[ { "id": 204414, "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-1962", "page_number": 46, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "37\n\nTHE BUDDHIST CAREER\n\nA lecture delivered on October 30, 1961\n\nHOLMES WELCH, M.A.\n\nFirst I think I should tell you a little bit about what I have been doing. Last spring I was awarded a grant by the Social Science Research Council to find out how Buddhist monasteries in China used to operate before 1950, what the monks did from day to day, and why. This is a subject on which almost nothing has been published: the best sources of information are the monks themselves. There are about 200 of them in Hong Kong, most of whom are not natives of the Colony, but come from all parts of China: from the northeast, northwest, the central provinces, and the south. Unfortunately all but a few left the mainland ten years ago or more, and their memories are beginning to fade. Furthermore, some are in their seventies or eighties and not only have fading memories, but it is a question how much longer they will be here to talk to. Their knowledge, unless it is recorded now, will be lost to all future students of China. That is one of the reasons I am doing what I am.\n\nIt is not an easy job to interview these monks. First, they speak in a baffling variety of dialects and accents. Second, they find it hard to understand why I should be asking them so many questions. Furthermore, they are not accustomed to answering questions about the practical side of monastic life. They are accustomed to expounding the sutras and the dharma, or Buddhist law. I have done only six months of interviewing so far and many points are still obscure.\n\nMany points are still obscure. What I am giving you today, therefore, is not in the nature of conclusions, but a kind of interim field report.\n\nThe subject of my talk is the Buddhist career. By that I mean the stages that a Buddhist went through in following his religion. Not everyone went through all these stages; in fact, almost no one did. But I shall describe them all, one by one, so that you can see what the possibilities were. I shall disregard the great majority of Chinese, for whom Buddhism was just one\n\nAL.\n\nMr. Holmes Welch is currently engaged in a study of Buddhist organisations in modern China. He is author of a book on the history of the Taoist movement, The Parting of the Way.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205503, "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-1968", "page_number": 45, "title": "RAS-1968", "content_text": "40\n\nzation\n\nMARJORIE TOPLEY\n\nsometimes helped to integrate groups of neighbouring communities who would be encouraged to form associations to resist their disruptive activities.\n\nReligion, then, was often a means of fortifying existing groups of people with common interests or roles in the community. It also sometimes brought organized groups into being among those already having common interests but no other form of organization. In certain circumstances it gave rise to organizations contributing to the integration of whole communities: when all individual members of a community had a status or interest in common. Ancestor worship did so when all villagers were kinsmen; temple organization might do so when it could appeal to all members of the community as residents, for whom a particular god had significance. In both cases wealth and education were needed to bring such organization to its highest development and were themselves factors limiting control. In certain circumstances secret organizations might provide some form of village cohesion: either through a common interest in resisting them, or, when economic and social conditions reduced the differences among members of a community, through common membership of such bodies. This kind of integration would probably last only as long as the conditions reducing differences among the community members lasted.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 This paper was prepared originally for a seminar on micro-social organization on China held at Cornell University in October 1962 and sponsored by the Sub-committee on Chinese Society of the Joint Committee on Contemporary China of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. It has been slightly abridged and rearranged by me for publication here. I have been limited in my use of published material to works available to me in Hong Kong. The research notes to which I refer were collected during field studies in Singapore during the years 1951-52 and 1954-55, and during the early 1960's in Hong Kong.\n\n2 See his Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London, Athlone Press, 1958), and Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (London, Athlone Press, 1966).\n\n3 See for example Hui-chen Wang Liu. \"An Analysis of Chinese Clan Rules: Confucian Theories in Action\", in Confucianism in Action, ed. David S. Nivison and Arthur F. Wright (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1959) pp. 63-64.\n\n4 See his Rural China: Imperial Control in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1960) p. 335.\n\n5 For example Hsiao, ibid., p. 329 and 359ff.\n\nPage 45\n\nPage 46", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1968.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/66833948d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205821, "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-1969", "page_number": 127, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "CHINESE DESCENT SYSTEM\n\n121\n\nof the two should in fact have proportionately more empty houses than its poorer neighbour22; it is not impossible that the sort of inefficiencies in the descent system that I have described whereby the swelling of a descent line in one generation may leave the next with more house-property than it needs or can redistribute — may account for this anomaly.*\n\nH. G. H. NELSON.\n\nNOTES\n\n1. Göran Aijmer, \"Being Caught by a Fishnet: On Fengshui in South-eastern China\", J.H.K.B.R.A.S., Vol. 8, 1968, pp. 74-81.\n\n2. Field data drawn on in this paper are derived from a period of work in Sheung Tsuen, Pat Heung, from June 1967 to October 1968. I was employed as a Research Officer of the London School of Economics, on a project financed by a grant made to Professor Maurice Freedman by the Social Science Research Council. Much of the information from the Hong Kong Government's land records was collected by my wife, whose fare to Hong Kong was provided by the London-Cornell Project for East and South-East Asian Studies, financed jointly by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Nuffield Foundation. I am very glad to acknowledge their generosity.\n\n3. See for example J. E. Spenser, \"The Houses of the Chinese\", Geographical Review, Vol. XXXVII, 1947, pp. 254-273.\n\n4. Cf. J. W. Hayes, ‘A Chinese Village on Hong Kong Island Fifty Years Ago Tai Tam Tuk, Village Under the Water', in I.C. Jarvie and Joseph Agassi, eds., Hong Kong: A Society in Transition, London, 1969, p. 33.\n\n5. Block Crown Lease, Demarcation Districts Nos. 112 and 114, 1905; various Memorials in Yuen Long District Office; and ‘A-Roll' volume X.14. I am most grateful to the New Territories Administration for their courtesy in allowing me access to the invaluable information contained in their Land Records.\n\n6. The current records conceal the difference between inhabited structures and \"house-lots' (Crown Rent being assessed on the site rather than the structure) - a difference of which the villagers are aware. Many of them, when asked how many houses they own, will say, \"so many houses and so many lots \"(uk-tel_£)\". It seems to me possible that some villagers may, in 1905, have been far-sighted ---or fortunate enough to register both their houses and their ruined lots, thereby avoiding the expense and complication of obtaining a New Grant Lot when they wanted to rebuild on an old site.\n\n* Groups of houses, bigger and more durable than usual, have also been built as a form of long-term investment (and prestige expenditure) by particularly wealthy men; but their hopes of producing enough sons and grandsons to justify this deliberate over-production of houses are often sadly unfulfilled.\n\n* On the subject of this article see also Mr. Hayes' note at pp. 158-160.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 206428, "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-1971", "page_number": 245, "title": "RAS-1971", "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n219\n\ntestify, long ago revealed the theoretical relevance of much of the earlier literature on China: it is pleasing to note, therefore, that some of the contributors to this volume are now combining field research with an extensive use of the available documentation on China. This has led to a much more sophisticated treatment of theoretical problems and has, I feel, made such works much more interesting to read and more intellectually attractive for people in other disciplines.\n\nThe essays in this volume, apart from one by Professor Arthur P. Wolf, were in their original form papers written for, and discussed at, a conference on Kinship in Chinese society, held in New York in 1966 and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (New York). As it is not possible for a workaday sociologist to discuss every paper meaningfully and in detail in a short review, I shall comment on only a few of the papers, not because they are necessarily the best or the more significant but simply because I have some comments on them.\n\nThe first essay is by Professor Myron L. Cohen, who discusses a key problem: the structure of the Chinese family. Professor Cohen argues that the relevant components of the chia (family) can be reduced to three: the chia estate, the chia group, and the chia economy, and that the connection between the three components can assume a variety of forms or types. As he writes, 'the Chinese family has by and large been described in terms involving or assuming the existence of a chia in which the estate is concentrated, the group is concentrated, and the economy is inclusive'. Much of his essay is taken up by a rigorous discussion of chia variations, such as that an inclusive economy can be found in association with a dispersed estate and, of necessity, a dispersed group. Professor Cohen concludes that 'the possibility arises that a good deal of the movement of persons in Chinese society, movement connected with \"horizontal\" or \"vertical\" social and economic mobility, or with efforts to achieve such mobility, in fact occurred within a chia framework'. The points he makes are important and crucial: they illuminate basic concepts used to understand Chinese society; and I am persuaded by his claim 'that there may be more to domestic units than meets the demographer's eye'. There is certainly some evidence from nineteenth century Hong Kong to", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210779, "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-1986", "page_number": 130, "title": "RAS-1986", "content_text": "113\n\nto a significant general trend in the recent development of the national minorities. If economic liberalisation continues, it is possible that this will lead to a reduction in the type of religious revivalism described above, since this has already occurred in the Dai areas of the Xishuangbanna.\n\nIt was Mao Zedong who first defined the nationalities question as a class struggle, and under Mao that the policy of allowing the minorities to develop at their own level was first outlined. It is clear that relations of class have not disappeared, either between the national minorities and the Han population, between national minorities themselves, or within particular ethnic groups. The questions which are likely to prove useful for future research on the national minorities of China, both for Chinese and for foreign researchers, are, therefore, the effects of state policies of economic liberalisation and ethnic unit classification on local distinctions of class and ethnicity, and the precise role of religious and cultural factors in this process.\n\nNOTES\n\n1\n\n3\n\n1 MILE = 1/15 ha.\n\nTerms in parentheses refer to self-appellations.\n\nMy fieldwork among the Hmong of Thailand was conducted from April 1981 to October 1982 with the assistance of the Social Science Research Council and the Central Research Fund of the Univ. of London.\n\nThe Third Plenary Session of the Party's 11th Central Committee was held in 1978.\n\nREFERENCES\n\nCohen, A. Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1969).\n\nFei, Hsiao-tung. 'Ethnic Identification in China': Social Sciences in China, March 1980.\n\nFitzgerald, C.P. The Southern Expansion of the Chinese People (Barrie and Jenkins, London 1972).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1986.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/jq08c7063", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 215605, "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": 382, "title": "RAS-2001", "content_text": "332\n\ncommented on them, though of course I must accept responsibility for their content! Dr. Chow Chun Shing (Eddie), a geographer at Hong Kong Baptist University, has been a research collaborator, patient listener, and untangler of confusions, throughout these last few years. My husband, David, has been my indefatigable fieldwork partner in Hong Kong and, for a week, in Guangzhou. I have been very fortunate that the David C. Lam Institute of Hong Kong Baptist University has extended to me the privilege of being Scholar in Residence for most of my extended periods in Hong Kong. Australian Research Council grants have underpinned some of the costs of the research.\n\nTeather, E.K. (2001). Time out and worlds apart: tradition and modernity meet in the time-space of the Gravesweeping Festivals of Hong Kong, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 22(2): 156-172.\n\nAlthough only published in 2001, this was my first attempt to write about Hong Kong's municipal cemeteries. The first draft was written in 1996. It took a long time to get it into print, partly no doubt because it was a sort of 'personal working paper' in which I tried to clarify for myself the non-material worlds that suffuse the material landscapes of cemeteries. These worlds are, I suggest, the world of the spirits, the world of fengshui, and the world of ritual time.\n\nChinese colleagues at Hong Kong Baptist University - personal friends as well as those working in related fields, such as Dr C.S. Chow - were really helpful in these early stages, and several attended a Social Science Faculty seminar that I gave in 1996. Clearly, they were astonished that a non-Chinese should be interested in Chinese matters of death. I owe much to their patience and courtesy, and in particular to invitations from three colleagues to accompany them to their family graves and columbaria. It was encouraging, too, when I presented an early version of this paper to the Hong Kong Anthropology Society, and also at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the National University of Singapore, in each case receiving useful feedback which indicated I was on reasonably appropriate lines in my thinking about these non-material worlds of the cemeteries.\n\nChow, C.S. and Teather, E.K. (1997). Chinese graves and gravemarkers in Hong Kong, Markers XV (Annual Journal of the American Association for Gravestone Studies): 286-317.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2001.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/zg651950g", "rank": 0 } ]