PERSISTENCE & PRESERVATION OF HAKKA CULTURE
43
create its own institutions for social control, worship, recreation and the management of external relations.
Freedman (1960: 35; 1961:479) held a similar viewpoint, but adopted an active evolutionary perspective. Using the Chinese communities in Sarawak and Singapore as two poles of a continuum, he argued that when the scale and complexity of the society increase, the associations which, in small-scale and relatively undeveloped settlements express social, economic, and political links in an undifferentiated form, lend to diverge into networks of associations which are comparatively specialized in their functions and the kinds of solidarity they express. Kerri even hypothesized that, with increasing modernization, industrialization, and urbanization, and the concomitant large-scale rural-urban migrations, kinship and territorial ties are no longer effective means for the organization of new social groups or the reorganization of existing ones (Kerri, 1976:23).
Considering the data obtained in this survey, I find that some of the ideas discussed in these researches are disputable and not applicable to the present study. My arguments may be summarized as follows:
1. In contrast to the associations created by West Africans as "civilizing" enterprises inculcating Western standards of dress and manners (Little, 1965:85), the Waichow Hakka associations, which perform social, political, economic, cultural, and recreational services to assist their members in adapting to modern urban situations, were established and have endured to date by observing traditional organizing principles. In other words, rather than constituting a "civilizing" agency for modernization, they are a mechanism for perpetuating and preserving Hakka tradition and culture.
2. In any society, the possibility of migration taking place by whole villages or clans is slight. Moreover, when the migrants arrive in an urban situation, rapid socio-cultural change further weakens the remaining precarious kinship ties and locality ties of the immigrants. This is why Kerri (1976:23) says that kinship and locality are no longer effective means for organizing associations in modern society. However, Kerri seems unaware of the existence of significant differences between the abstract concept and the true relationships of kinship and locality. For instance, a Chinese may
Page 75
Page 76