 In March 2020, I was a part of a lively online panel on COVID-19 and online sociality, organized by Ph.D. students Kaiyang Xu (USC) and Shiqi Lin (UC Irvine). As the organizers explain,
<<Drawing inspiration from “cloud clubbing,” a creative practice engaged by self-quarantined Chinese web users during the pandemic, this “cloud panel” was an experimental endeavor to discuss digital media, societal fears, and the responsibility of humanities scholars in a time of crisis. The panel brought together scholars working on biopolitics, media studies, video ethnography, urban studies, diaspora studies, and Chinese cultural studies to discuss the sources of pandemic anxieties; humor, care and intimacy animated by creative uses of social media; and the implications of social media in border-crossing. As the spread of the pandemic coincided with a transitional period of remote teaching in academia, the panel was also set up as a space for exploring alternative modes of intellectual collaboration during the pandemic.>> The transcript of the panel, featuring short essays and our Q&A with Kaiyang, Shiqi, Belinda Kong (Bowdoin) and Carlos Rojas (Duke), is now published online by the MCLC Resource Center. 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  In a few weeks, I'm headed to Lund University, Sweden, for a conference on cultural heritage in contemporary China, organized by Marina Svensson at Lund University. I'm contributing a paper on bullfighting in Guizhou (and Yunnan) to this event, and it's a challenge for me to think about this part of my research in the context of cultural heritage discourses as they circulate in and through China today. Clearly bullfighting has become emblematic of certain communities in rural ethnic China, and there is a lot of pride -- and money -- invested in promoting bullfighting as a unique, local practice. How these fights, as planned events and as moments of chaotic pleasure and entertainment for the audiences (as well as income for the organizers and owners), speak to subjective senses of ethnic difference and communitas, as well as to social-structural ambitions for recognition and rewards in China's ethnic tourism industry will be the focus of my presentation.
For a few photos of bull-fighting stadiums and other related phenomena, see my post from July 2014 . 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. http://aesonline.org/meetings/spring-conference/
This week, I'll be in Boston at the American Ethnological Society Spring Meeting which is being co-organized with the Society for Visual Anthropology. There's a packed schedule of events, including film screenings, keynote lectures, and paper sessions, and I'm really looking forward to this event! My paper will be on Friday, April 11, at 3 p.m. The title and abstract are below -- the session is a special "Media Makers" panel, with presentations that will feature substantial video and image-based work. Looking like the real thing: Surfaces and stereotypes in ethnic tourism Jenny Chio Emory University Paper abstract: Tourism to, and of, ethnic minority communities capitalizes on the experience of difference and, in particular, differences that can be experienced visually. This paper discusses the relationships between material, tangible surfaces and perceived (or anticipated) stereotypes in ethnic tourism in rural China. My aim is to move the analysis of imagery and representation in tourism beyond studies of tourist photography and the debates over authenticity, in order to consider the politics of appearance in ethnic tourism and the work involved in creating, maintaining, and presenting an ethnic reality that looks real to tourists. To do so, I draw on scenes and excerpts from my ethnographic film on tourism in rural ethnic China, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness (Chio dir. 2013), in order to illustrate how clothing, architecture, and other material surfaces are discursively understood by village residents as the real things that legitimate and demonstrate their ethnic distinction, and by extension their economic value, in the contemporary tourism industry. These surfaces are carefully crafted by village residents, tourism developers, and international development agencies to simultaneously meet and exceed existing stereotypes in a cyclical process of affirmation and appreciation, thus reinforcing Chinese state discourse of ethnic unity and global nostalgia for consumable heritage. 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. |