For residents of Upper Jidao, a Miao village in Guizhou Province, China, the past decade and a half of tourism development in the region can be boiled down to one single suggestion: make a spectacle of yourselves. The spectacle of the rural and the ethnic in tourism – the finely dressed performers, the renovated village architecture – is usually considered the necessary means to the desired end result of boosting local economies. In this essay, I examine how architectural renderings constitute a world-making practice of and in rural ethnic China and how they illuminate underlying ideologies about sociocultural difference. By analyzing these drawings alongside ethnographic observations from long-term fieldwork in the village, this essay sheds light on the embedded relations of power and agentive potential enabled by this kind of spectacular development.
The collection of essays in “The Village Global: Emergent Anthropologies of Rural Sociality” explores contemporary ethnographic articulations of the rural and the urban, understood as a continuum irreducible to the polarity of one or the other term. Considered together, this special issue offers a theoretical intervention in taking the rural seriously as more than just what is “left behind” by modernity. Collectively, our anthropological concern is not only with the (perceived, lived, or imagined) contrasts between what is characterized as “rural” in opposition to “urban” but with the constitution of the categories themselves as experienced realities.
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