I recently gave a public talk on my ethnographic film-in-progess as part of the Morphomata Lecture series at the University of Cologne, Germany, where I am a Fellow for the 2016-2017 academic year. As the theme of the fellowship year is "Figures of Image Control," for the past semester we have been discussing questions of biography as representation, portraiture and human experience, and the differences between image-based and text-based modes of depicting, describing, and interpreting human experience. The interdisciplinary group of fellows, coming from fields as diverse as Ancient History, Classics, Archaeology, and Modern German Literature (as well as Anthropology), has motivated me to think more concretely and conceptually about the possibilities of portraiture in ethnographic research and film-making. My lecture addressed some of the methodological and theoretical issues I am working through as I develop my second ethnographic film project, which will be a portrait of two Miao women from Guizhou, China, and is currently titled "These Days, These Homes." An audio-recording of my talk is available online through the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies website. Listen to my public lecture here [scroll down to "Audio Recordings"] 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. Thanks to the support and enthusiasm from Social Anthropology and the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, I'll be screening my film for a class on visual cultural and anthropology, and giving two talks in early November there as part of the China Studies Seminar and the Cambridge University Social Anthropology Society [CUSAS] seminar series.
Details on each of the talks: Wednesday, November 2, 2016 China Research Seminar Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Title: The Festival Crowd: Ethnic Body Politics and Vernacular Media Practices in 'Minority' China Thursday, November 3, 2016 CUSAS Seminar Division of Social Anthropology Title: Designing Development: Spectacle and Power in a Chinese Ethnic Tourism Village Both of these talks are based on field research in Guizhou and ideas I've been working on recently, and I'm really looking forward to discussing them with China studies and anthropology audiences across the university. 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. I learned today that my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, has been selected for screening at the 2016 Ethnographic Film Festival "Kratovo," organized by the Macedonian Ethnological Society. The festival will take place at the end of September to early October in Macedonia, and the program features films by anthropology students and scholar-filmmakers from across Europe as well as overseas. Although I'm not able to attend the festival, I'm excited to be a part of the event and hope to be able to Skype in for q&a.
Later this year, I will be taking up a one year fellowship at the Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies, at the University of Cologne, Germany. Naturally, I'm very excited and grateful for this opportunity to spend a dedicated year at a humanities-focused research center, where I'll be working on my next film project, "These Days, These Homes." Given that the theme of the research year will be life writing, biography, and portraiture, I look forward to dialogues and conversations with the other fellows about the processes and practices of representing life experience and life histories through visual arts, film, and/or text.
For a bit more information about the film project I'm working on, see my previous blog post here. For two weeks, my film 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, can be watched online as a part of Cultural Anthropology's Screening Room (Visual and New Media Reviews). The feature also includes an extended interview, in which I talk about my fieldwork on ethnic tourism in rural China, and how I see filmmaking as a part of my ethnographic research and anthropological scholarship. Thanks go to Patricia Alvarez and Berkeley Media for making this happen -- it was a really productive opportunity for me to reflect on how ethnographic filmmaking as a process can inform, and ideally deepen, one's analysis and insights from fieldwork.
To watch the film and read the interview, CLICK HERE. The new year has started with a rush! At Emory, I'm excited to be teaching my China anthropology course again, which has been updated with some new materials and will feature a guest lecture by two Chinese scholar-filmmakers from Yunnan in April. I'm also running a new graduate seminar, "Heritage and Power" with a great, multi-disciplinary group of students from across the university.
Moreover, I've just settled the dates for a number of public talks, seminars, and film screenings over the course of the spring in Montreal, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The dates and titles are below, and further details will follow: February 15, 2016 Digital Ethnography and Community Media Graduate Seminar, Concordia University February 16, 2016 Buffalo, Wrangler, Videographer: Vernacular Media and the Afterlives of Bullfights in Southwest China Public Talk, Global Emergent Media Lab, Concordia University March 5, 2016 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness Film screening and discussion, USC-RAI Ethnographic Film Festival in Los Angeles, Center for Visual Anthropology, University of Southern California (USC) March 7, 2016 These Days, These Homes: The Process of a Film-in-Progress Graduate Seminar, Center for Visual Anthropology, USC March 11-25, 2016 Cultural Anthropology Screening Room (Online) Review and filmmaker Q&A with online access to my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness April 2, 2016 Collaboration and Power: The Politics of Community Media in China and Taiwan Roundtable discussion, Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, Seattle April 4, 2016 Documenting Development in China: Community Media in Tibetan Qinghai Screenings and discussion of community media projects from Qinghai, China, Center for Chinese Studies, UCLA April 5, 2016 From Our Eyes: Community Media and Visual Ethnography in China Screenings and discussion, East Asian Studies Center and the Department of Anthropology, USC May 19, 2016 All Together Now: Ethnic Crowds and Vernacular Media in 'Minority' China Culture, Power, and Social Change Seminar, sponsored by Anthropology and the Center for Chinese Studies, UCLA June 19-22, 2016 Participatory Modernity: Vernacular Media in Ethnic China Paper presentation in a panel, "From Whose Eyes, In Whose Name? Interrogating Rural Media, Anthropological Knowledge, and Ethnographic Expertise in China and Taiwan," accepted for the 2016 Society for East Asian Anthropology Conference in Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong A new review of my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, has just been published online in Pacific Affairs! Written by Tenzin Jinba, Professor of Anthropology at Lanzhou University (Gansu, China) and author of In the Land of the Eastern Queendom: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity on the Sino-Tibetan Border, he starts his review by noting the questions immediately brought to mind by the film's title: "We may wonder: What does visiting peasant homes have to do with happiness? Are peasant hosts happy, too?" His own research (which I assigned last year in my course on ethnicity and nationalism in East Asia) explores many phenomena experienced and confronted by ethnic minority communities in Sichuan Province due to tourism development and modernization that were very similar to what I have observed and analyzed in Guizhou and Guangxi. I'm grateful for his expert attention to the questions raised by my film regarding ethnic identity in China, development processes, social transformation, and individual ambitions in rural communities. These are issues that are only deepening in meaning and political potential in light of China's poverty alleviation campaign that is being touted as part of the next Five Year Plan. As I continue to visit Ping'an and Upper Jidao nowadays, I'm keenly aware of how tourism is both definitely "here to stay" in both places and how changes in the domestic and global tourism industries, combined with shifting opportunities for village residents, are creating new challenges and possibilities for village social relations and imaginations of what "peasant family happiness" might entail in the future.
At the 2016 Association for Asian Studies meeting in Seattle, I will be a part of a roundtable discussion on Aboriginal and community media in China and Taiwan. I'm very excited that this has been accepted because it will provide an opportunity for Asia scholars to view new contemporary documentary films by ethnic minority filmmakers from both China and Taiwan. The event will feature visual anthropologists, film scholars, and media practitioners from Yunnan University, Yunnan Arts Institute, and Tainan National University of the Arts, and we intend to leave plenty of time for discussion and dialogue with audience members.
I will post details on the films to be shown when they are confirmed, but here is the panel abstract and the date/time. Hope to see many scholars of media, community development, and ethnic minority politics in Asia there! Collaboration and Power: The Politics of Community Media in China and Taiwan Saturday April 2, 3-5 p.m. Washington State Convention Center, Room 615 Seattle, WA Session Abstract: This roundtable critically engages with the thorny questions of power, agency, subjectivity, and ownership that underlie contemporary community media projects. Our collective goal is to develop new approaches to understanding the socio-political contributions and consequences of community media in China and Taiwan. Prominent examples from China include the “China Villager Documentary Project” initiated by Wu Wenguang, as well as numerous projects in ethnic minority regions of Yunnan spearheaded by academics and development organizations. In Taiwan, community media has played a significant role in indigenous, labor, and other social-political movements for decades. Our session will begin with excerpts of recent documentaries from Tibetan communities in China and indigenous communities in Taiwan. These films are produced by first-time filmmakers through participatory video workshops, and the excerpts will be followed by brief comments from the discussants and a substantial period of open dialogue. Notions of collaboration, participation, engagement, and empowerment are often taken-for-granted as positive features of community media production, and we aim to unpack such prevailing assumptions by analyzing the effects of community media within the context-specific conditions of contemporary China and Taiwan. Can these films reflect or embody new social relationships and subject positions for rural, minority people in China and Taiwan? How does the emphasis on collaboration and participation in community media reinforce and reimagine existing power relations? What forms of empowerment and/or agency are possible, and what desires or possibilities might be overlooked or overshadowed in these projects? Anthropological filmmakers Chen Xueli and Li Xin, from China, will speak to shifting power dynamics between rural and urban Chinese in their experience as trainers in participatory video workshops as well as to the subjectivity of the “native” filmmaker. Film scholars Ray Jiing and Tony Tsai will reflect upon their work with community media programs in Taiwan and on the archiving, preservation, and future of these documentaries. Jenny Chio, anthropologist and filmmaker, will discuss the role of media in rural development and the idea of “participation” in neoliberal strategies of self-governance. Together, we will foster more critical perspectives on the entanglements of power, collaboration, and media production in marginalized communities today. |
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