The first good news I have to share is that my book, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, is hot off the press and now available for purchase from the University of Washington Press, Amazon, and other retailers.  Contact me if you'd like a flyer and a discount code!

Second, for anyone attending the 2014 Society for Applied Anthropology Meeting in Albuquerque soon, I'll be screening my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, on Saturday, March 22, at 12 p.m. in Alvarado G (inside the conference venue, the Hotel Albuquerque Old Town).  I'm really eager to share this film with scholars working in applied anthropology in order to broaden my own perspectives on tourism studies.  There's also going to be a special plenary session on the Anthropology of Tourism, coordinated by Valene Smith, on Friday, March 21, which I'm looking forward to attending.

It feels strange, and great, to have these two pieces of work out in the world...and to hope that they will create some space for new conversations and discussions in anthropology, tourism studies, China studies, and related fields.

The Contributing News Editors of the Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA), graduate students Heidi Lam (Yale) and Yi Zhou (UC Davis), recently invited me to write a short reflection essay on the anthropology of tourism and ethnographic filmmaking in China.  This essay is now published online on the Anthropology News website (the news outlet for the American Anthropological Association) and the SEAA website. 

Writing this essay was a challenge, not only because I want to situate the film more broadly within scholarly conversations about tourism, rural social transformations, and contemporary understandings of ethnicity in China and elsewhere, but also because I still have trouble "detaching" myself from the personal stories and everyday details of life in Ping'an and Upper Jidao villages.  This is what I try to get at in the final paragraphs of the essay -- the difficulties and necessity of positing more general, or generalizable, questions through ethnographic research, writing, and filmmaking. Increasingly, I'm convinced that the only way to do this is to do more of all of these things: to make films about research, to write about films, and to think more critically about how we write and how we film.

And on a related, but tangential note, I am now serving as the chair of the 2014 David Plath Media Award committee and I'm excited to see what new media/visual projects are out there in East Asian anthropology!  Submissions are welcome until the deadline of May 1, 2014.  For details, visit the Award page here.