Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries

Abstract

How do media workers handle the risks of film and television production given market uncertainties, fears of industrial decline, and increasing job insecurity? What does the work of creating spectacle on-screen mean to media workers amid volatile conditions off-screen? In Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries, Sylvia J. Martin explores these questions about members of the highly commercial film and television industries of Hollywood and Hong Kong. Drawing on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research--including participant-observation as an extra in Hollywood and interviews with stunt workers in Hong Kong between 2003-2007--Martin takes the readers onto studio lots and urban filming locations in Hollywood and Hong Kong to discover the haunting perils and pleasures of the filming process for media workers as they also grapple with broader social, economic, and political issues. Signaling a new turn in anthropology of media, this ethnography is not only a comparative study of the Hollywood and Hong Kong media industries, but also an examination of the thematic and transnational connections between them. Identifying how industry workers must contend with, yet also rely upon, expressions of religion and the supernatural, Martin offers a unique perspective on risk and uncertainty for media labor and production studies.