Author: Robert Oppenheim
Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2008
Link to online store *
From the publisher’s website:
A historical ethnography of place amidst objects in the contemporary city of Kyongju, South Korea
Kyongju is South Korea’s preeminent “culture city,” an urban site rich with archaeological wonders that residents compare to those of Nara, Xian, and Rome. By examining these ancient objects in relation to the controversies that engulfed South Korea’s high-speed railway line when it was first proposed in the 1990s, Kyongju Things offers a grounded and theoretically sophisticated account of South Korean development and citizenship in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Its sensitivity to issues of place, knowledge, and cultural heritage and its innovative use of network theory will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in anthropology, Asian studies, the history of science and technology, cultural geography, urban planning, and political science.
Robert Oppenheim is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.