RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 ADVENTURERS IN HONG KONG 47 the Chicago meat trade. Morès soon joined forces with Drumont,49 the brilliant anti-semitic editor of La Libre Parole, served as the paper's official duellist, and created a body of street fighters called 'Morès and His Friends'. These street fighters, the first 'storm-troopers', were recruited from among the butcher boys of the district of La Villette in northeastern Paris. Morès outfitted his 'friends' in cowboy hats, purple shirts and other Wild West accoutrements. 51 In June 1890 Morès was sentenced to three months imprisonment50 for the publication of inflammatory writings; but this experience did not dampen his ardour as a fervent nationalist, socialist and anti-semite. He fought four duels, in one of which he killed Captain Armand Mayer, a Jewish officer in the French Army; but in 1893 his political position was compromised when Clemenceau revealed that the anti-semitic Morès had borrowed money from Cornelius Herz, a Jew associated with the notorious Panama scandal. In 1894 the impetuous Morès landed in Algeria and immediately embarked on a violent campaign to arouse the Moslems in North Africa. In 1895, after a short visit to France, Morès returned to Algeria. His purpose was to create an alliance between Catholic France and Moslem Africa so as to block British expansion in the African continent. His scheme was visionary and it is not clear how he expected to unify Frenchmen and Arabs in a crusade against British imperialism; but we do know he planned an expedition from Tunis through Ghadames and Ghat across the Sahara Desert to Bahr el Ghazal, where the French would be in a strong position on the Upper Nile to throttle British power in Egypt and prevent complete British control of the route from Cape to Cairo. In Tunis on 29 April 1896, Morès signed an agreement with a certain El Hadj Ali to guide a caravan from Gabes, Tunisia, to Ghat, a distance of some thousand miles. He left Gabes on the morning of 14 May with a small escort. On the journey south a party of Touaregs attached themselves to the caravan, claiming they would guide the party through the desert. In fact, they were the henchmen of the Touareg Bechaoui, who was waiting to plunder the caravan and kill Morès at a place on the Libyan frontier called Mechiguig. ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1974 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/x633mp077 56 H. I. LETHBRIDGE 41 In 1838 Charles Mirfin was killed in a duel on Wimbledon Common. The principal escaped abroad but the seconds were found guilty, sentenced to death, but later reprieved. In 1841 the Earl of Cardigan wounded Captain Tuckett in a duel and was accused of 'assault with intent to murder'. In 1852 a group of Frenchmen were indicted for duelling on English soil, sent for trial, and imprisoned. It must have been well known to both Mayréna and Morès that duelling was a criminal offence under English law and that the guilty could not escape easily from a term of imprisonment, even in Hong Kong. In 1872 the Spanish Consul in Hong Kong and the Peruvian Consul in Macao fought a duel at Chinese Kowloon. The Peruvian Consul was wounded by a pistol shot. They were each fined $200 at the Supreme Court in Hong Kong, although the duel had not taken place on Hong Kong soil! 42 ...the duel is a leisure-time institution... In civilised communities it prevails as a normal phenomenon only where there is an hereditary leisure class, and almost exclusively among that class' (Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York, 1934, p. 239.) 43 Alfred Capus (1858-1922) was a well-known journalist and man-about-town. 44 Maurice Mac-Nab (1856-1890) was a chansonnier, poet and notorious noctambule. The Rat Mort was a well-known café-chantant in Montmartre, the haunt of decadents, harlots and pleasure-seekers. The composer Charles de Sivry (1848-1900) was for a long time accompanist at the Cabaret du Chat-noir. He was the brother-in-law of Arthur Rimbaud. 45 At table, for example, the courtiers were expected to wait until the King introduced a topic of conversation. 46 John Fortescue Owen, born in 1869, entered the Federated Malay States Civil Service in 1889 and was appointed Junior Officer and Magistrate, Pahang, in that year. 47 See W. Lineham, 'A History of Pahang', Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 14, Part 2, 1936, p. 135. 48 Sir Hugh Clifford, 'The King of the Sedangs', Asia, July-Dec., 1926, p. 920. 49 Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) wrote a famous book, La France Juive, (1886), in which he attempted to demonstrate that France was controlled from behind the scenes by a pack of Jews. 50 R. H. Sherard gives an account of a personal interview with Morès in the Santé prison in The Real Oscar Wilde, London, n.d., pp. 401-2. 51 Morès did not mean to kill Mayer: Mayer impaled himself by running upon Morès's foil. 52 The Marquise offered a large reward for the capture of the assassins. There is a story that she tried to hire a number of cowboys to effect the rescue. She died in 1921 and in her will—a copy of which is in Somerset House, London—she left a sum of money for the erection of a monument at Mechiguig. In 1928 a large granite cross was placed on the spot where Morès fell. Lesley Blanch in her book The Wilder Shores of Love (London, 1954) claims that the Arab-loving Isabelle Eberhardt went in pursuit of Morès' assassins, but I have found no confirmation of the story. 53 Times, 20 July, 1896. 54 Soldiering was also an aristocratic sport, better than the chase. Many people volunteered to fight in wars which did not concern them; see, for example, the career of St. Leger Grenfell, who fought with John Hunt ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1988 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/ft84gb83q 246 Thus, contrary to Faure's "modest" claims, I see very little in his alternative thesis which offers any criticism of Freedman's model worthy of anthropological note, unless of course one finds it fair to force any body of ideas to answer questions it was not initially intended nor prepared to ask. Ironically, there is more in this book which is broadly supportive of lineage theory than contrary to it. For one thing, Faure's talk of lineage society as being real would have been enough to make Meyer Fortes, Maurice Freedman and other ancestors of lineage theory jump out of their graves in delight, especially if viewed in light of recent attacks by anthropologists who have argued that “descent groups” and **social structure** are imaginary constructs which have no basis in empirical reality at all. (Holy 1979, Dumont 1970) Even Faure's attempt to dissociate the village as something that should be understood in its own terms is confounded by his failure to look at the village as anything other than the aggregation of descent groups. In short, his talk of rights of settlement, rules of inheritance, genealogical linkages, membership criteria and relations to inalienable property reproduces the whole language of descent and social structure which is at the root of lineage theory (in any of its versions). To wit (anthropologists, take note), The history of the lineage is one of the most important means of recording village membership, and given the fact that settlement rights are inheritable until they are surrendered, for instance, by the act of moving away, this is exactly what the researcher should expect of the villager's narrative. (p. 30) Nonetheless, the founding of separate lineages, each holding independent settlement rights, but which retained the claim to, even if they did not practice, common ancestral worship, is clearly illustrated. The acquisition of independent settlement rights was, no doubt, a stage in lineage segmentation. (p. 47) I have described four dimensions of the lineage in the organization of the villages of the eastern New Territories. First, the lineage embodies the inheritance of the rights of settlement in the village. Second, it is the corporate body, or the collection of corporate bodies, that holds property. Page 270 Page 271 ================================================================================ 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 ================================================================================