Editorial Note

Volume 21, number 2, is the last issue of the volumes that will be produced under my editorship at The Journal of Korean Studies. My managing editor, Tracy Stober, and I have enjoyed building the journal and hope that it has served and will continue to serve as a major vehicle for the development of Korean studies in the English-speaking world and for nurturing the kind of scholarship that builds careers in Korean studies. We’re confident that the team of Charles Armstrong and Ted Hughes at Columbia will continue to develop the journal in new and interesting directions.

This final thematic issue under our watch has been guest edited by Robert Oppenheim and is devoted to what he called “The Multi-Sited History of the Anthropology of Korea.” Robert’s work has reminded us anthropologists of Korea, who came of age in the 1980s, that the anthropology of Korea already had a significant history long before modern Western fieldworkers set foot in (the southern part of) the country. This issue discusses the work of many of these Western pioneers— Maurice Courant, Percival Lowell, Georg Möllendorf, C. C. Vinton, and even the dean of American anthropology, Franz Boas—and does not forget the early Korean pioneers either. Thus, the history of the anthropology of Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries truly is multi-sited and includes the contributions of the French, Americans, British, Russians, Germans, Koreans, and others, each with their distinctive points of view. (Robert’s attempt to get a contribution about Japanese works unfortunately did not bear fruit in time for this issue.) This, in a way, is ironic since, as my own article shows, at least one American anthropological fieldworker in the 1970s perceived the anthropology of Korea to be “empty.”

In addition to our guest-edited articles we have five book reviews dealing with both ancient and modern Korea.

We look forward to reading the journal in the future (without having to produce it ourselves).