On a visit to a northern province in the 1950s, Hô Chí Minh, who had spent many years during the war with the French living with upland peoples in northern Vietnam, asked local authorities how many ethnic groups were found within the province. Professor Đang Nghiêm Van, the doyen of ethnologists in Vietnam, has written that President Ho received the following response:

The “scientific” project of ethnic classification undertaken for political purposes in Vietnam beginning in 1958 was comparable directly (and not unrelated) to a similar project undertaken in China in the 1950s.

The five cases of Protestant Christian practice in Indonesia and Thailand presented in this symposium are used to develop a sociology of Protestantism in Southeast Asia. A review is first undertaken of the history of Protestant missionary activity in Southeast Asia. Protestantism, it is observed, insists on the ultimate authority of the Bible. This authority has not been accepted by Southeast Asians until they have access to the Christian message in their own languages and they are motivated to adopt Christian practices as a means to confront deep crises in their lives. The establishment of Protestant Christianity has entailed the interpreting of the Christian message with reference to the non-Christian contexts in which Protestants in Southeast Asia live.

About every other undergraduate student eventually takes the UCLA elementary astronomy class Astronomy 3, and the two of us have been teaching about 1,000 of them every year. We will not repeat complaints about their poor and patchy high-school preparation in science, but we must mention it as an important phenomenon in U.S. education. The European system appears to be preferable, in which mathematics, chemistry, physics, and biology are mandatory and taught every year, although only 3 hours per week. It prevents large memory gaps and the spiral-wise parallel development in all four subjects makes it possible to teach on a higher level every subsequent year.

Although the Thai-Lao peasants living in rain-fed agricultural communities in northeastern Thailand have experienced some improvements in their socioeconomic situation as a consequence of the growth of the Thai economy since the mid-1950s, these peasants still constitute the poorest sector of the population of Thailand. Moreover, the socioeconomic position of the rural northeastern Thai populace has actually declined relative to that of the urban populace and that of the rural populace living in central Thailand. The economic disadvantageous position of Thai-Lao peasants is linked with a sense of being an ethnoregional minority within a polity that has been highly centralized since reforms instituted at the end of the nineteenth century. Much of the social action of Thai-Lao peasants with reference to the political-economic constraints on their world can be understood, as long-term research in one community reveals, as having been impelled by rational calculation aimed at improving the well being of peasant families. The ways in which peasants have assessed in practice the justice of these constraints as well as the ways in which they have assessed the limits to entrepreneurship must be seen, however, as being rooted in moral premises that Thai-Lao villagers have appropriated from Theravada Buddhism as known to them in their popular culture.

This introduction considers the issues raised in the debate, recently joined in the works of James Scott and Samuel Popkin and explored in the papers in this symposium, regarding the relative salience of moral and rational economic approaches to the study of the adaptation of peasantries to worlds transformed by their incorporation into modern states and into a global economy. The author offers a refiguration of theoretical assumptions, arguing that, in order to understand the variations in modes of adaptation that have been described in the symposium, it is necessary to assume that the constraints on the worlds of peasants generated by political-economic changes are made meaningful for social action not only in terms of instrumental rationality, but also with reference to culturally distinctive moral premises.