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this process of widening traditional understandings of the nature of local communities a step further. For his work on the 'Man' lineage of the 'New Territories' of Hong Kong, showed this historically and territorially rooted lineage, one of the 'Five Great Clans' of the New Territories, importantly uprooted under the colonial impact and partially re-established in London where younger male lineage members sojourned in the Chinese restaurant business before returning to their ancestral, 'local' homes (Watson 1975). The work was important at the time in modifying the Freedmanesque 'lineage paradigm' and showing that the maintenance of lineage structure did not always depend on the ownership of landed property. This lineage was, then, hardly to be considered as forming a 'local community' at all; its 'localisation' depended essentially on what we have now come to understand as its 'globalisation'. And I shall return to this crucial relationship of localisation with globalisation.
But Watson's work was important in another way too, for at a relatively early time drawing attention to processes which have been famously entitled the ‘invention of tradition.' My own favourite example of this is the historian Trevor-Roper's account of the invention of the Highland tradition of Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries out of a very uncertain history, complete with tartans, kilt, bagpipes and all. This sort of work, of which there has been much, reminds us of what has now become a fashionable view; that culture is not something static or stereotypical, inherited en bloc from the past and transmitted from generation to generation unchanged. Culture is something we are constantly reinventing at every moment, reinventing and recreating; it is something which we do and which in a sense we produce, and it is, therefore, always and constantly changing and in transformation, never still but ceaselessly metamorphosing (cf. Evans and Tam 1997).
Modernity itself has indeed been defined in precisely these terms - as 'the transient, the fleeting, the contingent" - and it spawns from within itself, from within its restless malleability, the fierce desire for origins, for traditions which are fixed and unchanging, for that unchanging, original point of authenticity from which change departs and against which it can be measured; the essential, the originary, the authentic and the typical. Anthropology can be seen as very much a product of this search for essential origins which emerges from the