SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE N.T. OF HONG KONG, 1963 259
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tinues to break up and industrialisation increases, marriage will move more and more into a 'modern' form.
There is little need to multiply points. A general study of family and marriage ought to be made; it should try to encompass as many different social settings as possible and trace out the changes which are to be expected in the control of children, the support of the aged, polygamy, accumulation of capital within the family, household budgeting, and so on. The study will call for both intensive enquiries and observations and extensive surveys (especially in respect of such matters as family structure and domestic economics).
99. I write as an anthropologist. This fact broadly limits the kinds of problem I have chosen to discuss as well as the methods of research I have so far taken into account. I should like partly to redress the balance by making it clear that I think that other kinds of social scientists ought also to be at work in the New Territories: sociologists, economists, and social geographers, at the very least. (I should have included demographers in this list had it not been that since his completion of the work on the 1961 Census Mr. Barnett has continued to interest himself in statistical questions and that further official studies of population seem likely). Some large-scale enquiries, involving careful sampling and the construction of complex questionnaires—for example, in the fields of education, social mobility, and housing—are necessary; these are matters which must rely on the techniques with which the sociologist is equipped. The field economist (as distinct from the man whose raw data are somebody else's statistics and facts) would be desirable in the study of those economic questions which, because they call for skill in handling technical matters (as in the investigation of business and complex financial affairs) may be too difficult for the all-round social scientist—which is what most anthropologists aim to be. The case for the social geographer is very easy to make: whether in agriculture or industry, the use of land and the relations of society to it are crucial subjects.
But these are my (summary) views, and sociologists, economists, and geographers must of course be left to speak for themselves.
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100. I come now to what I may call a plea rather than a recommendation. It involves taking a point of view which may be quite at variance with the spirit of the times in the New Territories. They and their inhabitants are so busy moving into a new era that the monuments of their past have little meaning for them. Documents