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The same lack of distinction as to subject matter was true of China itself up to 1949. You will remember that in all Fei Hsiao-t'ung's early work he called himself an anthropologist. It was only after 1949, under Russian influence, that a kind of division of labour appeared in China between the sociologists who studied the Han Chinese and the anthropologists who studied the National Minorities. Such a distinction is not made in the scholarly tradition in which I was trained. For us, both anthropologists and sociologists are ready to study any human society. It follows—and this is the first point I want to make clear to you—that social anthropology is not concerned merely with quaint folkways and curious old-fashioned customs from the past, as it is sometimes thought to be: it deals with the whole of human life and with all kinds of human life as well.
At this stage you may well be wondering what this discussion of a rather specialised point about academic boundaries has to do with the cultural heritage of the New Territories? The answer is almost everything, for it is a fact that the great bulk of scholarly social scientific research and writing about the New Territories has been done by social anthropologists. So the next point I want to try to make clear to you is exactly why and in what ways this fact has been both fortunate and important, and will, I hope, continue to be so.
I have just said that the major differences between sociology and social anthropology, as we see it, lie in their different methods and approaches. It is the latter, the approaches, that are really crucial. In methods, each subject steals from the other, but in approach they remain different. This is not the place to expatiate on this point; I shall just ask you to accept that social anthropological approach includes at least the following three points: (1) One tries always to see the society one is studying in the round; as a whole. (2) One is as much interested in the people's ideas and ways of thinking as in their societal organisation and behaviour. This means that in addition to analysing their social and economic arrangements (and usually also their material culture and technology) one has to be interested in their language(s), their values, their ideas about their own history and society, and the meaning of the symbols with which they operate—which last involves one in studying, among other things, their religion and the philosophical and cosmological ideas upon which they base their suppositions about the
SOCIAL & CULTURAL HERITAGE IN n.t.
117
The same lack of distinction as to subject matter was true of China itself up to 1949. You will remember that in all Fei Hsiao- t'ung's early work he called himself an anthropologist. It was only after 1949, under Russian influence, that a kind of division of labour appeared in China between the sociologists who studied the Han Chinese and the anthropologists who studied the National Minorities. Such a distinction is not made in the scholarly tradition in which I was trained. For us, both anthropologists and sociolo- gists are ready to study any human society. It follows-and this is the first point I want to make clear to you—that social anthro- pology is not concerned merely with quaint folkways and curious old-fashioned customs from the past, as it is sometimes thought to be: it deals with the whole of human life and with all kinds of
human life as well.
At this stage you may well be wondering what this discussion of a rather specialised point about academic boundaries has to do with the cultural heritage of the New Territories? The answer is almost everything, for it is a fact that the great bulk of scholarly social scientific research and writing about the New Territories has been done by social anthropologists. So the next point I want to try to make clear to you is exactly why and in what ways this fact has been both fortunate and important, and will, I hope, continue to be so.
I have just said that the major differences between sociology and social an hropology, as we see it, lie in their different methods and approaches. It is the latter the approaches that are really curcial. In methods each subject steals from the other, but in approach they remain different. This is not the place to expatiate on this point; I shall just ask you to accept that social anthropolo- gical approach includes at least the following three points as (1) One tries always to see the society one is studying in the round; as a whole. (2) One is as much interested in the people's ideas and ways of thinking as in their societal organisation and behaviour. This means that in addition to analysing their social and economic arrangements (and usually also their material culture and technology) one has to be interested in their language(s), their values, their ideas about their own history and society, and the meaning of the sym- bols with which they operate — which last involves one in studying, among other things, their religion and the philosophical and cosmo- logical ideas upon which they base their suppositions about the
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