Whenever I have been lucky enough to discuss my film, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness, after it has been screened, I’m usually asked a series of questions about my motivation for making a film, the relationship of the film to my larger research project, whether or not life in the two villages depicted has changed, and how village residents have reacted or responded to the film’s representation of tourism in their communities. These are important dimensions to the film that I enjoy speaking about and that have informed my own understandings of and approaches to tourism, rural social transformations, ethnicity, and ethnographic filmmaking in China today.
Briefly, 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness explores the contemporary lived experience of tourism, as a form of development and labor, in two ethnic minority villages in China – Ping’an, in Guangxi, and Upper Jidao, in Guizhou. Taking an observational, ethnographic approach, the first chapter of the film focuses on the different types of work of Ping’an residents, who labor to maintain the terraced field, operate guesthouses, and provide various tourist services, including handicraft sales and carrying tourists up the hillsides in sedan chairs. The second chapter features Upper Jidao, where tourism is still a work-in-progress, as village residents respond to and consider the potential benefits of tourism for their lives and livelihoods. There, tourism activities are centered on pre-arranged performances of ethnic Miao songs and dances, in choreographed formats that echo, and sometimes wholly reproduce, the more familiar, commercial staged ethnic minority shows in cities and on national television. The film’s epilogue shows moments from a short trip I organized for residents of Upper Jidao to visit Ping’an, during which residents of both villages reflected upon what it means for them, as rural, ethnic minority Chinese, to be involved in the tourism industry.
There is, of course, a lot of information that is left out of the film – including, significantly, how tourism in China has been integrated into national programs for rural economic development and state discourses of modernized ethnic minority communities. And, specific to these two villages, the film doesn’t discuss how Ping’an has been part of a much larger scenic area that is managed by a private tourism development company based in Guilin for over 15 years; how Upper Jidao is part of a current provincial-level project for tourism development and cultural preservation in Guizhou that is funded by a loan from the World Bank, that began a decade ago; how some of the individuals interviewed in the film at length are no longer engaged at all in their respective villages’ tourism industries; how when I last showed the final cut to a family in Ping’an, one man jokingly said it was like “watching an old movie” because some of the footage dates back to 2006.
I often bring up these points in post-screening Q&A sessions, yet with every screening, I’ve started thinking differently about the film’s potential reception. Rather than wondering what kinds of questions might be asked about the film, I have begun to turn the question around and consider what农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness might ask. How can the film, or any ethnographic film in this case, raise questions that push beyond the explanatory, the descriptive, and the empirical? Moreover, does my film prompt broader questions into conceptual issues such as labor, leisure, production, and consumption, while remaining grounded in the ethnographic everyday of life in Ping’an and Upper Jidao villages? The specificity of images, the fact that they are almost always depictions of a particular person at a particular place in a particular moment, as David MacDougall has argued, overshadows and usurps the anthropological impulse to unearth generalizations out of ethnographic descriptions. A woman selling colorful rugs becomes this woman selling rugs; a man talking about folk dances becomes this man talking about folk dances.
Why would I want my film to pose less specific, indeed more general, questions? After all, one of the most difficult editing decisions I grappled with was choosing not to combine footage from both villages into a single, all-encompassing story about tourism in China. Instead, I believed (and still do today) that it was important to give each village its filmic space, not to create an artificial “touristic world” in which every ethnic tourism village in China can become any ethnic tourism village. But at the same time, I also believe that农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness has the ability to be representative of something bigger than itself, and that ethnographic media, broadly speaking, should have the capacity to ask, and not just answer, anthropological questions. In the case of my film, I hope that these questions might be something like: How has tourism become constitutive of broader imaginations and subjectivities in contemporary rural ethnic China? What does it mean to produce leisure experiences for others? How is power negotiated in such an exchange? What are the implications when ethnic identity becomes a source of entertainment? How might the work of tourism require us to reconceptualize production and materiality? And finally, what makes a “good” tourist from the perspective of those who actually make tourism happen in destinations?
Ethnographic film competes for attention in a rapidly expanding world of documentary, reality-based images and stories, especially about travel and its romantic corollary, discovery; many people have been and are making films about tourism. 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness is one of these films, and one which, I hope, offers viewers a few new questions about the transformational effects of tourism in rural ethnic China.
Submissions for the 2014 David Plath Media Award are now being accepted until the deadline, May 1, 2014. Visit this page for details. Jenny Chio is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and associated faculty in Film and Media Studies at Emory University. 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness is distributed by Berkeley Media, LLC. Her ethnographic monograph, A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China, has just been published by the University of Washington Press. More information is available on her website. Please send news items, contributions, and comments to SEAA Contributing Editors Heidi Lam (heidi.lam@yale.edu) or Yi Zhou (yizhou@ucdavis.edu).