All Tomorrow's Cultures

      You’ll see them in film, k-dramas, music videos, webtoons and video games: narrow Seoul alleys ( 골목길 ), old restaurants with peeling wallpaper, protagonists drowning their sorrows in tent bars ( 포장마차 ). Sometimes these images are deployed for critical purpose: e.g., the 반지하 (semi-basement) that the Kim family lives in the 2019 film “Parasite.” And sometimes for nostalgia–with multiple documentaries and websites on the “last urban moon village” ( 마지막 달동네 ) of a Korean city. But this is not the Seoul–nor the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea)--that most people inhabit. Over the last 50 years, urban life in South Korea has been transformed in many ways, with successive waves of state-sponsored gentrification that has culminated with “New Town” developments of block upon block of orderly apartment complexes with mall-like commercial strips between them (Chen et al 2019; Song et al 2019). Here, Korea parallels (and anticipates) urban development e...

"The future" (however imagined) continues to be a concern for anthropologists, and this year is no different than 2017 .  But while I was content to just list the different panels in 2017, this year I decided to construct a semantic map of the session abstracts.  First, I created a text document with each of the 28 session abstracts that explicitly concerned the future as an object of research (rather than something like "the future of graduate education").  Then, I loaded up the file into Cowo , which spit out 55 words by frequency of occurrence (minus all of the stop words like "the").  Then I loaded the file onto VOSviewer, and created a semantic map of co-occurrences between terms (nodes) in the same sentences. Here's the visualization from VOSviewer:    And here it is again in Gephi: We can identify several semantic clusters here, but I want to highlight a few: 1). urban resistance to the neoliberal (right); 2) environmental disaster a...

https://uploads.knightlab.com/storymapjs/c28f0b6fab85650562ac54dd5cfa403e/my-seoul-fieldwork/index.html Over the course of a year of fieldwork in Seoul (2014-2015), I accumulated tons of photographs (and some short films) that I made all over the city: a corpus of material that, for the moment, just resides on a couple of computers and cloud drives, waiting to be deployed into publications and presentations.  With storymap, I could use these materials to trace the arc of my research through the city.  Ultimately, I tried to take what oftentimes felt like random discovery and imposed a linearity to my thinking.  Or, perhaps, the exercise helped me to connect the projects into some semblance of order.  Telling a story, after all, involves the imposition of a frame, and the one I've sketched here is about a particular strand of urban anthropology in a complex city.   In the end, this looks to me like an interesting way to do a research prospectus for a j...

--> (the Wow! signal, visualized by Benjamin Crowell, from Wikimedia) In a few days, many anthropologists will attend the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.   For several days, they will track back and forth to airless, windowless rooms that exist in a strange non-place and non-time: a conference space replete with kitschy designs, cheap gilding, stentorian carpeting that suggests transit lounges and casinos at any time from the 1970s to the 1990s.   But, given the growing horror just outside these conference-room bunkers—the growing crypto-fascism from the authoritarian government, almost-certain ecological apocalypse, economic and political collapse—it’s doubly important to look to the future as the anticipation of hope, of fear and, importantly, of radical difference and change.   And this is what has happened.   This year, there are an unprecedented number of papers and panels exploring the contours...

I've been following Kim's work for some time now, and, at some point, will post up my impressions of his novel, "Neighborhood War" (동네 전쟁).  But, until then, some short notes on his short story, "Superman Now" (초인은 지금) in the collection "The Superhero Next Door" (2015).  What draws me to Kim's work is his use of Seoul as the staging for his stories, and it is not difficult to see why.  Besides being a huge, Dickensian metropolis full of dramatic encounters and chance meetings, it is city of sometimes profoundly alienating spaces: row upon row of apartments, faceless office buildings.  Accordingly, Kim's Seoul is a place for disturbingly non-human encounters.  Seoul citizens are harried by a black-hole like sphere in 절망의 구 (2009), and by monstrous, multi-species aliens in 동네전쟁 (2011).  Confronted with the completely enigmatic, Kim's characters circulate rumors and wild theories, but their attempts to understand the city always fall sh...

Songdo Under Construction, Courtesy Wikipedia Commons. March 1 is the inaugural celebration of Future Day , and it's got me thinking about urban futures again.  On my futurist bookshself at the moment: Aerotropolis , by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay.  It's a business book, really: breathless descriptions of fabulous capitalists and the globetrotting edge cities they build.  I'm reading it because South Korea's Songdo is a poster child for this vision of the future.  At 7 miles from Incheon International Airport, this massive development on land reclaimed from tidal flats is supposed to represent the city of the future--a networked hub with near-immediate access to most of Asia, hard-wired for ubiquitous computing, and constructed for minimal levels of car pollution (although building a new city from scratch surely caused some pollution!).  Songdo will join other poster-cities for globalization, including Dubai and Shanghai. As Kasarda and Lindsay poin...