Fat, Fatigue and the Feminine: The Changing
Cultural Experience of Women in Hong Kong
Dr Sing Lee
16 December 1998
Wednesday at 6:30 pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
This talk explores how the rapid economic development of Hong Kong has transformed Chinese women's experiences of their bodies, producing new forms of identity, aesthetics, and aspirations, and novel patterns of distress. I show in this talk that women's being thin yet feeling fat, and being active yet feeling tired, does not reflect their own psychopathology, but rather a larger transformation in the experience of being a woman in Hong Kong. This transformation has led to conflicting demands of work and family, production and reproduction, being placed upon women in Hong Kong today: feelings of "fat" and "fatigue" embody what it is to become a woman in contemporary Hong Kong.
Dr. Sing Lee is a senior lecturer with the Department of Psychiatry, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; he is also a lecturer in the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. He is internationally known for his cross-cultural psychiatric research in neurasthenia and eating disorders in Chinese society, and has published widely in this area. His talk for the Hong Kong Anthropological Society is based on a manuscript now in press in Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.
12th Barbara Ward Memorial Lecture
A Matter of Islands
Dr Sidney Mintz
2 June 1998
Singing The Heartland
Divas, Clerics, Ethnographers & Warlords
A Music Festival in the Philippine Highlands
Dr. Manolete Mora
Department of Music
The University of Hong Kong
31 March 1998
Tuesday at 6:30 pm
HK History Museum in Kowloon Park
Professor Mora was awarded a PhD in Ethnomusicology by Monash University in Australia. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the USA and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Australia. His articles have appeared in journals such as Acta Musicologica, Philipnas, Sounds Australian and the Anthropological Forum. A recent CD of T'boli music was released by Rykodisc/ Hannibal Records.
Professor Mora will speak about his participation in a music and dance festival that took place on the highlands of Lake Sebu in Mindanao some years ago. He will trace how the T'boli, an indigenous Philippine people, were able to reassert their cultural identity and political authority through a music which helped them transcend earlier, often negative social relationships in their homeland. Professor Mora of course will illustrate the lecture with samples of T'boli music.
Born At the Right Time
A Post-War Baby-Boomer Considers Hong Kong's Cultural
Identity
Dr Lui Tai-lok
Department of Sociology
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
10 March 1998
Tuesday at 6:30 pm
HK History Museum in Kowloon Park
Professor Lui Tai-lok will offer reflections on growing up as a post-war baby-boomer in Hong Kong. He will explore the formation of a distinct Hong Kong cultural identity among members of his generation. The talk will be illustrated by film clips from movies about Hong Kong over the past 30 years.
Professor Lui obtained his BA (History) and MPhil (Sociology) from the University of Hong Kong; his PhD is from Oxford University. Writing extensively on Hong Kong's cultural identity and the mass media, he has served as a freelance newspaper and magazine columnist, a commentator for cable TV and until recently as a radio programme host.
The Hong Kong Anthropological Society &
The Hong Kong Museum of History
jointly present a lecture
The Ethnographer as Tour Guide: Adventures in Bali
Prof. Edward M. Bruner
20th January, 1998 (6:30p.m.)
Hong Kong Museum of History Kowloon Park (Tsim Sha Tsui
MTR)
Professor Edward M. Bruner received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1954. He is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Emeritus Professor of Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. Now, he is Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Tour groups that travel together become somewhat encapsulated during the course of their trip, so as a methodological strategy for doing fieldwork on tourism in Indonesia, and as a way of entering the group, I became a tour guide. I would travel with the tourists as they journeyed through Indonesia, gathering data on their reactions to the sites visited and on the meaning of tourism as experienced. Here, I would like to discuss what I learned, and also to describe the ambiguities of the role in which I had placed myself, as an ethnographer/ tour guide.