[
    {
        "id": 214790,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
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        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 205,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "170\n\nplace, with a hearty lack of nostalgic longings for ancestral roots - yet the sentimental or strategic nostalgia of overseas Chinese for their ancestral homes in China has also been well documented and described.1\n\nNostalgia is of course now commodified, fragmented and eclectic, as befits a late capitalist era in which global capital determines shifting allocations of labour. Nostalgia, and pastiche of the past, is almost commonplace, and through what was called the 'post-modern' eclectically mixes emblems of diverse eras of the past to provoke a momentary pang. The irony of Flagstaff House's transformation from a military site to a tea museum, noted by Abbas (1997), is a good example of this post-modern bricolage of meanings and historical ironies typified by Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (Harvey 1989), which we can find too in the toothless attendants and bright paints of restored Colonial Williamsburg (Lowenthal 1985), or the imaginary nostalgia of Disneyland disguising the unreality of America itself (Baudrillard 1994). But here I should like to draw attention to the importance of nostalgia as, if you like, a strategic resource for knitting together communities which have become dispersed and fragmented.\n\nWhile nostalgia adopts a temporal form (nostalgia for the past), it essentially implies the sense of belonging to a place (nostalgia for a place), as in its etymological roots. Can there be nostalgia for a taste, a face, an experience of abandon, a vanished emotion or capacity? Of course there can, but these experiences are all associated with a particular locus, a particular time and place (in the past). That place may never have existed, as writers from Lowenthal and Lovell to Mitchell remark, or not have existed for those who pine for it; the remembered, longed-for experience may be purely fictive and imaginative. Then again, it may have been very much a reality the loss of which is regretted; it was a real, living community we mourn the passage of. In any case, through the power of memory and recollection, that experience, that community, that place, can hardly be recollected exactly as it was, so that there is an inevitably imaginative, fictive quality to the faculty or power of nostalgia.\n\nIn one sense, it may not matter very much whether the lost object was, or was not, a reality, since that reality will have been transformed through the nostalgic recollection of it. Yet, in another sense, it does matter that not all nostalgia is necessarily imaginary; that real separations, real partings, may be what are being mourned.",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
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    {
        "id": 214799,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 214,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "179\n\nor blanket answers to questions posed in such a general way, but although the post-moderns have denied their validity ('Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces the 'real' symptoms?' asked Baudrillard, 1994), yet it is important I think to consider them. For these questions go to the heart of the relationships between culture and the polity, between modernism and modernity, between culture and society, between even the ethos's of the romantic and the puritan, the romantic and the rationalist - that is, to the analysis of modern culture and its relation with the social polity, addressed in such different ways by Daniel Bell (1976), Colin Campbell (1987) and Daniel Miller (1987).\n\nBut what I should like to do in Conclusion is to trace a little further some of these questions about the nature of communities, and nations, which the foregoing reflections and materials must inevitably provoke.\n\nFor in a sense it is with notions of the community that anthropology starts.\n\nAnd here our models of what the Imagination is and how it works prove crucial.\n\nThe primal community, you will remember, was seen by Morgan, Maine and others as a body of people related to each other by bonds of blood who lived in one place and met daily, on a face-to-face basis. There was no occupational specialisation or division of labour (of the kind later emphasised by Durkheim) in this kind of community because everyone produced, no rationalisation of common goals. This kind of, familiar, community was contrasted by Tonnies (1887) to a society, or association (Gesellschaft); in the latter you might not know personally other members of your group; occupational specialisation had occurred and people came together on the basis of common interests;\n\nyou related to a man as a baker or candlestick-maker rather than as your MB, and one baker or candlestick-maker could be substituted for by another. On that simple binary transition from 'status' to 'contract', to use Maine's (1861) terms, which also contrasted ties based on blood to those of territory, a whole edifice of social science was constructed. The isolation of anthropology from both history and psychology during the middle years of the last century perhaps accounted for why rethinkings of this paradigm did not occur much earlier. Indeed, while",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
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    },
    {
        "id": 214801,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1999",
        "page_number": 216,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "181\n\nREFERENCES\n\nAbbas, M Akbar 1997 Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press.\n\nAgamben, Giorgio 1998 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford. Stanford University Press.\n\nAnderson, Benedict 1994 'Exodus' Critical Inquiry 20.2. 314-27 Winter\n\n1983 (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London. Verso Editions.\n\nBahloul, J 1996 The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937-1962. Cambridge and New York. Cambridge University Press.\n\nBaker, Hugh 1984 'Life in the Cities: the Emergence of Hong Kong Man'. The China Quarterly (467-79).\n\nBaudelaire, Charles 1863 (1981) Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.\n\nBaudrillard, Jean 1994 Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor. University of Michigan.\n\nBell, Daniel 1976 The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York. Basic Books.\n\nCampbell, Colin 1987 The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford and Cambridge (Mass). Basil Blackwell.\n\nChambers, Iain 1994 Migrancy, Culture, Identity. London, Routledge.\n\nChan Hoi-man 1994 'Culture and Identity' in The Other Hong Kong, ed. P. Choi and L.S. Ho. Hong Kong. The Chinese University of Hong Kong.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
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