[ { "id": 208986, "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-1980", "page_number": 148, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "REDISCOVERING OUR SOCIAL AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE NEW TERRITORIES\n\nBARBARA E. WARD*\n\nAn audience composed mainly of Chinese residents of Hong Kong may well ask by what right a non-Chinese such as myself dares to speak on the subject of this symposium? My justifications are very simple: I am human, I am a scholar, I am a social anthropologist, and I passionately love Hong Kong, which is, after all, a place with which people from my country have been closely identified for more than one and a half centuries and which for more than thirty years I have regarded as my second home. There is, moreover, the further point that, as my husband is never tired of reminding me, I am a village woman by origin and rural society is familiar to me.\n\nI have just said that I am a social anthropologist, but some of you may wonder about this as you know me here as a member of the Department of Sociology. There is not really a problem here. In England, which is where I come from, and in many parts of what we here usually call \"the West\", the distinction between social anthropology and sociology is made primarily in terms of methods and approaches and general topics of interest, rather than in terms of who studies what societies. Perhaps you will understand this better when I tell you that although many of the courses I went to when I was a graduate student at the London School of Economics many years ago were indeed about so-called \"primitive\" peoples in parts of Africa and the South West Pacific, yet many others were about the complex civilizations of India and South East Asia, and the most memorable of all were the ones about China that were given by Professor Fei Hsiao-t'ung in 1947. Moreover, the first anthropological fieldwork I ever did was in London, and our subjects were English Londoners.\n\n* A paper read at a symposium held at New Asia College, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 10th June 1981. The author, who is well known to readers of this Journal, was then Visiting Reader in Anthropology at the Chinese University, on leave of absence from Newnham College, Cambridge.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209760, "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-1983", "page_number": 19, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "OBITUARY\n\nBarbara E. Ward (1919-1983)\n\nMembers will be saddened to learn of Barbara E. Ward's death in 1983. Barbara was a gifted teacher of social anthropology and sociology in general and of Chinese society in particular. She will be remembered with respect and affection by the many students who learnt from her at the various universities in which she taught: London, Cornell, Cambridge, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.\n\n3\n\nBarbara read history at Newnham College, Cambridge before the Second World War, gained a Diploma in Education at London University in 1942 and then taught in schools in England and West Africa until 1947. Like a number of other British social anthropologists of her generation, Barbara was led to the discipline by the experience of overseas service gained during and immediately after the war. Although she completed a thesis on the social organization of the Ewe-speaking peoples of southeast Ghana for a Master's degree at the London School of Economics in 1949 and later published some of her observations on social change in West Africa, Barbara became drawn to the study of Chinese society. The presence of enthusiastic Chinese scholars at the L.S.E., such as Tien Ju-k'ang, as well as the inherent attractiveness of a civilization which since the Enlightenment has had a special place in western social thought, were important factors underlying Barbara's growing interest in China. Much of her subsequent writing was based on field research carried out in Kau Sai, a New Territories community of boat-dwelling fishermen, between 1950 and 1953 and during a number of later visits. Barbara's essays on the boat people represent very substantial contributions to sinological anthropology, and through this work Barbara played a leading role in opening up the field of China to modern anthropology. Her friendships with the people of Kau Sai, many of whom appeared in an ethnographic film on the fishing community made by her and Hugh Gibb, were maintained for the rest of her life, and news of Barbara's death will have been received with much sorrow by her friends in Kau Sai as well as by many other residents of Hong Kong.\n\nxviii", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209761, "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-1983", "page_number": 20, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "In addition to her work on the Kau Sai fishing people, Barbara's writings during the 1950s and 1960s touched on a number of other aspects of Chinese society, including the structure and operations of Chinese small factories in Hong Kong and the organization of Hakka guilds in Borneo. Moreover, Barbara's data on Kau Sai were incorporated into her comparative study of the role of credit and loan facilities in peasant commercial production and also informed her essay on sex roles in southeast Asia—a valuable and perhaps underestimated introductory essay to the book, which she edited, on the impact of the changing public status of women upon the private domestic lives of both sexes in the various countries of southeast Asia. Barbara's writings on \"conscious models\" explored the problems of the manner in which the actual behaviour of the Kau Sai fishing people had been influenced by the traditional pattern of the classical Chinese family, the role of ideological models in promoting \"the uniquely long continuity and wide similarity of the Chinese socio-cultural system\" and, more generally, the relevance of Levi-Strauss' notion of conscious models to the analysis of the relationship between various local sub-cultures within Chinese society and the wider Chinese socio-cultural system. 8\n\nDuring the 1970s, Barbara became increasingly concerned with the social and cultural dimensions of opera in south China. Undoubtedly, Barbara's work on conscious models was an important factor in the development of this interest, for her first essay in this new area dealt with the role of opera as a disseminator of Chinese culture among the local communities of south China, such as that of Kau Sai. Sadly, Barbara died just at the time when her thoroughly-researched and well-written articles on popular Chinese drama were beginning to appear in print. Perhaps our greatest loss as a community of China scholars is that the potential of Barbara's endeavours in this area of Chinese social life can no longer be realised. Perhaps, too, the loss will be felt just as keenly by others whose concerns lie outside the China field. When Barbara chose Chinese opera as her topic for the Jane Ellen Harrison Memorial Lecture, which she gave at Newnham College in 1978, her lively presentation and thoughtful analysis of the symbolism of traditional Chinese theatre won the interest of a large non-specialist audience. It is hoped\n\nxix", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 } ]