The Position of the tribal minorities in the Philippines is fundamentally different from that of comparable populations in other parts of Asia. The manner in which they have been enabled to run their own affairs and retain many features of their traditional culture while simultaneously acquiring Western education and familiarity with certain modern technological achievements is indicative of an approach to minority problems which distinguishes the Philippines from most other Asian countries. Whereas in the former colonial territories of Britain, France and the Netherlands a centrally controlled service of professional administrators endeavoured to impose on all populations, advanced as well as backward, a minimum respect for law and order as seen by the colonial power, in the Philippines neither the Spanish rulers nor the American authorities set up a type of district administration such as existed, for instance, in British India. When in 1898 the Americans replaced the Spanish régime, they did not give high priority to establishing throughout the islands an administration capable of dealing effectively with problems of law and order. In the lowlands they could build on a political system set up by the Spanish, but in the mountains of Northern Luzon, the area with which I am here concerned, they found not even the skeleton of a colonial administration. The entire hill-region was inhabited by warring tribes, torn by feuds and passionately addicted to the practice of head-hunting. Faced with a similar situation in such areas as the Naga Hills on the Assam—Burma border, the British had set about pacifying the tribes, stage by stage, and area by area, establishing outposts of military police and creating administrative units in charge of high-powered and specially selected members of the Indian Civil Service. Village elders were made responsible to these district officers, who administered summary justice in their capacity of magistrates, and this paternalistic system worked well as long as British rule lasted, but was hardly intended to prepare the ground for a system of representative democracy.

In July 1928, upon the termination of the Northern Expedition, Chiang Kai-shek presented a sacrificial message to the departed leader, Sun Yat-sen, whose body reposed in the Pi-yün Temple outside the city of Peking. Sun had committed his life, Chiang declared, to the attainment of eight tasks in the rebuilding of a new China: (1) the explication of the Kuomintang's principles and the expunging of ‘unorthodox views’, (2) the constructing of a unified party through the curbing of individual freedom and the acceptance of party discipline, (3) the transfer of the national capital to Nanking to symbolize a new beginning for the nation, (4) a purposeful change in the ‘heart’ of the citizenry, (5) the psychological, economic, political and social reconstruction of the nation, (6) the disbanding of troops, (7) the termination of civil strife and a total commitment to national defence, and (8) the speedy introduction of local autonomy. These personal commitments—and public admonitions, as they were also meant to be—covered a wide range of national concerns, dealing as they did with ideology and organization, power and legitimacy, political socialization and national integration. It is noteworthy, however, that Chiang at the moment of personal triumph turned his attention above all to the ideological function of the ruling élite in the transitional Chinese society.

Under the terms of a Fellowship at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, the author was given study-leave for the academic year 1967–68 to go to Pakistan and India in order to improve his knowledge of Urdu and Punjabi. Having chosen Lahore as the most suitable place to pursue the concurrent study of these two languages, he lived there from September 1967 until April 1968, during which time he became increasingly conscious of, and interested in, the rather peculiar socio-linguistic position of Punjabi in the city's life. This article is a sunnary of the observations he was able to make about this, and of the thoughts to which he was led.

This Article deals with the turbulent years in Japan from 1853 to 1862, during which Yokoi Shōnan, a middle-ranking scholar–samurai from Kumamoto in Higo province in central Kyushu, was to gain national renown as a fearless, forthright thinker. This was Japan's first desperate crisis from abroad since the Mongol invasions in the late thirteenth century, a crisis which was to set in motion the final disintegration of the once mighty Tokugawa power in Japan.