Jenny Chio
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2014 SVA Film and Media Festival Program!

11/22/2014

 
The 2014 SVA Film and Media Festival program is now online, complete with film abstracts, screening times, locations, and the winning films!

Check out our festival highlights here: 2014 SVA Film and Media Highlights

View the entire program online here: 2014 SVA Film and Media Festival Program


Or download a handy PDF copy here: 2014 SVAFF Program


We kickoff on Wednesday, December 3, 2014 with the Best Feature Film, In the Steppes of Genghis, directed by Mike Majoros. All screenings are open to the public, and I hope to that those attending the AAA Annual Meeting as well as others in the DC area will come watch a few films this December, engage with our filmmakers, and discover new films.
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"Consuming Culture in China" -- 2014 AAA Annual Meeting Session

11/16/2014

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I'm part of a great panel for this year's American Anthropological Association's Annual Meeting, which is taking place the first week of December in Washington, D.C. This panel focuses on understanding the politics of cultural commodification in China today, with a particular emphasis on the processes through which ethnic minority communities are being reformed as highly valued "resources" within larger state policies and developments. There will be three papers based on research from Yunnan, along with my paper on bull-fighting in Guizhou; details below. If you're planning on attending the meetings from beginning to end, please attend our session. I am really excited to talk about bull-fighting in Guizhou, which is a topic I've been working on for a few years now, and I am looking forward to gaining feedback from other anthropologists.

Session title: Consuming Culture, Reforming Place, and Personifying Value in China

Organized by Lara Kusnetzky
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
12:00-1:45

My paper:

Organized Chaos: Bullfights As Cultural Production and Ethnic Practice in Guizhou

Abstract:
Bullfights in southeastern Guizhou index Miao cultural vitality and ethnic identity in regional and national tourism campaigns, rural development efforts, and heritage preservation programs. To be clear, while the Chinese phrase for bullfighting is douniu, according to some Miao scholars, bullfighting should be called niudajia to emphasize that two water buffalo fight each other. As events, bullfights are tightly organized competitions, yet often erupt into chaos when the bulls charge their handlers or into the crowds. This paper explores how the organization of bullfights and the enjoyment of them have become ways in which contemporary Miao use local resources, including funds from private entrepreneurs, and local government agencies (such as regional bullfighting associations and cultural bureaus) to assert an ethnic, minority cultural identity within the context, or chaos, of ever-evolving state policies of cultural preservation and rural urbanization. Unlike the many tourism projects in this region, into which bullfighting (or images of) are often incorporated, bullfights remain largely produced for local audiences. By interrogating the politics of bullfights as cultural production and ethnic practice, this paper argues that the shared experience of watching, and enjoying, bullfights reflect and refract contemporary Miao identities in a region and era where distinctive forms of ethnic-ness and cultural-ness are increasingly marketed, promoted, and celebrated. Thus, from their organization, participants, and their ubiquity as video-recordings, bullfights engender what can be called “productive pleasures” and speak to ways in which culture and ethnicity are governed within current state projects to modernize, and urbanize, rural China.
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农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness wins Award

11/23/2013

 
I'm really excited that my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, was awarded the 2013 David Plath Media Prize, given by the Society for East Asian Anthropology [SEAA].  The prize was presented during the 2013 SEAA Business Meeting, during the AAA Annual Meetings in Chicago. 

According to the SEAA, this award goes to "the best work (film, video, audio, and multimedia) on any aspect of East Asian anthropology and/or East Asian anthropology's contribution to the broader field." It's a huge honor to have my film recognized by the section, and hopefully this will encourage more anthropologists to consider the possibilities of film and video making in anthropological research. 

The 2013 committee wrote of my film:
This documentary explores the backstage efforts of locals in the world of ethnic tourism. Chio observes and documents interactions between locals and tourists with a focused yet easy rapport with members of local communities. A variety of perspectives, views and experiences are presented with appreciation for the dilemmas faced by individuals and groups who seek more stable income, material comfort and dignified living in ancestral villages. These concerns are situated against a backdrop of increased surplus disposable income and leisure time among China’s middle class....A kinder, gentler version of Dennis O’Rourke’s acerbic Cannibal Tours, Chio’s film shows how residents negotiate with visiting Han tourists and their idealized projections of ethnic minorities.

And now that this film finally feels like it is "done," I need to start thinking about what new projects are in store for me...

AAA (Chicago) Presentation -- November 23, 2013

11/19/2013

 
112th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, November 2013

I gave a paper titled "Precarity Alleviation: Tourism as Development in Rural, Ethnic China" as part of the invited session "Precarious Time: Discussions on the Un/Doing of East Asia," on Saturday, November 23. 

Check out this short post about the session on the Anthropology News blog:
http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2014/02/20/aaa-2013-invited-session-spotlight/

Paper abstract:
In 2009, the World Bank approved a US$60 million loan for a project titled “Cultural and Natural Heritage Protection and Development Project” in Guizhou province, China. Consultations and initial master planning for this project had begun nearly ten years earlier. This paper examines the unfolding of tourism as development in the village of Upper Jidao, one selected site within the project, from the perspective of those whose present conditions and future ambitions are most at stake: village residents. The oft-expressed intent of utilizing tourism as development in China is to alleviate the economic precariousness of rural livelihoods, particularly in ethnic minority regions, by creating new forms of labor and wage-earning in the booming national tourism industry. Likewise, such projects to protect heritage aim to stabilize the perceived precariousness of ethnic traditions and folk practices by rendering cultural differences into commercially entertaining, pleasantly familiar forms. And yet, at the most local levels of intra-village socialities and individual subjectivities, anxieties, uncertainties, and frictions are, in many cases, heightened precisely because of ongoing national, policy-level exhortations for rural, ethnic people to become more developed, more urban, and more modern. Rural, ethnic lives and livelihoods are thus made and un-made in the concomitant processes of tourism, development, and urbanization in China today, reinforcing conditions of social and economic precarity that are both inherent in tourism as development and newly emergent as a consequence of state-led ideological efforts to reimagine the stakes of being rural and being ethnic in contemporary China.

2013 SVA Film and Media Festival Program

11/18/2013

 
This year I've been lucky enough to co-organize the 2013 SVA Film and Media Festival, which runs concurrently with the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Chicago.  We've got an amazing line-up of films, from ultra shorts to feature length, and a number of the filmmakers will be present for post-screening Q&A.

The program is available to download here.
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University of Southern California   |  Department of East Asian Languages & Cultures   |    jchio@usc.edu