Christian souls and Chinese spirits : a Hakka community in Hong Kong /

This study of a Hakka, "guest people," community in Hong Kong focuses on the process by which these Hakka define themselves within the Chinese sociopolitical area. Speaking their own language, with a memory of their ancestors' participation in and persecution for the Taiping Rebellion in the 1860s, these more recent settlers use their conversion to Calvinist Christianity together with veneration of their ancestors and values of thrift and hard work to define their subethnic identity. Given the growing interest in studying ethnic group formation and self-definition, Constable (Western Michigan Univ.) has written a book that will interest students of ethnicity as well as those more generally concerned with the ethnography of the peoples of China and their diaspora. However, the author's omission from the discussion of many aspects of Hakka life in today's Hong Kong suggests this material might have been better presented as a monograph than a book. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty. F. B. Bessac; emeritus, University of Montana