THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Tobias BRANDNER
Hidden Worlds Behind Bars: Prison Culture in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia
Friday 11 September 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
Prisons constitute a fascinating yet largely inaccessible field of anthropological inquiry. As closed societies, they generate distinctive penal cultures shaped by informal economies, social hierarchies, moral codes, and everyday routines through which inmates navigate isolation, scarcity, and the coercive nature of confinement. This lecture introduces key dimensions of prison life, including the informal governance of inmate societies, the circulation of power and violence, the influence of organized crime networks, and the ongoing negotiation between conflict, cooperation, and accommodation that structures daily life behind bars.
Drawing on cross-cultural observations from Hong Kong and the Philippines, and supplemented by insights from Cambodia and Indonesia, the lecture explores how differing penal policies, colonial legacies, and social histories give rise to distinct prison cultures. By contrasting regimes of discipline, overcrowding, and institutional control, it sheds light on how prisoners organize social life, mitigate the pain of prison life, and maintain order under conditions of constraint. The lecture invites us to rethink what prisons are, how they function in practice, and what they reveal about the societies that sustain them.
Tobias Brandner is Professor of Theology at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, CUHK. He has been an honorary prison chaplain for more than 30 years, serving in local prisons and visiting prisons overseas. His prison-related publications include the monograph Beyond the Walls of Separation: Christian Faith and Ministry in Prison (Cascade 2014) and the article "'The room is small, but the heart is big' - Religion and community life in prison: a case study from the Philippines," Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology Vol. 21/4, August 2020, 1-20.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Miaomiao QI
Horticulture Boom in a Hot Valley: Gendered Labor and Migration in China's Southwest Frontier
Friday 28 August 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
In recent years, thousands of migrants from inland and coastal provinces have moved to rural Yunnan, a province in China's southwest frontier, to lease land and grow high value horticulture crops. Facilitated by the state's financial and institutional support for an agenda of agriculture modernization, their arrival has triggered a widespread land rush that is reshaping local agrarian livelihoods and landscapes. In this talk, I will examine how this internal land rush is transforming smallholder open-air horticulture into highly specialized and concentrated greenhouse production. As the industry expands, the remaining local smallholders, who are mostly middle-aged and elderly women, are increasingly drawn into seasonal agriculture labor. By tracing the flows of rural capital and labor, I highlight a profound reconfiguration of agriculture, rural livelihood, and everyday life-making.
Miaomiao (Mira) Qi is a recent Ph.D. graduate in the department of Global Development at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the process of agrarian transformation in China, specifically on the issues of rural labor and gender justice. She previously completed a master's degree in community development at the University of California, Davis.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Jeffrey SHAW
CITY IN TIME: Immersive Urban Heritage and Augmented Reality
Friday 17 July 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
CITY IN TIME is a cutting-edge augmented reality (AR) urban heritage project created by City University of Hong Kong for the Tourism Commission. Currently deployed at 44 locations across Hong Kong, the project utilizes photogrammetry and AR technology to transform smartphones into "magic windows" that reveal 360-degree historical panoramas perfectly aligned with modern-day surroundings. By blending archival research with digital visualization, it offers an immersive smart tourism experience that allows the public to explore the city's historical transformation in an interactive and engaging manner.
The Artistic Director, Professor Jeffrey Shaw will share the creative and technical processes behind the project and its application in cultural heritage preservation.
Professor Jeffrey Shaw is internationally renowned for his pioneering activities as an artist and researcher. His numerous internationally exhibited and extensively cited works are milestones of technological and cultural innovation that have had a seminal impact on the theory, design and application of digital media in art, society and industry. Currently he is Chair Professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU)'s Academy of Visual Art and Founding Director of the HKBU Visualization Research Centre.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Reynold K. W. TSANG
Peeking at Cannibals and Competing for Stouts: Asian Spectators in Colonial Museums of Hong Kong and Singapore
Friday 5 June 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
The nineteenth century saw the emergence of museums across the British Empire, including Hong Kong and Singapore. The first public museums in the two colonies, the Old City Hall Museum and the Raffles Museum, were established in 1869 and 1874, respectively. While they were planned for and curated by the British, they drew an overwhelmingly Asian audience. This lecture examines the Asian museum-goers within these colonial museums, moving beyond the colonists' vision to look at the colonised experience. From searching for "cannibals" on display to guessing attendance numbers to win free stout, Asian visitors actively reinterpreted the museum space defined by the British on their own terms. Through a historical and anthropological lens, this lecture explores how these visitors subtly challenged British authority and turned a tool of imperial dominance into a site of indigenous subversion.
Reynold K. W. TSANG is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chinese and History at the City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the intersection of museums and British imperialism in Asia.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Patrick HASE
Market Towns of the New Territories
Friday 1 May 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
This lecture will discuss the foundation and growth of market towns in the New Territories, looking at their plans, society, and economy in the period up to 1911, and their relationship with the city of Hong Kong. It will show that the oldest of the market-towns were Kowloon City, Tai Po, and Yuen Long, in existence from the twelfth century, while others such as Shataukok and Ma Wan date only from the nineteenth century. The relationships of these towns with the rural societies they served will be looked at, discussing those market-towns founded by the surrounding villages, and distinguishing them from those founded by groups of merchants. The lecture will also explore the traditional management systems of these towns, and will consider traditional local industries (salt-working, boat-building, rattan-weaving, leather-tanning, refining of spirits, the trade in salt-fish and firewood, etc.), as well as epidemics of typhoid and plague, and outbreaks of disastrous fires. The lecture will be copiously illustrated by plates and maps.
Dr. Patrick HASE is a local historian, and has been working on the history and historical anthropology of the New Territories since his arrival in Hong Kong in 1972. He is Past President of the Royal Asiatic Society, Hong Kong Branch. His most recent books are Settlement, Life and Politics: Understanding the Traditional New Territories CityU Press, 2020, and Villages and Market Towns in Hong Kong: Settlement and History, Chinese University Press, 2025 (also published in Chinese as 香港的村落與墟鎮:聚落與歷史, Chung Hwa, 2025). He is currently working on a book on Village Scholars and Traditional Village Scholarship and Education.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Youping NIE
Two Stone Lion Deities in a Chinese Village: A Hydro-Cosmopolitical Account
Friday 10 April 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
The stone lion is a widespread spiritual symbol found across the rural Dongting Lake basin in the middle Yangtze region. Drawing on ethnographic data obtained from 2017 to 2022, this lecture explores the intersection between a pair of stone lions, climate change, and state governance in a Chinese village. It delineates how these lions transitioned from water deities protecting against flooding to no more than generic stones during the Cultural Revolution. During the shift, one lion was submerged in the river it once tended. Amidst worsening droughts in the decades since, the remaining lion has been seen as a malicious spirit. Villagers believe that misfortune will befall their families if the surviving lion's gaze falls upon their farmhouses, and villagers repeatedly relocate the lion to avoid being watched. The interplay between the villagers and the stone lions mirrors growing anxieties and uncertainties over intensifying climate challenges in contemporary rural China.
Youping NIE earned her PhD in anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research examines the intersection between local cosmology, climate challenges, and state governance in Central China.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Tim ROSENKRANZ
How to Trust Strangers? Knowledge and Solidarity in the HK Quarantine Support Group
Friday 20 March 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
During the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, from 2020-23, people in Hong Kong lived with sometimes daily changing quarantine policies, testing requirements, and travel restrictions. In a confusing and often contradicting daily barrage of government press releases and announcements, media coverage, and social media discussions, staying informed became a frustrating task and routine. In these times, over 100,000 residents of Hong Kong and people who needed to come to Hong Kong turned towards the HK Quarantine Support Group. This Facebook group offered crowd-sourced support and information for matters of travel restrictions, testing requirements, hotel bookings, and vaccine documentation. This talk explores how people come to trust strangers and those they never meet in-person; and how they collectively create knowledge online. Based on an online ethnography of the HK Support group from 2020-2023, I examine various processes of solidarity formation as well as the interactive practices and hierarchies of knowledge-production within the group. I show how this online community manifested and transformed through three years COVID of policies in Hong Kong and how the group both challenges and reaffirms notions of official expertise.
Tim Rosenkranz is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the study of organizations as sites and professionals as actors of social, cultural, and economic change. His current project explores the practices of communal knowledge-production online.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Duncan POUPARD
The books that did not close: Survival and revival of Naxi pictographs in southwest China
Friday 6 February 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
Picture writing and hieroglyphs are often seen as writing technologies that belong firmly to the past. But what does it mean to write in pictures, and how can a tradition of "picture writing" survive into the present day? From the 1920s to the mid-20th century, the botanist/anthropologist Joseph Rock was the first to seriously study the Naxi pictographs of southwest China, a tradition he thought would disappear if he did not record it. In 1952 he made a dire prediction: "A very few years more and the Na-khi books will be undecipherable...they will remain closed books, no Rosetta stone would prove of value." But three quarters of a century later and the books remain open. This unusual writing system has survived in different forms: supported by tourism in Lijiang, the cultural capital of the Naxi people, and revived amongst the remaining ritual specialists of the remote mountain villages in the extended Himalayas. The writing is now touted as the world's "last surviving pictographs." This talk will show how scholars and local specialists come together to preserve ancient traditions, but also how those traditions are changing with the times.
Duncan Poupard is Associate Professor in the Department of Translation, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the translation, transmission and preservation of minority writing and literature in China, specifically of the Naxi people and their unusual ritual texts. He is the author of A Pictographic Naxi Origin Myth from Southwest China (2023, Leiden University Press).
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Jia Jia
Re-examining Hong Kong's identity through RedNote
Friday 16 January 2026, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
In the mid-2020s, Hong Kong continues to grapple with the socioeconomic aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased integration with mainland China. This talk explores the contrasts between the Special Administrative Region (SAR) leaders' efforts to recentre Hong Kong as a global financial hub and the organic, decentralising forces driven by geopolitical dynamics, fragmented mediascapes, and liberal ideologies of the 21st century. Drawing on observations of contents on the RedNote social app since 2023, when the city reopened, in this talk I will review the research and analysis conducted while writing my book Reimagine Hong Kong and will discuss how Hong Kong's identity is constantly reshaped from the viewpoints of local citizens, mainlanders, and Western perspectives, amid Greater Bay Area demographic shifts. What defines Hong Kong as a city? Is Hong Kong nowhere or is Hong Kong now here?
Jia Jia is a cultural theorist, columnist, speaker, and independent researcher. He authored Reimagine Hong Kong (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2025). With a series of poems, Jia Jia is one of the artists of After Sunset, a cultural project involving Hong Kong's cultural heritage.