Note from the Editors

Already we have come to the second of our annual guest-edited thematic issues. We were pleased with the enthusiastic response to our first thematic issue "Unsettling the National in Korean Cinema" guest edited by JungBong Choi (Volume 16, Number 2). As an editor I hope for an equally enthusiastic response to this issue, "Korea through Ethnography" guest edited by Nancy Abelmann and Jesook Song, and as an anthropologist I am gratified to be able to offer to students of Korea studies substantial recent ethnography on Korea.

Ethnography is a focus on the particular—the "particular scenes, spaces, bodies, places, people, media landscapes, and so on" promised in Abelmann and Song's introduction—yet we hope through careful consideration of these particularities to reach toward a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the peoples and places of Korea. Ethnography is based on observation, but observation always by a particular eye, whether of a cancer survivor or of a participant-observer of family garment production, so it is fitting that the articles emphasize the interaction of the ethnographers with their informants.

We want to thank the guest editors, Nancy Abelmann and Jesook Song, who did a splendid job of soliciting articles and preparing them for copyediting. This is the only way that Don, Josh, and I with our other full-time jobs of teaching and research would be able to manage a second annual issue, but we also believe that the model of one guest-edited issue a year provides multiple benefits by expanding the disciplinary range of the journal, as well as its social network.

This year Joshua Van Lieu has stepped up into the position of book review editor, and we look forward to his continued work with the journal. And, as we express appreciation for what has already been done, we look forward to our next guest-edited issue in the fall of 2013 commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Korean War Armistice of 1953, with Charles Armstrong as guest editor.

Sincerely,
CLARK W. SORENSEN, Editor-in-Chief
DONALD BAKER, Associate Editor
JOSHUA VAN LIEU, Book Review Editor/Assistant Editor
TRACY L. STOBER, Managing Editor