RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1976 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/hq382988q A REPORT ON SOCIAL RESEARCH IN THE NEW TERRITORIES OF HONG KONG, 1963 MAURICE FREEDMAN Introduction This report by the late Maurice Freedman, Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University and Fellow of All Souls at the time of his death in 1975, has hitherto been available only in mimeographed form. It was written for the New Territories Administration, Hong Kong Government, which gave assistance during his field study visit in 1963, as recorded in the opening paragraphs. The report is reproduced in full, with the permission of Dr. Judith Freedman and of the Hong Kong Government. Beyond making a few trifling corrections necessitated by the fact that Professor Freedman wrote the report away from his sources of reference (para. 2), I have abstained from amending the text or adding notes. Were I to do either, the report would lose some of that distinction that he gave to any study of place, time and context. For those members who are interested in Professor Freedman's later work, some of the contents of this report were incorporated in his Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (London and New York, 1966) and part into other work. A bibliography of his writings is appended to Professor G. William Skinner's obituary notice which appeared in the American Anthropologist, 78, No. 4, December 1976: 871-885. A useful collection of his essays will appear soon, edited by Professor Skinner.--Ed. The Report 1. On 8 February 1963 I began a study tour of the New Territories. I planned to spend some three months making a general appraisal of social conditions and assessing the possibilities of detailed social research. This period was to be followed by a further three months during which I would undertake some intensive study in one place. My visit to Hong Kong was financed partly by the London-Cornell Project for research into Chinese and South-East Asian societies (a body which came into existence in August 1962 and which receives its funds from the Carnegie Corporation ================================================================================ 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 ================================================================================ RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊 | RAS-1999 https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/s178b887x 191 relations, points out how in the sense that Europe was constituted through her colonies, as her effective 'Other', the end of colonialism has meant a crisis of identity for Europe as well as for what used to be called the Third World. 15 Bahloul (1996) in Lovell (1998). 16 Wordsworth's discovery of an earlier self in the landscape of his remembered past merits however a rethinking in terms of this early industrial disemplacement from origins and the emergence of formalised notions of childhood. 17 See Judith Okely (1978) and others on the institutionalisation of childhood. It was Wordsworth too who (in 1798) defined poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity'. I must confess to a certain nostalgia for the time I lived in Hong Kong - and for other places too I have regarded as 'home', from Chiangmai in North Thailand to Nainital in the Himalayan foothills, back to the Cotswolds. 19 What has been referred to as post-modernism is but one aspect of a more general shift towards roots', says Friedman (1999), a return to origins which he sees as contradictory to the demands and interests of a cosmopolitan identity. For me they are both part of a post-colonial reflection on the diasporic experience. 20 This is a paraphrase of the version common in South-East Asia, recorded by Lemoine (1972). The following is a translation of some verses of a version recorded by myself in Yunnan. There is a surprising similarity in the broad outlines of the verse among Hmong from Thailand to China, yet there are also some local variations and differences which follow the teachings of particular Masters. 21 Other work for instance stresses the problematisation of locality itself, its construction by wider discourses embedded in relations of unequal power for particular purposes (Olwig and Hastrup 1997, Lovell 1998). 22 See Schein (1998); also Tapp (1996; 1999; forthcoming). ‘Miao' is a term used for Hmong, but also other groups, in China. 23 Saskia Sassen (1996; 1999) very well charts the changing role of the state with regard to transnational forces and international migration. ================================================================================