Meditations on a Minor History: Voices Seen, Images Heard

As a historian, a visual ethnographer and artist, what do I care deeply about? Mentalities…how do people really think? What do they care about? What do they do with their thinking? What are the ways they do things? How do they participate in a culture and a shared cultural past? What kind of ideal personhood do they project? How do they make sense of the world? What kinds of self-made philosophy of life? How does story-telling become the converging point of the above? How do visual and audio fragments handed down from the past facilitate access to those lived moments? What kinds of documents are they? What kinds of linkages could we establish with those fragments? This paper is a visual ethnographer's experimental historiography for the history of Hong Kong. (The workshop was attended by 13 historians working on East Asian history by invitation only)