Paper short abstract:

Based up teaching and research experiences with young students and informants, I discuss the up-to-date social contexts within which visual anthropology is situated in China. I argue that the Chinese visual anthropology crucially demands to engage with the surrounding new cultural and mediascapes.

Paper long abstract:

Visual anthropology is confronted with many unprecedented challenges in China’s new cultural and media landscapes. Within the discipline of Chinese academia, visual anthropology remains its marginal status; ethnographic film as a meaningful research outcome is yet formally acknowledged. Nevertheless, under the national discourses of preserving heritage culture, anthropological filming is exploited, from top down, as a tool of documenting and rescuing the so-called traditional customs. At the same time, visual anthropology in China is facing a difficult engagement with the general public, in that its style is not all appreciated by the younger generations who are making full use of new media and technology to represent their own understanding about everyday culture and social realities.

Based up teaching and research experiences with young students and informants in their twenties and thirties in China, I discuss the complex up-to-date social contexts within which the practices of ethnographic filmmaking and the education of visual anthropology are situated. I argue that the Chinese visual anthropology crucially demands to go beyond its old boundary to meet the challenges and to engage with the surrounding new cultural and mediascapes; but at the same time it deserves a serious scholarly rethinking about what is the core spirit of visual anthropology that shall be maintained and valued.