Most writers on the Sino-foreign crisis of 1900 have agreed that it marked the end of an era. This perspective has developed out of their focus on north China. Pro-Boxer bureaucrats there were—in most cases—unrealistic reactionaries whose simplistic approach to Sino-foreign relations was terminated by the Allied intervention. Their removal reflected the end of Chinese reaction and of the Confucian state and society.

The longevity of Chinese civilization is generally conceded to be a unique phenomenon in world history; as such it has evoked explanations ranging from the plausible to the esoteric. A search for the roots of its longevity is now feasible, thanks to the massive archaeological and scientific data pouring out of China since 1949. A preliminary integration of such multifarious new data with rich archaic Chinese literary records has enabled me to reach the conclusion that the trait-complex of each of the major Chinese cultural elements—field agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, metallurgy, script, language, religion including the system of divination, social and political thought—is marked at once by a regionally distinctive Sinitic character and by a pattern of centrifugal geographic spread from the southeastern portion of the loess highlands of North China. The detailed evidence and argument that the Chinese civilization, in spite of its later coalescence and articulation, was just as pristine as the Mesopotamian, have been presented in my recent book, The Cradle of the East: An Inquiry into the Indigenous Origins of Techniques and Ideas of Neolithic and Early Historic China, 5000–1000 B.C. In the course of my research I have uncovered three basic factors that may provide a fresh interpretation as to why the Chinese civilization is the only major civilization of ancient origin that is still distinctive and vital today.

In the quarter century preceding the August 1945 Revolution, social change was a subject often on the minds of Vietnamese. People of diverse class backgrounds and political predilections knew that Vietnamese society was being altered fundamentally. How to understand, what attitude to ake, where to go in the future—these were questions receiving constant attention.

Chu Hsib (1130–1200), one of the greatest Chinese thinkers since Confucius and Mencius, and the most important in the last eight hundred years, synthesized Neo- Confucianism and built his own philosophy on a new basis. This philosophy—which dominated Chinese thought from the fourteenth century on, Korean thought since the fifteenth century, and Japanese thought since the sixteenth century—began to attract European attention in the seventeenth century. At that time, Catholic missionaries in China quarreled over the translation of “God” as Shang-tic (Lord-on-High), and over the interpretations of the Chinese term t'iend (Heaven). Consequently, they began to study Neo-Confucian thought. The publication, in 1715, of the Hsing-li ching-ie (Essentials of Neo-Confucianism) had a strong impact on them; Chu Hsi and other Neo-Confucian thinkers gradually occupied the minds of Catholic missionaries.

In Thai studies to date there has been little attempt to discuss the changes that took place during the nineteenth century in terms of what Western historiography would call intellectual history. The reasons for the scant attention paid to this subject are various, having as much to do with the infancy of the field of Thai studies as with the lack of speculative literature (in Siamese) that would attract the curiosity of intellectual historians. For example, we hardly know what books—especially what Western books—were read by the nineteenth-century Siamese elite, let alone how such books shaped its outlook and its perceptions of change. Because Siam has been a predominantly Buddhist state, it might be advisable to begin with Buddhist materials—in particular, with Buddhist cosmography and the Siamese reassessment of it that has taken place since the encounter with the West in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Many of you will have heard of the Social Science Research Council's Language and Area Studies Review. In fact many of you filled in one or more of its tedious questionnaires. Unfortunately, it has been caught up in the debate about the relative merits of various size-classes of language and area studies centers, a debate set in motion by withdrawal of Federal support from half of the NDEA VI centers. As a consequence, many of the problems brought out by the data contained in that report have not yet been faced, and no agenda for collective action in our field has been agreed upon. I do not wish to repeat all of these data and conclusions here, but only draw out a few of the features more relevant to the general development of area studies, and add a few events that have occurred since that survey was conducted.

THIS paper constitutes an attempt to reconcile—at least for one region of Southeast Asia: central Thailand—one of the discrepancies in analyses of contemporary Theravada Buddhism. The model proposed below—which is the outcome of comparing some of the relevant literature with my own field data—encompasses two distinct sections of society, each holding a different attitude towards Buddhism. The interaction between different interpretations of religion may well be one of the major factors n i the process of religious change in Thailand. Furthermore, this model may be of use for other Theravada Buddhist countries.

Literature on the Subject

A survey of the literature on the practice of religion in Theravāda Buddhist countries reveals what may be a unique situation in the study of religions. Many authors state unequivocally that Theravāda Buddhists adhere to more than one religious tradition. Apart from “otherworldly” Buddhism, these Southeast Asian peoples adhere to other strands of religion, generally classed under rubrics such as “non-Buddhist beliefs,” “folk religion,” “animism,” or “supernaturalism.” Yet, though virtually all authors recognize this situation, there is no consensus in their views on how the different subsystems are interrelated.

To make a global survey of the study of Chinese literature today would hardly be possible within the space of a single article; apart from the sheer amount of material to be covered and the linguistic competence required, it would be very difficult to discuss—in the same breath—works carried out in radically different social and cultural environments and under radically different assumptions about the nature and purpose of literary scholarship. This survey, therefore, will be limited to the study of Chinese literature in the Western world, which, however, is not to be understood in a strictly geographical sense but rather in a cultural-linguistic one. Thus, works written in or translated into a Western language, and with a predominantly “Western” orientation, may be included irrespective of the author's nationality or the place of publication—whereas works by Chinese, Japanese, Soviet, and Eastern European scholars in their own languages will not be discussed. It should also be made clear—obvious though it may be—that this survey, not being a bibliography, cannot be exhaustive; it can only concentrate on works that appear to represent significant trends. Failure to mention a work, therefore, does not necessarily imply lack of esteem, nor does mention of a work necessarily imply unreserved agreement. Chronologically, this survey will cover works completed since i960, as well as a few works in progress and planned works. Finally, we may venture to take a glance at future possibilities and problems.

Although political and cultural developments in India have strongly influenced those in Ceylon for many centuries, the effects were often contradictory and ironic. The land that sent the Buddhist religion to Ceylon also sent invaders to plunder its Buddhist monuments; and the Indian mercenaries recruited by the kings of Ceylon to strengthen the royal army were such a turbulent element that they themselves frequently posed the greatest threat to the stability of the realm. India's cultural contributions to Ceylon are well known, and have been examined in detail by Indian, Ceylonese, and Western scholars. The purpose of this paper is to examine the more abrasive side of the Indian–Ceylonese relationship during the eleventh century, when the imperial Chola kings of southern India sent invading armies into Ceylon, bent upon occupation and plunder. A more general aim of this analysis is to suggest thatorganized plundering activity was a more important politico-economic instrument in the traditional Indian state than most historians have hitherto acknowledged.

The decline of the Mughal empire is usually considered to begin late in the reign of the emperor Aurangzib (1658–1707). The favorite explanations consist of circles, or even spirals, usually vicious in nature. One important interpretation sees the decline as originating from an increased taxation burden on the peasantry, who revolted in several areas, ultimately with such success that the empire was weakened. More money was needed to crush more revolts, so there was more oppressive taxation and so more revolts. This is less than convincing, for peasant revolts—whether or not led by zamindars locally important land-holders)—were more or less a constant in Mughal India. They were particularly prevalent in Gujarat and Bengal, but Hindustan was far from exempt. What we really need here is an attempt at a quantitative assessment of the number of revolts, and of participants in them, during the whole seventeenth century.

Louis Charles Jean Dumont has been Directeur d'Etudes in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris since 1955. From 1951 until 1955 he was Lecturer in Indian Sociology at the University of Oxford. He began field research in India—among a single Tamil-speaking caste—in 1949, when the post-war generation of Anglo-American anthropologists was undertaking fieldwork on Indian villages. He had been trained in indology, Sanskrit and Dravidian studies; reared in the heritage of French sociology descended from Emile Durkheim through Marcel Mauss; and influenced by those intellectual currents that later took the name of structuralism. Thus, his perspective on India was different from that of his colleagues in the English-speaking world, and the results of his research were initially puzzling to them. There is no doubt that his work is now increasingly well understood outside France, especially since the appearance in 1970 of an English translation of his Homo Hierarchies: An Essay on the Caste System, originally published in 1967 in Paris. However, a great deal of uncertainty about the meaning and significance of much of what Dumont has written continues to be expressed in both anthropology and Asian studies. This symposium was organized in the hope that aspects of his thought might be clarified for a wide scholarly audience and some assessment made of his contribution to comparative sociology.

Analyses of Japanese political development during the period 1868–1900 have for the most part obscured the fact that the kind of problems faced by the Restoration leaders played a major role in shaping the governing structure they created. Perhaps the most significant of these problems in the years immediately following the restoration of the emperor in 1868 was that of leadership succession. The total replacement of Bakuhan leadership in the decade 1868–78 raised serious practical questions as to how the new leadership could insure their authority and legitimacy. Such questions were not peculiar to the Japanese situation; they are questions all organizations face when they undergo total or partial replacement of leadership. However, the application of such conceptual categories as “tradition” and “modernization” has made it difficult to distinguish between those features of political development that were the consequence of being forced to deal with problems that arise in all organizations as a consequence of leadership succession and those that can be attributed to continuing social and cultural patterns.

I began the work of this paper by trying to specify the different kinds of “hierarchy” that Louis Dumont uses in Homo Hierarchicus. Such an inventory, I thought, might be helpful to those who find the book difficult to read. Unexpectedly, in the course of the exercise, I began to uncover Dumont's argument and to find what I take to be solutions to two of the problems I had continued to have with this monumental work, even though it had been amply reviewed and discussed. I had been troubled by the mystery of “the mantle of our Lady,” that odd process of the encompassing and the encompassed, and the lack of fit between Dumont's model of the Indian caste system and that of his Anglo- American-trained colleagues. In the paper below, I present the inventory, argument, and solutions mentioned, as well as their implications for an understanding of Homo Hierarchicus by the empirically oriented social scientist.

In recent years, historians associated with the school of Indo-Muslim history at Aligarh Muslim University have developed a persuasive, now widely accepted, view of imperial decline. Satish Chandra and M. Athar Ali have argued that a primary cause of the collapse of the Mughal empire in the early eighteenth century was the rise of intense factionalism among the Mughal nobility. Conflict within this imperial elite (i.e., the body of amirs or mansabdars holding ranks of 1000 zat or above) resulted from a rapid rise to nearly double the number of nobles during the latter portion of the reign of the Emperor Aurangzeb (1658–1707). This growth in the number of nobles was not matched by a corresponding increase in the resources available to pay them and their followers. Consequently, the system of alienation of the land-tax proceeds for salary payments (the jagir system) broke down simply because not enough lands could be found to meet a sharply enhanced demand.

As an epigraph to Taipei jen (Taipei residents), Pai Hsien-yung could not have chosen a better poem for effectively evoking the mood of sadness and that gripping sense of loss emanating from the “wild grasses” and the “slanting sun” of his stories, for dramatically bringing out the contrasts between the past and the present, between age and youth—one of the memorable features of this anthology. Inasmuch as “Black Coat Lane” can be read as a tiao-ku (mourning the past) poem, so can Taipei jen be read as an elegy on the final dissolution of an ancient culture. That Pai Hsien-yung should have chosen Taipei as “the center of paralysis” is only logical, since the very concept of life for so many of his Taipei jen depends on the observation of rituals. By rituals, I mean a practice or a pattern of behavior repeated in a prescribed manner. Understood in these terms, such a story as “State Funeral” could not have taken place anywhere other than in Taipei. Where else could the death of a Kuomintang general be honored in such a pompous manner? And where could Tou Fu-jen (in “Wandering in the Garden”) stage her k'un-ch'ü dinner party if not in Taipei? In Taipei, if she chooses to, she could still prepare a cup of tea with as-much loving care as Yün Niang did in Fousheng Lu-chi (Six Chapters of a Floating Life), even if it is no longer possible to serve it in the immaculate manner of a Miao Yü in Hung-lou meng (The Dream of the Red Chamber).

There is a bewildering contrast between the superficial calm of the 1930s in Indonesia and the turbulence of the immediate post-war period. In addition to the enormous upsurge of anti-colonial militance, the years following the Japanese surrender were marked by an unprecedented degree of conflict amongst Indonesians, as society adjusted to the radically changed conditions of independence. In other countries occupied by Japan, notably Burma and Malaya, ethnic animosities were also unusually overt after the war. It seemed natural to ask, as Elsbree did in his pioneering essay of 1953:

did the [Japanese] occupation, with its dissolution of existing ties, aggravate the fissures of the old order? … Did the Japanese deliberately pursue a “divide and rule” tactic, and is their policy to be held responsible for the violent outbursts and the general increase in racial tension since the end of the war?

At first sight, the last fifteen years has been the most creative—as certainly it has been the most productive—period in the history of the study of why the Mughal empire in India declined. The succession of magisterial publications from the Department of History at the University of Aligarh—Satish Chandra's Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court 1707–1740 (1959), Irfan Habib's The Agrarian System of the Mughal.Empire (1556–1707) (1963), M. Athar Ali's The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), and Noman Ahmad Siddiqi's Land Revenue Administration under the Mughals (1700–1730) (1970)—have, taken together, offered formulae for the understanding of the growing weakness of the empire from the later seventeenth century almost Newtonian in their force and simplicity.

In any anthology of Chinese politicalor Kuan Chung or Kuan Tzu scattered in the works of most,writing, one is likely to find the namesif not all, periods fromKuan the Spring and Autumn to the present. According to a widely accepted tradition, it was due to Kuan Chung's political and financial policies when he was prime minister that Duke Huan of Ch'i was able to seize the leadership of the Chinese states in the seventh century B.C. Duke Huan thus became the first of a series of hegemons who dominated the Eastern Chou empire.

Louis Dumont has the unique advantage of combining field experience, large ideas, and a basic knowledge of Sanskrit. The patience to master a difficult archaic language, no longer the spoken vehicle of current thoughts in any defined society, is very rare in a scholar devoted to analysis of actual social groups, real people. Dumont is the only person to acquaint himself with traditional societies in India and with the cultural continuity within which they, and their neighbors, are intelligible as a unit. The large and daunting literate past of India is open to him; and there are few who can compete with this combination of skills. Nevertheless his study of the relationship between king and brahmin in traditional and (so far as is relevant) modern Indian society—a study found principally in one essay—impressed me in two ways, which, in association, did not sustain admiration. His ideas need to be placed alongside another interpretation of the facts, in order that a clearer perspective may be obtained. It is not the case that his reading of archaic and ambiguous materials is wrong; we do not yet know enough about the history of India to say that. But there is a real chance that the talent to generalize from the particular (which is one of the strengths of anthropologists) has here run a little ahead of itself. My aim is not to discourage the use of Sanskritic materials, still less to imply that there are “real experts” in competition with whom the anthropologist who emulates Dumont's efforts must remain silent. I value the stimulus Dumont's ideas have offered; and I know they will continue to excite response and encourage further research, even when they arouse suspicion. Let us attempt a new evaluation of the facts, and set that beside Dumont's findings.