Sets of narrative pictures portraying the life of Confucius (Fig. 1; all figures appear at the end of the text) first appeared in considerable numbers in the late Ming period, typically under the title Sheng-chi t'u (Pictures of the Sage's Traces; hereafter SCT) or some close variant. Produced at varying levels of expense, these illustrated biographies or hagiographies were made in a variety of media, such as woodblock prints, paintings on silk, and incised stone tablets. The various examples also exhibit a wide range of artistic quality. These differences in quality and form suggest that pictorial biographies were made for multiple purposes and for diverse audiences. Furthermore, the pictorial biographies differ in total numbers of scenes and in specific episodes selected for inclusion. These differences in content imply disparate conceptions of Confucius and the significance of his life.

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of scholarly works which have analyzed and reanalyzed Mohandas Karmachand Gandhi's epic life and work from numerous angles. In spite of this focused attention, or perhaps on account of it, the Mahatma remains something of an enigma: a genius, to be sure, and one inspired by a kind of transcendental moral conviction, but an enigma nevertheless on account of how he conceived of morality as a problem in which Truth and biology were equally implicated. As he put it, “morals are closely linked with health. A perfectly moral person alone can achieve perfect health” (CW 2:50). Following a statement such as this, my purpose in this essay is to work toward an analysis of Gandhi's genius by focusing on that which appears most enigmatic about his program of sociopolitical action: his somatic concerns and what I am calling his faith in the biomoral imperative of public health.

In this article, I argue that the ‘mandala’ and other spatialized concepts associated with the ‘cosmic polity’ in Southeast Asia (such as ‘exemplary center’ and ‘sinking status’, ‘galactic polity’, ‘concentric circles’, ‘nested emboxment’, etc.) are key concepts with a similar form that have dominated theories of premodern Southeast Asian political and social structure. I claim that previous approaches to the mandala polity have been defined from the perspective of dominant political groups, and thus are top-down or center-out models. As a result, theorists have inadvertently reified this perspective in a set of analytical concepts that reaffirm existing power structures. As such, they have skewed our understandings of the mandala away from that of a socially enacted set of spatial codes that communicate and index hierarchical status between individuals and groups, both dominant and nondominant.

From the 1920s to the late 1960s, Tamil nationalism in India was characterized by elements of radical innovation which made the Dravidian movement a mobilization for cultural revolution, in Tamil terms, as well as for the defense of Tamil interests vis-à-vis the central government. In the last twenty years concern for the ordinary person has manifested itself in extravagant displays of state largess and the encouragement of personality cults directed toward Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu. I delineate below major ideological themes of the nationalist cultural revolution and argue that these ideological elements, while representing change in Tamil political culture, were in many ways deeply anchored in prerevolutionary political concerns supported by institutions and symbolic systems with precolonial antecedents. I link these ideological elements to the dissolution of radicalism in Tamil nationalism and to the emergence of a style of governance which has undermined standards of public administration.

Although in recent years newspapers and journals have been full of reports about family politics in the Philippines, the growing economic might of President Suharto's children and the business holdings of the Thai royal family, the “family” has only recently emerged as a subject of serious study in the historiography of Southeast Asia (McCoy 1993 and Andaya 1992 and 1994). Barbara Andaya's study of Southeast Sumatra in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the first sustained examination of the significance of kinship for understanding political and economic relations in the history of any part of Southeast Asia (Andaya 1993). One of the most important reasons for the neglect of the family as a major historical topic, to extend the argument made by Craig Reynolds in a recent critique of writing on modern Thai history, is that historians of Southeast Asia generally have tended to focus less on gender or power relations in the region, and more on questions of male “power” and historical “structures” (Reynolds 1994).