Village Life in Hong Kong constitutes a unique ethnographic record of a cultural system teetering on the brink of transition. Living and working in the New Territories during the 1960s-1970s, the Watsons explored the cultural traditions of the Cantonese villagers who first settled in South China's Pearl River Delta primarily during the Tang and Song dynasties.

Two villages are featured prominently: San Tin and Ha Tsuen, homes of the Man and Teng lineages, single-surname communities that once dominated rural politics in South China. In the '60s and '70s, village life revolved around the performance of expensive and time-consuming rituals associated with birth, marriage, and ancestor worship. Geomancy (fengshui) was a universally accepted system of belief linking the living to the dead, while men and women lived in separate social worlds that were closed to members of the opposite sex. Working as a team, the authors were able to document both sides of this gender divide.

Many of the rituals and social activities described in this book are no longer performed in the New Territories, or in adjacent regions of Guangdong province, and the physical landscape has also changed dramatically in the wake of the "New Town" development of the 1980s-1990s. Nonetheless, indigenous villagers of the New Territories still constitute a vibrant, recognizable minority in Hong Kong's rapidly expanding population.

"This is an extraordinary volume that deserves attention and appreciation. It summarizes the achievements of two world class scholars. . . . Their passionate interest in local lifeways and their devotion to the communities studied stand in sharp contrast to a new generation of ethnographies that stresses global fluidity. . . . With sophistication and sensitivity, James and Rubie Watson have highlighted analytical issues and historical evidence that mark a significant phase in the field of Chinese Anthropology."

──Helen F. Siu

Professor of Anthropology, Yale University

". . . [E]ach author goes considerably beyond village confines and deals with fundamental aspects of Chinese culture and society, in classic articles such as those concerned with naming practices or the connection between belief and ritual. Thus this book's articles are essential reading not only for understanding village society in the New Territories, but also for appreciation of the larger cultural and historical forces that have importantly shaped it."

──Myron L. Cohen

Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

"James and Rubie Watson are exceptionally attuned to unconventional and sometimes sensitive research topics. Among the many challenging problems they analyze are class differences within lineages, the equalizing function of a lineage banquet style that violates all norms of formal dining, women's names, and ways of managing the terrifying presence of death pollution. Their analysis of such diverse topics is not grounded in any one theoretical model but, instead, is situated in a rich comparative perspective."

──Elizabeth Lominska Johnson

Curator Emerita and Research Fellow

University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology

reviewed in American Anthropologist

"In the Preface to this rich collection of essays . . . James and Rubie Watson note that some of the villages discussed have "disappeared from the face of the earth" and that the essays "constitute a partial record of a social system that no longer exists." Nevertheless, the eighteen essays gathered here — culled from their scholarly production of several decades and based on fieldwork in Hong Kong's New Territories from the late 1960s and 1970s — should be required reading for anyone in the China field."

──Ellen Oxfeld, Middlebury College

reviewed in The China Journal