1. Tahitian villages are only one kind of "simple traditional community." Like many other Polynesian communities, they are characterized by a relative self-sufficiency and a location in isolated undifferentiated aggregates of almost identical communities. Simple or, as they were once characterized, "primitive" communities elsewhere, such as those of Melanesia, which are embedded in complex areal relations with dissimilar communities, seem to have as a function of this areal complexity some of the same sorts of cultural and psychological differences from Tahitian villages, in both epistemology and the uses of symbolic forms, that Bhaktapur does. [BACK]

2. In chapter 17, we will discuss the problem of what "religious" means in relation to Bhaktapur. [BACK]

3. In addition, there are a centrally important series of performances in the city's neighborhoods by a major set of embodied deities, the Nine Durgas, which are partially determined by the lunar calendar and days of the week. There are twenty-one of these performances. [BACK]

4. Toffin (1984, 271) makes use of a similar characterization of "city" by Braudel (1967, 370) to support his definition of another Newar Valley community, Panauti, as a city. [BACK]

5. This distinction between "intelligentsia" and "literati," is, as we will suggest later in this volume and elsewhere, of considerable importance in the characterization of Bhaktapur's public and personal order. [BACK]

6. Some modern scholars, noting its disregard of the work of Fustel's own contemporaries, its cavalier use of his sources, and the untrustworthiness of its conclusions on Fustel's own evidence, have treated La Cité Antique mostly as an interesting and influential event in the history of ideas (Momigliano, 1977: Fustel de Coulanges 1980, preface; Finley 1977). Finley (p. 314) criticized Fustel, whose subsequent work he greatly admired, for replacing "the mode of subsistence by religion as the focus of attention and the key to the formation and change of institutions" in this study. [BACK]

7. J. C. Heesterman (1985) argues that India had its "axial breakthrough" even before the heterodox challenges in Vedic ritualism which was "unmythical, rational and individualistic" (see also Inden's [1986] review and criticism of this argument). Yet, it was, as Heesterman says in an aside, Buddhism with its legitimation of the universalistic imperial claims of the Mauryas that had an impact on the mundane order. The impact of Buddism in India was historically limited and countervailed by a developing Hinduism. It is the relation of "transcendence" to forms of mundane order, and not to elements of ritual order, which concerns us here. [BACK]

8. "With the modern knowledge . . . of the major role played by symbolic systems in shaping the individual understanding and, indeed, in shaping the very perception or cognition of the subject's world . . . [the problem of the relation of individuals to social action] becomes the problem of the relationship between individual (or group) interpretations of events in the light of a collective or encompassing symbolic code; and the problem now goes to the heart of our understanding of belief and symbols: in a word, culture" (from the introduction to a collect, on of readings on "symbolic anthropology" by Dolgin, Kemnitzer, and Schneider [1977, 16]). [BACK]

9. The Tantric and Vajrayana Buddhism of the Himalayas also functions in the support of archaic cities. This Buddhism is, in fact, a regressive Buddhism from the viewpoint of the transcendence of the "axial age" and is in its structure thoroughly Hindu. In its Newar form it has castes, married hereditary priests and no renouncers of society, and a pantheon of gods who are involved with special segments of space, time, and social structure—in short, all the immanent structures of the Hinduism of the city. [BACK]

10. I (R. L.) am indebted to Antony Hooper (1975) for pointing out this indispensable phrasing for the problem of the conception and actualities of "self" and "role," ''personality" and "culture" in psychological anthropology. [BACK]

11. As the matter of "self" has a bearing on our argument about Bhaktapur's peculiarities, some further remarks may be useful here. Tahitian response to the peculiar question from an interviewer who has known him or her for a long time, "Who are you?," is puzzlement at the question. If an answer is given, it is usually the person's name. The same question asked of a Newar is very liable to elicit an elaborate and self-conscious discussion. Newar informants sometimes said that the question of self or identity was an interesting problem for them and that they had discussed it with their friends. They characteristically define themselves discursively in terms of relationships, occupation, and descent, in terms of sometimes conflicting definitions that various segments of society hold about them, all in motion and dependent on context. As one respondent put it, "There is a saying in the Gita, I do not know it by heart, the verse where Krsna^{[ *]} talked to Arjuna, but I understand the meaning of what he said. He said that he [Krsna^{[ *]} ] was everything other. And so, to a great extent, it seems that I am everything other also, because whenever I cook, I am a cook; whenever I love some girl, I am a lover; whenever I have a son or a daughter, I am a parent, I am a father; whenever I am with my father, I am a son; whenever I am alone with a friend, I am a friend; whenever I am with foes, I am an enemy." Self in such examples is treated as a problem, a problem which generates discourse, a problem that has something to do with a multitude of situations and roles. In this example the "solution" to the problem, namely, ''I am everything other," is taken from a literary-religious text in the Hindu canon, from the available universe of marked symbolic resources, in this case the "extraordinary" conversation between the god Krsna^{[ *]} and Arjuna. [BACK]

12. The differences in the experiences of mature Tahitian villagers and Bhaktapur's citizens are augmented by great systematic differences in the household experiences and education of children in the two places, as well as by cultural doctrines such as maya . [BACK]

13. The studies of individuals chosen from all ranks of the status system that we will present elsewhere all show the intellectual ferment generated by their understanding of contrasting urban perspectives. [BACK]