RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q 258 Having now put forward the point of view that the village, the concept of "closeness" (chan) and the corporate cult of the dead all have to do with the principles of locality rather than ancestral worship in the strict sense of tsung (or descent for that matter), it now remains to explain in what sense this notion of locality is necessarily the product of history. All ideologies, customs and institutions, if they are indeed meaningful to the people who practice them, must be seen within the context of a kind of living history. Without speculating whether this history has a "life" of its own or whether it is the inevitable consequence of some evolving structure or process, I think it would be foolhardy to take for granted that these principles of locality, systematic as they may be in conceptual terms, should be reflective of some irreducible, static notion of culture, especially as the ABCs of Chinese society and civilization. The practical difficulties of pursuing empirical research in this regard aside, I think there is sufficient basis to believe that all of the above phenomena can be seen as the product of a particular and evolving social milieu (not to be confused with the functionalist concept of social structure) in broader socio-political terms. The diversity of local phenomena seen over an ethnographic spectrum at any one time as well as the peculiarity, even ephemerality, of these phenomena in a history demands that we look at these deeper issues, difficult as they are to characterize precisely. There is thus a need, as Faure's work clearly demonstrates, to look at local history. However, unlike him, I do not think that local history can be understood simply by looking at events and personnages as they take place “on the ground”. Works like those by Karl Polanyi (1944), the Annales historians, Clifford Geertz (1963), Barrington Moore (1966), Eric Wolf (1982), etc., have cogently shown that local events and institutions can be seen as part of a larger process which may be conscious or non-conscious to the actors themselves. What is needed then is a wider vision of what constitutes historical “change”. Faure's book begins with this promise but in the final analysis falls far short of expectation. Rather than being the open and shut case that he makes it out to be, the study of Chinese local history and society is in my opinion still very much an open field, 12 Allen J. Chun ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q 261 Baker, Hugh D.R. 1966 Bibliography of Sources Cited: "The Five Great Clans of the New Territories". Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 6. Brim, John A. 1974 “Village Alliance Temples in Hong Kong", In Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, edited by Arthur P. Wolf. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dumont, Louis 1970 Homo Hierarchicus: An Essay on the Caste System, translated by Mark Sainsbury. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fei Hsiao-tung 1946 "Peasantry and Gentry: An Interpretation of Chinese Social Structure and Its Changes". American Journal of Sociology 52(1), Freedman, Maurice 1958 Lineage Organization in Southeastern China. London: Athlone Press. 1966 Chinese Lineage and Society. London: Athlone Press. Fried, Morton H. 1970 **Clans and Lineages: How to Tell Them Apart and Why with Special Reference to Chinese Society”. Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica 29 (Taipei). Geertz, Clifford 1963 Peddlers and Princes: Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian Towns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Holy, Ladislav 1979 "The Segmentary Lineage Structure and Its Existential Status”. In Segmentary Lineage Systems Reconsidered, edited by L. Holy. Belfast: The Queen's University Papers in Social Anthropology. Kuhn, Philip A. 1970 Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pasternak, Burton 1969 "The Role of the Frontier in Chinese Lineage Development'. Journal of Asian Studies 28(3), Polanyi, Karl 1944 The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press. Moore, Barrington 1966 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Discovery: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, New York: Penguin Press. Strathern, Marilyn 1984 "Localism Displaced: A "Vanishing Village" in Rural England", Ethnos 49(1-2) (Stockholm). Strauch, Judith 1983 "Community and Kinship in Southeastern China: The View from the Multilineage Villages of Hong Kong". Journal of Asian Studies 43(1), Wolf, Eric 1982 Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Page 285 Page 286 262 ================================================================================