenticity to the non-Pashtun peoples of Afghanistan remains the defining controversy of national identity.

This article explores the importance of transnational forms of Muslim cultural identity in northern Pakistan. By documenting the dynamism of a transnational form of Muslim identity that encompasses people belonging to a wide range of ethnic communities and Islamic doctrinal traditions, as well as extending across countries whose Muslim peoples have experienced the differential effects of their incorporation into both the Soviet Union and British India, the author seeks to challenge the work of Islam specialists who emphasize the centrality of “globalizing modernity” to the making of contemporary forms of Muslim identity. In contrast, this article builds on historical accounts of premodern forms of Muslim cosmopolitanism, notably Engseng Ho's study of Hadrami Muslim scholars who saw themselves as active creators of a universal world structured around the transregional ideals of their faith in the expansive Indian Ocean trading world. Building on this and other work on cosmopolitanism, the author documents the ways in which older experiences of mobility in this politically sensitive region of the world influence villagers' present-day engagements with globalizing processes. The ethnographic focus is on the ways in which Sunni and Shi'a Ismai'li Chitrali Muslims interacted with refugees into their region from Afghanistan and Tajikistan between 1979 and 2002, a time when both countries were experiencing violent civil and international conflict.