Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of "Land" in the New Territories of Hong Kong (Studies in Anthropology and History)

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Unstructuring Chinese Society is a culmination of long term field work and archival research that challenges existing theories of social organisation and cultural change. The book makes new sense of historical contradictions, political conflicts and deep seated social transformations that have underlined the experience of colonial rule and the practices of local institutions in Hong Kong over the past century. By focusing on the ongoing interactions of discourse, practices and global-local relations in cultural terms, Unstructuring Chinese Society puts forth a fresh perspective in the field of historical anthropology, while addressing ongoing critical concerns in postcolonial theory and our understanding of tradition and modernity.

Unstructuring Chinese Society: The Fictions of Colonial Practice and the Changing Realities of "Land" in the New Territories of Hong Kong (Studies in Anthropology and History) Review

This book is a major achievement. Detailed consideration of cases and memoranda, with sensitivity to their legal and administrative minutiae, brings out the interplay of large forces, all of them changing in relation to each other. He shows the importance of global forces, of the conversion of the Hong Kong economy into an advanced market-capitalist centre, of a colonial regime moving from a paternal imperialist to a powerful arbiter of profit-taking local interests and of Cold War strategy with pragmatic (mutually beneficial) arrangements with the mainland Communist government, and of the transformation of landholding and kinship by New Territory residents from surface-sub-soil bundles of rights to relations transformed by immigration of new settlers and urban migration of old in which the nature of land changes without disturbing ties to land. He achieves his aim to show that what are usually studied as phenomena isolated from each other, namely the kinship organisations of the New Territories, the laissez-faire and indirect rule of Hong Kong, and globalisation of politics and economy were not isolated, but formed in relation to each other locally and in basic ways. He shows successfully that the descriptions of each have been stereotyped.The book is a contribution to historical anthropology, questioning and rethinking the way 'custom' has been an object first of transformation when it is preserved by a rationalising ordinance and then of negotiation and misunderstanding, as well as a preserve of indigenous subjects adapting themselves to fiercely competitive change. It is a contribution to the history of the ways in which the British colonial doctrine of indirect rule has been implemented. Finally, within these achievements, it is a reappraisal of the post-war anthropology of kinship, in the New Territories and elsewhere, while bringing together a great many individual studies. To them he adds his own enquiries into a number of Hakka villages in the NT. Again this is done with great sensitivity, this time to the participants' usage of terms and their misunderstanding when translated into English as 'family' or 'lineage'. The major theoretical result of this reappraisal is to dissolve the British social-structural problematic of local solidarity carried by lineage trusts and local lineage segments, and to demonstrate that the formation of trusts is an individual's will to his patri-descendants, distinct from the transmission of worship and of common substance down a patriline, and also from the general obligation to continue to look after the dead, and that all these are distinct from the incorporation of a family or of a village in a present situation which includes the formation of villages as communities in different and specifiable historical conjunctures (Ming dynasty as distinct from pre-Ming, British colony pre-war and post-war, etc.).In short, this book is bound to be a major contribution to the anthropology of China and to the historical anthropology of British colonial rule, its basic assumptions and how some of the same assumptions were inflected through British anthropology. Help other customers find the most helpful reviews� Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Report abuse | PermalinkComment Comment

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