Our central assumption in the foregoing analysis is that cultures are integrated; therefore, the view that peasant cultures are compounded of empirically and conceptually separable great and little traditions is unfounded. We recognize the utility of the terms “great tradition” and “great community”; these abstractions are useful for describing the intellectual thought and interests of civilizations, and groups of individuals who promote and further these interests. The little tradition by contrast, we agree with Dumont and Pocock, is the whole culture of the little community or peasant society. Peasant cultures are “wholes”; but we agree with Redfield that they are not isolates. Peasant cultures or little traditions are linked with the great tradition through a common cultural idiom, which establishes channels of communication between the two traditions and sets up standards of mutual reference and influence. There are common sets of concepts and a common terminology. Though the substantive content of the terminology and the emphases given may be different in each tradition, there is a core of shared meanings associated with the terminology which facilitates movement between the two traditions. This is because the common idiom is derived historically from a great tradition, though refashioned to fit the peasant world view. The common idiom not only links the little tradition with the great, but also links the little traditions with one another. This represents an important aspect of the cultural unity of a civilization: a shared commonality of meanings which define the central values of the people and constitute their governing ethos.

Language, culture, and society can be studied from various points of view. Classical Indology and Indian anthropology have different points of departure, but deal sometimes with the same material; the difference in background has generally prevented close collaboration. Classical Indologists tend to look upon Indian anthropologists as mainly interested in almost inaccessible hill tribes, in village superstition, and sometimes in contemporary affairs; moreover a synchronistic bias in methodology has often limited the potential richness of their studies. Anthropologists who study India, on the other hand, are often inclined to view classical Indologists as busy with case endings and etymological derivations, or as discussing obscure and long-forgotten doctrines. Yet neither field has been able to dispense with concepts traditionally handled by the other; for instance, anthropologists talk about language, and classical Indologists about culture. A recent example is the concept of Sanskritization, introduced by anthropologists with obvious reference to Sanskrit, the language to which the main attention of classical Indologists has always been directed. As a student of Sanskrit and classical Indology, I offer some reflections on Sanskritization with the hope that I am not altogether blind to the problems occupying anthropologists.

In 1961 our Association President, Norman Brown, discussed with us the problem of the content of cultural continuity in India. He pointed out that in spite of many variations in time and local differentiations in space, the highly developed civilization of India from the third millennium B.C. to the present offers to the student a picture of a continuing entity, a kind of moving picture in which the successive events of a plot seem to be informed and given a special character and vitality by some pervasive element running through the story, an element which might be sought, it was concluded, in the particular perdurable values basic to many Indian behavior patterns.

People impatient to get out were pushing me from behind; people anxious to get in pulled me out. Somehow I landed on my feet on the dusty platform. I gathered the few packages and made my way out of the railway station through a crowd. The reasons for the crowds became clear: today was the day of the weekly market, and the “god” on his journey had reached this town to make a day's halt. My guide and I picked our way through heaps of millet and wheat and rice, through pots and pans, through bales of cloth and saris, toys and hand-mirrors, vegetables and sweets—everything displayed on both sides of the road. Farther on, there were amusements—the revolving cradles and merry-go-rounds, gramophones shrilling loudly, a snake-charmer, a troupe of tight-rope dancers.

On July 7, 1937 a handful of Chinese and Japanese soldiers exchanged rifle-fire in the vicinity of the Marco Polo Bridge about thirty miles from Peking. This, minor fracas precipitated a sequence of events that soon propelled Japan into full-scale hostilities on the mainland—a war that was significantly to influence the course of Japanese-American negotiation in the fateful months leading up to the Pacific War. Many historians have portrayed the China incident as the consequence of a conspiracy by the Japanese military and as a repetition of a pattern of aggression identical with that of the Mukden Incident of 1931. With this approach, the Sino-Japanese war presents little apparent difficulty to our ascertaining why the fighting at the Marco-Polo Bridge occasioned a major war. The culprit is the Japanese military.

John Fee Embree some time ago remarked that “… we can never learn the nature of a religion simply by a perusal of the sacred texts, i.e., written words, torn from their social context; nor will a life of Buddha and a study of his original teachings in 500 B.C. tell us much of the nature of religion in contemporary Japan.” This statement from a decade and a half ago is as applicable to religious behavior and belief in a modern Buddhist country like Burma as it originally was to pre-war Japan. There is a good deal of literature which purports to be descriptive of Burmese religion and Burmese religious behavior. Much of this literature takes as an initial premise that Burma is one of the most actively Buddhistic countries in the world and that we may therefore gain the most intimate understanding of Burmese religious behavior through a perusal of the sacred canons of that faith. This approach is not without merit, and it would be foolhardy indeed to take as a premise that Burmese religion is not Buddhistic and that the Pali scriptures are worthless as explanatory points of reference. Such an alternative would be unrealistic, and would be infinitely shocking to Burmese, who certainly regard themselves as Theravada Buddhists. At the same urne, the imported nature of the Buddhist faith in Burma is well understood, and its historic superposition upon a more ancient substratum of customs and beliefs is appreciated, even though descriptive details in the matter may largely be lacking. All objective reporters speak, in greater or lesser detail, of residual elements in Burmese religion which owe little or nothing to Buddhism.

We have heard much about the Sung archaeologists' mistakes but little about their important work, upon which much of our work in some fields is based today. They did not make spectacular discoveries of buried cities through the use of classical sources as did Heinrich Schliemann less than one hundred years ago. But they did use the early literature, together with a critical sense of judgment, some eight or nine centuries ago to discover much truth about the remote past and to dispel misinformation which had accumulated in the ensuing centuries. Many of the Sung scholars had a most enlightened and what might even be called a modern approach in their attitude towards this work. They had progressed far beyond the “cabinet of curiosities” stage, still current in Europe at a much later date, and were engaged in intelligent research concerned with identification, etymology, dating, and interpretation. Moreover, they practiced, within the limitations imposed upon them by the advancement of science at that time, most of the critical methods and devices used in modern archaeological work.

Since the Communist Chinese take-over of Tibet, climaxed by the Tibetan revolt and the subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama, increased interest in that land and its culture has called attention to the meagerness of information concerning details of Tibetan daily life, economy, and politics. In a series of interviews widi members of the Sakya ruling house undertaken by the authors, it has been possible to secure considerable data concerning die administration of what is perhaps Tibet's most ambitious irrigation project, and the role the Sakya government played in that administration.

The problem of historical explanation is presently engaging the deep interest of philosophers of history. Accepting the view that writing history partakes of the artistic in that the same material may be used, with controls, to support different conclusions, we will attempt to reevaluate certain premises on the early nature of parliamentary government under the Meiji Constitution. To facilitate the discussion, however, we should first present the traditional views on the development of parliamentary government prior to and soon after the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution.

Independence was an old question in Philippine-American relations, free trade a middle-aged one, and sugar production a very young one when all three converged in 1929. They remained tangled until an independence bill, a redefinition of Philippine-American trade, and the combined limitation and allocation of Philippine sugar production straightened them out again by 1935. The struggles of the intervening years involved every phase of American colonial policy and every phase of Philippine public life. Here I single out for examination the Philippine place in America's sugar market and the place of sugar in the Philippine political economy.

Western economists who wish to study economic conditions in Communist China are plagued both by the quantity and the quality of economic statistics made available by the Chinese Communist authorities. Quantitatively, the meagerness of statistical data makes the task of serious research difficult. Qualitatively, most Western economists have little confidence in these statistics as reliable representations of the actual situations. This paper will examine the general reliability of the physical output data of industrial commodities published by the Chinese Communist authorities. Industrial output data have been selected for our purpose for two reasons. First, great emphasis has been given to industrial production in the economic plans. Second, the Chinese Communist authorities have released relatively abundant data concerning industrial production so that it is possible to conduct certain empirical tests, as will be seen later, to determine the general reliability of the output figures for certain commodities.

The development of commerce and the rise of a merchant class in Tokugawa Japan have deservedly received considerable attention from both Japanese and Western scholars. In Japan that interest would seem to have been prompted by the problem of the rôle of the pre-Restoration merchant class in the development of the modern capitalist Japanese economy. The study of this problem was characterized by a long controversy in which the Tokugawa merchants were depicted as either “progressive” or “feudalistic,” depending on the historical philosophy of the participants. The argument was conducted at a high level of generality and on both sides within frameworks derived from the leading European (mainly German) schools of economic history. For some time neither side seems to have doubted the applicability of these frameworks to Japan's experience, but the controversy did eventually lead to valuable detailed studies of Tokugawa commerce and to attempts to interpret Japan's economic development in its own terms. Among the first to do this were the members of the so-called “Kyoto School” under Professor E. Honjō.