Seeking to transcend the hoary insistence on East-West dichotomies, this collection looks for transformations in cultural and political organization across Eurasia that were both more general and more psychologically significant to pre-1830 actors themselves than the problem that has obsessed twentieth-century comparativists, namely, the origins of a unique European industrialism. Specifically, it contains nine coordinated essays which explore the proposition that the integration of isolated units to form more cohesive systems in France, Russia, and other European countries ca 1000-1830 corresponds in important respects to integrative processes in parts of Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Japan.
The collaborators of this project show, in varying degrees, that political centralization in these areas reflected and inspired the creation of vernacular literatures at the expense of more universal languages. They illustrate that societies in widely separated areas, with no obvious links, became more literate, mobile, specialized, and commercial at roughly the same time. And they point out that administrative development in many of these same areas showed curiously synchronized cycles. Finally, having defined Eurasian parallels and sketched their limits, they push on to explore the underlying dynamics of these discoveries, scrutinizing the role of guns, global climate, markets, new information networks, institutional pressures, and sixteenth-century messianism.
Insofar as similarities between some European and Asian areas exceeded those between different sectors of Asia, this collection invites historians to reject continental perspectives in favor of more thematic, contextually-specific categories. But at the same time, it raises the possibility of a broad "early modern" period for Eurasia at large.
The contributors are Mary Elizabeth Berry (University of California, Berkeley), Peter Carey (University of Oxford), James B. Collins (Georgetown University), Valerie Kivelson (University of Michigan), R. I. Moore (University of Newcastle upon Tyne), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris), John K. Whitemore (University of Michigan), and David K. Wyatt (Cornell University).

"This is not only a new philology but a new American linguistic philology. . . . Becker's harvest over a lifetime will be widely welcomed and respected." -Paul Friedrich, University of Chicago

". . . a book of extraordinary quality and importance." -James Boyd White, University of Michigan

How does Ralph Waldo Emerson sound in Kawi?

In this collection of essays A. L. Becker develops a new approach to translation he calls modern philology, an approach that insists, beyond translation, on the sorting out of ambiguities and contexts of meaning. Becker describes how texts in Burmese, Javanese, and Malay differ profoundly from English in all the ways they have meaning: in the games they play, the worlds they constitute, the memories they evoke, and the silences they maintain. In each of these dimensions there are excesses and inadequacies of meaning that make a difference across languages.

Drawn from over three decades of studying, teaching, translating and writing about Southeast Asian languages and literatures, the essays collected here for the first time are particular accounts of Becker's experiences in attempting to translate into or out of Burmese, Javanese, and Malay a variety of texts. They describe such things as the building of a Javanese shadowplay, how a Sanskrit story about the language of animals has been used in Indonesia, and some of the profound semantic silences a translator faces in taking an anecdote by Gregory Bateson from English into Malay.

In linguistics, the essays emphasize important kinds of nonuniversality in all aspects of language and look toward a new theory of language grounded in American pragmatism. In anthropology, the essays demonstrate that much of culture can be described in terms of text-building strategies. And for the comparativist, whether in literature, history, rhetoric, music, or psychology, the essays provide a new array of tools of comparison across distant languages and cultures.

A. L. Becker is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology, University of Michigan.

When the Mahabharata and Ramayana are performed in South and Southeast Asia, audiences may witness a variety of styles. A single performer may deliver a two-hour recitation, women may meet in informal singing groups, shaddow puppets may host an all-night play, or professional theaters may put on productions lasting thirty nights. Performances often celebrate ritual passages: births, deaths, marriages, and religious observances. The stories live and are transmitted through performance; their characters are well known and well loved.

Yet written versions of the Mahabharata and Ramayana have existed in both South and Southeast Asia for hundreds of years. Rarely have these texts been intended for private reading. What is the relationship between written text and oral performance? What do performers and audiences mean when they identify something as “Ramayana” or “Mahabharata”? How do they conceive of texts? What are the boundaries of the texts?

By analyzing specific performance traditions, Boundaries of the Text addresses questions of what happens to written texts when they are preformed and how performance traditions are affected when they interact with written texts. The dynamics of this interaction are of particular interest in South and Southeast Asia where oral performance and written traditions share a long, interwoven history. The contributors to Boundaries of the Text show the difficulty of maintaining sharp distinctions between oral and written patterns, as the traditions they consider defy a unidirectional movement from oral to written. The boundaries of epic traditions are in a state of flux, contracting or expanding as South and Southeast Asian societies respond to increasing access to modern education, print technology, and electronic media.