ABSTRACT
A recent paper of mine (Ward, 1965) drew attention to Lévi-Strauss’ distinction between the models any people make of their own social system and the models produced by observers from outside. The former, constructs of the people under study themselves, he calls conscious or ‘home-made’ models; the latter, unconscious or observers’ models (Lévi-Strauss, 1953). Later in the same article I suggested that it is likely that any people possesses more than one kind of home-made model. With reference to a community of Chinese fishermen in the British Colony of Hong Kong, I distinguished at least three kinds of models of Chinese social systems which I believed most of them to subscribe to as part of their collective representations. In the first place there was the ordinary working-model, a kind of blueprint, of their immediate community, which I called the ‘immediate model’. Secondly, there was their model of what they believe to have been the social system of China as the traditional literati saw it: this, which they regard as the proper Chinese model (to which they know their own community does not completely conform), I called the ‘ideological model’. Thirdly, there was a varying number of other models representing the social arrangements of groups of other Chinese, neither literati nor fishermen, with whom they were more or less familiar: members of other dialect groups, farmers, traders, and so forth. These I called ‘internal observers’ models’.
