Sixty years after Independence, India now faces critical political situations as shown by the rise of Hindu Revivalism. In this connection, it is highly pertinent to evaluate the basic political trends in India and formulate a somewhat long-term view of her political future. In order to tackle this problem, this article aims to analyze the political culture of India, especially the concept of power in Indian political tradition. India has cultivated two distinct concepts of power: a secular concept of power embodied by the traditional Kshatriya and shared by the dominant castes in contemporary India; and an idealistic concept of power exemplified by Gandhian saintly politics, which is based on Brahmanical tradition. In the political field of modern India, these two rather opposite political orientations are intermingled and have exerted complicated but tremendous influences and determined her course of political development.

In spite of its ideology, Hindu Revivalism represents the secular political trend, and as such it lacks the potential to glorify the Indian state as well as mystify its political values. In this sense, politics of Hindu Revivalism is not qualitatively different from that of the Indian National Congress, which has been strongly influenced by the dominant castes since Independence. However, if Hindu Revivalism pursues its political objective too uncompromisingly, Indian politics might be drawn into a deadlock. And when the political confrontation becomes too acute, saintly politics may re-emerge. This type of politics is based on values that lie at the center of Indian tradition, so that it has the capacity of asserting itself when the situation becomes too serious, as is shown by the rise of Mahatma Gandhi during the Independence movement. Of course, it is uncertain whether this type of politics will re-emerge. However, if it does, it will stabilize the political system, by restraining political behavior and purifying the political process.

Pastoral areas of the People’s Republic of China, such as Inner Mongolia Uighur and Tibet, have suffered serious rangeland degradation since the 1980s due to overgrazing. Therefore, the Chinese government has extended the Household Responsibility System to rangeland as well as crop fields. This study aims to show some patterns of alpine pastoralism at the village and household level, and to discuss “privatization” of rangeland in the alpine environment. Field survey was conducted in two Tibetan villages, of Shanggelila county, northwest Yunnan province.

Three kinds of bovine livestock are raised, and these are classified into two types according to how they are fed: as part of mixed farming or by mobile pastoralism. The former type is connected with crop fields by supplying manure and plowing, and is essential for every household. The latter is selectively raised in roughly half of all households. Winter grazing methods are different between two villages: the herd is left in mountain pasture in Wengshang village and grazed around the settlement in Hompo village. Alpine pastoralism presents several patterns on the basis of agro-pastoral linkage, and rangeland would have a different value in each case. In considering the privatization of rangeland, it is necessary to grasp the diverse form of alpine pastoralism.

The collapse of Suharto’s New Order regime led to vast socio-political changes in Indonesia, and the political slogan of “regional autonomy” became, and remains, one of the most important keywords characterizing the post-Suharto era.

This paper analyzes some provisional results of the ongoing decentralization policies of the domestic government system and the accompanying changes at the provincial, district and village levels. The first section summarizes the structural and financial changes in provincial and district government which took place in the first year of the enforcement of the two laws formulated under the new regional autonomy plan, presenting and analyzing data from the Bali provincial office and the Gianyar district office. The second section presents a comparison of the national and district regulations (of Gianyar in Bali and of Agam in West Sumatra) on the new village government system, and discusses the expected progress in village level democracy. The third section focuses on the Balinese traditional village system, which needs to be restructured in accordance with the newly established village government. The final section discusses the ongoing process of democratization of traditional village administration in the broader context of modernization.

In recent studies in anthropology and sociology, static viewpoints are often criticized or rejected. An unfortunate result of this is that, in the fields of environmental issues, sound and realistic goals like sustaining stable conditions are sometimes rejected. However, static vs. dynamic viewpoints depend merely on the temporal and spatial scales of the phenomena treated. Thus, static viewpoints should not always be rejected, but appropriate viewpoints must be chosen depending on scales. The very famous and frequently cited paper by Scoones [1999] states that as static viewpoints had been rejected in ecology (he calls it “new ecology”), social sciences concerned with environments should also be reformed. As he noted, there was a dispute between older equilibrium theories and newer non-equilibrium theories in the field of ecology in 1970s-80s. However, this dispute centered simply on the ranges of temporal and spatial scales in which equilibrium models can remain effective. Scoones and a number of authors referring to his paper seem to misunderstand that equilibrium ecological theories are totally rejected through the equilibrium vs. non-equilibrium dispute. Here, I introduce some examples in which ecological theories have contributed to the progress of environmental anthropology. In these examples, contrary to Scoones’s opinion, equilibrium ecological theories were useful to understand the reasons and processes of transformation of socio-environmental conditions, not only the maintenance mechanisms of stable statuses.

Tawada Hiroshi

Toshihiro Nobuta. Living on the Periphery: Development and Islamization among the Orang Asli of Malaysia. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2004, viii+472 p.

Katsuki Toshitaka

Koichi Fujita. Rural Development and Changing Class Structure in Bangladesh. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2005, iii+287 p.

Ogawa Sayaka

Misa Nomoto. The Ethnography of African Urban Society: Money and Home-village for “Commercial People” Bamiléké, Cameroon. Tokyo: Akashi Shoten, 2005, 310 p.

Onodera Yuki

Remained Small Forests in Northeast Thailand

Ogawa Hisashi

The Sumatra Tsunami and Social Change: Present, Future of Fishing Village in Southern Thailand

Ishizaka Shinya

The Last Inhabitant Gandhian of the Submerging Town, Tehri, India