Thank you very much, everyone, for coming out to the 2012 SOAS Food Studies Distinguished Lecture. The SOAS Food Studies Center was founded in 2007, and it's based in the anthropology department here at SOAS. We run a distinguished lecture every year, as well as a seminar series. The center is the location of the master's degree program in anthropology of food. While it is based in the anthropology department, there are members of the food studies center from nearly all of the departments here in the school at SOAS. Additionally, there are a great many associate members that come from other institutions across London and beyond, in addition to people working in food policy, in food activist organizations and NGOs, people working in the media, people working in the food industry. For those of you who are interested in keeping abreast of what we do at the SOAS Food Studies Center, you may join the center as associate members if you wish to do so, send an email to soasfoodstudies at soas.ac.uk. Now, I'd like to introduce, I'm Harry West on the chair of the SOAS Food Studies Center, Professor of Anthropology, but I'd like to introduce the deputy chair of the center, Dr. Jacob Klein, who will be introducing our speakers tonight. James L. Watson is Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at Harvard University. He is a past president of the Association of Asian Studies and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Watson graduated from the University of Iowa in 1965 with the BA in Chinese Studies. He then trained in anthropology under the supervision of Jack Potter and George Foster at the University of California Berkeley, receiving his PhD in 1972. Following that, he came here to the School of Oriental and African Studies where he taught anthropology until 1983. He then taught at the University of Pittsburgh before joining the faculty at Harvard in 1988. Since 1969, in collaboration with Ruby Watson, James Watson has been carrying out ethnographic and historical research on Hong Kong's new territories, particularly on the villages of Santin and Hachun. He has also worked with migrants from Santin in the UK, in mainland Europe, and in North America, and since the 1990s, also with returning migrants in Hong Kong. Moreover, he has done fieldwork in the provinces of Guangdong and Jiangxi in the People's Republic of China. Professor Watson has made significant contributions to a number of areas in anthropology and Chinese studies. These include kitchens, especially the study of lineage organizations, migration and diaspora studies, popular religion and ritual, class and social stratification, slavery and servitude, and socialist and post-socialist studies. Food has long played a part in James Watson's scholarship and in a variety of dimensions, ranging from the symbolic meanings of pork in Cantonese death ritual and ancestral worship, to the role of the Chinese restaurant trade in migration patterns and migrants' lives in Britain, as explored, for instance, in his 1975 monograph, Immigration and the Chinese Lineage. Two, also, is now a classic essay from 1987 from the Common Pot, Feasting with Equals in Chinese Society, in which he discusses the use in the rural new territories of banqueting as a social leveling device. In the 1990s, Watson convened a small group of anthropologists who explored ethnographically the roles played by McDonald's in everyday lives in five East Asian settings. This led to the publication in 1997 with Stanford University Press of his edited volume, Golden Arches East McDonald's in East Asia. The book caused an immediate sensation and was an important and controversial intervention in debates on consumption and globalization. In 2006, a second edition of the book was released. That same year, Blackwell published a co-edited volume by James Watson and Melissa Caldwell, the cultural politics of food and eating, a reader, an indispensable resource for researchers, teachers and students in the field. Indeed, Watson's contributions to food studies are to be found not only in his research and writing, but also very much in his teaching. He taught hugely popular courses in food and culture from his time at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s until his retirement from Harvard in 2011. And several of his former graduate students have become important figures in the field of food studies in their own right. So it is truly a great honor to welcome Professor James L. Watson to SOAS and the Food Studies Center this evening. The title of the lecture is Saltwater Marjoram, Red Rice, Reclamation and Restaurateurs along the South China Coast, an ethnographic puzzle. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here. I see some old friends coming back. This is a particularly interesting feeling. I remember attending many talks in this lecture hall. First, I'd like to thank my hosts and the SOAS Food Studies program, Jacob Klein and Harry West for inviting me to come this evening. Jacob has organized this very well indeed and I'm grateful for him for doing so. Now standing here tonight brings back some memories of my 11 years of teaching here at SOAS as lecturer in Asian Anthropology from 1972 to 1983. Now those were very good and productive years and a couple of you in the room by looking around spotting you will agree, I hope, I think. Now in those days the term British Anthropology with quotation marks around it actually meant something. It was still a distinct discipline with a unified canon that everybody read and everybody talked about. One of those leaders of that discipline was Jack Goody, to whom I wish to dedicate this lecture. Jack, unfortunately I can't be here tonight, but there was also a food studies conference held earlier this week at his honor, the 30th year of the publication of this classic volume, Cooking, Class and Cuisine. So I'd like to dedicate this to Jack. Jack is one that many of you know. He always had his feet very firmly on the ground in the pursuit of political economy, ecology and social history. And I hope, when I send this to him, that he will appreciate tonight's trek through the rice paddies of South China. Now my lecture this evening takes the form of an ethnographic puzzle. And by the way, where's my laser pointer? An ethnographic puzzle. Did you leave off? Well, okay. You don't need to run. I thought everybody had laser pointers. So this lecture takes the form of an ethnographic puzzle. How did migrants from an impoverished, hard scrapple village in the remote corner of rural Hong Kong, which is here, how did migrants from one of those villages that I would point out soon, how did the villagers from that remote corner of rural Hong Kong end up being extremely successful and in some respects dominating parts of the Chinese restaurant trade in England, Scotland, Holland, Belgium and Canada. Now like most anthropologists of my generation, and I see a few in the room, we began our ethnographic careers, in my case over 40 years ago, working among people who could be described as the victims of world capitalism. There was no point in denying it. That was what we did. And as the decades have passed, however, I have found myself in the rather awkward role of chronicler-python historian for a kinship group that has become spectacularly successful by any measure. Now in a Cantonese chapter lineage that today has a membership of approximately 3,000, there are, at my last count, and I'm sure I'm out of date, at least 25 multi-millionaires, oh I know, millions don't mean that much anymore, but they're verging, a couple of them are verging on the big B, the billionaires, but there are at least 25 that are quite wealthy by any standards, and plus well over 400 others in this group that are wealthy enough to fly around the world attending to transnational business ventures. Now clearly trying to keep track of a group like this is a very difficult task for an ordinary field working anthropologist. Now having begun my career by talking to retired farmers while they drank tea in mosquito infested ancestral halls, I now have to make appointments with their grandson's secretaries in high-rise office buildings in Toronto, Hong Kong, and Dusseldorf, among other places. But that's another story, a methodological story about what happens to longitudinal studies and multi-cited studies if you keep at it long enough. Basically if you keep at it long enough all kinds of things happen. And you will always regret what you published two decades ago. Well, but all of that is another story. Now returning to tonight's puzzle, how does one explain a pattern of entrepreneurial and professional success that affects not just a few isolated individuals, as is usually the case, but not just a few isolated individuals of an entire kinship group, but an entire group. What is it I'm going to be asking about the members of this patrilineage that sets them apart from their neighbors? Now when asked, members of this group have a ready answer. And this is my generation of people I knew in the patrilineage. This is what they would say to me. We were always different, said a successful restaurateur in 1980. We always had to struggle for a living. Just look at our history, he said. Look at our history. It's always been that way. So tonight I propose that we do just that. Let's look at their history, their agrarian history. Okay, so the place I'm talking about is right here. This is Hong Kong, it was British Hong Kong. The border between China and what was British Hong Kong, and is now the SAR, the Special Enrichment Region, is right here on a river that I will be talking about. The village I studied is right smack in here, and the one that I lived in in the 1970s, a decade or so later, a few years later, is right about here. And this is the Pearl River Delta that I will be talking about. So what is it about their history? Founders of this lineage, referred called the Mon lineage in Cantonese, Mon, Mon, Mon, and Mandarin One, arrived in the Pearl River Delta Region during the chaotic aftermath of the Manchu conquest of South China, and this would have been mid-17th century. As late comers to this region, they had no choice but to settle near assault water marshes that no one else wanted. Basically that was all that was left. They reclaimed nearly a thousand acres of mud flats and constructed brackish water ecosystems and enclosures that produced a single variety of red rice, an industrial crop. And I wish to underline the notion that this is an industrial crop that used primarily for winemaking, and this type of rice is essentially inedible for humans. A point I will return to later. To grasp the full implications of the ecological adaptation that I'm talking about, one needs to look at the agricultural system and the history of the Pearl River Delta itself. Let's see if I can get back, yes, to the map. The Pearl River Delta is one of South China's premier rice growing regions. Most of the valleys and the plains bordering this delta, all of the land that's in green here, all of this land was converted to fresh water, double crop irrigated fields, long before the mon arrived on the scene. Now these lineages in this area, there are about maybe about ten of them, ten big lineage communities in this region. We're studied by Hugh Baker, one of my colleagues here at SOAS, among other people, and by Jack Potter, who was my supervisor at Berkeley when I was a student, and Ruby Watson, who was my life companion and fieldwork companion, and also Chan Guoxing, who was a graduate of SOAS, and that's a student who graduated from here. So a number of these lineages have been studied in this region, and all of them basically are the big, wealthy freshwater lineages. These were first settled during the Song Dynasty around the 13th century. And by this way Han Chinese pioneers built Conquistador-like outposts in this region as early as the Tang Dynasty around the 10th century. Rice grown by the descendants of these pioneers, that rice, was an exceptionally fine, wonderfully tasting, aromatic, long grain variety of white rice that was prized by China's elite. It was fabulous stuff. And this is a rice shop in the nearby market town, but we're near where we live, and it still had some varieties of the old rice when we first arrived. Now legend has it that bags of this long grain of white rice was shipped every year to the Imperial Court in Beijing as tribute from the local magistrate. The lineage communities that emerged in this rice haven were large and prosperous. The affluent Deng lineage, for instance, neighbors of the mon, maintained impressive ancestral halls, beautiful schools, libraries, and the Deng also produced an occasional scholar who passed Imperial exams and became government officials. It was a really significantly wealthy place, the lineage outpost of the Deng. The agricultural system built by the mon lineage, by contrast, was radically different. The very name of the community, as I indicated, the name of that is Santin, which signals its singularity. The Cantonese term Santin means, literally, new fields, highlighting efforts to rest the arable land from the saltwater mud flats of the Delta. The mon fields were limited to a single crop of red rice each year. Here, the brackish water ecosystem, a single crop, and the land was too salty for catch crops of vegetables and sweet potatoes. There was, however, one advantage to this ecological adaptation. In contrast, by the way, the mon had only one single crop of rather low-quality rice, whereas all the other landages had freshwater double crop. They had two crops a year of white rice, plus they could grow vegetables and sweet potatoes on the dykes, and that sort of thing, because it wasn't salt investment. There was, however, an important advantage to inherit to a reclamation technology of the type that the mon developed. This is the border zone, and that is the river in the distance in the border between Hong Kong and China. As the mon lineage expanded, and this is their territory, the dykes were extended farther into the saline marshes step-by-step over the centuries. Santin grew to be one of the largest single lineage villages in the Pearl River Delta region. Rival lineages, based as they were, on freshwater irrigation systems, were caught in a demographic trap. They could not expand, they could only expand at the expense of their neighbors in neighboring lineages, a reality that set off bouts of inter-linear warfare and feuding, which was endemic to this region, and which was also the topic of two books that Morris Friedman wrote and published in the LSE monograph series. Now, from the 17th to the early 20th century, the irrigation-based lineages of the Delta reached a demographic equilibrium, stabilizing the population of between 700 and 800 males. By contrast, by about the 1850s, the mon lineage had grown to twice the size of most of its rivals. The mon thus played a role in the politics of the region, not through wealth, but through sheer weight of numbers and the power of their local security force, about which I will have more to say later, a lot more. The ethnographic puzzle I posed at the outset of this talk would not be complete without delving into the micro-details of the mon reclamation system. Now, try to bear with me some of this. I've been working on this for 43 years, and I'm still working on the details. They are maddeningly complex, and I certainly don't have time to even begin to unpack them all here tonight. These are maddeningly complex details, and because they are, of course, irresistible to any anthropologist. Anything that is complex and is going to be irresistible. Last year, in the bowels of Hong Kong's bureaucracy, I discovered a set of RAF aerial photos taken of the Sontine area. This was one of those eureka moments that all anthropologists saved. We all wait for it, and if we're lucky, we'll get a few in our careers. Suddenly, almost magically, the eureka moment helps you clarify years of interviewing and on-site exploration. Here in front of me, in an RAF photograph taken in 1945, was the reclamation system revealed in all of its involuted glory. Now note the strips, which are going to play a big part in my story, and I'm going to continue working on this for years then I may have. The strips in the system, as opposed to these kind of fields you will find around here, which are regular rice packets, which are oblong, square, but we're talking about strips. Now those of you who are historians will begin to recognize one of the themes that's emerging. The problem was, until I saw these photographs, meant these aerial photographs, until that point I had not actually seen the mon farming system in operation. Rice farming had ceased by the time I arrived as a graduate student to start my first field research in 1969, freshman Berkeley. What follows, therefore, is an ethno-historical reconstruction and a historical reconstruction of years of interviewing, which I carried out with retired farmers, and also, in the context of interviewing, hand-drawn maps, all of which I have saved in my archive and have been scanned, never throw anything away, those of you who are students, thinking of anthropology, keep it all, just be a pat-rad, because someday you're going to use it. Believe it or not, 43 years later, here I am using this stuff. Hand-drawn maps, by local farmers, and I have lots of these, and I spent hours with these guys going over the maps, and they argued and fought in the local tea house, and they broke one time, trying to keep them going with their maps and drinking at the same time. I also, of course, had access to government records. These are maps drawn by Punjabi Sikh cartographers who were on Sukundman from the Indian Civil Service to the Hong Kong government in 1905, and these Sikhs came out into the new territories and spent five years mapping every square inch. It's wonderful.  It's unlike anything you'll find in almost any other part of China. And I've got land records that go with it, who the owner was, how much it was worth, how much it costed sales. So there were records going with these maps. These just as 1905 showing what the reclamation system looked like when the Punjabi Sikh cartographers were working on it. And then I also have, of course, my own observations, basically having tramped through this region for many, many hours. Many hours of tranting, going out up to my knees and mud with farmers that were then showing me where they farmed and how they did it. Now, tonight I can only give you a quick overview of the system. Please bear with me. I'll try to do this fairly quickly. Each of the major reclamations that I'm talking about are called Guai in Cantonese, Wei in Mandarin. And the term, the Chinese character, means enclosure or compound. A Guai contained up to 24 to 160 acres. Now, let that sink a bit. 160 acres. Now, that's pretty decent-sized cornfield in my native Iowa. This is a serious piece of land, much bigger, far bigger than most rice paddies in this part of China, at least, ever get. The Mon reclaimed eight of these Guai, clustered together in a fan-shaped landscape as I showed in the photographer's map, bordering on a money creek up here, which is called the Shenzhen River, which later became the border between British Hong Kong and China. The eight Guai were separated by buns, and the entire system was protected by a dam out here along the river to keep the saltwater out and to retain whatever fresh water they could get. Now, as shown in the illustration on the screen, each Guai was divided into four subsections called Hou in Cantonese, Hao in Mandarin, which usually translates as number, but it doesn't really have a translation here, or mark. And the divisions between the Hou were maintained by lines of ten-foot-tall bamboo stakes. The Hou, in turn, were divided into strips, as you saw on the aerial photo. Lots and hundreds of strips. And the strips were on every five strides wide, about this wide, and then about a hundred yards long, or somewhat longer, depending on the entire size of the Guai. Now, the strips in Cantonese were called Fu, or in Mandarin they're called Fu, which translates literally as a strip of cloth. Here are the strips, the Fu. Again, depending on the overall size of the reclamation, there could be up to 64 of these strips. Now, are you still with me? I know this is a little tedious, but you've got to love ecology if you're going to do this kind of stuff. The families in the states own differing numbers of folk or strips. If, for instance, as an example, the Sumenin, Mr. Mon, Sam Laram, own three folk, he or his tenant had rights to farm three strips, three strips at each of the four hulls. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, he owned three, but he had actually twelve altogether. The strips were unified and demarcated in the fields by ordinal number, as in third, fourth, fifth strip. The Cantonese linguistic form is daisam folk, daisei folk, daigun folk, and in Mandarin it would be disandisi diwu. In other words, they're labeled as such. So Mon Sam Laram had rights to three of these at each of the four inside the Y. But he did not always cultivate daisam, daigun, daigun. In other words, not the third, fourth, and fifth. He instead, a lottery was held every year here in the ancestral hall, this one, the main ancestral hall, central ancestral hall. And during the lottery, farmers chose lots and were assigned strips for that year. In other words, the owners or their tenants farm a different set of strips each year, thereby randomizing access to the best land. And it depended very much if you were close to the river. It was not so great if you were close to the village. It was somewhat better. And also, of course, not only randomizing access to the most productive land, but ameliorating risk. And it was an interesting social system emerging as context of this, in the context of that. The Mon Lani each had over 100 ancestral states, which were land-only corporations composed of descendants of named ancestors. These strips also were rented annually to Mon farmers in an auction. Also held in the ancestral hall. So, many farmers might farm strips that they inherited from their fathers and also whatever they could get in bidding. But it was all randomized then in the lottery. Now, it will not have escaped the attention of millions among you that this pattern of strip farming combined with an access lottery should be familiar. This system emerged in many agricultural ecosystems in the world. This is Hitchin, England in 1866 in the famous English common field system in which there was a randomization and changing every year the strips that a farmer would farm. Going in cycles from spring corn, fall corn and fallow and then back corn of course in this context meaning grain and usually rye or such. So, there are many obvious parallels of the common field systems in medieval and modern England. This is 1896 study. This is Colonial New England. This is 1652, a map of Concord, Massachusetts. Again, strip farming, you can see down here. And other examples. Here's one from Africa. This is Polly Hill's classic study of couple farmers in Ghana. Now, I could of course go on at great length but I'll desist. However, by the way, if any of you have good examples or know of any especially in the Delta regions of Odesh and India, please send me an email because I'm looking for them and I'm having trouble. I know that they exist but I've got to find them, especially in the Brackishwater Deltas of South Asia. Now, returning to the Pearl River Delta, what are some of the social and economic consequences of a Brackishwater ecosystem? Perhaps the most important was heavy dependence on the market. Red rice, as noted earlier, could not be consumed by people wanting because humans could only eat this specialized crop by milling the grain down to a white core and essentially a tiny nub and even then it was foul bitter tasting. This put them on at a decided disadvantage in a market economy. If you look at calories of rice consumed, the percent of calories, total calories devoted to rice in 1981. This is work by John Wilson Buck. It was average around 83%. And rice supplied by one's own farm in Guangdong, the region that I'm doing my research on double crop rice down, up to almost 60% for people in other words, consume their own crop. The Mon, of course, could not do this. Unlike their neighbors, the Mon could not even eat the portion of their crop. Now, marine byproducts associated with the Brackish paddies, fish, crab, shrimp, etc. were cash commodities far too valuable to eat locally except under dire circumstances. So Mon elders claimed, by the way, that their farming system never let them starve but it did not generate enough income to satisfy the needs in a market economy. Now for that the Mon had to look elsewhere. But there's another critical factor associated with red rice production, namely the super abundance of spare time for men of the community. Red rice here, shown again, and John Bosing Buck's data. Now this is the growing season. Red rice the local variety had a 150 day growing cycle, one season for a single crop and there were no cash crops. So one has to ask what did the Mon do with the remaining 215 days of the year because they were only involved in agriculture for 150 days. Another way to look at this problem is by looking in contrast to freshwater paddy systems which had a huge amount of labor consumed with cash crops and vegetables as I'll show basically hardly any time was left for now. Another way to look at the problem is to review John Bosing Buck's treasure trove of Chinese agricultural data collected in the 1930s. Again this is wonderful data. And he has actually a table or two he refers to as the idleness factor. Buck's survey shows that the average number of idle months per worker and double crop freshwater paddy systems was 1.7 months per year. Now the rice farmers in the area where I've worked is more like this. The true rate is basically hardly ever zero spare time in that region both for men and for women. In red rice systems the idleness factor was as high as 7.1 months per farmer probably actually it was higher. Sontine's local seafood industry certainly couldn't absorb the labor and there were no handicrafts in the village of any consequence. So the mon thus faced an ever present ever urgent push to find alternative sources of income outside of Sontine. Now this was especially true of young men from the age of 15 to 40, men at the height of their physical powers. Now Sontine adopted a survival strategy that was well suited to its local needs. Rival lineages followed what might be called an orthodox mode of lineage development. They invested in double crop rice fields as well as education and business ventures including mills ferries, pawn shops, tea houses and the like. These lineages unlike the neighbors, unlike the mon also produced wealthy landlords. Now the mon by contrast pursued a decidedly unorthodox mode of lineage development specializing in entrepreneurial activities that are probably best described in today's terminology as security services. The mon were renowned for their martial arts skills and their utter fearlessness. Young men from Sontine literally had nothing to lose but their lives and their reputations. For reasons that I've explored elsewhere, the mon also had a high percentage of permanent bachelors. Never marries who lived short but often colorful lives. The mon lineage retained, maintained that residents of neighboring villages referred to as all agree as the largest and most professional self defense corps in the region. The Cantonese term for this organization is chandeng, perhaps best translated as village guard. Now normally guardsmen engaged in crop watching and neighborhood patrols and they sell them for ventures beyond the confines of their lineage domain. The mon guardsmen by contrast were employed as security specialists throughout the eastern Delta region halfway up to Guangzhou formerly known as the city of Canton. They served as body guards for merchants, watchmen, and pawn shops. They rode shotgun for money changers who transported cash to and from Delta centers. Here by the way inside one of the ancestral halls in Sontine is an armory where they kept their weapons which were corporate property of the lineage. That's where they kept the shotguns. Sontine adopted this kind of survival strategy. Mon guardsmen also as you might suspect protected businesses from gangs and extortionists. By the early 20th century after the new territories was absorbed into the Hong Kong British colony recruiters from European freighters companies paid regular visits to Sontine where they knew that they could find men who knew how to eat bitterness. Basically that means Stoics who can survive difficult circumstances without complaining. The Mon were disproportionately represented in this new demanding occupation of sailors on freighters. Many of these villagers jumped ship in London Amsterdam and New York where they established small diners and laundries. These enterprises became the essential footholds as I'll show later for later waves from Sontine to Europe. During the Second World War another part of the story Japanese forces occupied the new territories and put a stop to the entrepreneurial ventures of the Sontine village guard and three of the Mon leaders were executed by the Japanese. There was a desperate push of young men out of the village during this period because the Mon unlike their neighbors of course could not live off their own crops. More like 3035 Sontine youth ended up in the East River Brigade a famous guerrilla unit affiliated with the Red Army. Unlike most of their compatriots and from other Hong Kong villages the majority of these Mon guerrillas survived the war. They knew how to survive. A handful stayed in China where they joined the Communist Party and became local government officials. Others the majority returned to Sontine and later 10 years, maybe a bit later they ended up in Europe and became mainstays in the European restaurant trade. Now the connection between guerrilla activity and the immigrant catering trade is not as far fetched as you might assume. The qualities that ensure success in both spheres are similar determination, confidence and a laser beam attention to detail, meaning survival. The Mon as I've discovered in my 43 years of field work have never lacked in any of these qualities. Meanwhile in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War Hong Kong rapidly became a center of light industry focused on the emerging global market. Hong Kong's urban population exploded as tens of thousands of refugees spilled over the border in the 1980s and 1960s and hence the demand for fresh vegetables to feed this growing population in Hong Kong started a headlong rush to convert the old rice paddies into vegetable plots thereby increasing your profit up to seven fold per year. All of the major lineages that I've described and talked about in the new territories joined the surge of vegetable growing and became wealthy in the process all except of course one the outlier. The Mon of Sontine their brackish water ecosystems would not sustain vegetables because of course it's too much salt. Meanwhile the People's Liberation Army had closed the Hong Kong border and the market for Sontine's red rice collapsed almost overnight because the largest wine distilleries were across the river on the Chinese side. So after nearly three centuries of steady production and the reclaimed fields were fallow and began to revert back to marshland. The Mon were confronted with obviously the most serious crisis in their long history but resilient as ever they opted for the best alternative. They became international migrants on a massive scale using the footholds established by Dirk Hensman namely the jumped ship sailors nearly 1,200 maybe 1,300 members of the Mon lineage males emigrated to Europe between the years 1955 to 1962 this is an entire lineage up and leaving in a very short period it is almost unprecedented especially when you consider they have to get passports they have to get passives they have to mobilize and get out. The latter date 1962 some of you who do migrant studies will be aware is significant because it marks the passage of the first Commonwealth Immigrants Act legislation that restricted access to the UK the Mon were well aware of the political developments in Britain and moved quickly to beat the ban as it was called they had their newspaper circulated newspaper articles circulating in saunty to this effect that had been translated from English into Chinese and everybody knew about it. By the time I began my field work in 1969 85 to 90% of the able-bodied males in the Mon lineage were gone. They moved to Europe where they established over 400 Chinese restaurants by that time it grew much more rapidly like this one in Amsterdam over 400 one sub branch of the lineage relocated from England to Canada where they dominated the Chinese restaurant trade in the Toronto area where I just visited in the course of this wholesale movement the lineage was transformed from a corporation based on land ownership and common fields like I described earlier to an organizational framework for the coordination of large scale emigration. In effect the Mon lineage became an information network a kind of emigration agency with jobs, introductions and travel tips circulating in the pre-existing patrilineal categorized patrilineal group Appliance those married in sons-in-law especially sons-in-law friends and other new territories neighbors were not part of this network and were systematically excluded from advantages that might accrue it was kept strictly within the patrilineal network. In my first take on this problem the book that Jacob referred to in the introduction emigration in the Chinese lineage in 1925 I captured the Mon in a transitional state somewhere between a classic emigrant community in which migrants are considered considered themselves transient workers who will retire to their own village and halfway to the formation of what a layer began to realize was the emergence of a transnational diaspora a micro-diaspora for lack of a better term focused on kinship by any measure members of today's far-flung Mon lineage are highly successful while their grandfathers and great-grandfathers arrived in Europe and Canada with little but the shirts on their back contemporary members of this kinship group are property developers here's a few of them property developers accountants professors even several of their professors in Taiwan professors in China, professors in Britain two or three in the United States that I know of engineers, government officials tour operators and yes there's still a handful of high-end restaurateurs left in this group they've moved out of the restaurant trade and they're now into lots of other things I am now in my fifth decade of fieldwork and I've worked in other Cantonese villages but I still keep track of the Mon when I can and of course the developments in Sante now if I can ever draw a line in the sand which is very hard for field workers to do just draw a line and say that's it and call it quits I'm planning to write a sequel to my first book and I intend to call it the Mon lineage revisited diaspora formation of the long-term consequences of emigration but of course like all anthropologists I can't quit Tai however I want to address the ethnographic puzzle I proposed at the beginning of this talk how does one explain this remarkable transition from the mudflats of the Pearl River Delta to the middle and upper middle classes of Europe now I realize explanation is somewhat out of fashion in modern anthropology but I cling to these notions that we should try to explain things I do not want to leave the impression that I believe the Mon succeeded in Europe because of their ecological adaptation as farmer entrepreneurs on the margins of the Pearl River Delta now by the way you'll notice that at some point I will make a subtle shift and I will stop saying the Mon like the newer or some other group because what happens is they don't necessarily begin to think of themselves as a unified kinship group and my concept and my vision of them begins to change with it when I did my first field work they were indeed the Mon and they would say to you in Cantonese I know who I am and I'm not like the Chun I'm not like the Dong and I'm a Mon and if you don't like it please move out of the way it was central to their personal identity the Mon lineage identity came first and all the other accoutrements of identity were packed down below nowadays it's just one feature of identity and I'm trying very hard in my research to find that subtle transition that happens in diaspora in the formation where these kind of changes occur it's one of the things I'm approaching but we still have to explain this transition I don't want to leave the impression that the Mon succeeded in Europe because of their ecological adaptation as I said farmer, entrepreneurs on the edge of the delta but however and here's comparison coming in of fashion there's good comparative evidence however that their ability to adapt to changing new situations suited them well at least during the early decades of diaspora formation other neighboring lineages also dabbled and they also produced a few immigrants but at a much smaller scale than the Mon at the beginning of the 1950s and early 1960s immigration served alternatives for the Mon they either moved to Europe or they would end up in dead end industrial jobs which are pretty grim in Hong Kong at that time because farming, vegetable farming and all the other things were totally out for them and the nearby village of Ha Chun where Ruby Watson did her research and where I resided with Ruby for nearly two years a few years after we did the Santine study in the mid 70s there were a handful of successful immigrants but there were also if not more villagers who had returned from Europe essentially their tails between their legs as they would say they returned because they could not adapt or as they would say they became, quote, homesick which is an okay thing to say I'm homesick, therefore I want to go back to Hong Kong basically they want to come back and eat and I could understand having Lydman Boston and Pittsburgh in places like that in my 40 years 43 years of tracking the mon I never met one who admitted to homesickness and most did not even understand the question what are you talking about as one restaurant worker said to me in 1977 where am I going to go if I don't work here this would have been here in London what am I going to do when I get back to Santine there's nothing there and I haven't saved enough money to retire yet it is obvious to me at least that their ancestors historical adaptation to a unique ecological niche is a critical determining factor and the chain of events that culminated in the entrepreneurial success of at least the first and second generation of these migrants now having said that tempting as it is for someone of my generation to draw grandiose motor production marxian inspired conclusions which of course I'm always pulling towards and all of my generation it's like a magnetic force attempting as it is to do that it's obvious that there is more to the story than ecology equally important are a set of political and economic circumstances that confronted them on at a critical point in their agricultural system when it collapsed they do not forget their subjects born in a British in a crown colony prior to the immigration act carrying commonwealth passports which gave them access to Britain and from there they could bounce to Europe and Canada and elsewhere at least they could before July 1st 1962 when they all stampeded out in anticipation of that date they also had the advantage of footholds in Europe established by an earlier generation of jump-shipped sailors and not very many communities had that advantage and they arrived at Europe and here's another critical factor when you think of today's economy maybe not in London but certainly maybe in the rest of England go to Detroit and you don't see what I mean they arrived in Europe just at the time of an economic boom when the middle classes were beginning to eat out now in my research when I did my original study I looked into restaurants and eating out in London and Britain and it was a god awful pitiful scene prior to this period when the Chinese restaurant began to take off it was grim indeed so the middle classes were ready to eat out and the Mon and others were ready to feed them now getting back to the question how did the Mon themselves the ones that I talked to in the first and second generation how how do they explain their success they by the way are very aware of their uniqueness among Hong Kong's indigenous lineages and they're proud of it because not very many lineages have succeeded like they have the Mon I have spoken with about this issue have a straightforward unambiguous explanation of their relative success in contrast to their neighbors they have devised a justificatory ideology that resembles a Chinese version of the Protestant ethic Max Weber argued of course that capitalism did not emerge in China because in his view the Chinese lacked a proper mind set as he called it in other words the overpowering influence of Confucianism and Taoism precluded the formation of an inner driven personality of the type fostered by Protestantism in Eastern Europe somehow Weber says they lacked it well my friends in the Mon lineage would be very surprised to hear this in their own representations of their own history they outdo even the most radical Faberians in their emphasis on the social construction of an adaptive personality and the central significance of a work ethic many retired immigrants now many of whom are now my generation grandfathers and great-grandfathers worry about the quality of the next generation the hard-bitten driven men entrepreneurial empires are afraid that their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are too soft to prosper in the 21st century during recent encounters in Hong Kong at the grave of the family ancestor some of these old Jansu of course my age now asked me repeatedly if I thought the younger generation was hard enough to compete in the world of global capitalism had I noticed a big change since I started my research many had read my first book in English by the way have our grandchildren suffered enough they would ask are they strong enough to fight their way to the top and they are asking me to quote one of the retired restaurateurs in their own view in their own internal world view therefore at least the original generations the most successful of the Mon are more Faberian than Marxist to them history is important because it explains how they managed to succeed in the tough world by sheer force of will in their view they succeeded in spite of their history not because of it now many members of the Mon group that I've talked about beginning to shift group I'm calling it now now see themselves as members citizens of the world I'd like to say they have created a transnational diaspora that uses the bonds of patrilineal kinship as its focus elsewhere I've explored the nature of this emerging kinship group it is no longer a lineage of course in the classic sense of the term that my anthropologist used in the past the people who today call themselves Mon and claim dissent from monocyte who is the founding ancestor of Sontin people are very complex lot many of them are Eurasian and at least half speak little if any Cantonese most do not live in Hong Kong and some of my coins have never visited Sontin yet in some respect they're members of the Mon lineage because of course the central problem I continue to pursue after all these years and I will keep going is the question of goodness, materiality or lack thereof of the Mon lineage there are hundreds of thousands of lineages and clans like this from South China that have spread to the winds and almost none of them are still held together like this one something that's interesting about it if you look at the American Chinese communities on the east and the west coast they're all fragmented and there's no locality there's no ground in this the question then continues in my research groundedness the question is what about the land or in today's context what about the real estate the old patty system of the Mon ancestors built several centuries ago is still there and the biggest enclosures are still owned by two of the largest ancestral estates this is the river the border and this is the old reclaimed fields fish ponds marsh that is the river and this is Shenzhen the big wild west crazy capitalist center of South China right smack there on the border and literally these postmodern buildings come right up to the river and they hover over like this and they're just lusting after that land in Hong Kong it's the last open space in all of Hong Kong you can imagine what it's worth the old patty system is still there male I emphasized male descendants of that founding ancestor still have certain limited but nonetheless concrete material rights in this property it's very difficult to fair it out and that's what I've been kind of trying to do it's hard by the way are another very serious issue that's come up with this research over the 43 years that I've been dealing with notice who's sitting on the front row of this group of this diaspora group a daughter of the mon lineage who would have thought it my god a daughter of the mon lineage because in the past daughters married out mothers came in from other lineages they took dowry with them their parents they were not part of the ancestral estate system now the daughters are coming home and they say I want my share and the old guys are going to serve because they don't know what to do about it it's the next step in this research and others no doubt some of this may come up in the question period a new generation of anthropologists have been tracking this what can only be called a general revolution in the property system in a while what has become of the land well there's one site here's one one vision of it 1997 and this is another vision of the land in 2009 here is the old you can still see the old fan shape of the estates today this land here sorry I need to get myself back here a little ahead of myself this land here was between 1955 which marked the closure of the border here by the People's Liberation Army in 1955 and 1997 the date of Hong Kong's repatriation to China the old reclamations were fallow and unchanged like they appear here the colonial government would not allow the development of the fallow land because it was too close to the Chinese border not looks all very benign but at the height of the Cold War for decades it was a sometimes dangerous and always unstable Cold War Frontier this was Pan Mun Zhang this was checkpoint Charlie during the Cold War An Mon Land patrolled by Gorka Regiments and the Hong Kong police for decades until the reversion to China now today in the second decade of the post-colonial era the Mon fields have started a transformation into an quasi-industrial transportation zone hugging the border of China this is Luck Ma Zhao border crossing running right along and through some of the Mon land this is one of the world's busiest border crossings now located on the wide land lorry traffic is only backed up for miles on each side of the border it resembles the kind of the border at San Diego with Mexico more than it does anything else it's a hugely complicated center right on Mon land so my saga continues we're just essentially at the beginning of a new phase and my research appears to have taken a new life of its own away from me out of my hands out of anyone's hands Mon lineage it will never end and a younger generation of researchers will, I trust and hope, succeed me and contract with what's going on as long as the common fields which you can see are still somewhat there as long as the common fields survive in some form the lineage in some form will continue and will survive now I leave it you tonight I leave you with this last image the now defunct and seemingly ages common fields of the Mon lineage which are heading somewhere into the future and I hope to be around long enough to see the next phase but that will only be the next phase of God knows how many so thank you very much for your time


Top 7 oldest tribes in the world are all from Africa. Did you know that all of the 7 oldest tribes in the world are from Africa? Yes, Africa is not only the cradle of humanity, but also the birthplace of some of the oldest and most fascinating cultures on earth. These ancient tribes have managed to survive and preserve their unique cultures and traditions for thousands of years. Join me on a journey to explore these fascinating African tribes and learn about their history, customs, and way of life. Africa is sometimes nicknamed the Mother Continent due to its being the oldest inhabited continent on earth. At number 7 is one of the most well-known and celebrated tribes in Africa is the Mayasai. This tribe, which is over 3000 years old, is located in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. The Mayasai are known for their unique customs, such as their traditional dress, which includes brightly colored clothing and intricate beadwork. They are also renowned for their fierce warrior culture and their close relationship with the natural world around them. At number 6 is another ancient tribe in Africa called the Berbers, who have been around for over 10,000 years. They are found across North Africa, including in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The Berbers are known for their distinctive language, music and art, which have influenced cultures throughout the region. At number 5 is the Sandawe tribe, which is one of the oldest in Africa, with a history dating back over 87,000 years. They are located in Tanzania and are known for their unique language, which is not related to any other language in the world. The Sandawe are also known for their deep connection to the land and their ability to live sustainably in the harsh environments of the African savanna. The African pygmies at number 4 are another ancient tribe in Africa, with a history dating back over 100,000 years. They are found in several countries across central Africa and are known for their small stature and their close relationship with the forest. The pygmies are also renowned for their music and dance, which are an integral part of their culture. Number 3 is the Hadza tribe, also located in Tanzania, has a history dating back over 100,000 years. They are one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa and are known for their extensive knowledge of the natural world. The Hadza are also renowned for their unique language, which has a series of click sounds that are used in everyday speech. At number 2 is the Nama tribe, which is located in Namibia. The Nama has a history dating back 100,000 to 140,000 years. They are known for their herding practices and their ability to live in some of the harshest environments on the continent. The Nama are also renowned for their intricate beadwork and their rich oral history. At number 1 is the San, also known as the Bushmen, are one of the oldest tribes in Africa, with a history dating back 100,000 to 140,000 years. They are found in several countries across Southern Africa and are known for their deep connection to the land and their unique language, which has a series of clicks and other sounds that are used in everyday speech. The San are also renowned for their rock art, which is some of the oldest and most intricate in the world. In conclusion, these seven oldest African tribes have a rich history and culture that have withstood the test of time. They have lived in harmony with the land for thousands of years and continue to inspire people around the world with their unique traditions and way of life.


what's going on guys it's your boy dpj here today with another destiny video and into today's destiny video I'm going to show you guys through my nightfall looting results for the past week now over the past say since the recent update where they fixed nightfalls or supposedly fixed nightfalls I have really been bigging them up a week in week out saying that nightfalls have definitely improved today I'm not too sure judging by my looting results for past week as you guys will witness in a second pretty embarrassing to say the least I'm not too sure about nightfalls anymore but getting straight into the video starting with my hunter I got a 300 defense ghost shell offering intellect and discipline detects nearby spirit bloom and generates additional glimmer when killing hive as you can see easy now 1337 got a three or three defense gold shell his offering discipline and strength he's detects nearby spin mail and generates additional glimmer when killing vex moving on to my titan and guess what guys I got another gold shell this time offering low defense of 294 offering discipline and intellect detects nearby worm spore and generates additional glimmer when killing hive easy now got the exotic take note Titan helmet offering 310 defense 47 intellect and 51 discipline so that's quite a badass drop to be honest moving on to my warlock and I got 18 18 strange coins damn as you can see easy now got their 310 attack thunderlord which is an exotic heavy machine gun which is also a pretty badass drop so me playing with my body witnessing him get some amazing drops what I get the worst loot I think I've ever had extremely embarrassing to say the least I mean two gold shells which I do not need an 18 strange points which I suppose come in handy somewhere down the line but at the end of the day there is still a lot of things I still need and nightfalls basically one of the only places I can get it drop but guys that was my nightfall new to resolve past week probably the worst week I've had in white a while two gold shells and 18 strange coins and that's about it the nightfall this week was the bum brothers wasn't too bad we two manned it and found it relatively easy but still at the end of the day at least one of my three drops could have been an exotic but not this time round but guys hope you enjoyed the video do drop a like I do appreciate the support subscribe for daily destiny comment down below in that comment section what you guys got from the nightfall and I'll catch you guys on the next one please until next time we all on YouTube every damn day watching these videos of the brand new games bid at the bid many are the same that's why you gotta go and find DPJ listening gameplays weekly snipes heavy uploads gonna have you a hype started in the UK now he's worldwide DPJ go and subscribe


What's good YouTube this your boy Chihuahua back at y'all again with another speed art video if you're new to the channel comment subscribe make sure you hit post notifications so you will be notified every time your boy drops on heat I want to let y'all know man if you're looking for some dope beats hit up my bro rocks well I will have his link in the description below y'all make sure y'all hit him up to go get some dope beats he made the beat that's in this video so I'm gonna run it back one more time and let y'all hear it all the way through the person I'm drawing for this video go by the name of Cain squad he's an upcoming YouTube we got a very lit channel y'all make sure y'all go check him out appreciate y'all for your love and support and I'm out


Thank you very much for that nice introduction. I first became acquainted with Hilger and Nair in 2008 when I visited Louise and Hilly Dunn, her daughter and granddaughter, at their home in Stanford. It seems strange now, since we've been running exhibitions at Hilger for 10 years now, it seems odd to think that the purpose of that initial visit was to determine whether there was enough among her sketches and models and cartoons to make an exhibition at all. And I still remember that first day with Louise saying, oh, I don't know, I don't know if there's anything here for an exhibition. Meanwhile, I was quickly up to my ankles getting like those cartoons that you see downstairs and all the sketches and everything. From the beginning, what struck me about Hilger's work was, aside from the great scope of it, I mean, the breadth and variety of what she created, it's the way she seems to channel multiple threads of visual history. Without ever appearing to be derivative of any one thing or any one movement, she has this uncanny ability to just channel all kinds of art and, as I said, visual history. Her work, it resonates with all these different influences, but at the same time, it remains her own. And in 1922, when she was working on one of her earliest commissions for the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, she wrote about her process in similar terms. And this is a quote from her. She says, I looked and looked at brief vases and copied and traced until I thought I had the spirit. Then I looked at Egyptian and contemporary art as their coloring seemed appropriate. Then disregarding most of my researches, but being influenced by them, I started designing. And this is the result. These are from the pendentives in the National Academy of Sciences, which was completed in 1924. And you have air, earth, fire, and water. And you can see the influence of a variety of different things. These are painted in gilded gesso. And she worked together with Rafael Wastavino. Those of you who commute back and forth to the city, you see Wastavino's work every day in Grand Central Station. And Gilbert worked with him on the development of those acoustic tiles. So this is raised and painted. And you can see the Greek influences, but also you can see the beginnings of her art deco style. In the earlier part of her career, she's revised an art deco artist. And you see that the art deco mixture of the figure drawing, a little bit of abstraction, the bright colors, the vibrant movement. And this is the very, very early part of her career. And to me, I feel strongly that this approach of looking and looking and absorbing and running all this knowledge through a creative process, I think it characterizes everything she does. And the point here is to talk specifically about the classical influences. But I think to understanding the impact of those influences, we need to look at how she comes to understand classical art, how she comes to acquire those influences, and how she uses them in conjunction with other things that feed her imagination. And we're going to come back to this, but I wanted to start with it. This is called radio and television encompassing the Earth. And this is a metal relief that she created for the Archeo Theater at Rockefeller Center in 1932. Everybody knows the three round bills that are outside of radio, so they use a call. We're during the exhibition downstairs, and you'll see them here a little bit later. This was done with the same metal technique of colored layer and colored metals. And what's interesting to me is the phenomenon of how she could create this really vivid iconography or a concept that had no visual antecedents. I mean, radio and television, telecommunications in general, it's an industry that wasn't still in its infancy in 1932, it was certainly in its early childhood. And it suggests to me a comprehensive knowledge, not just of traditional symbols and imagery, like many artists have, but of the essence of how symbols and images actually work, how they're created, how they're built, and where they come from. It's as if she saw or was able to create a mythology behind the new phenomenon of modern communication. And so in order to understand where or to try to understand it anyway, how she has this ability, I think it's rooted in a number of aspects of her background. First and foremost, the influence of her mother. We know that Hilda's mother showed her books and pictures of world art from a very early age. And this is another quote from Hilda. She says, even before we went to school, she, meaning mother, used to show us reproductions of the best pictures in the world, pointing out to us why they were great, explaining their meaning to us, and telling us the story of the artist's lives. So this is from her earliest days. Another influence would be her extensive travel to see the art. It seems that she saw the art of the entire world. She made her first trip to Europe in 1911 with her mother. And she traveled abroad throughout her life very often on her own, which was unusual at that time. In the 1930s, for a woman to be traveling, to be traveling on a company, but it seems that Hilda was pretty fearless. And then another aspect would be her education. And I mean her artistic education or art training, but also in the context of her ability to create allegories, images, meant for one of her work. I'm also emphasizing her formative schooling and specifically her Catholic education, which I think is extremely important in her development. And I think it feeds into her what I perceive to be the result of her imagination. And Hildred went to the Sacred Heart Academy in what was then Manhattanville. You see it up on the hill. This photograph predates Hildred by a few decades. But I always think it's fascinating to see what New York City looked like at one time. Today, this is West Central Harlem. And today, it looks beautiful again, but in a completely different way.  This is the Hamilton Grange. This is the City College campus. This is the Sacred Heart Academy. It was there until around 1952. And then it became that land became part of City College. And the sisters moved to Curtis, New York, where there is now Manhattanville College. And I see the nodding going on. I know there are a lot of Sacred Heart alums here. And I took it for granted that even where we are, there would be Manhattanville College alums also. The Sacred Heart experience was very important. It was a very important part of Hildred's life. And by extension, the life of the entire family and they will maintain very strong allegiances to this day. But getting back to the source of the classical influences, Latin, and this is until the 1970s even, Latin was at the core of the curricula in Catholic academies, both the academies for men and the academies for women. Mass, of course, which would have been a requirement at that time, Mass, of course, was in Latin. And it was in Latin throughout Hildred's entire life because she died shortly before the Church transitions to the Mass in the vernacular. But the liturgy was not how any of us were taught the language. The language was taught through the Roman classics. And typically you might have the grammar in the first year and the second year. You might start with literature. You might have had Caesar's Gallant Wars. Then you might have had Cicero.  So it's a foundational part of the Catholic education. I understand that Latin was also taught in the public schools at that time. But I don't think quite as intensively. So you're reading this literature which is, so you're reading about the gods and the gods and the heroes and a certain amount of mythology. Also, Catholicism, I mean, certainly then and certainly through my entire education, I understand that it's different now. But Catholicism was not taught from the Bible. It was taught from the Catechism. And it was taught from tradition. And I think that this originates way back in the fourth century when Constantine made Christianity the official religion of Rome. You start to see an amount of the old ways and the Christian ways. Of course, the pagan gods are rejected. But you start to have allegories. Concepts that were represented by gods are now represented by allegorical figures. This continues into the Renaissance. And we all know in the Vatican, Stanzae and in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, for example, has the creation narrative. But there are also the civils. The Roman civils, the oracles. Raphael in the Vatican Stanzae has the dissertation of the sacrament. But there's also the allegories of philosophy, theology, jurisprudence, and poetry in the ceiling there. So this then dovetails with the Catholic hagiography, the story of the saints. And the saints, as we know, all have symbols and attributes. So this is also a part of what she would have been very much aware of. This is by Hildreth. This is from 1947. This is the ultimate piece of the chapel at Fordham University in the Bronx. And you can see there's a whole array of saints here all with their attributes. In the Hebrew robe is St. Joseph. And I think you can see that he's holding this carpenter's stool, which would be one of his attributes. Behind him is St. Francis, who's contemplating the crucifix because he had the wounds of Christ. He received the stigmata. Upwards is St. John the Baptist as a little boy with the Lamb of God. Down below is St. Ignatius kneeling and pledging his allegiance to God and the church. Across from them, it's interesting to note that there's a side from the Virgin Mary. There's only one female saint. That is St. Genevieve. And you see that she looks like she's holding a model of Notre Dame cathedral. St.  But her claim to sanctity is that she saved the Holy City of Paris from an attack by the harms. And this is field-driven cooperating here, not necessarily a classical tradition, but a Renaissance tradition. We're probably familiar with the Renaissance tradition of including the Domnus portrait in the religious state. St. Genevieve is in this picture because a woman named Genevieve Brady paid for it. There's a whole story about the Brady's. They were people duke and duchess, the Brady's. So the whole question of Asia and the symbols of the saints gets carried a step further in the Catholic teaching. And this is certain to remember that this is all before the Second Vatican Council. And it's all before the canon of saints was purged by the church. So we have some saints who don't simply have an attribute. They are the attribute, which means they actually never existed. And I'm going to concentrate on just one because she's probably the most famous, and she's apropos this week. This is Veronica. This is St. Veronica. And I remember when we were kids, we never questioned why Veronica both was able to capture the image of Christ. And she, by coincidence, her name meant the image of Christ. Her name, Veronica, comes from the two words in Latin or Greek. The vero part is the truth, and the icon part is the image. So Veronica has the true image of Christ. She is not in the Lionel. I believe she is in the Legenda Oreo, which is where a lot of the legendary saints come from. This comes from the early Middle Ages. But she is the sixth station of the cross. So she's very present in what we've taught. This painting is by Hans Memling. It's 15th century. And it's in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. And how she gets the true image of Christ is that as he's carrying the cross, she approaches him and she uses her veil to wipe the space. And then when she removes the veil from the space, his image is on it. So this has been venerated for years. And this is an example of how promises teaches us to embody images and symbols and sometimes objects with tremendous value and significance. And I think just a couple of days ago, we saw a major example of it when they grew up with crowned thorns out of Notre Dame. That crowned thorns has been revered for centuries as a holy icon of the Passion of Christ. And it was interesting to see newscasters who typically can be very cynical just celebrating the fact that it was safe and not making any comment on its authenticity. I mean, there are, for what I understand, about 700 new thorns in churches throughout Europe, many of which have been proven to not even be from the same kind of play. But the one that's in Notre Dame is revered as the icon of the Passion of Christ. And now it's acquired in another layer because nobody's ever going to forget the story of the priest running into the burning building to rescue it. We're never going to forget that. So in addition to this education, Mildred, of course, had a lot of formal art education. She studied in New York at the Art Student League. She was in the Boz Arts programs. And at the new school, she was in the program for applied design for women in San Francisco. She studied at the California School of the Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. And this is really interesting. I don't know if it applies to her classical influences. Well, it does, because I'm in a program for Fortune in a minute. She studied mechanical drawing and applied mathematics. And it does figure in here. She studied mechanical drawing and applied mathematics at Columbia, but for the purpose so that she could be a map maker. She joined the Navy. She joined the Navy and made maps during World War I. But a very big influence on her was, of course, access to the Metropolitan Museum. And beginning in 1870, in the 1870s, the Metropolitan amassed this enormous collection of plaster casts. And this is how museums collected ancient Greek and Roman art at the time. It was through plaster reproductions. As the Metropolitan grew and became wealthier, and now we all know they have one of the largest collections of actual Greek and Roman art in the entire world, the plaster cast became less and less necessary. On the left is from the 1880s. This is when they opened. It's an engraving from Harper's Weekly when they opened the plaster cast throughout the gallery. And on the right is a photograph of, well, the few pieces that were left around 1959. I thought I was going to be extremely clever in telling you where you could go to see plaster cast and then when I arrived here today, I was going to go down to see what we're doing this. This is the Slater Museum in Norwich, where they had an enormous collection of these things. And this is the type of thing that those of you who would have seen had the Metropolitan plaster cast of all the famous Greek and Roman statues and also architectural fragments. And if you really want to see something astonishing, this is the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. And they have these enormous replicas, not only of the Greek and Roman statues, but famous architecture. And you see all the way on the right, that's one of the portals of the Metropolitan cast. And you can see the scale from the students sitting on the floor. I mean, these things are even more just enormous. So, this onto radius, onto radius in musical. These are from 1932, we've all seen them. And they are metal, there's several layers of different metals. And you can read in the past downstairs that they were assembled with a special process that kept the metals from chemically interacting with one another. They've been clean since 1932, but they've never needed to be restored there, they are the way they are. And now we start to see real classical influence and her ability, and her ability to create her own iconography. Now, throughout her career, she did work with a man named Hartley Burr, Alexander, who was a professional iconographer.  But each individual object, the result of each thing is very, very clearly her own. And she doesn't do the muses, these are not the muses, but she creates the personification of dance, drama, and song. We're looking at dance, and we can see this sort of frenetic movement. She had worked in the theater, in the early part of her career. Hildren worked in the theater, she worked with the famous actress Alfred London Lynn Fong's hand, the famous actress Margaret Anglin. And she designed costumes for the Metropolitan Opera. And she did sketches of famous performers. So she knows her theater, and she knows the world of the performing arts. And she did some sketches of famous performers, one of whom was Anna Pavlova. Anna Pavlova is on the left. And this is Hildren's sketch of Anna Pavlova, it's called Anna Pavlova in a Grecian costume. That could possibly be Anna Pavlova's idea of a Grecian costume. It certainly is in Hildren's idea of a Grecian costume, as you'll see, Hildren, you will see from these roundels, Hildren's new Higree garments extremely well. But this is where I think that I believe anyway, that nothing happens in a vacuum. They're very, very rarely, very, very rarely is an artist or creative person doing something that's so totally unique that there's nothing like it around. And Hildren, with her awareness of the theater and her awareness of everything around her, it seems to me, based on look, analyzing these reliefs, that I think she's absorbed a lot of other things. There's sort of a surge at this time and interest in classical forms in a variety of the arts, in dance in particular. The photograph on the right is Isadora Duncan. And if you remember the story of Isadora, she created dances in a Grecian vein. She was also the lady of the flowing scarves. And we see this here. And many of you probably remember the story of the flowing scarve actually caused her death. She was in a Maserati convertible with her, a scarve flowing behind her. It got caught in the axle of the car and she's trying to deathly. And so Isadora died in 1927, but Isadora left an incredible legacy and it's very, very famous. To this day, there's a dance company that recreates her work all over the world. Recently they were actually in Greece doing that. So in this, I don't think there's any kind of loafer here, except maybe the shoes. But there maybe is a little bit of Isadora. But I think there's a lot more of this. This is Montagran. It's Montagran and Bertrand Ross. The Montagran's work is called Crihanestra. Montagran did a lot of works that were based on Greek mythology. And you can see from the gestures, the Monta gestures of the angled elbows, the angled legs, and also interesting enough, the bare limbs, which are new in dance, they were not being cut lovis, cut lovis line. So I think there's a little bit more Monta in this than there is Isadora. One is the sketch and one is the left is the sketch and the right is the finish. So moving on, now we're at drama. And she uses the ancient classical references, the Roman masks of comedy and tragedy. The central figure, I believe, is Athena. Athena, among a hundred other things, was the goddess of wisdom. She presided over the arts. She was also the goddess of war, the goddess of government, the goddess pretty much of everything. But here we see her, I think, as the presiding goddess of the arts and inspiration. And she is correctly dressed in what's called a Grecian peplos. And you can see that there's this part that hangs over in the middle there. The Greek garments, they were not sewn, they were simply rectangles of cloth and it depended on how you wrapped it and tied it and ended it and that's how you got the shape. And Hilgritz seems to understand this as you'll see from further examples. And so they would wear that and then there was also a large cloak that they would wrap around themselves called a Hymation. It looks like a hynation in English. A Hymation is the big cloak. So Athena has that. And this is a sketch. And that is a statue of Athena Parthenos in the National Museum of Athens. And so you can see why I think that central figure is Athena.  She's wearing the peplos and she's got her wanky headdress which Hilgritz has abstracted into this arched echo shape on top of her Athena's head. So that's why I'm incredibly convinced that she's telling us that this is Athena. And now we get to song. And here we've got, she starts out with the peplos. And today in Couture, you might have a jacket as a peplum and that's where that comes from from this little. She starts with that and then she starts to relax it a little bit and that style of dress is called a chiton. It's just wrapped in a more gentle way without the layers folded over. An interesting thing that she does is that in the early sketches, she hasn't really decided whether song is going to be just on her own or whether it's gonna be a duet. The person, the man is playing an Orphean liar which we associate with this singing act in her poets or even the psalmist of the Bible and it's implied that that person, you can see a little bit more in the second sketch, would also be singing. By the time she gets to the final product, he's playing reed pipes. So song is allowed to be to be the representation for our home. And again, picking up from what I think is the aura around her in the arts on the right hand side, that's also Isadora. And you're dancing bare-legged and she did the way she's dancing on the beach there the way she danced on the stage. If you ever have the opportunity to see the film or the loves of Isadora, Vanessa, right? Great place, absolutely, really great. And so that's where I think some of that has come from. Now we're coming back to radio and television and this to me is Ilger's great lost masterpiece. I think this is heartbreaking that we don't have this anymore. The theater was destroyed in the 50s and the sculpture was lost. There's a replica of one of the subway entrances by the McRoy bill building. I don't have a picture of this, I don't like it. Oh! And it doesn't look like, it doesn't look enough by Filbert to me. It looks like somebody else's copy of Filbert that I'd rather look at first. And what we see here, and this is what that's fascinated me from the beginning. She creates this entire mythology for something that has no visual antecedents. Now she's got the central male figure and you can see the benefit of her sketching all those blessed casts in the bodies. And so is he Mercury, maybe? Or is he just the spirit of the airwaves more likely? And he's trying to control the airwaves which are getting away from him. And let's look at the way she builds the figure. Oh, and this is another thing, yeah, by contrast in some of her contemporaries. This building is exactly contemporary. This is the Supreme Court of the United States. And what we have here is a classic Grecian pediment like you have on the Parthenon. And so this is what a contemporary is doing and the way a contemporary is channeling an ancient classical influence by simply copying and not really doing anything with it. And it represents liberty in the center between order and authority. And to me, it's like, okay, if you tell me that's what it is, then I'll believe you. But the thing is you can't really get read anything out of this. Also, when you're in front of the building, you can't see it, it's been claimed within an inch of its life.  But it is a strict classical pediment based on what's called the divine proportion. And I think what Hilter is doing with radio and television, I think she's doing a variant. I think she's deliberately using this triangular shape to kind of add a little bit more, a little bit more of a classical touch to what is essentially the blank wall of a modernist building. Strictly speaking, the hypotenuse, the cited side should be 1.6 of the central, the central rod. On the hypotenuse, she's dead on but the two heads at the bottom line do the same proportion. And there she's kind of varying from the form. And she's also outside the pediment sort of the way, like a hypermetric poem, she's a little bit outside the meter. So she's not quite in that shape. But I think there's enough here to suggest the intent. Because the basic intent is that you use a precise proportion and you create something that can be divided into two exactly matching triangles. And I wouldn't attempt to draw a triangle across this by any means. But I think she's also used in the influence of the pediment because you saw it was liberty between order and authority. So a central dominant figure and then all the subordinate figures coming out. So if you read this as one work of art rather than three, you're getting a similar effect. You have Athena in the center who's presiding over all of the dependent arts. And actually here, she's channeling several different art historical things. A religious triptych in which you need all three parts to tell the story. And also Renaissance tundos, which are common in Raphael and Michelangelo and the Renaissance artists where the picture is forced into a circular frame. And since they're bar reliefs, I guess they're probably more like Deborah Robier than the painters. All right, so this is an early sketch for radio and television. She starts out with a very rigid figure. And this is why I think that she is channeling the proportion, the divine proportion because this to me looks very much like this. And this of course is Leonardo's betrubian man based on the perfect proportion suggesting that everything should be in proportion both in God's creation and in man's creation. And I think that that's what she's channeling here. Then she starts to play with it a little bit. He's still sort of static. And but the figures are starting to change and there are more of these wires going on. But this is an opportunity, I'm gonna jump ahead just a little bit. Those peculiar circles that the airwaves are holding, these are pretty much forgotten shapes. But on the left is an antenna from the 1930s and on the right, that's obviously Colin Furf and the cute speech that he's talking into. He's talking into a circular microphone of the 1930s. And that's what she's doing here. That's what the airwaves are controlling. Now she starts to do something different with the figure. Now he's crouching the airwaves so they're pulling away, they're pulling away from him. And I think she's making him a chariot here. And he's pulling on the way the chariots here would pull on the reins of the horses. These are two ancient bosses. The one on the left is in the gay museum and the one on the right is in the British Museum. The one on the left, this is in an Olympic competition or in the Athenian games or whatever. The one on the right is closer to the point. The one on the right is depicting the chariot of the sun god. And the sun god would be really asked if you could look at San Francisco's Apollo. But the point is he drives the chariot across the entire star. In other words, across the canopy of the earth, dispensing life. The way radio and television is encompassing the earth. So I think that's one way that she's getting at it. Here we're looking at another possible influence. This is not an ancient classical sculpture but this is in the tradition of an ancient classical form called a quadriga. There's one of these on the roof of St. Mark's in Venice without the chariot guy. This is the Brandenburg Gate, which dates from the late 18th century. So what's being represented here is sort of the imperial Germany and the imperial. So the power of figure describing horses, you notice the horses are not all going the same way. So they're branching out like they're going to come back. They're going to go to the four corners of the earth. So I think that's also informing that. Now, this is a relief. This is a work of art that's going on the exterior of a movie theater. And we know that she consumed all kinds of culture. We know from her journals that she went to the movies. I mean, I read a passage where she was in Moscow waiting to get into St. Basil's Cathedral. She had nothing to do and she was looking for a movie to go to. So we know she went to the movies. We have to, this is 1932. Movies are really becoming to blossom. And we all know, we all know the 1956 banter. And of course the 10 commandments we're probably going to see one on both of them this week. But this is quite a filter, it would have been familiar. This is the 1925 Simon version of the banter. And this was the biggest thing since sliced bread. I mean, the way, because even in 1956, there was only one way to do this. You had to do it and turn the camera on. So in 1925, this is even more challenging. Everybody was aware of this. I mean, it was everywhere in the world. Here are the guys in the chariots, that's Ramon Navarro. And I don't know who that is, but I love this accent. It was happy, it was great. To indicate, really to underline the fact that this was unavoidable, absolutely unavoidable. In 1925, for part of the year, Mildred was in Paris for the international exposition of modern decorative and industrial arts, the famous Art Deco conference. So she was there in 1925. This is the 1925 window card from the French release of the banter. This is from a movie theater in Louvain, but if it was in Louvain, you can be sure it was in Paris. And if she happened to be in New York or San Francisco or wherever in the United States, when the film came out, if it was in Baltimore, Massachusetts, it was in New York, it was in San Francisco, Chicago, it was absolutely everywhere. So to me, I see her as somebody who absorbs not only what she learns and sees from tradition, but from everything around her and everything that's happening around her. And that's why then you start to look at this and then to me, suddenly the bottom part starts to look like it's some sort of a carriage structure. The thing in the front looks like a wheel and I'm imagining another one in the back, you know? And we're already at a time when we've already had Picasso for a couple of decades, we said rock. So the ability to kind of deconstruct the image and make it not necessarily, make it look like it's going in one direction when she really is growing it apart. So we can sort of believe that it's a chariot, even though she has deconstructed it. And to me, this is her genes and that's why I think it's a great shape. I think if we still have this today, it could be the quintessential icon of telecommunications. Now, I said earlier that maybe that figure was Mercury or maybe it was just the end of things. This suggests that it could possibly be Mercury. Mercury usually has a helmet with the wings and the wings on his feet, but this one is Mercury, she calls this Mercury and he has the wings on his feet. This is from a few years earlier, this was gonna be for the communications for the 1930 world's fair in Chicago where she does get some spectacular work that doesn't fit into the context of this exhibition, but it's well worth looking into. And you can see she's using these lines as the airwaves and these antennas seem to be shooting something up there. This was never executed, but you can see the classical modeling is extremely evident Now, here, this is her 1937, this is Mercury. And here he's got the winged helmet, he's got wings on his feet and she abstracts. It's interesting that Mercury holds the caduceus which now is the symbol of medicine, but it was the symbol of the message of God originally. She abstracts it into this thing that looks like a TV antenna that might earn money, but it is meant to be this caduceus and it's Mercury delivering the mail rapidly. And another thing justice forgotten as those antennas that we looked at is the concept of air mail. We don't have air mail anymore. A mail now is just the mail, but this is the thirties, this is 1937, air travel is leaking and air mail was huge. There was a point in the mid-thirties and air mail accounted for more of the post office revenue than regular mail. I mean, we tend to forget all this because it was a higher price. You remember that special papers we had by the TV special onwards, I mean, it was a big revealer to send something by, so that's what's happening here. This is X-tan, it's in Logan Square in Chicago. Mercury also, this is just to indicate that she's not the only one, I mean, it's kind of everywhere. This is a copy of the Renaissance sculpture by Giovanni da Bologna. It's in the central court of the National Gallery in Washington. Before it came to the National Gallery, it was all over Europe. It was in several collections in Europe and then also in a collection in California. And there you see Mercury carrying this caduceus. It's very clear. And this is called the glory of commerce. It's by a sculptor named Jules Coutan. And this is obviously on top of Grand Central Station. And this was built between 1911 and 1914. So she would have seen this frequently. But what's interesting about it in terms of the iconography is that Mercury hears the quote, the messenger god, but he's also the god of commerce. And he's with Hercules and Athena. And we've seen Athena and her role and we're about to see Hercules. This now we're at Hilbert's last commission. And again, she uses, she creates a mythology, a classical style of mythology for something that didn't have one. This is for the Prudential Insurance Company in 1960. The Prudential Insurance Company logo, the logo as well as we all know is the rock of the hole. She did not create the logo, the logo existed for many, many decades. But she creates a mythology for the rock. She uses the mythology here for the rock of Gibraltar, the Prudential Insurance Company. She creates this image of Hercules going through the straits of Gibraltar. Hercules on one of the labors that he was assigned to do. He had to go from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean didn't like the fact that the rocks were in his way. So he, being Hercules blessed through and created the straits of Gibraltar. So she uses the straits of Gibraltar as Hercules' attribute, as if you were the same way you would have the attribute of the saint. She gives him the attribute of the straits of Gibraltar. And there he is in that little boat and he's already blessed through it. He's sailing through it. And this is a sketch. And then on the right is a painting by Domenico Veneziano. This is from the 15th century. It's saying John the Baptist in the desert is also in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. And what prompted me to make this juxtaposition was a couple of things. In the fact that sometimes in paintings, in Renaissance paintings, religious paintings, you see the saint along with his or her attribute. And she has Hercules along with his attribute. But the other thing that has jumped out on me is a little bit of a little bit to the side of the classical influences. It's another influence. Her fascination with these land formations. Because in the Domenico Veneziano painting you see these, whether they're mountains or hills or whatever, they look like they were made with clay sculptors night. And she does a similar thing. And she does it a lot. It's in a lot of her work. And where I think it comes from is the early Renaissance painting. These are two vignettes by Draco in the Sorrento Chapel in Ottawa. One, of course, is the birth of Christ. And the other is the Nolime Tantres. It's the Mary Magdalene St. Jesus is said for the resurrection. And there are those shapes. And she imports them into all kinds of things. This is an altered piece that she designed for an Episcopal church in Buffalo. It now resides in the other quick center at St. Barnabas University, which is near Buffalo. And there are those shapes. And of course, there is a saint with his statue. I mean, in this case, it's not St. John of Vassus, St. John the Evangelist. And he has the emblem of the eagle, which is his. And there are vignettes here from the gospel of St. John. The Prudential Insurance Company Mosaics. These are mosaics. And they were on a Sony original sketch that was in the Elevator Bank. They were taken down 15, 20 years later.  They were very long, very long time. And for many years, many years they were presumed to be lost. A new CEO came into Prudential by this time, even when she was designing them in 1960, abstraction had already become the norm in decorating architecture. You already had abstract murals. So they were kind of a little bit beyond their time, even when they were put up. So they didn't last very long. They were presumed to be lost when we opened the first children near exhibition in 2009. Miraculously, the Prudential Insurance Company suddenly told us that they weren't lost. They were in a warehouse in Iceland, New Jersey. They together with the Dayton Foundation, which is sponsored this exhibition, Prudential and Dayton together funded them, the moving of them and the restoration. The panels, they're not all together, but they're in terrific places. The central panel with Hercules is permanently installed in the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey, which is across the street from the Prudential headquarters. So that's a great place for that to be. The other two panels are at the Harvard University Center for Atlantic Studies in Washington, D.C. And you can see there, what they did was, it's pretty spectacular. They built a room for them. They built a new conference room. The one on the top is inside the room. And the one on the bottom is exactly behind it in an outside courtroom. The process of restoring them was fascinating. This is Hildred at their creation. And what's interesting is like St. Genevieve, who we saw earlier, she's the only woman in the picture. I think that's a topic for another whole discussion, as Hildred, what she was able to achieve and what essentially was an answer to the question. But if you take a look at the guy who's the guy with the big checks on his shirt, right behind him, his name is Tony Schiavo. He's not related to me. He doesn't have a moment of his name, but he's also a Sicilian. And he worked on the creation of these murals. About 60 years later, he worked on the restoration. And he's an amazing guy. He's about as durable as the most eggs. He just survived an incredible surgery. And he's alive and kicking in his eggs. But it's just an incredible story that so many years, 60 decades later, he gets to restore the thing that he created. This is where we ended. I just wanted to end with a picture of Hildred. So that we would know at least not what she looked like. This only scratches the surface of one or two aspects of her career. I mean, she's an incredibly prolific artist in so many different genres. I hope you enjoy the exhibition. And I hope you get to know her more.


They'd be programmed to do that, to get the easy fixes and they don't have a way to really come back into their body, so to speak, to really experience how they feel to be alive. I keep hearing that a lot of them feel that everything's fake. Everything's fake. They feel life is fake. That's something I hear a lot from young people and I don't blame them because if you grew up with technology, with the internet, with everything being digital, then life becomes very fake. If it becomes very artificial. So I think that's what they mean is that everything seems so digital and seems to be something that's created. So they feel like they're in a matrix.