From the publisher’s website: Although rights-based claims are diversifying and opportunities and resources for claims-making have improved, obtaining rights protections and catalysing social change in South Korea remain challenging processes. This volume examines how different groups in South Korea have defined and articulated grievances and mobilized to remedy them. It explores developments in the institutional … [Read More]
Booklist: Anthropology & ethnography (page 2)
Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War
An utterly original and illuminating work that meets at the crossroads of autobiography and ethnography to re-examine violence and memory through the eyes of a child. Seeing Like a Child is a deeply moving narrative that showcases an unexpected voice from an established researcher. Through an unwavering commitment to a child’s perspective, Clara Han explores how … [Read More]
Peace Corps Volunteers and the Making of Korean Studies in the United States
From the publisher’s website: From 1966 through 1981 the Peace Corps sent more than two thousand volunteers to South Korea, to teach English and provide healthcare. A small yet significant number of them returned to the United States and entered academia, forming the core of a second wave of Korean studies scholars. How did their … [Read More]
Presence Through Sound: Music and Place in East Asia
Presence Through Sound narrates and analyses, through a range of case studies on selected musics of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Tibet, some of the many ways in which music and ‘place’ intersect and are interwoven with meaning in East Asia. It explores how place is significant to the many contexts in which music is made … [Read More]
After the Korean War: An Intimate History
Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War’s enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and … [Read More]
Chaoxianzu Entrepreneurs in Korea: Searching for Citizenship in the Ethnic Homeland
From the publisher’s website: This book explores the nature of the state-citizen societal relationship in Korea during the transition to neoliberalism, through the lenses of class and nationalism. Examining the process by which a new class, Korean Chinese entrepreneurs, emerged from Korean Chinese enclaves in South Korea and quickly became a leading group within those … [Read More]
On the Margins of Urban South Korea: Core Location as Method and Praxis
This book provides a rich and illuminating account of the peripheries of urban, regional, and transnational development in South Korea. Engaging with the ideas of “core location,” a term coined by Baik Young-seo, and “Asia as method,” a concept with a century-old intellectual lineage in East Asia, each chapter in the volume discusses the ways … [Read More]
Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption: Embodiment and Emotion
From the publisher’s website: This book investigates the experiences of South Koreans adopted into Western families and the complexity of what it means to “feel identity” beyond what is written in official adoption files. Korean Adoptees and Transnational Adoption is based on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and interviews with adult Korean adoptees from the United … [Read More]
Transgression in Korea: Beyond Resistance and Control
From the publisher’s website: Since the turn of the millennium South Korea has continued to grapple with transgressions that shook the nation to its core. Following the serial killings of Korea’s raincoat killer, the events that led to the dissolution of the United Progressive Party, the criminal negligence of the owner and also the crew members … [Read More]
Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society
From the publisher’s website: The Routledge Handbook of Korean Culture and Society is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource that explores the formation and transformation of Korean culture and society. Each chapter provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking overview on key topics, including: compressed modernity, religion, educational migration, social class and inequality, popular culture, digitalisation, diasporic cultures and cosmopolitanism. … [Read More]
Three Streams: Confucian Reflections on Learning and the Moral Heart-Mind in China, Korea, and Japan
From the publisher’s website: Recent interest in Confucianism has a tendency to suffer from essentialism and idealism, manifested in a variety of ways. One example is to think of Confucianism in terms of the views attributed to one representative of the tradition, such as Kongzi (Confucius) (551-479 BCE) or Mengzi (Mencius) (372 – 289 BCE) … [Read More]
Base Encounters: The US Armed Forces in South Korea
An ethnographic introduction to the social, economic and political factors that have contributed to tensions on the ground over US bases in South Korea Base Encounters explores the social friction that US bases have caused in South Korea, where the entertainment districts next to American military installations have come under much scrutiny. The Korean peninsula … [Read More]
Under the Ancestors’ Eyes: Kinship, Status, and Locality in Premodern Korea
From the publisher’s website: Under the Ancestors’ Eyes presents a new approach to Korean social history by focusing on the origin and development of the indigenous descent group. Martina Deuchler maintains that the surprising continuity of the descent-group model gave the ruling elite cohesion and stability and enabled it to retain power from the early Silla (fifth century) … [Read More]
South Korea’s Education Exodus: The Life and Times of Early Study Abroad
From the publisher’s website: South Korea’s Education Exodus analyzes Early Study Abroad in relation to the neoliberalization of South Korean education and labor. With chapters based on demographic and survey data, discourse analysis, and ethnography in destinations such as Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States, the book considers the complex motivations that spur families … [Read More]
Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea
From the publisher’s website: Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation’s famine and its citizens’ social and … [Read More]
Multiethnic Korea? Multiculturalism, Migration, and Peoplehood Diversity in Contemporary South Korea
From the publisher’s website: By the late 1990s and early 2000s, South Korean government sponsorship of cultural globalization had valorized “multiculturalism” (tamunhwa), but did not dispel widespread discrimination and xenophobia against actual multiethnic and multicultural populations. This volume’s contributors employ the dual concepts of “multicultural” and “multiethnic” to make sense of an intriguing facet of recent … [Read More]