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MAURICE FREEDMAN
(as I hope it will be) of the relations between a market town and its surrounding villages, then there will be in the course of it the opportunity to see how local leaders acting in concert may attempt to deal with disputes brought to them.
47. I turn now to a different subject. Fung shui is very much in the administrator's mind and I was pleased to have my own growing interest in Chinese geomancy reinforced by the interest shown by the District Officers. I should explain that before I began my survey in the New Territories I had not dealt with fung shui as a field problem and that the only analysis I had made of it from the literature was concerned with the significance of quarrels over grave sites. (My Lineage Organization deals briefly with this matter at pp. 77f.) I had therefore much to learn while I was in the New Territories and there remain many points I have yet to study. The following account, as a result, is an exploration and only the beginning of an analysis.
48. I shall open the discussion with a bald statement that any view of the situation is misguided which starts from the assumption that the inhabitants of the New Territories are parties to a great cynical conspiracy seeking to exploit the tender concern of the Administration for the religious susceptibilities of its charges. This is a view held by many city people who, in a mixture of envy and condescension, gaze on their country cousins from afar, and by some outsiders in the New Territories whose distance from the local people is to be measured socially and not in miles. True, the Administration has shown itself to be zealous in the protection of Chinese religion (and more tolerant of it than the preceding Chinese regime, whose officials were required to suppress unorthodoxy); and there are undoubtedly cases where a government with a less tender attitude might with impunity have overridden geomantic objections which, in the event, have cost the Administration time, annoyance, and money. But in fact the success of many country people in getting their way in fung shui matters has necessarily rested on their belief in it; for were people to be generally cynical the system of action could not go on unchanged. There are sceptics, some of whom may behave as though they were not in order to benefit from the rewards for belief. I have already suggested that Village Representatives may disbelieve in the validity of their constituents' claims and yet press them for political reasons. On the other hand, it is not always easy to be sure that the expression