Introduction: The Multi-Sited History of the Anthropology of Korea

Five of the articles appearing in this special issue of The Journal of Korean Studies (JKS) were first presented at a short seminar at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, convened around the same theme in November 2013. The sixth, Jong-pil Yoon’s consideration of Maurice Courant, was submitted independently to the JKS and added to the issue by mutual consent after it became clear that its subject dovetailed with the other collected papers.

Ordinarily, the venue of an originating workshop or seminar is of precious little interest to readers of the ultimate published volume of contributions. Yet, as is said about the settings of certain novels and films, SAR was more important than usual for the story we were collectively trying to put together in 2013. Over the years, the institution has hosted a number of seminars that have led to important developments in anthropological theory across the four fields of the discipline—physical/biological, linguistic, cultural anthropology, and archaeology—as it is commonly constituted in the United States.¹ SAR has also maintained a strong interest in Native American studies and issues and has upheld a concern for anthropology’s own past, two topics that, in the North American anthropological tradition at least, are often considered nearly coterminous insofar as early American anthropology is understood to have been dominated by the study of the indigenous peoples of North America.² Indeed, while SAR has long been caught up in the debates of a discipline now global in both practice and subject matter, its own name has been slower to change; until 2007, the acronym stood for the School of American Research.³ Our seminar sought to be in dialogue with these overlapping histories and their tensions. In relation to Korean studies, the point of the exercise was to gather a broad view of the historical significance of anthropological and near-anthropological knowledge of and in the Koreas. But in relation to the general historiography of anthropology, another point was anchored in the belief that Korea is exceptionally “good to think with” for the sake of more complex understandings of anthropological pasts.⁴

How and why might this more expansive view help reopen past anthropologies as a research topic for Korean studies? How and why, in turn, might a dalliance with Korea be productive for those who would tell a general disciplinary story? Sufficient answers to these questions bring in both substantive and methodological elements. What follows is thus an exploration of problematics across which range the individual articles presented in this issue of The Journal of Korean Studies. “The” and “of” can be left well enough alone, but it is illustrative to unpack aspects of the four major words of our title: “multi-sited,” “history,” “anthropology,” and “Korea.”

A MULTI-SITEDNESS OF INTEREST

A basic proposition of our seminar was that Korea has been a site of significant interest for multiple national anthropologies and quasi-anthropologies and thus offers a particularly good place for considering the co-presence and (at times) interaction of national knowledge traditions. Discussions of the history of anthropological knowledge of various other world regions are often implicitly discussions of the dynamics and issues of one particular national anthropology. With respect to Korea, this is not the case—or, at least, it need not be.

Some of these national traditions have been more obvious and better represented in the literature than others. First are Korean anthropologies themselves in combination with various Korean instantiations of quasi- and proto-anthropological knowledge that preceded them. Scholars have pointed to the connections and roots of post-1945 anthropology as such with, for example, late nineteenth-century forms of auto-ethnographic knowledge, the transmission of still older Sirhak social empiricism, and colonial-era developments in historiography and folklore studies.⁵ The fragmentation of anthropology (along with other intellectual milieus) and the trajectories of individual scholars in the context of division offer another focus of consideration.⁶ To date, less attention has been paid to the differing institutional formations and intersections of ethnography with statecraft in the two Koreas...