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. I just received an advance copy of my book, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, which is now featured on the University of Washington Press website and in the Spring 2014 catalog. It's amazing to see this project finally coming into being as a book. I'm really looking forward to sharing it with my friends and collaborators in China, as well as discussing it with colleagues, students, and anyone else interested in tourism, labor, and ethnicity in contemporary China. The Tourism Studies Working Group at UC Berkeley has just added announced my book on their website too! Visit the page and learn more about TSWG here. Carol Clark, of Emory's eScienceCommons blog, has just published an article on my research about tourism's impact in rural Guizhou and Guangxi.
Read all about it here: http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2014/02/a-close-look-at-tourisms-impact-in.html I had a great conversation with Carol last December about my work in China, and I'm pleased to be featured (along with some of my photographs) on the blog! I'm very happy to learn that my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, will be screened in a special session during the 2014 Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in March! I'll be there in person for a post-film q&a.
The theme of this meeting is "Destinations," and I'm looking forward to discussing my work with professionals and scholars working on tourism, cultural heritage, preservation, and related issues across the academic and applied spectrum. There are also plans for panels, lectures, and related events on tourism studies in anthropology, so it'll be a great chance for me to engage more fully with current work in the field. The details for the screening are: Saturday, March 22, 2014 12-1:20 Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town www.sfaa.net
The call for papers is now closed, and we are excited to have received an unexpected number of submissions! I have been working closely with the organizers in AES and the SVA to pull together a number of sessions that will feature extended video presentations. A preliminary program is now available online.
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