Fieldwork, Film, and the Tourist Gaze: Making 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness

Abstract

Making a film about tourism and being a tourist can often look like the same thing-an outsider with a camera, gazing at a community and people through a lens. And while using a camera in the field can render the ethnographer more legible and logical to one's interlocutors, the production of a film using footage gathered during fieldwork demands an acknowledgment of one's responsibility and relationship to a community and to individuals, qualities not demanded of tourists (or the images they make/take), whose visits are fleeting and temporary. Moreover, a film about tourism challenges viewers to think critically about the consequences of the "tourist gaze" in a destination community. This essay explores the structural, ethical, and social issues faced in making Peasant Family Happiness, a film about two rural, ethnic tourism villages in China. In so doing, I reflect on ethnographic filmmaking as both a component of ethnographic fieldwork and a form of engagement with, and for, viewers. [China, ethnic minorities, ethnographic film, fieldwork, rural villages, tourism]

Filmmaking in a Linguistic Ethnography of Deaf Tourist Encounters

“…Filmmaking allows for movement away from "lingual bias," which I define here as the predisposition to treat signing as primary in deaf communication and the exclusive analytical focus on the production of signs and the structure of sign languages. Ethnographic film is a visual representation of the research; the film is entwined with theory, which drives the editing, pacing, and choices of interviews (Chio 2014(Chio , 2018. Kusters et al (2016, 9) observed, "Deaf signers are often studied and represented in ways that ultimately obscure the visual, embodied nature of their languages, including their expertise, subjective experiences and participation."…”