165
POST-COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
LOCAL IDENTITIES AND VIRTUAL NATIONALITY IN THE HONG KONG-CHINA REGION
NICHOLAS TAPP
I’d like to start with a bow in the direction of Barbara Ward, who I’ve always regretted just missing being supervised by.1 Barbara Ward pioneered local anthropological studies of Hong Kong, in the sense that she lived here, she worked here, and she undertook intensive field-work among the fishing and other communities of Hong Kong. Many here were her friends, and many will remember her. But what was the importance of her work, to Hong Kong, and to anthropologists today?
Anthropology used to be thought of as the intensive study of small-scale ‘traditional’ communities. Since the days when Maine (1971) foregrounded the importance of territory by tracing the transition from blood to soil as the basis of social evolution and Morgan (1877) talked of the transition from kinship to territory, anthropologists have specialised in localities, local situations and local identities, and their relations to even more primary kinship groupings. And certainly Barbara Ward’s work contributed to this aspect of traditional anthropology. But at the same time, and really since the beginnings of modern anthropology with Malinowski’s (1945) work on colonialism, anthropologists have also sought to understand the encounters between different cultures; culture-contact, social change and the modernization process.2 So there has been a constant struggle to depict the local communities, whom anthropologists so intensively studied, in terms of wider social, cultural, political or economic frameworks. Here Barbara Ward’s work was critical in the Hong Kong context, for she showed us the fishing people, so often thought of as a community apart, feeling and representing themselves as members of a much wider, ‘Chinese’ society, of which they felt very much a part (Ward 1965).3 The idea of a merely local community, then, somewhere between the family and a society, had to be revised, restructured, to take account of this sense of belonging to a far wider, more dispersed, social category associated with a nation-state.4
Another great contributor to studies of Hong Kong has been Professor James Watson, and his own work can be seen as having taken
165
POST-COLONIAL ANTHROPOLOGY:
LOCAL IDENTITIES AND VIRTUAL NATIONALITY IN THE HONG KONG-CHINA REGION
NICHOLAS TAPP
I'd like to start with a bow in the direction of Barbara Ward, who I've always regretted just missing being supervised by.' Barbara Ward pioneered local anthropological studies of Hong Kong, in the sense that she lived here, she worked here, and she undertook intensive field- work among the fishing and other communities of Hong Kong. Many here were her friends, and many will remember her. But what was the importance of her work, to Hong Kong, and to anthropologists today?
Anthropology used to be thought of as the intensive study of small- scale 'traditional' communities. Since the days when Maine (1971) foregrounded the importance of territory by tracing the transition from blood to soil as the basis of social evolution and Morgan (1877) talked of the transition from kinship to territory, anthropologists have specialised in localities, local situations and local identities, and their relations to even more primary kinship groupings. And certainly Bar- bara Ward's work contributed to this aspect of traditional anthropology. But at the same time, and really since the beginnings of modern an- thropology with Malinowski's (1945) work on colonialism, anthropolo- gists have also sought to understand the encounters between different cultures; culture-contact, social change and the modernization process.2 So there has been a constant struggle to depict the local communities, whom anthropologists so intensively studied, in terms of wider social, cultural, political or economic frameworks. Here Barbara Ward's work was critical in the Hong Kong context, for she showed us the fishing people, so often thought of as a community apart, feeling and repre- senting themselves as members of a much wider, 'Chinese' society, of which they felt very much a part (Ward 1965),3 The idea of a merely local community, then, somewhere between the family and a society, had to be revised, restructured, to take account of this sense of belong- ing to a far wider, more dispersed, social category associated with a nation-state.“
Another great contributor to studies of Hong Kong has been Pro- fessor James Watson, and his own work can be seen as having taken
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