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 came across this really generous and thoughtful review of my book, A Landscape of Travel, written by Zhen Wang, a visiting scholar at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, in Munich, Germany. I really appreciate Zhen's careful reading of the book, and the fact that she sees how the case studies of Upper Jidao and Ping'an villages speak to much wider and bigger changes happening across rural and ethnic minority regions of China. What I describe and analyze in these two villages is so much a part of a larger pattern and shift not only in the lives of village residents (who may or may not be interested in "doing tourism") but also in the way rural and ethnic identities are discussed and imagined throughout the country, by government officials, by tourism developments, and of course by rural and ethnic people themselves. It's really rewarding to see my research reaching scholars in disciplines other than anthropology too, and particularly to scholars in environmental studies because, as I try to show, tourism has everything to do with questions of landscape -- social and natural. A new review of my book, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, is now out in the latest issue of American Anthropology (volume 118, issue 3), written by Yujie Zhu, a specialist on tourism and cultural heritage in China. In his review, Zhu summarizes some of the central arguments of my work. He writes that in my analysis, "The integration of mobility and visuality adds texture and complexity to the question of how ethnic tourism becomes commonplace in the daily lives of Chinese ethnic minority villages....More importantly, tourism not only affects villagers as an impetus of economic development but also becomes a new form of culture that influences the local value system, expectations, and visions of life." I am really grateful for the continued attention that my book is receiving from anthropologists, tourism scholars, and China studies scholars. Tourism as a form of development continues to be promoted throughout rural, ethnic minority regions of China, and it's vital to maintain a long-term research perspective on the impacts that tourism may have on local lives and livelihoods. Equally, I think it's critical to keep an eye open to the other, emerging opportunities and ambitions that rural ethnic Chinese villagers may want to pursue, particularly given the national push towards rural urbanization in many regions and changing patterns of labor migration throughout the country. Another review of my book is just out, this time in The China Quarterly! Written by John Donaldson (Singapore Management U), a political scientist who has written extensively on rural development, poverty reduction, and tourism in China, he offers a thorough and informed take on my analysis of how mobility and visuality constitute the "work" of tourism for village residents. Here's an extended excerpt from the review (click here for a preview of it online):
"Tourism is a complicated business, particularly if you are a villager in a poor, rural minority area of China. Jenny Chio's recent work focuses on the nuanced social impact of tourism, refreshingly adopting a 'backstage' point of view from which to examine rural tourism. As leaders of minority villages tussle with officials, tourists and even each other in an attempt to get 'doing tourism' right, Chio focuses on the effects this has on culture, power, identity, and ethnicities. Chio utilizes to good effect the lenses of scene and visuality (the need to look appropriate to a tourist), as well as movement and mobility, to analyse dilemmas confronting rural residents. The result if a satisfyingly insightful and convincing account of the stunningly complex landscape of tourism in rural China. Of the many strengths of this research, two are particularly pronounced. First, the volume includes exceptionally rich research based on Chio's extensive fieldwork in and beyond two villages. This unusual penetration into the world of tourism allows Chio to compare the impact of developing tourism sites in two unique, yet comparable, rural villages....Chio is a vivid writer who uses her extensive fieldwork and visual eye effectively. Second as an outsider not to rural tourism but to the visual anthropological lens that Chio brings, I found her use of two conceptual tools -- scene/visuality and movement/mobility -- especially effective in understanding these two villages." Donaldson also notes at the end of his review that my book should speak to the broader literature and be more clear in how I am contributing new perspectives and analytical findings to existing work on ethnicity, tourism, and social change. This is a critique that I take seriously and that I am trying to address in my current writing projects. As I have gained some distance from the book itself, combined with return visits to both Upper Jidao and Ping'an over the last years, I am even more convinced of the importance of studying tourism as a form of work and of critically unpacking the politics of visual appearances in order to understand the forces of power, desire, imagination, and obligation that inform decisions to change (or maintain) the "look" of a place and of people. Travis Klingberg (U Colorado Boulder) has written an insightful review of my book, A Landscape of Travel, for the journal Pacific Affairs. In his review, he notes how my book extends and updates much of the earlier scholarship on ethnicity and tourism in China, as well as presenting new arguments on the intersections of mobility and development in rural China. Klingberg writes, "In highlighting the role of migrant subjectivities and labor, Chio has at the same time helped clarify the relationship between migration and tourism in China. The rediscovery of rural and remote China by urban Chinese has been a significant social and political change over the past two decades in China. This is a question that I have pursued in my own work. But mobilities of leisure and labour don’t map cleanly onto the schematic movement of urban tourists to rural China and rural labourers to urban China, and A Landscape of Travel is a valuable study of how closely related these mobilities are." Additionally, he also points out important comparative, future work that needs to be done on tourism in China -- in non-ethnic minority regions, for example, and also in the discursive deployment of "green" urbanization project or "ruralizing" urban spaces.
A preliminary version of the review is now available online and will be in the print version of the journal in a future issue. A PDF of the online version is also available here to download. I'm grateful for the time and attention to my work by Klingberg, and of course it's exciting to see my work being situated more deeply in the (relatively) small field of China tourism studies as well as across disciplinary perspectives. The very first review of my book, A Landscape of Travel, was recently published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage! The review author's comments and feedback are insightful and productive in helping me think more expansively about the reach and scope of my research on tourism in ethnic minority, rural China, and how my work might speak to larger issues in tourism development and cultural heritage management in urban contexts as well. I'm especially excited that the author finds my book relevant across and beyond disciplinary boundaries. Here's an excerpt from the review: "Jenny Chio’s insights and methodological innovations...shake all our analytical certainties and reveal the necessity for an all encompassing integrated evaluation (surpassing the bipolar analysis of leisure-labour, migrant-tourism). This sounds as an invitation to all researchers on tourism, independently of their disciplinary background (anthropology, ethnography, geography, history, economics, architecture, cultural studies, heritage conservation, sociology, politics, etc.) to integrate the two major characteristics of tourism – that she identifies as visuality and mobility – and to investigate on their effects not only in relation to tourists but also with regard to the hosting societies." Download it here:
One of the coolest things about having my book published is the chance now to discuss and reflect on my work through talks and public lectures. I really enjoyed presenting my work at Emory a few weeks ago to a very engaged audience of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Next week I'll give a public lecture at Hamilton College, in New York, about my research on ethnic tourism in rural China. Since my fieldwork in Upper Jidao and Ping'an villages began eight years ago in 2006, and these lectures are a great chance for me to update my findings and to reconsider some of the implications of what I've observed and analyzed.
Public Lecture The Labor of Leisure: Reconsidering the Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China Friday, November 7, 2014 4-6 p.m. Kirmer-Johnson 102 Hamilton College Website: Events Calendar Here
Thanks to a University Research Grant from Emory, I was able to travel to China this summer for a five-week-long trip to keep developing my new research project on rural media, with a particular focus on locally-based Miao videographers in and around Kaili, Guizhou, and the documentary films that are being produced by rural filmmakers through a community media project called "Eye of Villager" (乡村之眼), based in Kunming, Yunnan. There is simply so much media-making happening in these regions that the project is expanding in a lot of exciting ways, which I hope to think and write about over the next few months. At the same time, I was also able to give copies of my book to some of the people who have helped me so much during that research, including people in Upper Jidao and Ping'an villages. It's eye-opening, always, to see how much these villages have changed in the past few years. Here's a small gallery of my photographs, showing some of the things I'm looking at, and mulling over, now. 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. |
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