THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Gordon MATHEWS
Will We Ever Have a Global Anthropology?
Friday 18 July 2025, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
In the late 19th century, the founders of anthropology Morgan and Tylor postulated that the United States and Europe were at the high point of contemporary civilization, with other societies in the world at various stages behind them in "savagery" and "barbarism." Anthropologists in later decades wholly repudiated these ethnocentric views, but today we are living them out again, not intellectually but institutionally. Because of the increasing importance of global university rankings and citation indexes, anthropologists around the world are increasingly being forced to write in English for top-ranked Anglo-American journals if they want to keep their jobs and get promoted. This is Morgan and Tylor all over again: "West is Best."
In this talk, Gordon Mathews examines the prospects for whether anthropology can become a discipline not of the rich studying the poor of the world and the poor intellectually emulating the rich, but rather a truly global discipline. When can we have an anthropology not just for the West but for the world? This process is already underway; the future of anthropology as a discipline depends upon its success.
Gordon Mathews, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations and Co-Chair of the World Anthropological Union.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Ryan Xin XIE
Taking Pictures of Snakes at Midnight: An Anthropological Perspective
Friday 22 August 2025, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
The widespread availability of social media technology in Hong Kong enables both amateur and professional photographers engaging with nature to share their observations in visually appealing ways. What do images of wild animals mean to achieve? Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork among nature enthusiasts in Hong Kong, this talk places photographs of wild animals such as snakes at the centre of the complex relationships between humans and nature. It examines the cultural narratives of wildlife photographs in promoting an ecological perspective of urban environments and fostering empathy for human-animal coexistence.
Ryan Xin Xie is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research focuses on the intersections of urban wildness, power/knowledge, embodied cognition, and human-animal relations in urban China.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Jacqueline Zhenru LIN
Wandering Ghosts of National Forefathers: Gender Politics of Transnational Commemoration of WWII in Asia
Friday 5 September 2025, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
As the People's Republic of China prepares to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, over 100,000 remains of Chinese fallen soldiers have been displaced in the former China-Burma-India Theatre. This talk focuses on how these war dead breathe new life in a historical redress movement led by grassroots memory activism in the PRC, involving transnational collaboration with the offspring of WW2 soldiers in Myanmar. In their quest for justice for the wandering ghosts, these activists have been organizing exhumation, repatriation, and commemoration activities since the early 2010s. By emphasizing the cooperation and conflicts between activists from the PRC and the descendants of WWII soldiers in Myanmar, this study explores how the intersection between gender and nationalism shapes the relationships between the living and the dead, the transnational memory network, and the power dynamics between the state and society in war commemoration.
Jacqueline Zhenru Lin is a research assistant professor at the Centre for China Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research delves into war memories, gender, nationalism, NGO development, and online charities in China.
The HKAS is a member of the World Council of Anthropological Associations