Abstract
ABSTRACT Cheap amateur videodiscs are a common household object in Buyi (Bouyei) villages in Guizhou, southwest China. Buyi videographers are hired to record and edit footage of local life-cycle rituals and household banquets, and copied videodiscs are distributed informally to, and repeatedly viewed by, relatives, neighbours, and fellow villagers—mostly middle-aged women. Attentive to on-demand, vernacular video products as such that are underexplored in media anthropology, I examine the Buyi domestic videos as straddling the private and public realms of cultural production. While playing a significant role in the construction of ‘home’ as mediated spaces and bodily practices, these domestic videos thrive on an intimate public, which emerges out of an on-demand economy based on kinship-based and place-based networks. This video sociality involves a milieu of relationality for those that enter into its sphere, binding shared objects, aesthetics, emotions, and experiences together.
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