From the publisher’s website: Death and the activities and beliefs surrounding it can teach us much about the ideals and cultures of the living. While biologically death is an end to physical life, this break is not quite so apparent in its mental and spiritual aspects. Indeed, the influence of the dead over the living … [Read More]
Booklist: Anthropology & ethnography (page 3)
Living on Your Own: Single Women, Rental Housing, and Post-Revolutionary Affect in Contemporary South Korea
From the publisher’s website: An ethnography of young, single women struggling to live independently in South Korea. Living on Your Own is an ethnography of young, single women in South Korea who seek to live independently. Using extensive interviews, along with media analysis and archival research, Jesook Song traces the women’s difficulties in achieving residential autonomy. … [Read More]
An Affair with Korea: Memories of South Korea in the 1960s
From the publisher’s website: In 1966 Vincent S. R. Brandt lived in Sokp’o, a poor and isolated South Korean fishing village on the coast of the Yellow Sea, carrying out social anthropological research. At that time, the only way to reach Sokp’o, other than by boat, was a two hour walk along foot paths. This … [Read More]
Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea
From the publisher’s website: Songs of Seoul is an ethnographic study of voice in South Korea, where the performance of Western opera, art songs, and choral music is an overwhelmingly Evangelical Christian enterprise. Drawing on fieldwork in churches, concert halls, and schools of music, Harkness argues that the European-style classical voice has become a specifically … [Read More]
De-Bordering Korea: Tangible and Intangible Legacies of the Sunshine Policy
From the publisher’s website: As tensions remain on the Korean peninsula, this book looks back on the decade of improved inter-Korean relations and engagement between 1998 and 2008, now known as the ‘Sunshine Policy’ era. Moving beyond traditional economic and political perspectives, it explores how this decade of intensified cooperation both affected and reshaped existing … [Read More]
Mobile Subjects: Boundaries and Identities in the Modern Korean Diaspora
From the publisher’s website: The essays in this collection offer a rich and complex picture of changing circumstances on the Korean peninsula over the past one-and-a-half centuries. By drawing attention to mobility in subjectivity—to the contested nature of subjectivity in the processes of mobility—this volume seeks to connect the experiences of the Korean diaspora with … [Read More]
Reframing Transracial Adoption: Adopted Koreans, White Parents, and the Politics of Kinship
From the publisher’s website: A provocative critique of transnational, transracial adoption from a critical race and feminist perspective and a vision for reform. Until the late twentieth century, the majority of foreign-born children adopted in the United States came from Korea. In the absorbing book Reframing Transracial Adoption, Kristi Brian investigates the power dynamics at … [Read More]
Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry
Often depicted as one of the world’s most strictly isolationist and relentlessly authoritarian regimes, North Korea has remained terra incognita to foreign researchers as a site for anthropological fieldwork. Given the difficulty of gaining access to the country and its people, is it possible to examine the cultural logic and social dynamics of the Democratic … [Read More]
Adopted Territory: Transnational Korean Adoptees and the Politics of Belonging
From the publisher’s website: Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice … [Read More]
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 … [Read More]
New Millennium South Korea: Neoliberal Capitalism and Transnational Movements
From the publisher’s website: Despite the common held belief that Asian nations have displayed anti-market tendencies of under-consumption and export-oriented trade since the Asian financial crisis, in the 10 years since the crisis, South Korea has bucked this trend accruing a higher debt rate than the US. This groundbreaking collection of essays addresses questions such … [Read More]
Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945
From the publisher’s website: This remarkable book examines the complex history of Japanese colonial and postcolonial interactions with Korea, particularly in matters of cultural policy. E. Taylor Atkins focuses on past and present Japanese fascination with Korean culture as he reassesses colonial anthropology, heritage curation, cultural policy, and Korean performance art in Japanese mass media … [Read More]
On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea
From the publisher’s website: Since the Korean War, gijichon—U.S. military camp towns—have been fixtures in South Korea. The most popular entertainment venues in gijichon are clubs, attracting military clientele with duty-free alcohol, music, shows, and women entertainers. In the 1990s, South Korea’s rapid economic advancement, combined with the stigma and low pay attached to this work, led to … [Read More]
Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion
Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only … [Read More]
Diaspora without Homeland: Being Korean in Japan
From the publisher’s website: More than one-half million people of Korean descent reside in Japan today—the largest ethnic minority in a country often assumed to be homogeneous. This timely, interdisciplinary volume blends original empirical research with the vibrant field of diaspora studies to understand the complicated history, identity, and status of the Korean minority in … [Read More]
The Unending Korean War: A Social History
Dong-Choon Kim seeks to understand the true impact of the Korean War (1950-1953) on South Korea’s people and society. How did key figures such as President Syngman Rhee respond when North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and what does this tell us about the nature of the South Korean state at the time? How … [Read More]