Dumont's essay “World Renunciation in Indian Religions,” given as the Frazer lecture at Oxford in 1958, has achieved a considerable reputation; it inspired, for example, J. C. Heesterman's article “Brahmin, Ritual and Renouncer.” Dumont's article is not easy to understand; I feel that the rather naive and hasty general comments: “The renouncer thinks as an individual, and this is the distinctive trait which opposes him to the man-in-the-world and brings him closer to the western thinker” are unfortunate. I also feel that greater historical and linguistic rigor is mandatory. But more important than questions of scholarship and of method, it seems to me that something crucial is missing from Dumont's essay. It is certainly useful to emphasize, as Dumont does, both in this essay and in his more recent Homo Hierarchicus, the structures evident in saṃnyāsa as an institution (“[H]e does not really leave society …”). Even here I could not help but feel that a Marxist approach would have yielded greater theoretical gains. (Cf. the remarkable essays by the late D. D. Kosambi.) I am sorry to see that Dumont has failed to come to terms with renunciation as a psychological event; I shall attempt to focus more closely than has hitherto been done on the psychological characteristics of asceticism.

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.

In 1871, aborigines in southern Taiwan killed fifty-four shipwrecked Ryukyuan fisherman. By 1874 this incident had grown into a major international crisis for the Ch'ing Court in Peking, because the Japanese had insisted on punishing the aborigines (through a military occupation of their territory) after the Chinese hesitated to do so. As a result of the negotiations with Japanese diplomats concerning this matter, the Court was made sharply aware of the need to intensify and extend the Chinese administration of Taiwan; to fail to do so would obviously tempt the Japanese and other foreigners to occupy and perhaps annex areas that were not governed or settled by the Chinese.

The importance of Louis Dumont's work—both for specialists in Indian studies and for general social science theory—is by now obvious. Yet, since the publication of the initial volumes of Contributions to Indian Sociology (old series, coedited with D. Pocock), Dumont's work has been subjected to intensive criticisms that do not simply suggest he is wrong about a particular ethnographic fact, but rather that his approach is wrongheaded, that his starting points are idealist, biased (in favor of upper castes), or irretrievably tied to “French intellectual currents.”

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.

Scholars of medieval Japanese history are not often blessed with sufficient statistical data to employ it systematically in their analysis of problems in the political, social, and economic history of the period. Yet in certain limited areas of investigation, enough information does exist to permit independent testing of the validity of conclusions that have been based on the historian's examination of the archival record—for example, the lower bureaucracy during the Muromachi period (1336–1573), which consisted of a group of officials known as the bugyōnin.

The collective name of the work whose translation is here being reviewed was apparently added, long after their composition, to ten of Dōgen's (1200–1253) minor works–only two of which bear a date (1234). How long after the event the compilation was made may be deduced from the colophon, written in 1357. While there can be no quarrel with the title of the translation, a closer paraphrase might be ‘collection of writings concerning the mental preparations necessary for the study of the Path’. The Path is, of course, that of Zen; something must be said about study/étude.