Imagining a Field Site: Preparing for Anthropological Fieldwork in South Korea in the Mid-1970s

In the 1970s it was not unusual for anthropologists to do fieldwork in countries they had never visited. This article explores one person’s process of imagining such fieldwork in South Korea, an authoritarian US client state, in the context of the Cold War. The article explores how the orientations of anthropological theory of the time reflected Cold War concerns, and how the expectations of informants, conditioned by the experience of the Korean War and its aftermath, also affected the information that the fieldworker collected. As diverse intellectual influences and familiarity with Korean anthropologists’ postcolonial desire to salvage lost cultural authenticity also leavened the project, I argue it was not Cold War anthropology per se. That is, metropolitan theoretical paradigms alone cannot explain the direction of the research. Rather, this article provides a reflexive look at how sociopolitical constructs and historical context condition even the most carefully theorized and researched anthropological projects and argues for the value of rethinking past projects.