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are confused with those of the interviewed. But these are more methodological problems which should not be blamed on the students
Highly related to, and probably more appropriate if included in the religion section are the reports on offerings used in religious worship and on yu lan jie (ghost festival). The strength of these two reports is that they have made better use of field investigation to complement library material to reconstruct the historical development of their topics. The students who wrote on yu lan jie, for example, compare the Buddhist and Taoist versions of the festival by attending each of the occasions and plotting the similarities and differences, in terms of the administration, the main rites and the problems faced due to social change. The report on the manufacture of offerings, though grouped with two other reports on “traditional occupations", comes up with a list of the kinds of incense, candles, and paper goods involved in worship of different deities, as well as a tabulation of the frequencies of domestic worship of selected deities among members of a secondary school, reflecting the pervasiveness of popular religion.
Many of the reports in the book follow a similar line of treatment. They emphasize structural descriptions, delineating specific historical events. How individuals respond to these events and how they conduct themselves in these situations are not known. The report entitled "The Eighteen-day Nightmare” on the half-hearted and short defence in Hong Kong against Japanese invasion in December 1941, for instance, uses a lot of space listing military maneuvers and explaining their significance. As a report on "the nightmare", however, it should be talking more about the lives of different sectors of society during this particular period. Similarly, this is a weakness for two reports that deal with remnants of Qing Dynasty in Hong Kong. One plots the marine defence facilities along the coast of Hong Kong, while the other describes the village schools scattered in different heungs of Yuen Long. The schools and forts were painstakingly visited and their physical layout recorded, but the reports only manage to preserve what existed in the past, and fall short of reliving what happened. If the reports put social actors in their specific historical contexts and let them speak for themselves, they will add life to the historical events, demonstrating the dynamics among social actors as individuals as well as social groups, and paint a more complete picture of the history and culture of Hong Kong.
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are confused with those of the interviewed. But these are more methodological problems which should not be blamed on the students
Highly related to, and probably more appropriate if included in the religion section are the reports on offerings used in religious worship and on yu lan jie (ghost festival). The strength of these two reports is that they have made better use of field investigation to complement library material to reconstruct the historical development of their topics. The students who wrote on yu lan jie, for example, compare the Buddhist and Taoist versions of the festival by attending each of the occasions and plotting the similarities and differences, in terms of the administration, the main rites and the problems faced due to social change. The report on the manufacture of offerings, though grouped with two other reports on “traditional occupations", comes up with a list of the kinds of incense, candles, and paper goods involved in worship of different deities, as well as a tabulation of the frequencies of domestic worship of selected dieties among members of a secondary school, reflecting the pervasiveness of popular religion.
Many of the reports in the book follow a similar line of treatment. They emphasize structural descriptions, delineating specific historical events. How individuals respond to these events and how they conduct themselves in these situations are not known. The report entitled "The Eighteen-day Nightmare” on the half-hearted and short defence in Hong Kong against Japanese invasion in December 1941, for instance, uses a lot of space listing military maneouvers and explaining their significance. As a report on "the nightmare", however, it should be talking more about the lives of different sectors of society during this particular period. Similarly, this is a weakness for two reports that deal with remnants of Qing Dynasty in Hong Kong. One plots the marine defence facilities along the coast of Hong Kong, while the other describes the village schools scattered in different heungs of Yuen Long. The schools and forts were painstakingly visited and their physical layout recorded, but the reports only manage to preserve what existed in the past, and fall short of reliving what happened. If the reports put social actors in their specific historical contexts and let them speak for themselves, they will add life to the historical events, demonstrating the dynamics among social actors as individuals as well as social groups, and paint a more complete picture of the history and culture of Hong Kong.
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