This essay traces the colonial origins of the concept of endogamy and its history as a foundational idea in the modern study of society in South Asia. The history of the concept of endogamy reveals how the control of female sexuality shaped the overlapping fields of Indology and ethnology. The invention and deployment of endogamy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is discussed in the writings of key colonial writers and British administrators, such as J. F. McLennan and H. H. Risley, and Indian intellectuals, including S. V. Ketkar and B. R. Ambedkar. It argues that the modern study of caste naturalized the control of female sexuality through the uncritical use of the concept of endogamy, which Ambedkar diagnosed as the irresolvable problem of the “Surplus Woman” in 1917. The essay reflects on the long life of endogamy and the enduring problem of nonconjugal sexuality in modern social theories of South Asia.

In 1533, Lady Qu, native prefect of Wuding Prefecture in northern Yunnan, sponsored the inscription of two texts on a cliff face at the center of her domain. One was in Nasu, the language of the ruling lineage; the other was in Chinese. Both commemorated the long, powerful line of Né (or Yi) native chieftains to which Lady Qu was heir. Yet they gave contradictory accounts of the forms of chiefly succession, sources of political authority, and geopolitical position of the native domain. The inscriptions show that chiefly sovereignty was neither merely embodied in ancestral authority nor simply endowed by the emperor. Sovereignty—particularly that of a female chieftain—was the capacity to master both modes of self-description while embodying their incompatibility. While we often understand colonialism through power-laden projects of translation, Lady Qu's inscriptions give evidence that Ming colonization of the southwest might require a different approach. Native chieftains were often intermediaries in encounters between indigenous peoples and imperial agents, garrisoned soldiers, and other migrants. Rather than merely understanding these elites as translators and mediators of colonialism, we might also ask how they emphasized and strategically deployed cultural and linguistic differences to achieve ends of their own.

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

This article examines the webtoon (wept'un)—a term coined in Korea to refer to webcomics—which is arguably the most pervasive and powerful form of digital serial production in twenty-first-century Korea. Webtoons have developed by utilizing various potentials that the digital platform offers, such as open solicitation, (partial) free web/mobile distribution, profit from advertisement and page viewing, and transmedia production. As a new cultural medium, the webtoon is thus inseparable from its platform and organically tied to its distinctive platform ecology, which is different from the ecosystems that other (global) mega-platforms create. Engaging with the insights from recent studies of platforms and utilizing empirical media analysis, I argue that Korean webtoon platforms demonstrate the continuing and intensifying dependency of art on platforms—a process that I call “the platformization of culture”—and that this specific type of platformization is reinforced by what I call “the artist incubating system.” The case of webtoon platforms reveals a number of telling aspects of media ecosystems for art production in the digital age—aspects that are spreading and expanding to various fields of art.

How do we think about migration? This question was the topic of the first installment of the 2019 Tanner Lectures on Human Values, given by the exiled Russian journalist Masha Gessen, at Harvard University. Gessen, who had reported on immigrants, began with a story of a Montenegro man whose family fled to the United States when he was five. Then they told a second story, then a third, followed by fifty-four more stories of individuals’ sorrows, despair, and dreams. Gessen's intent was to bring to life individual migrants, underscoring their diverse experiences. Individuality and complexity matter, because too often, people on the move are reduced to numbers in the news and in the eyes of governments.

In the early fourth century CE, after the escalation of a series of succession disputes among the imperial Sima clan, the Jin dynasty collapsed and its capital city of Luoyang 洛陽 was destroyed. However, the end of the dynasty did not cause the Sima clan to fall from power entirely. Instead, the Jin dynasty was reestablished in the new capital of Jiankang 建康, the city known today as Nanjing. The earlier incarnation of the Jin would come to be known as the Western Jin dynasty, while the restored Jin dynasty is referred to as the Eastern Jin. The impact of this cataclysm on the inhabitants of Luoyang and the surrounding regions is difficult to quantify, and even harder to understand in more personal terms. We know that many of those who did not perish fled to the southeast, crossing the Yangzi River to resettle in the new capital. Later texts refer to this period as “The disorder of the Yongjia Reign” (Yongjia zhi luan 永嘉之亂). This epithet uses the imperial reign name given to the period between 307 and 313, even though the disasters did not neatly begin and end with those years. Although the Yongjia troubles are addressed throughout surviving historiographic material, there is no work of history dedicated to documenting the ensuing exodus from Luoyang to Jiankang.

At the turn of the fifth century, a story about a man contesting real estate with a ghost circulated in several different versions in South China. In one of the versions, a young man discovered three lacquer coffins when digging a tomb for his deceased father and had the coffins reburied elsewhere. That night, he dreamed of Lu Su 魯肅 (172–217), the powerful minister in the southern Kingdom of Wu, who angrily announced that he would exact revenge. He also dreamed of his late father, who told him that Lu Su was fighting with him over the gravesite. Later, the young man found copious blood on his father's seating mat.

Controlling the physical movement of people was a well-established tradition throughout imperial China. Scholars have argued that the Qin (221–206 BCE) and Han (206 BCE–220 CE) empires required their subjects to register personal information, including their place of residence, with local governments, and both empires exerted strict control over the flows of officials and those who traveled for personal reasons within the territory, mainly through checkpoints and travel documents. Recent studies have also shown that forced resettlement was a common means of mobility regulation. Ancient states, from the Qin to the Mongol empire, achieved their imperial goals through a variety of measures, one of the most important of which was the relocation of subjects and conquered peoples whenever and wherever they saw fit.

The Shi Jun sarcophagus (580 CE), a house-shaped stone coffin of a Sogdian immigrant couple, is one of the most important Silk Road discoveries ever made (figure 1). Excavated in Xi'an (Shaanxi Province, China) in 2003, it belongs to a group of sarcophagi created for Sogdian community leaders in sixth-century China that have been uncovered over the course of the past century, primarily in the last two decades. The Shi Jun sarcophagus sets itself apart from the others with an epitaph inscribed in both Chinese and Sogdian. The epitaph recounts the migration of a Sogdian couple from Central Asia to the Chinese heartland. Even more unusual than this inscription is the exterior of the sarcophagus, which is carved with a continuous sequence of narrative reliefs. These represent the deceased's multifaceted journey on the Silk Road.