This work is the result of a co-operation between a social anthropologist and a social historian and is focused on the social evolution of Southern China. Based on a longitudinal fieldwork study in the Pearl River Delta, which is the heartland of the Cantonese-speaking world, the book explores how the ordinary people and their society evolved in a period of time characterized by drastic change. The study reports on how history supplies people with a repository for the future and accounts for how their march towards modernity is, at the same time, a reconstruction of a tradition.
