Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance

From the publisher’s website:

Contributors to this volume explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional “us.” They describe the multifaceted ways “tradition” is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditized goods and services first appeared in the colonial period in such spectacular and spectacularly foreign forms as department stores, restaurants, exhibitions, and staged performances. Today, these same forms have become the media through which many Koreans consume “tradition” in multiple forms.

In the colonial period, commercial representations of Korea—tourist sites, postcard images, souvenir miniatures, and staged performances—were produced primarily for foreign consumption, often by non-Koreans. In late modernity, efficiencies of production, communication, and transportation combine with material wealth and new patterns of leisure activity and tourism to enable the localized consumption of Korean tradition in theme parks, at sites of alternative tourism, at cultural festivals and performances, as handicrafts, art, and cuisine, and in coffee table books, broadcast music, and works of popular folklore. Consuming Korean Tradition offers a unique insight into how and why different signifiers of “Korea” have come to be valued as tradition in the present tense, the distinctive histories and contemporary anxieties that undergird this process, and how Koreans today experience their sense of a common Korean past. It offers new insights into issues of national identity, heritage preservation, tourism, performance, the commodification of contemporary life, and the nature of “tradition” and “modernity” more generally.

Consuming Korean Tradition will prove invaluable to Koreanists and those interested in various aspects of contemporary Korean society, including anthropology, film/cultural studies, and contemporary history.

Contributors: Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, Kyung-Koo Han, Keith Howard, Hyung Il Pai, Laurel Kendall, Okpyo Moon, Robert Oppenheim, Timothy R. Tangherlini, Judy Van Zile.

Table of Contents

• Material modernity, consumable tradition
• Dining out in the land of desire : colonial Seoul and the Korean culture of consumption / Katarzyna J. Cwiertka
• Shrinking culture : Lotte World and the logic of miniaturization / Timothy R. Tangherlini
• Travel guides to the empire : the production of tourist images in colonial Korea / Hyung II Pai
• Guests of lineage houses : tourist commoditization of Confucian cultural heritage in Korea / Okpyio Moon
• Crafting the consumability of place : Tapsa and Paenang Yǒhaeng as travel goods / Robert Oppenheim
• The Changsŭng defanged: the curious recent history of a Korean cultural symbol / Laurel Kendall
• The “Kimchi wars” in globalizing East Asia : consuming class, gender, health and national identity / Kyung-Koo Han
• Blurring tradition and modernity: the impact of Japanese colonization and Ch’oe Sǔng-hǔi on dance in South Korea today / Judy Van Zile
• Kugak fusion and the politics of Korean musical consumption / Keith Howard