A close look at tourism's impact in rural China

Women in Upper Jidao village, Guizhou, wear their festival attire and perform Miao songs and dances for tourists. Photo by Jenny Chio.

By Carol Clark

While most of the world has been dazzled by the transformation of China’s cities in recent years, Emory anthropologist Jenny Chio has been quietly recording changes in the rural way of life. Her documentary film “农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness” explores the impact of tourism in China, from the perspective of residents of two rural villages where urbanites go to seek a “country” experience.

The film, which won the 2013 David Plath Media Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology, is getting good reviews as it makes the rounds of conferences and festivals. In May, Chio has a book coming out, “A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China,” which will give more details about the impact of touristic desires on village life, while also delving into the visual politics of tourism and photography.

“I’m fascinated by tourism and I think it’s an important topic,” Chio says, “but I don’t study tourists. I made a decision early on to focus instead on the people who are actually doing the work to create an enjoyable, cultural experience for the tourists.”

Watch a BBC interview with Jenny Chio:


Chio was born in the United States, to parents who immigrated from Taiwan in the early 1970s. She was raised in the Midwest and California and speaks Mandarin Chinese.

As an undergraduate majoring in anthropology at Brown University she became interested in museums, particularly those run by Native Americans, and how they are used to address historical trauma and promote revitalization of cultural heritage.

After graduation, she spent a year teaching English in Beijing. “That’s when I realized that everything that I thought I knew about China was inadequate,” Chio says. “It was like, ‘Wow! I have so much to learn about this place.’”

The crowds of people, cars and non-stop construction can feel overwhelming to a first-time visitor to a city in China, she says. “Beijing is much louder than an American city. There is this energy that comes from the fact that life in China has changed so dramatically, so quickly. The buildings are so new and so shiny and modern.”

She cites a running joke: Reports of Chinese tourists going to Europe and the United States and being disappointed that the cities look so old and decrepit in comparison.

Chio went to Goldsmiths College, University of London, for a masters degree in visual anthropology. For her thesis, she created a digital video on the representation of ethnic minorities in Chinese ethnographic films from the 1950s and 1960s, titled “Film the People.”

In this still image from "Peasant Family Happiness" a village woman muses whether she should maintain an "ethnic" look while doing her household chores.

While “visual anthropology” is fairly new as a term and as a sub-discipline, “anthropologists have been using still photos and film cameras since their invention,” Chio says. “But many in the field have considered imagery as too slippery for communicating research because you can’t control how people interpret it. My take is that images are obviously important, but they have to be used very consciously, with an awareness of what they can and cannot do. Film speaks to us in one way and text in another. I’m interested in how they may work together.”

Chio began filming the villages in “农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness” in 2006 as part of her thesis for a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Domestic tourism is booming in China. As the middle class has blossomed in cities, the government has promoted tourism in the countryside, to help address the vast economic disparities between the urban and rural populations. The term “peasant family happiness,” or nong jia le, became a catch-all phrase to describe the phenomenon of homestays and guesthouses where “city slickers” can unwind while enjoying local food and activities.

Chio turned her camera on two ethnic minority villages cultivating tourism in their largely agricultural and wage-labor economies. The first, an ethnic Zhuang village called Ping’an in the terraced rice fields of mountainous Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has been on the tourist map since the 1980s, due to its dramatic scenery. The second, Upper Jidao Village in Guizhou Province, is an ethnic Miao community with a quieter beauty. Set at the foot of a hillside in front of a river, Upper Jidao was just beginning to transform itself into a tourist destination when Chio started filming.

A villager at work in a rice field. Photo by Jenny Chio.

Here’s an excerpt of a review of  Chio's documentary, published by the journal American Anthropologist:

“The film opens with some striking footage of tourists being carried up steep slopes in colorful canopied bamboo sedan chairs. Ping’an men keep tallies on whose turn it is to carry the next passenger at the sedan chair boarding station. From an observation point, a tour guide in ethnic dress armed with a microphone rallies the tour group, consisting of urban Chinese tourists, to admire the rural landscape.” 

“It’s fascinating to me all the types of labor involved in creating and maintaining tourism in these villages,” Chio says. “The visitors must be fed and entertained. And the villagers have to learn how to re-visualize their living spaces and environments. Jeans and t-shirts, for example, may be cheaper, but the tourists expect to see villagers in ethnic dress.”

The tourists may want to have a cultural experience, but they don’t necessarily want it to include strong smells. In order to create a guesthouse, village families must consider whether they need to move their pigs away from their traditional location, beneath homes, to pens further away.

A flush toilet and indoor plumbing, uncommon luxuries in many villages, are basic essentials for city folk. Windows may need to be screened, and a balcony added to a room to make it more desirable. A concrete house may be more practical, and less of a fire hazard, but a wooden home is more picturesque.

One of Chio’s favorite scenes from the film shows about two dozen men from Ping’an strapping a 2,000-kilogram electrical transformer to two tree trunks, then hefting the trunks to their shoulders and carrying the transformer up a steep slope. “I don’t actually explain what’s going on to the viewers,” Chio says, “but, of course, if you’re going to bring more electrical capacity to an 800-meter-high village with only footpaths and one narrow road, then you are going to have to pack in a larger transformer. When the men finally arrive at the place where they can set it down, you hear this collective groan and cheer that sounds so tired and full of relief. It was a pretty amazing, joyous moment for the village.”

Residents of Upper Jidao and Jenny Chio pose with "minority models" for a souvenir photograph in Ping'an.

A major benefit of tourism is that it can allow families to stay in ancestral villages and keep their home and land. “I’m very much a product of the American suburbs,” Chio says, “but in rural China people have really strong ties to their land. The young adults of a family may go into the city and work, but many of them return for holidays and they talk about wanting to come back to their villages permanently.”

As more village youth graduate from college, rural tourism gives them an opportunity to return and run a hotel or other business. “They may help their parents create web sites for a guesthouse and build networks with travel companies,” Chio says.

Among the negative effects of tourism are environmental problems. “Tourism uses a lot of resources, like water and energy,” Chio notes. “It also makes village residents much more aware of the inequities between rural and urban parts of the country.”

China’s population recently tipped for the first time into a predominantly semi-urban-to-urban one, but 49 percent of the country remains rural.

“Rural China sits at the heart of a lot of key issues that the government has to deal with,” Chio says, including political instability at the local level, the critical need for food security, population mobility and tensions between the “haves” and “have nots.” The rapid urbanization of China has put more pressure on the government to help the countryside catch up.

Chio’s next project is focused on the digital technology and media practices of rural China. In some areas, non-governmental agencies have been training villagers in video production. The videos appear to have varying aims, from fostering awareness of social issues and environmental problems to simply offering glimpses of local festivals and other events.

“Making short, home-movie-style videos of local ethnic life is becoming a part of everyday life in rural China,” Chio says. “People are selling some of these videos at street stalls and in shops. I want to learn more about what these videos portray, who is making them, and who is buying them.”

On the gruesome trail of syphilis, then and now

A woodcut from about 1497 shows a physician treating a patient with syphilis, one of the earliest known depictions of the disease.

Tracking the origin of syphilis, and related treponemal diseases, has taken Emory anthropologist George Armelagos and his graduate students across the globe and through time, from the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the forests of West Africa where modern-day monkeys suffer from a vicious form of yaws. Armelagos co-wrote an article for The Scientist summarizing the work with two of his former Emory graduate students: Kristin Harper, now a researcher at MetaMed, and Molly Zuckerman, who is now an assistant professor at Mississippi State University. Below is an excerpt from the article:

"By the close of the 15th century, chaos reigned in Naples, Italy. At the invitation of Pope Innocent VIII, the French King Charles VIII invaded the city with 25,000 troops. Soon after, a terrible new disease appeared among the soldiers and the prostitutes who accompanied them. Boils as big as acorns that burst and left scabs, terrible joint pain, rotting flesh, and a revolting odor tortured the infected. By the dawn of the 20th century, it was estimated that as many as 10 percent of London residents, 15 percent of Parisians, and 20 percent of US army recruits had the disease—dubbed syphilis after the hero of a 16th-century poem who is afflicted with the infection as a punishment for insulting the god Apollo.

A CDC micrograph of T. pallidum.

"The pale, corkscrew-shaped bacterium responsible for the outbreak, Treponema pallidum, was identified in 1905, and the prevalence of the infection plummeted in the developed world after the discovery of antibiotics. Still, roughly 12 million people are diagnosed with syphilis each year, and it remains an important public health problem in low-income countries.  ...

"Recently, many researchers, our group included, have taken a new approach to the study of the origin and evolution of syphilis and its cousins, and the breadth of these diseases’ reach today. Leveraging techniques from genetics, biological anthropology, and wildlife disease ecology, syphilis researchers are now beginning to answer questions that have been pondered for hundreds of years. The skeletal, genetic, and ecological information scientists are now uncovering could inform our understanding of how T. pallidum has evolved and how we can best control it today."

Read the whole article in The Scientist.

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Winter's Tale: From birds to snow angels, traces tell a story

Written in snow: While most people are focused on Atlanta's human traffic jam, Tony Martin is using his camera to record animal traffic patterns. 

By Carol Clark

For Emory ichnologist Anthony Martin, a snow day is a great day to do science in the field. Ichnology is the study of traces left by living things, including tracks, and Martin is an expert in the traces of both prehistoric animals and modern-day ones.

Photo of Martin by Ruth Schowalter.

“Living in Georgia, it’s rare for me to see tracks in snow, so it’s a big treat,” Martin says. “It’s been really fun to see the patterns left by birds around our feeder, right outside our front door.”

Martin doesn't have to see the birds to know that the feeder was visited by hopping, skipping warblers, sparrows and wrens.

A blanket of snow to Martin is like a big sheet of white paper with all kinds of stories written on it.

If you take a walk in the snow, you may be surprised by the variety of animals and their activities recorded in it. Martin advises amateur ichnologists to start by looking for patterns.

“Try to think about what sort of story is being written in the snow by the animal,” he says. “Focus on ‘what is this character doing, rather than ‘who is this character.’ That makes for some really fun tracking.”

A snow angel resting trace, seen in Decatur's Adair Park. Photo by Tony Martin.

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When scientists go to the movies, they need their space

Keir Dullea played astronaut David Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

“We can’t count on science fiction to always get the science right,” Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz told Popular Mechanics. “But we can count on it to generate excitement and interest in viewers.” 

Ocasionally, however, Hollywood does get it right. Popular Mechanics polled dozens of scientists and engineers on their favorite sci-fi movies, based on both scientific plausibility and cinematic merit.

Their top pick: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the 1968 film of space exploration by director Stanley Kubrick. Even seasoned astronauts gave Kubrick the thumbs up for his depictions of space flight.

Click here to read the other 10 top sci-fi movies named by the scientists and engineers.

The magazine also polled the scientists about the worst sci-fi movies. Among the top five is 2003’s “The Core” which, Perkowitz says, “gets more science wrong than almost any other film I know.”

Related:
Fantastic light: From science-fiction to fact

Psychologists document the age our earliest memories fade

What's your earliest surviving memory? 

By Carol Clark

Although infants use their memories to learn new information, few adults can remember events in their lives that happened prior to the age of three. Psychologists at Emory University have now documented that age seven is when these earliest memories tend to fade into oblivion, a phenomenon known as “childhood amnesia.”

The journal Memory published the research, which involved interviewing children about past events in their lives, starting at age three. Different subsets of the group of children were then tested for recall of these events at ages five, six, seven, eight and nine.

“Our study is the first empirical demonstration of the onset of childhood amnesia,” says Emory psychologist Patricia Bauer, who led the study. “We actually recorded the memories of children, and then we followed them into the future to track when they forgot these memories.” 

The study’s co-author is Marina Larkina, a manager of research projects for Emory’s Department of Psychology.

The Bauer Memory Development Lab focuses on how episodic, or autobiographical memory, changes through childhood and early adulthood.

“Knowing how autobiographical memory develops is critically important to understanding ourselves as psychic beings,” Bauer says. “Remembering yourself in the past is how you know who you are today.”
 

Scientists have long known, based on interviews with adults, that most people’s earliest memories only go back to about age 3. Sigmund Freud coined the term “childhood amnesia” to describe this loss of memory from the infant years. Using his psychoanalytic theory, Freud made the controversial proposal that people were repressing their earliest memories due to their inappropriate sexual nature.

In recent years, however, growing evidence indicates that, while infants use memory to learn language and make sense of the world around them, they do not yet have the sophisticated neural architecture needed to form and hold onto more complex forms of memory.

Instead of relying on interviews with adults, as previous studies of childhood amnesia have done, the Emory researchers wanted to document early autobiographical memory formation, as well as the age of forgetting these memories.

The experiment began by recording 83 children at the age of three, while their mothers or fathers asked them about six events that the children had experienced in recent months, such as a trip to the zoo or a birthday party.

“We asked the parents to speak as they normally would to their children,” Bauer says.

She gives a hypothetical example: “The mother might ask, ‘Remember when we went to Chuck E. Cheese’s for your birthday party?’ She might add, ‘You had pizza, didn’t you?’”

The child might start recounting details of the Chuck E. Cheese experience or divert the conversation by saying something like, “Zoo!”

Some mothers might keep asking about the pizza, while another mother might say, “Okay, we went to the zoo, too. Tell me about that.”

Parents who followed a child’s lead in these conversations tended to elicit richer memories from their three-year-olds, Bauer says. “This approach also related to the children having a better memory of the event at a later age.”

Memories that stick around longer may have richer details associated with them.

After recording these base memories, the researchers followed up with the children years later, asking them to recall the events that they recounted at age three. The study subjects were divided into five different groups, and each group of children returned only once to participate in the experiment, from the ages of five to nine.

While the children between the ages of five and seven could recall 63 to 72 percent of the events, the children who were eight and nine years old remembered only about 35 percent of the events.

“One surprising finding was that, although the five-and-six year-old children remembered a higher percentage of the events, their narratives of these events were less complete,” Bauer says. “The older children remembered fewer events, but the ones they remembered had more detail.”

Some reasons for this difference may be that memories that stick around longer may have richer detail associated with them and increasing language skills enable an older child to better elaborate the memory, further cementing it in their minds, Bauer says.

Young children tend to forget events more rapidly than adults do because they lack the strong neural processes required to bring together all the pieces of information that go into a complex autobiographical memory, she explains. “You have to learn to use a calendar and understand the days of the week and the seasons. You need to encode information about the physical location of the event. And you need development of a sense of self, an understanding that your perspective is different from that of someone else.”

She uses an analogy of pasta draining in a colander to explain the difference between early childhood and adult memories.

“Memories are like orzo,” she says, referring to the rice-grained-sized pasta, “little bits and pieces of neural encoding.”

Young children’s brains are like colanders with large holes trying to retain these little pieces of memory. “As the water rushes out, so do many of the grains of orzo,” Bauer says. “Adults, however, use a fine net instead of a colander for a screen.”

Now that Bauer has documented the onset of childhood amnesia, she hopes to hone in on the age that people acquire an adult memory system, which she believes is between the age of nine and the college years.

“We’d like to know more about when we trade in our colanders for a net,” she says. “Between the ages of 9 and 18 is largely a no-man’s land of our knowledge of how memory forms.”

Images: iStockphoto.com

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