It began with the Phoenicians. Most written languages now use their invention— a phonetic alphabet. The invention of alphabetic writing escorted an influential theory of language onto the intellectual stage. Aristotle expressed the basic outline of that theory, which has since dominated Indo-European views of language:

Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of the spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs of—affections in the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses of— actual things-are also the same.

Muslim movements in the twentieth century have sought to develop new reading and listening publics attuned to the messages of reform and renewal. Across Asia and the Middle East, scholars, poets, and activists have created distinctive vernacular genres intended to make the words of scripture widely available. Newspaper columns, quickly printed tracts, and popular poetry have been shaped to the task of tafsīr, the interpretation of scripture. International networks of printers, booksellers, and, more recently, television producers have extended the reformist's reach far beyond older networks of scholarship and communication (Metcalf 1990; Eickelman 1992). Often modernist writers have signaled their break with past scholarly traditions by writing in vernaculars, sometimes developing new vernaculars. They wrote in Turkish, Urdu, Bengali, or Indonesian, rather than the traditional religious and literary languages of Arabic, Persian, and Javanese (Anderson 1990; Freitag 1988; Mardin 1989).

Dream of the red chamber has been analyzed and reanalyzed by thousands of Chinese commentators in the more than two centuries since it was written (e.g., Yu 1923; Hu 1940; Zhou 1953; He 1956; Liu 1956; Jiang 1959; Wu 1961; Wang 1983). Indeed, entire journals are devoted exclusively to the novel's analysis, and strictly original contributions to this vast literature are rare. However, Meng Zhang's comparison of the genealogical relations of the principal characters of the novel with Eugene Cooper's ethnographic data on twentieth-century Zhejiang, and the joint analysis of the results are informed by an anthropological consciousness uncommon to previous commentators. The analysis not only takes note of patterns of cousin marriage recognized by earlier commentators (e.g., Yu 1923; Zhou 1953; Wu 1961), but also discovers instances of several of the more obscure patterns noted by Cooper in his Zhejiang materials (Cooper, in press).

Chin Yao-Chi (Ambrose Y. C. King) is internationally known for the knowledgeability and fluency with which he uses many of the perspectives of Western social science to discuss Chinese culture, modern Chinese history, and current developments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Born in 1935, growing up in Shanghai, he obtained a Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh and today is Professor of Sociology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His life, however, has also been rooted in Taiwan, where he lived for many years after the fall of the mainland, and where he obtained both his B.A. and M.A. degrees. Long before the promise of the Republic of China's development became obvious, at least as early as 1966, he recognized it, astutely introduced Western modernization theory to analyze it, understood that pursuing it required not iconoclasm but a process of critically and creatively building on the inherited culture, and widely influenced Taiwan intellectuals as they tried to make sense out of their complicated, often distressing situation (Chin 1979, 1987, 1991). The publication of eleven of his articles written during the last decade (a few originally in English) by Oxford University Press (Chin 1992) rightly indicates that his views about Chinese modernization should be weighed by all those around the world concerned with this issue, not just by small scholarly circles. Yet just how insightful are his views? To what extent are they shaped by premises that have commonly informed much modern Chinese thought, and that many Western scholars could not easily accept? To what extent has Professor Chin himself “self-consciously” (tzu-chueh) identified any such premises and pondered their viability?

The tenacity of family-farming households in agrarian economies experiencing capitalist penetration has long figured in a debate about the ultimate consequences of such penetration for agrarian social structure. On the one hand are those who argue that, while various forces may work to speed or delay the process, the most likely long-term outcome of the capitalization of agriculture is that envisioned by Lenin: polarization of the countryside into two opposing classes, capitalist farmers and landless laborers, linked by wage relations (Bartra 1974; de Janvry 1981). On the other hand are those who claim that, at least under some conditions, capitalist farming can stimulate small-scale entrepreneurship and socioeconomic differentiation, with the attendant persistence of small family farms (Goodman and Redclift 1982:109–12; Maclachlan 1987:16–23).