AN ASIAN FRONTIER: American Anthropology and Korea, 1882–1945 | By Robert Oppenheim
Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. xx, 423 pp. (Illustrations.) US$75.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8032-8561-3.
The title phrase “An Asian Frontier” refers to Korea conceptualized as an extremity of nineteenth-century US westward expansion. The book’s timeframe coincides with the institutionalization of anthropology as an academic discipline in the United States and the troubled integration of the Korean Peninsula into the global capitalist economy. In seven chapters, Oppenheim thickly describes numerous imperial encounters to argue that Korea and Koreans played an important, if overlooked, role in the history of US anthropology. Based on exhaustive archival research, the author tracks entanglements of people (royals, missionaries, consuls, politicians, and anthropologists); objects (ceramics, skulls, board games, bolts of silk and brocade, ritual implements, and musical instruments); texts (letters, editorials, exhibit inventories, sketches, letters of introduction); and institutions (museums, government offices, editorial boards, universities, World Exposition bureaucracies) to illustrate the complexity of this trans-Pacific relationship. Instead of positing general claims about early twentieth-century American portrayals of the Korean Other, the book documents how two generations of American anthropologists, collectors, and curators, often in collaboration with Korean scholars and politicians, constituted Korea as a complex if somewhat incoherent object of knowledge.
The first chapter documents overlaps between Korean elite reformist thought and evolutionary anthropology. During the 1880s especially, American collectors and curators of various stripes used artifacts to assess Korea as barbarous and degenerate, or refined and civilized. Oppenheim traces the paths of particular objects from site of collection to display case to show how diplomacy, looting, commerce, and scholarship converged at the site of museum-based anthropology in America. Royal heirlooms were given to collectors for services rendered to Korean dynasts, or to intervene in the presentation of Korea in America. Objects were also collected to answer riddles regarding universal human evolution, or the diffusion of forms across cultures. Some Korean expert informants co-opted evolutionism’s Enlightenment-inspired version of universal progress to bolster their political project to reform the Korean court, making them willing participants in the reification of Korean culture.
The contingency and intentionality attending their procurement, transmission, and display shaped the way artifacts came to serve as symbols of the Korean people. Therefore, Oppenheim persuasively argues that the history of museum-based anthropology cannot be told without paying careful attention to how “anthropological collecting networks” functioned. His second chapter explores the circulation of Korean ceramics, which are widely recognized symbols of Korea’s ancient splendour. This contemporary discourse has its origins in the 1880s. Oppenheim acknowledges that many of the ceramics in US museums were obtained in pillaging that accompanied successive imperialist invasions, or by purchase from grave robbers. At the same time, he cautions readers that notions of national patrimony did not yet apply to Korea, and that it would be anachronistic to simply blame foreigners and ignore Korean agency in the removal and commoditization of these goods.
Chapters 3 and 4 chronicle the complex history of Korea’s role in diffusionist and evolutionist US anthropology. They illustrate how these paradigms could blur, overlap, and be conducive to empirically rich descriptions of Korean folkways. These two chapters provide an in-depth and riveting account of how the study of Korean games especially (but also other forms) shaped several grand debates in the discipline’s early decades.
The last three chapters of An Asian Frontier highlight the involvement of anthropologists Frederick Starr and Aleš Hrdlička in the politics and anthropology surrounding the Japanese colonization of Korea. Here Oppenheim plumbs relationships between older anthropological paradigms and defenses or criticisms of imperial rule. Starr did not protest Japan’s heavy-handed brand of imperial rule in Korea, while he defended King Leopold’s cruel reign in the Belgian Congo from its hypocritical American naysayers. At the same time, Starr lambasted US rule in the Philippines, castigating Americans for imposing their will upon others despite a bounty of domestic resources. As Starr’s career progressed, his personal relationships with Korean scholars warmed. By the time of his death, he neared an emic perspective on Korean Buddhism, thanks to his admiration of its practitioners.
Hrdlička, by contrast, advocated Korean independence and fiercely denounced Japan. A dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist, Hrdlička attacked Nazi racial science from the right by arguing that the so-called master German race was in fact composed of a mixture of racial types. Hrdlička himself was a Czechoslovak nationalist. Unsurprisingly, his national people were close to a pure racial type, which made the mongrel German occupation of thoroughbred Czechoslovakia abhorrent to nature, by his reckoning. By analogy, Koreans constituted a nearly pure type for Hrdlička, who argued that Japan, like Germany, was a mongrel nation. Paradoxically, Starr, a lately bloomed Boasian cultural relativist who worked closely with Korean scholars, did not use his platform to upbraid Japan, while Hrdlička, the unrepentant racist, was an anti-imperialist champion of Korean independence.
For its original, learned, and well-crafted studies of diffusionist and evolutionist anthropology as actually practiced, An Asian Frontier should be required reading for all historians of the discipline. Instead of making global claims regarding anthropology’s complicity with postcolonial primitivist discourses regarding non-Western peoples, Oppenheim advances a series of theses and propositions that resist holistic summation, and by extension moral certitude. This wide-ranging study locates the origins of American anthropological knowledge about Korea in an imperial context, while avoiding the temptation to treat its founders as two-dimensional villains. With reference to an impressive array of documentation, Oppenheim situates their activities within immediate institutional settings and the trajectories of individual scientific careers. As a corollary, An Asian Frontier demonstrates that Koreans from many walks of life participated in the politically consequential battles to shape the picture of Korea in US anthropological circles and beyond. I was not persuaded by every argument put forward, but found all of Oppenheim’s provocations worthy of continued investigation and reflection.
Paul D. Barclay
Lafayette College, Easton, USA
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