Tamil country, in the southeastern portion of peninsular India, has been an identifiable cultural region for almost two millennia. Tamil literary productions dating from the early centuries of the Christian era to the present time speak of Tamilakam (the land, or the abode, of Tamils)—setting out its boundaries by reference to mountains, rivers, and the sea, but making few distinctions within this macroregion and not specifying what lay beyond it. This paper is an attempt at more precise definition of the nature and development of this cultural region and its changing structure, by means of consulting a variety of evidence and by using the concept of “circulation.”

The cult of Khaṇḍobā, one of the largest contemporary popular Hindu cults in the Deccan, is extremely rich in both mythology and ritual; yet, the most popular ritual festival in the cult has no corresponding cultic myth. Interviews with pilgrims, analysis of pilgrim behavior at the festival, and examination of certain astrochronological notions prevalent in popular Hinduism indicate that explanations of the place of the festival in the cult and of its importance for hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year are to be found not in any aspect of the mythology of the cult but rather in notions, preserved generally in popular Hinduism, of the special accessibility of power at special times.

The profound impact of the civil service examinations upon students' lives marks one of the most important developments in Sung education. During the Sung, the whole process of education gradually became geared to the purpose and demands of the examinations; the new important role of the examinations in the recruitment of government officials in turn resulted in the transformation of Chinese society.

At the conclusion of the war in 1895, Japan acquired two territories from China: Liaotung Peninsula and Taiwan, including the islands of Penghu. (Hereafter Taiwan will denote the main island of Taiwan and the Penghus.) It is easy to understand why Japan annexed Liaotung: because of its proximity to Korea. But why was she interested in annexing Taiwan, located more than a thousand miles away from the principal battlefield and more than half of it controlled by headhunting aboriginal tribes? According to the conventional interpretation, Japan's decision on the annexation was based on consideration of two factors: (1) the island's potential as a new market, and as a supplier of food and raw materials for the rapidly expanding Japanese capitalism and labor forces and (2) its military value as a stepping-stone for future expansion in south China and southeast Asia. Implicit in such views is the assumption that Japan had planned the annexation long before the war—perhaps as early as 1874, when a Japanese expeditionary force briefly occupied a part of the island.

Marx's writings on Asia do not bulk large in the corpus of work he published in his lifetime: several articles for Charles Dana's Daily Tribune; scattered references in his Critique of Political Economy, Capital, and Theories of Surplus Value; and (more precise and analytic than the aforementioned) the statements in the Grundrisse. Obviously, his overriding interest lay in the description of capitalist society in western Europe. Nevertheless, what he studied about Asia significantly affected his understanding of capitalism, communism, and dialectical naturalism. Though he never wrote in an extended manner on Asia, the Orient was implicitly present in, and had profound influence on, his western-centered scholarly work. It is impossible to grasp the central meaning of communism and the dialectic without comprehending Marx's attitude toward Asiatic history. Failure to correctly appreciate Marx's writing on Asia has led many scholars to distortions in their evaluations of Marx and their projections about a communist society. Karl Wittfogel is a case in point; because he misconstrued what Marx thought of Asia, he was led to make invalid judgments about the nature of communism and the course of communist revolution in the twentieth century.