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The volume collects the published articles of Dr. Marjorie Topley, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the postwar period and also the first president of the revived Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Her ethnographic research in Singapore and Hong Kong set a high standard for urban anthropology, and helped create the fields of migration studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology. These essays showcase Dr. Topley's many groundbreaking contributions in anthropology, migration studies, and women's studies. Marjorie Topley trained at the London School of Economics, worked as curator of anthropology at the Raffles Museum in Singapore in the early 1950s. In 1955, she moved to Hong Kong until her return to England in 1983, and conducted path-breaking research in both Singapore and Hong Kong
About the author
Jean DeBernardi is a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her areas of specialization include Chinese in Southeast Asia; the anthropology of religion; and ethnicity, nationalism, and transnationalism. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research on Chinese popular religion in Malaysia and Singapore, and her publications include Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community (2004) and The Way that Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia (2006).
