[
    {
        "id": 214788,
        "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": 203,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "168\n\nfollowing Foucault, raised such questions of the interlocking of forms of knowledge, with forms of power, and it is worth reflecting on this discursive power a little in the Hong Kong context, and the formation of 'post-colonial subjects' in Hong Kong.\n\nI cannot at all agree with Abbas' (1997) strange claim that the invention of the Hong Kong subject took place in a cultural 'space of disappearance' or 'disappearing space', nor with his remarks that Hong Kong had no pre-colonial history to speak of or was until recently a 'cultural desert', nor generally that Hong Kong occupies a unique position in the history of colonialism when we think of the range of differences and unique situations that colonialism has brought about. Nor does Chan Hoi-Man's deeply conservative critique of Hong Kong's 'lack of a unifying cultural foundation' or 'hegemonic foundation of high culture' work very well when one thinks (in Gramscian terms) of the alliance of hegemonic interests represented by British and (mainland) Chinese cultures (Chan 1994).\n12 Rozanna Lilley's (1998) argument that the 'muting of local identity' in Hong Kong in the past was achieved with reference to two master narratives, those of Chinese and European history, seems to me far more to the point. And it is precisely from these sorts of colonialist disjuncture that strong senses of local identity eventually emerge. Evans and Tam (1997) trace the history of the interest in the emergence of a particular Hong Kong sense of identity, from Baker (1984) to Wong Siu-lun (1986) and Lau and Kuan (1988). Guldin's pioneering work on ethnicity also stressed the significance of a 'Hong Kong' identity (Guldin 1977a; 1977b; cf. Guldin 1997). Gary Hamilton (1999) emphasises the transition of the people of Hong Kong from temporary migrants from south China to 'Hong Kongers', people who identify deeply with the locale and its urbane outlook'. Graham Johnson (1997) similarly notes a ‘sense of Hong Kong identity that was not apparent until the 1970s', and Gordon Mathews (2000) also remarks the emergence of a 'sense of Hongkongese as an autonomous cultural identity' from the post-war generation, emphasising (1997) that Hong Kong people are 'not chameleons' who can easily adopt or transmute their senses of cultural identity.\n13 In this formation of a specific local identity, however much it may be confined to a particular generation or sector of the population, and however much it may now be challenged by the future political status of Hong Kong, Hong Kong's role in a global",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214794,
        "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": 209,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "174\n\nIn China a series of academic and business meetings have taken place in which overseas Hmong have been dismayed to be introduced to Miao of other, non-Hmong groups who could speak no Hmong and knew no Hmong customs or practices.22 At the official, educated level, a strange shift of identification has taken place in which some recognition of a common ancestry with these non-Hmong Miao is made, yet when the overseas Hmong meet local village Hmong, in Wenshan or the Hong He region of Yunnan, with whom they can freely converse and exchange tales of the tragedies of war and parting, the emotions are overpowering. There is an enormous nostalgia during these encounters, and a longing for an untrammelled past in which the Hmong were their own masters and practiced their own social customs with little interference from those around them - a time which for many is mythic, and yet not without some substance in historical realities. Now that these re-encounters are becoming institutionalised and regularised, some economic transformations have developed at the local level with the production of costumes and items of Hmong culture for sale and reproduction overseas (see Schein 1998). In these processes of local economic transformation, resulting directly from a diasporic return, the state plays a very ambivalent role, at once threatened by the potential emergence of pan-national, trans-border identities and trading interests, and yet benefiting economically through tourist revenues and investments in local productive enterprises and infrastructure.23\n\nNostalgic constructions of place are, as we have seen, inevitably implicated in these processes of return to a homeland, which Hong Kongers must be familiar with in at least two aspects; the return of Hong Kong families to ancestral sites in China which became possible after economic liberalisation in China in the 1980s, although these may now have lessened as Hong Kong becomes itself the site of nostalgia24; and the return of Hong Kongers who had left to establish new homes in the West and luodi shenggen, plant roots abroad (Wang 1998) prior and subsequent to the return to Chinese rule. Wong Siu-Lun (1999) has recently examined these returning ‘astronauts', where whole families rather than individuals have been on the move, and for whom China is no longer home.25 While from the point of view of the returnees these visits may merely be return sojourns, brief visits to assuage nostalgia, from the local point of view they may be seen in almost celebratory, rejuvenant way; as a triumph of local ties of community and friendship over the arduous separations brought about by time and space. Post-colonialism",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 214812,
        "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": 227,
        "title": "RAS-1999",
        "content_text": "192\n\n24\n\nOpinions differ on this. Sinn (1998; cf. 1995) for example, traces the continued emergence of native-place associations in Hong Kong through the 1950s and their importance to date, yet Wong (1995) talks of Hong Kong identity as 'receding'.\n\n25 Earlier Salaff and Wong (1997) had emphasised the importance of 'network capital' in motivating emigrations. See also articles in Skeldon (1994 and 1995) on the Hong Kong emigration process.\n\n26 It may be the nostalgia for a vanished Hong Kong which has most afflicted Hong Kongers since the end of British colonialism (personal communication, Yang Tsung-Rong 5 December 2000).\n\n27 Tapp (1996).\n\n28 Personal communication, Prasit Leepreecha, 1995.\n\n29 identity@lao.net' in Evans (1998). Souvannavong (1999) also provides some extremely valuable insider-research on returning Laotian elites.\n\n30 See Ben Anderson (1994) on the dangers of 'long-distance nationalism'.\n\n31 The most appropriate visual image here is one of VORTEX; an enormous up-surge from a centre, leaving a void which aches to be filled...\n\n32 Somewhat similarly Saskia Sassen (1999b) contrasts the 'utopian' view of the Internet as a space of freedom and empowerment with the 'dystopian' which focuses on the power of big corporate networks to dominate the media.\n\n33 See Hughes (2000) for another account of real social actions emerging from cyber-communications.\n\n34\n\nAnthropology owes a great debt to the work of Anthony Cohen (1982; 1985; 1986) in reviving the notion of the community and its symbolic boundaries.\n\n35 As in simplistic contrasts often drawn in development studies between undifferentiated, homogeneous villages and fragmented, divided societies resulting from the impact of capital.\n\n36 \"The Anthropology of Separation and Reunion in China', LSE, 15-16 May 1999.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1999.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215606,
        "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-2001",
        "page_number": 383,
        "title": "RAS-2001",
        "content_text": "333\n\nThis paper focuses on the material objects of cemeteries: grave forms and furnishings. We looked in some detail at a new private grave in Junk Bay Cemetery, at the grave in the Aberdeen Chinese Permanent Cemetery (CPC) of the founder of what is now a Hong Kong-based sub-lineage, at a columbarium niche in the CPC older columbarium in Cape Collinson Cemetery, at a symbolic grave, and finally at a charitable grave, the last two both in the Sandy Ridge Cemetery. We pointed out that in Chinese culture, death is regarded as polluting; and that landscapes of death are regarded as potentially powerful, and are avoided except at festivals or on other appropriate occasions.\n\nThe paper was written for the very specialised Journal of the American Association for Gravestone Studies. Americans have for decades been fascinated by gravestones. Is this because it's a settler society, much of whose history is told in its graveyards and cemeteries? If so, it's an interesting cultural contrast that there isn't the same public acknowledgement of the contribution that graveyards and cemeteries make to clarifying the identity of Hong Kong as a community as there is to the parallel contribution that the same type of spaces make regarding the identity of American communities. In both places, those who now reside in cemeteries and columbaria are, for the most part, immigrants. Note that one of the USA's most respected human geographers, Wilbur Zelinsky, has written a couple of well-quoted papers on American cemeteries.\n\nWhere Chinese grave forms are concerned, Eddie Chow made an unexpected find in a bookshop while preparing this paper: a book on the different types of grave shapes in southern China: Bin He, Jiang Zhe Han Zu Sung Zong Wen Hua (The Death and Burial Culture of the Han Nationality in Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Beijing, 1995. The scarcity of such material implies that the Chinese awe of death may well be hindering research into a field that is potentially of deep cultural significance in Chinese society.\n\nTeather, E.K. (2000). High rise homes for the ancestors: cremation in Hong Kong, Geographical Review 89(3): 409-430.\n\nThe decision in the late 1950s to encourage Hong Kong residents to consider cremation rather than coffin burial, and the gradual acceptance of the policy over the succeeding decades, is intriguing. Over ninety per cent of Hong Kongers are cremated now, if we include",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 215906,
        "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-2002",
        "page_number": 205,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "139\n\nTHE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY\n\n(HONG KONG BRANCH):\n\nTHE FACES, THE STORIES AND THE MEMORIES\n\nEve Lam\n\nThe hall in the Hong Kong Museum of History, is dark. The room seats about 200, but it's not even half full. Those in attendance are mostly gweilos and gweipos, and with his silver-blond hair and fair skin that looks a bit flushed under the spotlight, the man giving the opening remarks on stage is indeed a gweilo. But this foreigner knows more about the place than most born and bred Hong Kongers.\n\nHis name is Dan Waters; he's president of the Royal Asiatic Society (Hong Kong Branch) — and he's giving the opening address at the Society's 40th anniversary conference, \"Hong Kong: Forty Years of a Growing City.”\n\n\"If I had been born in the computer age, the chances are I would be reading this address from a portable ‘electric brain,' as a computer is termed in Cantonese,\" Waters said. \"But several of us taking part in this conference were born many years earlier. Indeed some of us have lived in Hong Kong for longer than the 40-year period (1960 to 2000) which we are reviewing here today...\"\n\nThe conference is free for all RAS members. They are a dedicated lot who have come in early on a Saturday morning to listen to these scholars and celebrate the accomplishments of the society to which they proudly belong.\n\nA glance around the hall and everyone is concentrating their attention on Waters, the longest active member of the Society.\n\n\"...An RAS member who lived in Hong Kong for approaching 30 years wrote a couple of years or so ago from his home in England: 'No, I do not miss the present-day Hong Kong one little bit. But I do miss the Hong Kong of the 1950s and '60s.' To what degree does nostalgia creep in? Let us take a wander down memory lane. What was the Colony really like when our Branch was re-constituted in 1960?...\"",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
        "rank": 0
    }
]