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The Hong Kong
Anthropological Society
and
The Hong Kong Museum of History
present
Yemeni men
seeking a career in the building trade must negotiate their apprenticeship
with a master builder, or usta. Despite the introduction of modern
building technologies, the usta continues to manipulate significant
power in the production and reproduction of both his trade and Sanaa's
distinctive built environment. It is the usta's obligation to ensure
that a disciplined comportment and expert knowledge is passed on to
select younger members of his team in order to safeguard the integrity
of the craft and the reputation of his family name. Based on extensive
fieldwork with a team of builders specialised in the erection of mosque
minarets, this presentation will discuss both the apprentice's training
and the construction process of these magnificent towering edifices.
Dr. Trevor Marchand received his degree in Architecture from McGill University and his PhD at the School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London, where he is currently a Lecturer in Anthropology. He specialises in the study of traditional builders and apprenticeship, and has worked in West Africa and Yemen. He is the author of Minaret Building and Apprenticeship in Yemen (2001) and his new book on The Masons of Djenne is forthcoming
The Hong Kong Anthropological
Society
and
The Hong Kong Museum of History
present
While the ancient ritual of Chinese paper burning ties families together through the generations, living and dead, the differences in these practices also characterize and even divide certain communities. In Macau, at least, the people who make the paper constructions say that two groups buy the best paper: fishermen and those fishers for men (and women), the Black Society. While very little paperwork is made especially for them, the distinguishing sacrifice, the paper firearm, draws the center of a bulls-eye of connected sacrifices, from submachine guns and gambling equipment to the Dai Lo Bo Ma [Gangster Beemer]. These sacrifices are made and burned all around us in the trading ports of South China. This lecture is a practical field guide to the search for street-level evidence of this traditional subculture. It will also feature many paper examples.
Bill Guthrie is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Faculty of the University of Macau, where he has taught since 1996. Before that, he was an educational consultant in Hartford Connecticut, founded Profit International Business Magazine (the original capitalist business magazine in Eastern Europe), wrote business planning materials for a silver mining company, worked as a military reporter/editor specializing in Afghanistan, took a PhD in medieval studies from the University of Colorado, and taught archeological excavation technique at a field school at the end of a clay road outside Cimarron, New Mexico.
The Hong Kong Anthropological
Society
and
The Hong Kong Museum of History
present
Islam has a
long history in China. People think, however, that this religion concerns
only the Turkish people of Xinjiang. In fact the Chinese-speaking Muslims,
the most important Muslim group, have been spread throughout China since
the 13th century.
The Chinese Muslims built many mosques in a Chinese style, and have
built mosques for women too, especially in the Central Plain region.
Who exactly comes to these mosques? How do the women organize their!
religious activities? What is the history of these mosques? How can
we explain this almost-unique situation in the world?
Elisabeth Alles is a researcher in Anthropology affiliated to the French National Centre for Scientifc Reseach (CNRS) in Paris. After a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate School of Social Sciences (EHESS) in 1998, she joined the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China at the beginning of 2002. She was born in Algeria in 1952 and has lived in various different places (e.g., Algeria, Guyana, Spain). She began her research on Islam in China in 1991, and has published extensively in French on the topic of Islam in China.
The Hong Kong Anthropological
Society
and
The Hong Kong Museum of History
present
BY
16 October 2002
Wednesday <> 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall Ground Floor <> 100 Chatham Road South
Family systems
theory holds that the cultural norms of a group's family system critically
inform reproductive goals. This lecture, based on data from a 1% sample
of the 1990 Chinese census, explores this in southeastern China, where
different ethnic groups have distinctive family systems. I first characterize
the family systems of the major ethnic groups in the Lingnan and Southeast
Coast macroregions. I then infer the operational principles that would
inform reproductive decision-making. Finally, I examine the reproductive
behavior of couples, to analyze significant ethnic-group differences
appearing in the proportion of complex families, household size, total
number of surviving offspring, and gender configuration of surviving
offspring. Obviously, while family systems may shape reproductive behavior,
they cannot be said to determine it. Culture is not everything, and
it is certainly not immutable. Spatial analysis points up the important
role of ecology and position in the regional economy in channeling change
in both family systems and culturally-rooted reproductive strategies.
G. William Skinner is one of the most well-known anthropologists
of China in the world today. He has written and edited numerous books,
including Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community in Thailand
and The City in Late Imperial China. He has also written scores of articles,
the most famous of which is "Marketing and Social Structure in
Rural China," extraordinarily influential both in anthropology
and sinology. For many years he was Professor of Anthropology at Stanford;
today he is Professor at! the University of California, Davis.
Prof. Skinner's visit to Hong Kong was funded by the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fund.
For many people, the 1970s were the golden age of post-war
Hong Kong. That era witnessed the rise of social movements, the emergence
of a local identity and local culture, the establishment of the ICAC and
a change in the nature of colonial governance, economic recovery after
the oil shock, and much more. Most important of all, Hong Kong people
began to feel good about life in Hong Kong in that decade, as had happened
never before, and, some would say, may ever happen again. But was life
really that good in the 1970s? As well as giving a presentation on what
is already known about Hong Kong in the 1970s, Tai-lok Lui will talk on
what he really WANTS to know about that so-called gol! den decade of the
MacLehose years. Was life then really as good as they say? Or is that
just nostalgia from a cloudy present for an imagined sunny past that really
wasn't all that sunny?
Tai-lok Lui teaches Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written and edited many books, including most recently, in English, The Dynamics of Social Movements in Hong Kong, and Consuming Hong Kong, and in Chinese, Check Please! A Sociologist's Notes on Hong Kong Society.
This talk is about the Naxi people and ethnic tourism in Lijiang, Yunnan. The focus is on homestay tourism and the strategies adopted by the Naxi in coping with tourists, government bureaus, migrants, and international NGOs. The presentation seeks to explore how ethnic culture survives in the context of the local and the global as forged by tourism and heritage preservation.
Miss WANG Yu is from Yunnan Province, and is now an M.Phil candidate in the Anthropology Department of CUHK; she will be entering the Ph.D. program at Duke University, in the United States, starting next September. She conducted the fieldwork for her master's degree research in Lijiang Old Town for about 3 months last summer. This talk is based on the collected data from her fieldwork.
Current
government policy allows 55,000 Mainland Chinese citizens,
primarily wives and children of Hong Kong permanent
residents, to immigrate to Hong Kong each year. Increasing
government and non-government resources have recently
been
mobilized to help provide solutions to the problems of
adaptation faced by these individuals and their families.
For the past
eight months, the speaker has been conducting dissertation
fieldwork as a volunteer member of an international NGO
which
depends on such local resources to run its social service
center for these new arrivals in Sham Shui Po. In this
talk, she will
discuss her on-going research by introducing the life
stories of five immigrants who have all arrived in Hong
Kong during the
past two years.
Nicole
Newendorp is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Harvard University
Department of Anthropology and, for the 2001-2
academic year, also an Honorary Research Assistant at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong Anthropology Department.
Supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation grant,
she has been conducting dissertation fieldwork on the
subject of
newly arrived Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong since September
2001. Her research will continue through June 2002.
The environment
of the New Territories has undergone gradual, but notable change
in recent decades. This change includes the virtual disappearance
of agriculture, the village housing policy, and the use of New Territories'
land for urban dumping. The talk will take up these issues, discussing
the historical, political and social "reason" for things
as they are.
An appreciation of Barbara E. Ward, given by Dr. Janet Lee Scott,
will precede the lecture.
The Barbara E. Ward Lecture will be given in English.
Sir David Akers-Jones arrived in Hong Kong in l957, having spent three years in Malaya, and after a brief spell in the Commerce and Industry Department was appointed as Tsuen Wan District Officer in 1959. He then served as District Officer in the Islands and Yuen Long Districts and become Deputy Chief Commissioner in 1967. He became Secretary for the New Territories in l973, Chief Secretary in l985, and served as Acting Governor on several occasions in the l980s and l990s.
A most vibrant aspect of life in modern Hong Kong is the celebration of traditional Chinese culture, a celebration which includes an increasing appreciation of the traditional material culture of everyday life. One especially significant category of traditional material culture is the complement of ritual paper offerings accompanying the ritual events, great and small, public and private, of the ritual year. Paper offerings are burned to deities, ghosts and to ancestors, with the aims of expressing gratitude, seeking assistance, alleviating the misery of neglected souls, and caring for the deceased: aims reflecting traditional cultural and social values. The talk concerns the paper offerings for the honorable dead, the ancestors, and will consider the ideological basis for the giving of offerings and the meaning of the objects themselves. The talk will be illustrated with examples of current offerings.
The talk
will follow the AGM (which begins at 6:30p.m.) and will be given
in English.
________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Janet Lee Scott is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University. She took both her MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University and has been teaching in Hong Kong since l980. She is currently a Council Member of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and a History Advisor (Ethnography) to the Leisure and Cultural Services Branch. Research into paper offerings was supported by an Earmarked Grant for Research.
In the European
imagination, the island of Borneo has commonly been associated with
mystery, danger and excitement; images created by European travelers
and adventurers. While the native inhabitants of Borneo are usually
referred to as "Dayaks", a name derived from words meaning
"native" or "inland" people, the Dayaks are members
of tribes culturally and linguistically diverse, and attempts to classify
them into neat categories have not been successful. The talk will focus
on a tribe called the Suku Kantu, located in the province of West Kalimantan
(Kalimantan Barat, Indonesian Borneo), where research was conducted
in the village of Pala-Pulao near Putussibau. Among the Suku Kantu,
the festival after the harvest is held between April and June and is
called the Gawai, meaning "to be busy at work." The spirits
and deities responsible for agriculture are welcomed and celebrated,
and their aid invoked, so that their supernatural powers may protect
the Kantu from the malign intention of spirits. The festival is also
a time of celebration, visiting among relatives and friends, and marriages,
as people celebrate a good year.
Dr. Tiziana Ciavardini is a cultural anthropologist and graduate of La Sapienza of Rome. She has spent over seven years in Southeast Asia, with fieldwork concentrating in West Kalimantan Borneo among the Suku Kantu, and has authored academic articles in both English and Italian. She is currently writing a book on the Dayak, and travels regularly to West Kalimantan.
Local
underground bands have recently been surfacing as distinctive
post-1997 alternative lifestyle options for teenagers. They
are critical of mainstream middle-class ideologies, and their
music serves as a symbolic means for cultural differentiation
and resistance. They generate strong emotional energies that
mix with populist anti-government sentiments of the larger
society. Yet these sub-cultural forms are quickly absorbed
by consumerism to the point that their resistive postures
seem quickly to become fashionable lifestyle commodities.
The talk will present ethnographic data on the most prominent
such band, LMF, to better understand the phenomenon, and will
discuss the speaker's attempts to understand the band and
its audience and their positions within Hong Kong Society
today.
Eric Kit-wai MA is Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of seven books on the popular culture of Hong Kong, most recently in English, Culture, Politics and Television in Hong Kong (Routledge 1999), and in Chinese, two books on Hong Kong's alternative music scene.
Scholarly
work on Chinese catering has focused on such topics as: the
business and organizational aspects of ethnic
enterprises, the role of ethnic niches as survival strategies
in host economies, and the role of family and kin relationships
in
establishing and maintaining the business. Little attention
has been paid to the functions of Chinese restaurants within
Chinese communities as well as the meanings these restaurants,
as showcases of ethnic culture, produced and
communicated to the host society. Establishing restaurants was
vitally important for the Chinese community, not only as a
principle business and migration strategy, but also as a creation
of a primary social and cultural space, a reproduction of
local (home) space in a foreign environment. Using James Watson's
metaphor of Chinese restaurants as "islands of
Chinese culture", the talk will discuss how these "islands"
were created and how they functioned. It will include a
brief ! analysis of meanings and images communicated by the
Chinese restaurants useful for understanding how a new
cultural tradition within the host society was invented.
Ms. Mezlikova-Moore
studied Chinese language and literature at Charles University
in Prague. Graduating in l992 with a
B.A. in Chinese Language from Beijing Language Institute, she
then received her M.A. in Chinese Studies from Charles
University in l994. She has worked as an interpreter for Chinese
migrants and is currently working on her Ph.D. in the
Department of Sociology, at the University of Hong Kong.
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