New Territories

— Accustomed as we are to working in small, “bounded” rural communities, anthropologists are often disconcerted by the amorphous and heterogeneous populations of large cities. How are the boundaries of the urban sample to be determined, and how should the fieldworker proceed with his study? As Anthony Leeds has pointed out (1968:31), we often try to solve this problem by concentrating on slums, squatter settlements, or ethnic minorities, on the assumption that they are analogous to the small rural villages we know, and that they can be investigated in similar fashion. Watson, for example, found that even in London he carried the image of the rural village with him from San Tin, the village in the Hong Kong New Territories he had studied.