My newly published essay, "Theorizing in/of Ethnographic Film," is available as a free download from Routledge!

The chapter is part of the wide-ranging Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video, which examines the current state of ethnographic media-making from theoretical and practical perspectives. My chapter is motivated by a series of overly ambitious questions regarding the state of ethnographic film in contemporary anthropology and cognate disciplines. Namely, what are the methodological, epistemological, and conceptual relationships between ethnographic filmmaking and ethnographic theorymaking today? How can ethnographic film help produce, or at least help inform, better ethnography, and vice versa? And, perhaps most importantly, how can ethnographers, filmmakers, and ethnographic filmmakers go about actually doing better at whatever it is that they seek to do (producing social scientific knowledge, film, or some combination thereof )?

Race is a topic that must be talked about -- that much has been made painfully clear in the last days, weeks, months, and years. While issues of policing, structural violence, and institutionalized racism are absolutely vital to unpack and rethink, it's also critical to examine how race informs and shapes aspects of our collective social lives that might, at first, seem less relevant.

I am grateful to be a part of a discussion on tourism and race, which has just been published in the Journal of Tourism History. Moreover, I am humbled to be in the company of a number of amazing scholars whose work directly investigates and critiques the history and persistence of racism and injustice in contemporary tourism (and tourism studies).

Read the discussion here.

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 was invited to write an afterword for this forthcoming special issue of the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology on film and the representation of "exotic others." The issue features a wide range of case studies of (mostly) documentary filmmaking projects across the Asia-Pacific region, and the authors analyze the multiple intersections between documentary film, tourism development, and the imagination of the other. Moreover, the essays in the issue question deeply how the representation of "otherness" is produced and practiced in touristic contexts.

In my afterword, I situate these case studies within broader anthropological debates on tourism imaginaries and visual anthropology. As my own work as an ethnographic filmmaker and anthropologist tries to show, the fundamental methodology of participation observation can and should be critiqued and challenged by concepts and practices of filmmaking and visual representation. Thus, I titled my afterword "filmmaking as critical participation observation" in order to illustrate what ethnographers (particularly those working in touristic contexts) can gain from taking film seriously in the practice and production of cultural representations.

Click on the image for a list of articles and abstracts from the issue!

Visual Anthropology Review Issue 30 Number 1
Special Issues on new ethnographic film in China

Maris Gillette has edited a special issue of VAR, featuring five research articles and film reviews of recently completed ethnographic films about China directed by anthropologists: Writing in Water, by Angela Zito; Chaiqian/Demolition by J.P. Sniadecki; Broken Pots, Broken Dreams by Maris Gillette; Bored in Heaven, by Kenneth Dean, and my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness. The issue provides a broad look across a range of filmmaking practices and subjects, as well as a sense of how extensively anthropologists have been using film and filmmaking as a means of ethnographic analysis and knowledge production, particularly in the context of contemporary China. My hope for this issue is that it will help spur more conversations about the how anthropological research can think through filmmaking, as a means of research and analysis.

My article, titled "Fieldwork, Film, and the Tourist Gaze: Making 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness" can be downloaded here. A thoughtful review of the film, by Laurie Kain Hart (Haverford College), is available here.