Ethnic conflict is said to be rampant today. To all those instances familiar to us from the recent past, we may add the latest explosions in Southern Russia, in Eastern Europe, and in India's Kashmir.

A great deal has been written on the historical antecedents of ethnic conflicts, and on the political, religious, economic, and social circumstances in which many of them have broken out. These accounts include the effects of global processes that stem from metropolitan centers upon satellite countries, the assumptions and the problems of nation-making, and the politics of ethnic and other group entitlement claims in plural societies.

Although there has been great interest in how properly to conceptualize the person in Indian culture, few have explored Indian perceptions of leadership, achievement, and agency as valued features of individuality (Singer 1972; Mines 1988; Fox 1989). Indeed, since Dumont (1970a,b) forcefully argued that the values of equality and liberty that support the Western notion of the individual were absent from Indian society, the important roles that personal uniqueness, volition, and achievement play in Indian history have been largely overlooked or understated. This paper reconsiders an Indian sense of these roles by examining the south Indian concept of the “big-man” (periyar, periyavar), a notion of individuality and instrumentality that is central to the politics of south India and crucial to an understanding of the dynamic relationship that exists between action and organization in Indian society (cf., Fox 1989).

Ch'oe namsŏn (1890–1957) was a leading Korean intellectual during the era of Japanese control (1910–1945). His activities included publishing Korea's first popular modern magazine, pioneering modern poetry in Korean, drafting the Declaration of Independence for the 1919 March First Independence Movement, and publishing numerous articles on Korean culture. He was also a leading Korean historian at a time when Japanese scholars monopolized Korean studies.

As recently as one decade ago, there was no “field” of Chinese demography. There were virtually no demographers of China and little available data. It is fair to say that China was at once the largest and the least known of any human population.

The change has been sudden. New sources of data now place China among the better-documented national populations. Publications on Chinese population have boomed. In consequence, we can now speak of a field of Chinese demography, although it is hardly in a steady “state.” We can only outline the explosion of demographic research that is continually expanding and refining our understanding of Chinese population today and in the past. This outpouring of data and knowledge provides unprecedented opportunities for the study of Chinese society and offers unusual challenges to our understanding of comparative population dynamics.

For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, China's student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications. Their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachev's visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe. As we write in mid-1990, the movement and its bloody suppression have already produced an enormous body of literature—from eyewitness accounts by journalists (Morrison 1989; Zhaoqiang, Gejing and Siyuan 1989) and special issues of scholarly journals (Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs Nos. 23, 24; The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 14.4), to pictorial histories (Turnley and Turnley 1989) and documentary collections (Han 1990; Wu 1989), and, most recently, textbook chapters (Spence 1990) and analytical works (Feigon 1990; Nathan 1990)—tracing the development of China's crisis. Despite a flood of material too massive to review in the present context, we still lack a convincing interpretive framework that places the events within the context of China's modern political evolution, and also provides a way to compare China's experience to that of Eastern Europe. Such an interpretation should help us to understand why massive public demonstrations spurred an evolution toward democratic governance in Eastern Europe, but in China led only to the massacre of June 3–4 and the present era of political repression.

As a result of an editing error, the word “and” is missing from the third sentence of the first paragraph of Myron L. Cohen's article, “Lineage Organization in North China” [49.3 (August): 509]. The sentence should read, “The characteristics of the lineages in Yangmansa, a village approximately seventy-five kilometers south of Beijing, appear to have been typical of this broader pattern and considerably different from those associated with the southeastern model that has dominated the anthropological literature.” Without the “and,” the sentence implies that these lineages differ only from the southeastern model, whereas Professor Cohen intended to say the lineages are both typical and different. The editor regrets the error.