Through Other Eyes: An Anthropologist's View of Hong Kong

By Barbara E. Ward

Through Other Eyes offers a rigorous, empirically grounded account of Hong Kong's boat people--known locally as the Tanka--during a period of rapid postwar transformation. Drawing on decades of fieldwork conducted between 1950 and 1967, Barbara E. Ward analyzes the social organization, economic practices, and ritual life of Tanka fishing communities, highlighting their complex credit systems, family structures, gendered division of labour, and distinctive religious practices. She documents the profound effects of mechanization between the 1950s and 1960s while situating these changes within broader debates on peasant economies, modernization, and the relationship between cultural models and social behaviour. Ward's influential formulation of "conscious models" provides an analytic framework for understanding how communities interpret and negotiate social change. Spanning topics from modernization to lineage, folk religion, factory life, and women's status in Asia, Through Other Eyes stands as a classic of Hong Kong anthropology and a rare account of a culture in rapid transition.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9882374220
• ISBN13: 9789882374225
• Release Date: December 2026
• Publisher: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
• Length: 350 Pages