How are we to understand the history of a nonmodern civilization without refracting and distorting what we see through the prism of the ostensibly individualistic and egalitarian modern culture in which most of us live and which we tend to take as normative? In this article I invite other modern-minded readers to turn our worldview upside down and look at Chinese society over the long term from the perspective of its official ideology and not from the perspective of a universalized modern worldview in which economic relations are privileged above all others.

Throughout east and southeast asia multilingual speech communities are the norm rather than the exception. In most countries in the region, nonstandard dialects and ethnic languages survive and even thrive despite the introduction of national languages and their utilization in government, business, and education. Where communicative isolation is not the cause of their survival, the persistence of such regional languages often signals the continuing importance of distinctive infranational identities, operating within (and sometimes across) the boundaries of the modern nation state. Although surely not the only important marker of ethnic or social distinctiveness, language is a particularly rich medium for the expression of social identity. Conversely, the adoption of a new linguistic standard often requires the resolution of what are perceived as competing social identities. In much of developing Asia, therefore, researchers on language history regularly encounter some variant of the same question: what social and historical conditions determine the ways that speakers in multilingual communities resolve problems of language and identity? More specifically, what mix of cultural and political forces ensures that some linguistic varieties persist while others decline or even disappear?

The privilege of addressing this audience is one I never expected to have. That it contains so many of my teachers and students, as well as past, present, and perhaps future colleagues, makes the occasion a particularly happy one for me. Something of a summing up seems in order. I shall make it brief.

The most popular book in northern India is a Hindi retelling of the ancient tale of Prince Rām and his wife, Sītāa, composed in about A.D. 1574 by the poet-saint Tulsīdās of Banaras. Throughout a vast region with a population of more than three hundred million people, this epic of some fourteen-thousand lines has come to be regarded not only as a great masterpiece of literature but also as a religious work of the highest inspiration—a status recognized by nineteenth-century British scholars who labeled it "the Bible of North India." To its audience it is known by several names: simply the Rāmāyaṇ(borrowing the title of the Sanskrit archetype that, for Hindi speakers, it has largely supplanted); the Tulsī Rāmāyaṇ(invoking its author); and also the Mānas(The lake), which is a condensation of its true title, Rāmcaritmānas(The lake of the acts of Rām). Encountering the last name for the first time, a reader from another culture might be puzzled by its central metaphor: why should the image of a lake be so closely associated with this celebrated saga of virtue, heroism, and devotion?

Few cultures had as rich a vocabulary for pictures of specific places as did eighteenth-century Japan. Why then did yet another word, shinkeizu (literally “true-view pictures”), come into being in the late eighteenth century? The answer is that none of the existing terms satisfactorily articulated the ideological essence of a new kind of painting advocated by a group of artists who sought to incorporate into their work styles and concepts associated with the art of the Chinese literatus. These Japanese masters came to constitute a school known as Nanga (the Japanese interpretation of the Chinese “Southern school” of painting; it was also called bunjinga, “literati painting”). For a picture (zu) of a given scene (kei) to be profound, argued the connoisseurs of Nanga, the artist must experience the vista at first hand and then absorb and transmit its essential reality (shin). It was in the circle of the brilliant literati artist Ike Taiga (1723–76) that the concept ofshinkeizu became the integral element of the new Japanese conception of depictions of actual scenes.

The narrative richness of the Chinese Ming (1368–1644) novel known as the Hsi-yu chi, or The Journey to the West, presents a daunting challenge to the interpreter. The bewildering array of cultural lore—especially from the three major religious traditions of China (Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism)—is so diverse and boldly interwoven that it almost appears as “simply furniture thrown in to impress, or mock, the reader” (Plaks 1977:181). Thus any interpretation faces the danger of exaggerating the importance of these cultural and religious elements, only to discover that the author offered them in jest.

The history of industrialization of many developing countries in Asia is related to conflicts between foreigners and a growing local bourgeoisie over industrial ownership and control. This article analyzes one such country—India—from the end of World War I until a few years beyond independence.

For many japanese the events of August 1945 placed their country in a special position. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave Japan the dubious distinction of being the only country to have sustained atomic bomb attacks. Acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration meant that the military government was eradicated overnight, along with the extraordinary status of the emperor who had presided over it. Although the emperor himself remained on the throne, democracy came to Japan, and with it an entree into the international economic community.

The classic model of Chinese kinship organization, with its complementary emphases on patrilineality, patrilocality, and patriarchy, continues as a framework for research on Chinese social organization despite accumulating evidence of alternative models or of disjunctures within the elite model. This model has come under critical scrutiny from a variety of perspectives, most notably anthropologically informed historical research (Watson 1982; Watson 1985) that has led to a questioning of the lineage model (Freedman 1965) and field-based research that has drawn attention to the prevalence of uxorilocal and “small daughter-in-law” (tongyangxi) marriage and to the nurturing of uterine families (Wolf and Huang 1980; Wolf 1972). My purpose is to contribute to this reassessment with a discussion of customary practices of postmarital dual residence for women and continuing ties between married women and their natal families. These practices and ties cannot be accounted for within the framework of the structural-functionalist model and require an adaptation of practiceoriented theory. This may illuminate the specific structuring patterns and disjunctures described below as well as suggest possibly fruitful lines of analysis for other societies in which lineages are salient. The contribution of this article is to identify and explore a significant dimension of structuring practices in informal kinship relations in rural China.

A tiny, radical student group seems at first glance to be an unlikely vantage point from which to evaluate continuity and change in the social organization of Japan. Yet social scientists often study extremes and misfits in order to gain new perspective on the conventional and normative. Whatever the people on the margin share unquestioningly with the rest of the society hints at the breadth and power of social norms; whatever they question, or have trouble doing, points to the inevitable cracks in the social order. Moreover, when a society seems to emphasize harmony and order, it is particularly important to examine the points and processes of conflict. Points of conflict are the harbingers of social change, and processes for managing conflict reveal the price that is paid for order.

In the literature on the process of socioeconomic transformation, a major debate centers on the questions of how and how much indigenous traditions, including kinship structures, are transformed by the larger political economic framework (Sahlins 1985, Hobsbawm 1983, Wolf 1982). Marxist theoretical analyses tend to emphasize the eventual demise of gender inequality and male-oriented (patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical) kinship systems—kinship systems within which gender relations are also embedded (cf. Engels 1972). The analytical literature on Vietnamese kinship and gender in the socialist era is certainly not an exception in this regard. It is pervaded with general propositions regarding the nuclearization of the family (Houtart and Lemercinier 1981, Werner 1981) and the political-economy-based transformation of the system toward a structure of egalitarian gender relations (e.g., Lê thḷ Nhâm-Tuyêt 1973).

In ōta yōko's (1903?–63) novel Han-ningen (Half-Human, 1954) the heroine, named Oda Atsuko, is like author Ōta herself a famous A-bomb writer suffering from severe depression. She enters the hospital in an attempt to cure an addiction to tranquilizers whose intemperate use derives from very real, but to the medical profession opaque, neuroses ultimately due to the trauma of Hiroshima. No treatment proves totally effective. Medicine can only hope to counter illness, not history, and Oda's deepest torments remain chronic. She continues to be plagued by a frustration linked in the novel's fifth chapter with the choices she has faced in the seven years since the end of the Second World War: suicide, flight, or the writing of a “good work of literature.” Throughout the novel Oda dismisses suicide as not in her nature; Ota, in her essay “Ikinokori no shinri” (The psychology of survival, 1952), concludes that no Japanese writer can abandon Japan, and her heroine here concurs. Of Oda's three alternatives all that is left is the writing of a good work, but that too seems elusive. What constitutes “good” is unclear. Just how she might recognize such a work (ii sakuhin to wa nanimono ka) is a literary problem inextricably bound with Oda's physical and psychological problems, and all have arisen from her presence at Hiroshima's destruction on August 6, 1945.

A successful pattern of close ties between the state and large-scale private enterprise in Japan and Korea has attracted the attention of scholars, policymakers, and businessmen. The prewar Japanese state (Moulton 1931; Lockwood 1955; Nakagawa 1983) with its distinctive methods of promoting private enterprise played a major role in this eminently successful case of a “late developing” (Gerschenkron 1966; Rosovsky 1961) society. It also provides an early example of what has recently been termed a “capitalist development state” (Johnson 1987). Studies of prewar business-state relations have distinguished business policy associations as major loci of state ties with Japanese firms (Ishida 1968; Tiedemann 1971; Heidenheimer and Langdon 1968), thereby offering insight into the formation of an entrepreneurial elite and the role of private enterprise in state-directed development efforts.

The nationalist military intelligence service has long been a controversial topic in the history of the Chinese Republic (1912–49). This organization, known as the Military Bureau of Statistics and Investigation (Junshi Weiyuanhui Tongji Diaocha Ju, or Juntong), first impinged on civilian society in the 1930s, when it carried out violent deeds against urban-based intellectuals critical of the Nationalist party's rule. Newspaper writers and editors subsequently compared Juntong to the infamous Eastern Depot and Embroidered Guards of the despotic Ming emperors, denouncing the “feudal” and “fascist” nature of Nationalist rule in political tracts and assemblies. During the Pacific War the image of Juntong's chief, General Dai Li (1897–1946), was blackened when he was compared to the Nazi Heinrich Himmler by the Western press. In the bitter and protracted civil struggles between the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and the Guomindang (GMD) after 1941, the Communists focused sharply on the atrocities committed by Juntong and portrayed Dai Li as a monstrous instrument of Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship.