A City Inscribed and IAR Lunar New Year event. Registration is strongly encouraged.
Over the decades there have been many encounters between members of the Hollywood and Hong Kong entertainment industries such as film collaborations and co-productions. In comparing the two industries, stark differences including their size, scope, and relationship to the state are evident. Yet, production ethnography reveals that the Hollywood and Hong Kong entertainment industries share commonalities, and that the professionals within them express similar concerns. Drawing upon multi-sited anthropological fieldwork conducted with media professionals in the commercial film and TV industries of Los Angeles and Hong Kong, I will analyze some of these connective threads. Examining commonalities between these industries illuminates how global processes interact with local dynamics from the perspective of media anthropology. This paper also seeks to demonstrate that ethnographic research contributes to a more informed and holistic understanding of images and stories that audiences consume by exploring the conditions in which mass media are produced.
Sylvia J. Martin is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries (Oxford University Press, 2016). Dr. Martin specializes in media anthropology and has published on Hong Kong and U.S. film production, performance, globalization, and media labor. Selected publications include articles in Visual Anthropology Review and Critical Studies in Media Communication, the latter of which has received an Outstanding Paper Award (2017) from the Academy of Hong Kong Studies.
This seminar is organized by the Hong Kong Studies Initiative and co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, the Centre for Chinese Research, the Department of History, St. John’s College, the Department of Theatre and Film, and the Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research (SFU).
