The nationalist struggle to bring about the end of colonial rule in India, and the Republican and communist struggles to arrest and reverse the humiliation and the “carve-up” of China by foreign powers, were both closely allied to the struggle to become modern. Indeed, the two goals were usually seen to be so closely related as to be indistinguishable: a people had to start becoming modern if they were ever to be free of foreign domination, and they had to gain sovereignty and state power in order to undertake the laborious but necessary task of building a strong, prosperous, and modern nation. Thus in India, as in China, political movements from the latter nineteenth century sought to found a sovereign nation free from domination by a Western power or powers, and also sought to make this putative nation and its people “modern,” both as a necessary means towards the nationalist end and as an end in itself.

A few months after the fourteenth Dalai Lama stated at the Kalachakra Initiation Ceremony in India in January 2006 that Tibetans should cease wearing clothing lined with endangered animal skins, Tibetans across the Tibetan Plateau destroyed millions of yuan worth of otter, leopard, tiger, and other pelts. Outsiders' interpretations of these events have flattened out the complexity of participants' motivations, which included not only religious and national loyalty, but also concerns about inequality wrought by capitalist development, framed through a lens of modern Chinese history. This paper traces heated debates among Tibetans about the burnings, including their implications for Tibetans' global reputation, the survival of Tibetan culture, and the possibility of a moral economy in an era of deepening commodification. It also explores the embodied, visual, and performative elements of the burnings through participants' videos. The role of local filmmaking efforts in spreading the burnings makes the accompanying videos especially relevant.

One promising traditional industry slated for revival in late colonial India was carpet weaving. Characterized by low technology, high product value, and strong demand, carpets appealed for obvious economic reasons, while simultaneously evoking India's luxurious artisanal past. In western India, carpet weaving was centered in jails where convicts produced high-quality rugs using historic designs in prison factories that served as laboratories for redefining penal labor and traditional design under the eyes of the colonial state. For, even as they were poised at the center of new exchange networks of design ideas, jail factories also claimed practical economic goals: to earn money for jails, train convicts in new skills and habits, and build India's productive potential in a time of economic malaise. As such, they provide an ideal site for examining the economic context for the emerging design industry, and for limitations of colonial visions of the Indian economy.

This paper examines the changing reputation of one village in Himachal Pradesh, India, looking back over 30 years. This village has long had a singular identity and local notoriety for its association with jadu (‘witchcraft’). I argue that in this village today the idea of ‘witchcraft’ as a potent malignant force is losing its old persuasiveness, and with this change the village is also shedding its unwanted reputation. Against claims for ‘the modernity of witchcraft’ in various parts of the world, I argue that, in this case at least, witchcraft is construed as distinctly unmodern. The capacity of jadu to cause fear and, equally, its value as an explanatory idiom are, I suggest, being overwhelmed by social changes, the cumulative effect of which has been to reduce the previous insularity of this village and greatly widen the social networks of its members. I pose two main questions. Why should this village have held such a particular reputation? And why should it now be on the wane? Linked to the second question is the relationship between this decline and local understandings of ‘modernity’. In developing my argument around the specificity of an unusual village, I also consider the significance of ‘the village’ as both social entity and, formerly, one cornerstone of the anthropological project. Finally, I reflect on the methodological opportunities of long-term familiarity with a setting, exemplified in the iterative nature of learning ethnographically, as the children known initially in early fieldwork become the adult conversationalists of today, partners in interpreting their own village's past. In exploring their explanations for the decline in the salience of jadu, the pivotal impact of education and the pressures of ‘time’ created by the ‘speed’ of modernity are both salient.

There are approximately five million Muslims in Thailand (7 percent of the total population), with about 1.8 million in the southernmost provinces bordering on Malaysia. A considerable literature in history, anthropology, political science, international relations, and religious studies has been produced since January 4, 2004, when a violent Muslim insurgency dramatically erupted in the area. At that time over 100 Muslim insurgents raided an arms depot of the Fourth Army Engineers in Narathiwat Province. On January 22, in south Thailand, two Muslim young men on a motorcycle used a long knife to slit the throat of a sixty-four-year-old Buddhist monk, killing him. The monk had just returned from his early morning round of tham bun (alms-collecting extending merit to Buddhist families).