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very nature of modernity, when one thinks of the fathers of modern anthropology who from the turn of the last century fled their modernising societies to search out and to prioritise, quintessential local communities whose traditions might be shown to be unchanging and invariant.
And there is a deep nostalgia involved in this, a sense of the loss of the original referent, a separation from a source, which some have compared to those complex processes in which a child establishes a separate identity in relation to a maternal other. I'd intended to talk at this point about the historical role of the Hong Kong Anthropological Society, and its changing role in a post-colonial Hong Kong - but I am not sure that I dare. Let me just point out, as others have, that an interest in local traditions and customary folklore, local history and identity, is nothing very new. Certainly since the late Victorian era the informed interest in archaeological excavation of local pasts became embodied in a variety of academic societies, learned journals and individual scholarly activities; my own grandfather wrote several monographs on the local history of Surrey after a career as cavalry officer and stockbroker, when he was not collecting lepidoptera for the Museum of Natural History. But there were more serious impulses behind this obsessive curiosity about the past, the local and the quaint, which in Hong Kong one can also see reflected in the learned activities of the Royal Asiatic Society.
In regard to the Middle East it was these sorts of scholarly activities which Edward Said labelled 'Orientalism,' suggesting that considered as a whole they depicted an imaginary, passive Orient in such a way as to rob it of its own powers of self-representation, its own agency, or 'voice', and in this sense were in collusion with the colonial enterprise (Said 1978). While a mute Hong Kong may be a little difficult to imagine, we must remember that this has not always been so. For many years people regretted the apparent lack of political participation by the people of Hong Kong, and this was of course at a time when, under an authoritarian colonial administration, scholarly inquiries were taking place into the local traditions and customs of Hong Kong and its neighbouring regions. Chiu (1997) shows how this lack of political participation was largely an ideological effect achieved through the works of certain local social scientists which reflected colonial interests, yet he also charts a real muteness resulting from this. It was Said who,