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.

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.

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?

The disciplinary dissection of Indian studies has divided Indologists into diverse academic unions, each with its own in-group jargon, research interests, and intellectual traditions. It has also created discontinuities in the units of analysis selected by scholars of different disciplines, which create in turn discontinuities between contemporary and historical studies of Indian society. Thus historians have generally not focused on caste or caste associations, while a central referent of anthropologists has been precisely the caste (jati) unit. Partly this reflects a difference in levels of analysis, the historian taking a more encompassing perspective while the anthropologist in the course of his fieldwork concentrates on the grass-roots social world of village India. Partly it reflects the bias of the historical discipline in general toward formal institutions and. toward political, as opposed to social, change.

During the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, a series of violent outbreaks erupted in the rural areas of Malabar District in northern Kerala. The outbreaks were conducted by small groups of Mappillas, the indigenous Muslims of Kerala. At the time they occurred, these “Moplah Outrages”—as the outbreaks were gothically labeled by British administrators—were the subject of extensive debate and wildly divergent interpretations. However, apart from unpublished official correspondence, little has been written about these incidents; and the few discussions that have appeared, rather than analyzing the outbreaks, have instead cited them as evidence to support a simplistic Marxist interpretation of South Indian history. This ideological approach is characteristic of the various works written by the former Prime Chief Minister of Kerala State, E. M. S. Nambudiripad. It is also clearly evident and conveniently epitomized in the most recent article dealing with the outbreaks, Kathleen Gough's “Peasant Resistance and Revolt in South India.” Professor Gough argues that the outbreaks were essentially an economic phenomenon, that they were directly and solely a response to radical changes induced in the agricultural economy of Malabar District by British administration. In fact, there is no doubt that British rule substantially altered the agricultural economy of Malabar District. Land became a marketable commodity, and landholders became land-owners with new rights which they could and did invoke in British courts to coerce their tenants. Yet while these changes helped to trigger some Mappilla outbreaks and influenced the course of others, these incidents were an extremely complicated phenomenon; and none of them was solely the result of economic pressures.