Lecture by Gordon Mathews
Professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
Who are we? Today two contradictory discourses shape our cultural identities, those of the state and of the market. The state tells us that we should love our country, while the market tells us that we should love money and choice. Both of these forces are based on lies, but because we are immersed in these discourses, we cannot easily see this. Hong Kong is unusual in the world, in that it has long been based not on the discourse of the state, but only on that of the market.
This accounts for some of the political turmoil in Hong Kong in recent years. Are Hong Kong people, in their inability or refusal to follow the discourse of the state, blind as the rest of the world is not, or are they seers in a world that is blind?
Gordon Mathews is a professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written and edited various books, including What Makes Life Worth Living: How Japanese and Americans Make Sense of Their Worlds (1996), Global Culture/Individual Identity: Searching for Home in the Cultural Supermarket (2001), Hong Kong, China: Learning to Belong to a Nation (with Eric Ma and Tai-lok Lui, 2008), and Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong (2011).
Thursday, November 5 – 7pm
Connecting Space Hong Kong