Military establishments are omnipresent if not everywhere omnipotent. While these costly bureaucracies are the bane of finance ministers around the world, they do provide an important opportunity for comparative analysis. This paper examines a military system—the Indian one—through time, and attempts to demonstrate the changing relationship of that system to Indian politics and society in general, and to the low-caste communities of India in particular. We select the low-caste untouchables because they represent an extreme challenge to the integrative capacity of both political and social systems, and because they have recently been the subject of intensive political and academic concern.

Six hundred miles west of Hang-chou the Yangtze River emerges from a mountain corridor onto the lowland plain of south-central China. Here the river bed widens sharply and loses depth; the Yangtze winds a snake-like path across a thousand miles of rich, flat, water-laced country, northeastward to Han-yang, then south toward the Po-yang Lake, north again to Chiang-ning (modern Nanking), and finally into the East China Sea at modern Shanghai. Medieval Chinese called it simply “River”—a River among rivers, the designation of an entire S-shaped area whose character depended more on water than on land, the dominant feature of the southern landscape. In the twelfth century this river region developed a strategic importance as it became first the refuge for a besieged court, then an area of contention with barbarian invaders, and finally the principal artery of Chinese control. This transformation reflected a major reorientation of the Chinese mind.

The ch'ing dynasty (1644–1911) was the last and most successful of the dynasties of alien rule in China. “The key to its success,” noted Professor Ping-ti Ho, “was the adoption by early Manchu rulers of a policy of systematic sinicization.” The integration of the Manchu ruling class with their Chinese subjects was most striking in staffing the bureaucracy. Unlike preceding alien dynasties, the Manchus over the course of 268 years of rule shared a good proportion of key offices with Chinese. The system of dual appointments of Manchus and Chinese operated in the capital, while Chinese dominated the local officialdom.

Japan controlled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, longer than the United States ruled the Philippines, and sent more of its people to live in that colony. The pervasive impact of Japanese colonial rule helped insure a continuing Japanese influence in postwar Taiwan. “The dogs treated us better than the pigs,” was a common Formosan phrase heard by the writer in 1961–64 to denote the invidious comparison between Japanese and Nationalist Chinese rule. This article will discuss the trend of official relations between Japan and Nationalist China since their bilateral peace treaty in 1952; Japanese leadership views obtained through interviews with government, opposition, and bureaucratic specialists; and attitudes of public and various interest groups in Japan toward Formosa.

Anthropological data is typically produced in single villages, but consumed by persons interested in peoples, regions, and nations. Although this paper suffers from the disabilities implied by that situation, its goal is to attempt to ameliorate them. The status of headman which I will describe in Ban Ping is found, named, and assigned the same legal duties in all Thai villages. This should permit other fieldworkers to make straightforward comparisons with their communities.

Many writers interested in Chinese culture and society have drawn attention to the uneven distribution of large, highly corporate, localized lineages in China. Many have noted the concentration of such lineages in the two southeastern provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, but relatively few writers have attempted to offer anything like a systematic explanation for the distribution. The most recent and ambitious attempt to come to grips with the problem is found in Maurice Freedman's book, Chinese Lineage and Society. The author reviews a number of factors relevant to the emergence and persistence of strong lineages, and singles out a few which he considers to be of special importance. A relationship is suggested between rice cultivation, extensive irrigation, the exigencies of frontier life, and the emergence of large, localized, highly corporate lineages. The purpose of this paper will be to reassess the role of the frontier in the development of the Chinese lineage. We will consider the extent to which the conditions of frontier life may have functioned as a catalyst in the formation of elaborated, localized lineages in China. Freedman has suggested that the need for cooperation in opening and bringing water to wild land, and in defending life and property, stimulated a rapid development of corporate, localized lineages on the southeastern Chinese frontier.

With this one sentence paragraph Jawaharlal Nehru began a description of his visit to and subsequent arrest and trial in the Punjab state of Nabha during the agitation over the abdication of its princely ruler, Maharaja Ripudaman Singh. Though Nehru treated his experiences as an alarming but politically insignificant initiation into Indian state politics, the abdication of Nabha and concomitant events came to have major repercussions on political developments within the Sikh community and on the evolution of British policies within the Punjab. This incident at Nabha originated in a senseless but bitter personal feud between Ripudaman Singh and his neighbor, Maharaja Bhupinder Singh of Patiala. It assumed wider ramifications when each rival sought support for his respective position from such varied groups as the British government, Sikh organizations like the newly formed Shiromani Gurdawara Parbandhak Committee (the Central Gurdwara Management Committee which will hereafter be referred to as the S.G.P.C.) and the Akali Dal, the Indian National Congress and assorted Indian nationalist and Sikh religious leaders. As these new forces entered the dispute, the area of controversy was broadened and issues of political significance were raised.

In the Indian Hindu society of today voluntary associations form for the purpose of sponsoring annual religious ceremonies or pūjās. These associations are organized by young men who collect funds from their neighbors and friends, install images for worship in temporary shelters on open land on the ceremonial days, and employ priests to perform the religious rituals. Such associations may be composed of men of any caste, and although they observe religious ceremonies, they also provide many secular diversions. These associations devoted to religious ceremonies have proliferated since India gained her Independence. They seem to exemplify the changes that have come into Hindu society with the assurance of the preservation of the traditional culture by the new government. They also indicate the greater awareness of the larger community beyond the range of the family, due to enhanced mobility of the population and the trend toward urban dwelling.

In 1824 Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), the Adam Smith of France, undertook to forecast the future of the British Dominion in India. He did this in an essay entitled Essai historique sur I'origine, les progrès et les résultats probables de la souveraineté des Anglais aux Indes (Paris, 1824), subsequently included as a chapter in his definitive Cours complet d'economie politique pratique, first published in 1828–29. This essay thus appeared eleven years after the East India Company was given a new charter in 1813, but one stripped of its former trade monopoly, and six years before the transformation of the Company's dominion into what subsequently became the British Indian Empire. The officers of this new dominion would “have been much surprised to see the Indian flag hoisted in Delhi only a hundred and twenty-nine years later.” But would Say have been surprised?

English repositories are gradually organizing and indexing their large holdings of missionary material under the guidance of trained archivists. The general practice is not to bind their manuscripts, but to place them in boxes arranged chronologically by country or, where missionary activity has been intense, by mission station within the country. Each box contains an index for material in that box. The larger societies have files on individual missionaries and the London Missionary Society has a painting or photograph of each individual it sent into the field. Gradually, comprehensive indexes to the whole archive are being prepared and registered with the National Register of Archives (Quality House, Quality Court, London W.C. 2). The National Register is mimeographing these guides, but in limited quantity.