What began at the turn of the century as a community audiovisual practice in Tibetan and ethnic regions in southwest China is developing into a unique cultural practice under China’s rapidly changing environmental, social, and political landscape. For over 20 years, non-Han ethnic people and sociocultural anthropologists have collaborated with community development NGOs to produce a large volume of documentaries made by local people. In recent years, this collaboration has extended into an experiment with using TikTok-like short video social media platforms. Full of paradoxes, debates and reflections, the cultural practice of community media production challenges the knowledge production and discourse of the classic “autoethnography” and China’s expanding of ethnographic filmmaking phenomena. Furthermore, the audiovisual products and their internal-and-external circulation reveal the cosmology and epistemology of representation among various ethnic minorities in the era of screen culture. This workshop presents documentary images, films, and audiovisual materials produced by ethnic communities along with scholarly research about them. It explores the socio-political economy and the complex process of intersubjective meaning-making in contemporary Tibetan and southwestern China under the context of cultural capitalism, internal colonialism, and the construction of “a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation.” The workshop brings together local filmmakers, anthropologists, and NGO workers to participate and discuss the web of meaning-making using audiovisual medium.
(Participant: Ji Yea Hong, PhD candidate, University of Chicago,USA
Participant: 2~3 local community based ethnic minorities filmmakers,China)
