The Hong Kong Anthropological Society was founded in 1978 in response to a growing interest in Hong Kong in the culture and ethnography of the region. It now has some 120 members in Hong Kong, including professional anthropologists and other academics from Hong Kong's eight universities, postgraduate and undergraduate students, and interested laypeople from all walks of life.
The Society works in close association with the Hong Kong Museum of History and with the Department of Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and organizes regular monthly talks by scholars, professionals, and local experts on all aspects of anthropology. Topics vary from netizens in China's cyberspace to the struggles of Hong Kong Disneyland, from shamans in Indonesia to Hong Kong's new Chinese identity, from asylum seekers in Hong Kong to the meaning of taste in wine consumption, ecotourism in Malaysia, diasporic Sikhs, and Sufi musical genres. These talks are followed by informal dinners at a local restaurant, to which all are invited.
The purpose of the Society is to bring anthropology beyond the doors of the academy to a larger public of interested people in Hong Kong and beyond. We seek to bring academics and laypeople together in a common forum, in order to broaden academic anthropology and in order to broaden the understanding of anthropology by people beyond the academe.