During the past year I have traveled to the regional associations, from Santa Cruz to Denton, to Albany, and to points in between, such as Ann Arbor, Boulder, and Boone. I have been impressed by the generosity and good will of our members, but above all, I have been impressed by the sense that we have special relationships through sharing in a common cause. For that reason I have chosen an elliptical and somewhat odd title for this address, which is one of the otherwise not very onerous duties required of the president. The title is “The Tradition of Mission—Asian Studies in the United States, 1783 and 1983.”

The role of patrilineal ideology in Chinese village social organization varies more widely than the orthodox paradigm would predict. In minor multilineage communities closely interspersed among dominant elite lineages, interlineage rivalry and competition may indeed prevail. But in the many similar villages somewhat removed from the pressures of dominant lineage expansionism, lineage solidarity may coexist harmoniously with community solidarity, legitimized through a liberal extension of the kinship idiom. This article reviews several village studies and describes in detail a multilineage alliance that complements rather than supplants lineage unity, suggesting that principles of segmentary opposition and solidarity can provide positive means of integration among separate lineages in a shared territory as effectively as among branches of a single lineage.

In this article the author examines what he terms an “institutional culture of authority” that has come to characterize postrevolution Chinese industrial enterprises. This institutional culture is shaped by a pattern of organized dependency that is inherent in the economic relationship of employees to enterprises, and also in systems of reward and control that link the opportunities of employees to their behavior and attitudes. This institutional culture is manifested in widespread ritualism in political meetings, low exercise of voice by subordinates, the creation of patron-client networks linking the Party to selected employees, and the everyday cultivation of personal connections for individual gain.

Analyses of Thai political economy since World War II have sought to define the stages of Thai social evolution from earliest times to the present and to determine whether or not the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and the 1932 coup mark changes in the social formation and/or the mode of production. Over the past decade, as a consequence of political change in the mid-1970s, a new generation of historians has rejuvenated Marxist methodology, using it to pry the chronicles and archives away from royalist and nationalist myth-making concerns, to dismantle the court-centered historiography, and to erect a new historical paradigm for the late twentieth century.

In 1947, when Pakistan was created, scarcely any attention was paid to resolving the problems inherent in a culturally plural society. Existing institutions proved inflexible and new ones did not evolve to respond to the aspirations of the Bengali people. As a result, Pakistan was dismembered within twenty-four years of its birth. Contrary to expectations, Pakistan's national disintegration failed to generate analysis or debate among intellectuals. Via thematic analysis of a cross-section of Urdu creative writing about the events of 1971, the author of this article probes the mentality of selected writers, searching for their response to the disintegration of their nation. What is the meaning of Pakistani nationhood? How do the writers interpret the breakup of 1971? And what implications do their attitudes have for the issue of regional versus national identity? The author concludes that the ethos of the writers scarcely differs from that of their society—it is an ethos that might well have precipitated the 1971 crisis.