The Contest over "Indigeneity": Film and Ethnography in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
An online film and conversation series curated by Jenny Chio

Event website: www.filmandethnography.org

Register via the website to receive the password to view films between Friday, April 23 and Friday, April 30, 2021. You will also receive the Zoom link to join the live discussion on Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 7 pm EST. The film in the Hong Kong program requires separate registration; please visit the event website for details.

This online event, featuring eleven films, three pre-recorded conversations between filmmakers and scholars, and a live Zoom discussion, examines Indigeneity in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In each political space, “Indigenous” has come to represent and symbolize the different stakes of identity, culture, and heritage in the modern world, while grappling with ongoing political tensions around national sovereignty, China’s global influence, and social solidarity. The films and speakers all approach Indigeneity from their own personal backgrounds and experiences as citizens, artists, and scholars from and working in China, Hong Kong, and/or Taiwan. Pre-recorded conversations between the filmmakers, curator Jenny Chio, and invited scholars can be viewed on the event website (no password required), along with an essay by Prof. Chris Berry (Film Studies, King's College London).

My newly published essay, "Theorizing in/of Ethnographic Film," is available as a free download from Routledge!

The chapter is part of the wide-ranging Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video, which examines the current state of ethnographic media-making from theoretical and practical perspectives. My chapter is motivated by a series of overly ambitious questions regarding the state of ethnographic film in contemporary anthropology and cognate disciplines. Namely, what are the methodological, epistemological, and conceptual relationships between ethnographic filmmaking and ethnographic theorymaking today? How can ethnographic film help produce, or at least help inform, better ethnography, and vice versa? And, perhaps most importantly, how can ethnographers, filmmakers, and ethnographic filmmakers go about actually doing better at whatever it is that they seek to do (producing social scientific knowledge, film, or some combination thereof )?

From May to July 2020, I was a returning fellow at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany. Although the fellowship was held virtually, due to travel restrictions and the global COVID-19 pandemic, it was nonetheless a wonderful opportunity to think about and discuss portraiture, life-writing, and questions of representation with an amazing group of fellows. My MLC lecture, on social media and social distancing, is available online.

An Archive for Now: Portraiture, Social Media and Social Distancing
Virtual MLC Lecture held via Zoom on 29 June 2020
Watch the lecture here!

Lecture abstract:
This talk will reflect on some interconnections between social media and social distancing that have emerged over the past six months or so. In places where relatively high-speed Internet access is assumed to be accessible, much of social life has moved online (making infrastructural and economic inequalities unavoidably obvious). Socializing in a time of social distancing now appears as a series of portraits. Faces flicker and sometimes freeze. Heads and shoulders appear and disappear in the windows of a Zoom meeting. Comments and chats stand in for conversation. Video cameras turned off now come across as disengagement or, worse, refusal. Quarantine photographs turn everyday items into portrait props; backgrounds reveal commonalities and inequalities. The vertical smartphone camera frame captures bodies and faces, the former aggravatingly small and the latter uncomfortably close. But at the same time, this increased reliance on social media has spurred widespread desires to build an archive, for now, of life in the time of COVID-19, perhaps as a way to make sense and maintain some control. Countless projects to record and remember, and to create and collect, are underway at universities, museums, and other public institutions around the globe. What, then, does a portrait of social distancing look like, and what might it mean, in a moment when collective memory is driven by social media?

Race is a topic that must be talked about -- that much has been made painfully clear in the last days, weeks, months, and years. While issues of policing, structural violence, and institutionalized racism are absolutely vital to unpack and rethink, it's also critical to examine how race informs and shapes aspects of our collective social lives that might, at first, seem less relevant.

I am grateful to be a part of a discussion on tourism and race, which has just been published in the Journal of Tourism History. Moreover, I am humbled to be in the company of a number of amazing scholars whose work directly investigates and critiques the history and persistence of racism and injustice in contemporary tourism (and tourism studies).

Read the discussion here.

In March 2020, I was a part of a lively online panel on COVID-19 and online sociality, organized by Ph.D. students Kaiyang Xu (USC) and Shiqi Lin (UC Irvine). As the organizers explain,

<<Drawing inspiration from “cloud clubbing,” a creative practice engaged by self-quarantined Chinese web users during the pandemic, this “cloud panel” was an experimental endeavor to discuss digital media, societal fears, and the responsibility of humanities scholars in a time of crisis. The panel brought together scholars working on biopolitics, media studies, video ethnography, urban studies, diaspora studies, and Chinese cultural studies to discuss the sources of pandemic anxieties; humor, care and intimacy animated by creative uses of social media; and the implications of social media in border-crossing. As the spread of the pandemic coincided with a transitional period of remote teaching in academia, the panel was also set up as a space for exploring alternative modes of intellectual collaboration during the pandemic.>>

The transcript of the panel, featuring short essays and our Q&A with Kaiyang, Shiqi, Belinda Kong (Bowdoin) and Carlos Rojas (Duke), is now published online by the MCLC Resource Center.

It's been a very long time since my last post! Here are some highlights from the past year:

**My ethnography of tourism and rural social change in ethnic China, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, is now open access, thanks to UW Press in collaboration with Manifold. You can read the entire book online, along with all of the books in the Studies on Ethnic Groups in China.

**In 2019, I published an article on the politics of bodies, crowds, and festivals in Miao vernacular media in the journal Current Anthropology. This publication includes five scholarly commentaries by anthropologists working in China and media studies, as well as my response to their ideas and critiques.

**I was invited to write a commentary on the Oscar-nominated documentary, American Factory, for Docalogue.com, a website devoted to generating conversations about contemporary documentary film. Feel free to join the dialogue on labor, culture, and globalization through the site.

I've just released a "preview" of my work-in-progress second film, These Days, These Homes! With support from the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship (awarded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation), I've been working on the film all year and hope to have it finished in 2019. For a description of what I've been doing and what's coming next for the film, see my blog post on the Wenner-Gren website.

As of August 2018, I'm now based at the University of Southern California, as Visiting Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Moving from Atlanta to Los Angeles took up most of the summer, but now the semester has begun at USC and it's full steam ahead. I'm excited to be teaching a First-Year Seminar titled "Nation, Culture, and Power in East Asia" as well as a graduate seminar on Media Ethnography and Chinese Visual Culture. USC has a vibrant visual studies and visual anthropology community as well, and I recently spoke as a discussant for the opening "back to school" event in the Visual Studies Research Institute, which featured talks on art and heritage politics by Sarah Hollenberg (University of Utah) and Peter Probst (Tufts University). In Spring 2019, I'll be co-teaching the visual studies graduate seminar with Nancy Lutkehaus (USC Anthropology), on cultural heritage, tourism, and art.

In other news, I was interviewed for a recently published article on ethnic minority restaurants in China, by Georgia Freeman, who has a cookbook on Yunnanese food coming out later this fall.

I was invited to write an afterword for this forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology on film and the representation of "exotic others." The issue features a wide range of case studies of (mostly) documentary filmmaking projects across the Asia-Pacific region, and the authors analyze the multiple intersections between documentary film, tourism development, and the imagination of the other. Moreover, the essays in the issue question deeply how the representation of "otherness" is produced and practiced in touristic contexts.

In my afterword, I situate these case studies within broader anthropological debates on tourism imaginaries and visual anthropology. As my own work as an ethnographic filmmaker and anthropologist tries to show, the fundamental methodology of participation observation can and should be critiqued and challenged by concepts and practices of filmmaking and visual representation. Thus, I titled my afterword "filmmaking as critical participation observation" in order to illustrate what ethnographers (particularly those working in touristic contexts) can gain from taking film seriously in the practice and production of cultural representations.

Click on the image for a list of articles and abstracts from the issue!

I have a new book chapter out in the edited volume, Asian Video Cultures (Neves and Sarkar, eds., Duke University Press, 2017). My contribution explores video documentary making in rural ethnic China, and I argue that these films and filmmakers are contributing to the rise of a distinctly rural public culture.

The volume explores a wide range of video-making across East, Southeast, and South Asia, and I'm thrilled to be a part of the book. The introduction to the volume is available to read and download online here: AVC Introduction.