The Last Moon Village: A Proposal for a Multimodal Anthropology

 

 

 

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 elsewhere.

However, this proposed project is not a critique of urban (re)development (재개발), but an inquiry about what remains. Here and there, amidst the gleaming office towers and high-rise apartments of Seoul and other Korean cities, there are older neighborhoods with housing stock from previous decades–small islands of the past. On the one hand, these represent surplus neighborhoods for later redevelopment schemes. On the other, older neighborhoods evoke nostalgia for the past and for what people frequently characterize as a less alienated time. “Moon neighborhoods,” so-called because many were constructed on squats in hills and mountains that were not thought suitable for apartment development, remind people of the struggle and determination of past generations. What happens to these places in the interstices of ubiquitous housing blocks?

If we were doing this research in the United States, the answer would be clear enough: gentrification, abandonment and displacement, the legacy of post-War urban development that may have moved into more hybrid strategies in a neoliberal age, but that still remains devastating to people in working-class communities (Logan and Molotch 1987; Durington and Collins 2019). In South Korean cities, however, “touristifcation” may instead be the result. Rather than move into neighborhoods of older homes without access to infrastructure and amenities, tourists visit instead to snap photos for Instagram posts and to explore (Kim and Holifield 2022). In some cases, the state has facilitated this process by painting colorful murals on neighborhood walls–literally enabling Instagram-able moments. The result is a digital gentrification without the physical displacement of people (Hartmann and Jansson 2024).

My proposed research project is on the way community identity is physically and digitally negotiated in older neighborhoods that have become sites of state intervention, touristifcation and nostalgia.  My earlier work in Seoul included places like Ihwa-dong and different neighborhoods along the old city walls (e.g., Bukjeong Maul). These have been the targets of urban regeneration, media representation and tourist development (Nam and Lee 2023; Yun and Kwon 2023). Older housing stock, narrow alleys and colorful murals attract location scouts for k-dramas and film, as well as busloads of domestic and international tourists. But people live in these places as well, people who have little to show for the mediatization and fetishization of their communities. Yet it would not be accurate to conclude that they are powerless against the onslaught of touristification and hallyu media. For one, residents have occasionally risen up against the commodification of their communities, as in the vandalism of artistic murals in Ihwadong in 2016 (Oh 2020). In addition, as one of the most wired nations on Earth, Koreans engage in social media productions across multiple platforms, and document their neighborhoods and their lives in ways that diverge significantly from the Instagram posts and hallyu tours. Finally, communities host events, gallery shows, media broadcasts and other projects that constitute genuine place-making, and stake a claim not only to their homes, but additionally establish what their communities mean (Kim and Son 2017; Kang 2023).

My perspective on these negotiations is one of multimodality, a recent, anthropological turn I have explored through numerous articles and a recent, co-authored book (Collins and Durington 2024). In anthropology, multimodality recognizes the anthropological practice in non-anthropologists as they seek to document, represent their communities, and intervene in the futures of those places. People are ultimately anthropologists of their own lives, and I have helped to develop a methodology that integrates this insight into a more collaborative, and more de-centered work that considers multiple, community-produced media alongside more “official” anthropological analysis (Collins and Durington 2015; Collins and Durington 2024). Here, I propose looking to neighborhood identity as a collaborative, negotiated and occasionally fraught negotiation of meaning, place and identity. My insights have been very much informed by fieldwork - in South Korea and in Baltimore. And it’s these same insights that I propose to bring into the classroom in a series of methodologically focused, participatory courses that task students with documenting the anthropologies of their own communities. What I hope to accomplish through this research and teaching will ultimately work towards an understanding of global processes in an age where the physical and the digital occupy overlapping spheres in the lives of people and in the futures of communities.

 

Precursors

Years ago, I became interested in a general nostalgia for the narrow streets and claustrophobic spaces of older neighborhoods, including “taldongne” (달동네)—clusters of homes that originated as unofficial housing in the heavy urban migrations after the Korean War, and that are characterized by a lack of planning and infrastructure. Perhaps the most iconic moment for me was the huge popularity of the “Reply 1988” (응답하라 1988), a nostalgic, family drama/comedy that unfolds against the backdrop of the Seoul 1988 Olympics and takes place in a modest neighborhood of 1970s-era homes and narrow streets. The end of the series finds the old neighborhood abandoned and slated for re-development–and end to a more simple time. Indeed, by the 1970s, many of the residents of older neighborhoods were being forcibly (and even violently) evicted, and large-scale apartment developments put up in their place. This trend accelerated through the early 21^st century with the establishment of “new town” developments radically transforming the urban fabric of multiple South Korean cities. Predictably, perhaps, the disappearance of these older, largely working-class neighborhoods was accompanied by a longing for community and an appreciation for these organic, eclectic spaces, in dramatic contrast to the huge developments that now house the majority of people in Korea.          

That nostalgia extends across multiple media, from television and film to webtoons, games and apps—and, of course, social media, where the search for selfies and more aesthetic photography sends millions of domestic and international tourists to the few, extant working-class neighborhoods in search of the perfect pictures for their Instagram accounts. In my 2014-2015 fieldwork, I analyzed numerous “alleyway” social media accounts, and set off with local photography clubs (1 Korean, 1 Korean and non-Korean), taking pictures of narrow streets, rusted grates and broken latticework. Globally, the neighborhoods are iconic, connoting “Korea” even as their existence fades from Korea’s urban fabric; it would be difficult to find a k-drama that didn’t have some romantic moment set in one of these places. Yet the vast majority of Koreans have never lived in them.

Nevertheless some neighborhoods still remain. My previous work in Seoul coincided with a period of relative openness in the form of urban regeneration policies that were just beginning under the leadership of then-Mayor Park Won Soon (Nam and Lee 2023). Through government programs, non-profits and museum exhibitions, people in Seoul looked to these communities as something that deserved, at least, some measure of preservation–in sharp distinction to the policies of Park’s predecessors that had accelerated the frenetic pace of urban redevelopment. Along with this came calls for a more textured and genuine urban life where people might develop attachments to each other and to their neighborhoods (Lee 2011). Along the way, new public spaces, sidewalks, and parks were all constructed to make Seoul a more livable city.

Yet, people in older neighborhoods must still negotiate with the combination of touristification and gentrification that have encroached upon their lives. Touristification in the form of busloads of people coming to neighborhoods that were once avoided by non-residents, and gentrification in the form of up-scale teashops and bars that have grown up in “edgy” and “artistic” areas. There are a variety of means to resist these forces, but I became interested in the ways that residents have utilized diverse media in order to form counter-representations of life that contest the romantic commodification from tourism and, to some extent, from the state. YouTube, film and podcasts are generated alongside print magazines, gallery shows and other events in order to give voice to residents and to underline their placemaking. The irony here—and there are many ironies—is that, in their resistance, residents are instantiating the very community ethos over which people and media have waxed nostalgic.

 

AAA Paper Abstract: The Weight of Absence: Anthropologies of Non-Connection

(A day's worth of geolocated instagram posts in Baltimore: August 24, 2018)

The digital world presupposes a binary logic of connection and disconnection, one that decomposes into haves and have-nots. Moreover, this binary logic follows on burgeoning urban inequalities in a neo-liberal age, and growing chasms in wealth and opportunity only seem to confirm the either/or logic of digital capitalism.  In cities, it echoes in the dreadful calculus of gentrification and abandonment, capital investment and disinvestment, inclusion and exclusion. But is dis-connection only an absence?  In this paper, I explore absences and disconnections in social media and in urban networks as latencies visible through an application of structural holes, triadic closure, structural equivalence and other social network tools to digital media in cities.  This work is inspired both by Ernst Bloch’s “Not-Yet” and his insights that even forms of social life thoroughly imbricated in capitalism nevertheless contain a “surplus” of potentiality that gestures towards critical, emancipatory futures.  In addition, the work is inspired by anthropological methods from Alfred Russel Wallace and others that take absence as data points in the empirical proof of presence.  I argue that even absence itself is imbricated by a “horror vacui” that sets up presence as a moral dialectic.  In this paper, these take the form of alternatives that connect equity, justice and utopian alternatives to disinvestment and abandonment visible through analyses of diverse digital platforms, including social media, app platforms and website connectivity.  Ultimately, this research builds on anthropologies that move beyond the narration of what is to the speculative design of what should be.

Attack of the Social Media Zombies

My colleague, Matthew Durington, and I have just finished our final iteration of a 4-year collaborative project, Anthropology By the Wire.   From the outset, we sought to produce

YouTube Video from this year’s Anthropology By the Wire, “Clean and Green Superheroes”. Photo courtesy Samuel Collins

counter-narratives to David Simon’s “The Wire,” alternative representations that contest urban imaginaries of Baltimore premised on crime and drugs.  Through collaborative productions shared through social media, we have tried to challenge the directionality of these representational regimes by making local media disseminated on YouTube, Tumblr and Flickr.

But what we have realized is that the urban imaginary (as LiPuma and Koelbedescribe it), is constituted not only by representations of urban circulation, but the imagination of the circulation of those representations of circulation (and it may be circulations all the way down).  In other words, it is not only the representations of the city that allow people to understand themselves and others, but the way people imagine that those representations circulate.

As mass media, “The Wire” (and other television and film evocations of the city) is imagined to circulate through an audience: a mass that desires and consumes media, that can be characterized by demographic analyses, and that, finally, can be packaged and sold to advertisers.  It’s the imagined gaze of that homogeneous “mass” that has been so devastatingly effective in slotting Baltimore as “Other”: as a racial and class alterity that becomes the subject for critique and intervention.

Stereotypical Spectacles of Baltimore: Abandoned Industry. Photo courtesy Kamau Collins via Flickr

In many ways, this idea of mass audience has been profoundly challenged by the widespread adoption of social media; to some media scholars, we are all “prosumers” now.  But the social media platforms that communicate our work draw upon other circulation imaginaries.

The Spectacle City

The first is an extension of the flanerie that marked the city as a site of male privilege a la Charles Baudelaire.  In the postmodern logic of late capitalism, this means the city as an extension of individual identity.  In his prescient Soft City (1974), the writer Jonathan Raban put it best: “Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you.”  In other words, the city exists as a foil for the elaboration and construction of one’s identity.  Raban’s Soft City is echoed in countless films (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and endless postmodern spectacle, where the city becomes a site for personal consumption and successive elaborations of commodified identity.

Social media has been erected on this capitalist scaffolding.  First, social media is ultimately personal social media—the city as an object for individual consumption on instagram and pinterest.  With social media, life may be constituted as “an immense accumulation of spectacles” (a la Guy Debord), but those representations are inward-focused, with the spectacle of the city laid out as a buffet of representations to take and share with a circle of intimates: pictures of lunch and dinner, of urban desolation, street festivals, alternative fashion.  Superficially ethnographic, each of these images and videos are mobilized as a projection of self to a cluster of acquaintances.

The Contagious City

Crab Cakes. Photo courtesy jpellgen via Flickr

Alongside the privileged flanerie of the 19th century city came panics over pollution and contagion, with the 1864 Contagious Disease Act targeting the poor and dissolute as sources of “pollution” to the flanerie of upper-class men.  Today, theories of “contagion” are deployed epidemiologically, but they are also utilized to represent the spread of information in networks, the spread of crime in cities (the “broken window” theory) and in the virality of social media.

In each case, the question of contagion becomes a network problem.  In any cascade of information, disease, new technologies, new ideas, what percent of a given social network configuration needs to be “infected” before it can spread to the remainder?  When media go viral, they have passed this cascading “tipping point,” and a number of network scholars are currently examining the morphology of networks for clues to the virality of content.

Zombies during the Baltimore Marathon. Photo courtesy Nick Hall via Flickr

Although contagion seems like the opposite of the individuated consumption of the city, it is really its logical counterpart, with each individual first atomized into her own media telecocoon before influencing her neighbors.  It’s not by mistake that zombies have become such a ubiquitous figure in social apps and movies about the city.  If I imagine myself as active in my individualized consumption of the spectacle of the city, than everyone else can only be a zombie, a node through which my influence propagates.  In other words, as a form of circulation, we imagine social media to be composed of individuals and zombies: people who tweet, and people who propagate that tweet.

For our social media circulation of Baltimore, we therefore imagine not only media producers (those who represent Baltimore and share their representations on social media), “consumers” (those who watch the media we’ve produced), but also this interstitial category of social media zombies that pass along the links to our YouTube media and blog posts—who do the work of network propagation.  In this respect, much of our social media tagging can be considered varied forms of zombie food: keywords that encourage re-posting and that stimulate networked cascades.  Tagging your photo “urban ghetto” precipitates one form of contagion, while tagging the same shot “gentrification and abandonment” generates quite another.  Yet these lines of contagion are only possible in the imagined circulation of individual consumption and, in the end, we need to be mindful of our zombies lest they overtake us altogether.

The Ends of the Urban Imaginary

The last scene of Akira shows Tetsuo exploding out of his body with tendrils of flesh and machine.  Often interpreted as an apocalyptic, nuclear vision of Tokyo, it is simultaneously one where the differences between people and between places are eviscerated: Tetsuo’s monstrous appendages engulf his friends and enemies, traduce geographies, brachiate uncontrollably through Tokyo.

For me, Akira is a metaphor for the limits of our imaginaries of circulation.  It’s the ends of these two imaginaries—the individual spectacle and the contagious zombie—pushed to their limits until social media itself has become something monstrous where the city, the individual and the community disappear into circulatory flows.  In these scenarios, new configurations of the circulatory imaginary implode into non-representation.  Do we have an alternative?  Ultimately, our efforts to replace one circulatory imaginary with another—as Bruno Latour and Marilyn Strathern have shown—will ultimately produce more monstrous imaginaries.  Who will save us from our zombies then?

(Second photograph courtesy Kamau Collins; Third photo courtesy jpellgen; Fourth photo courtesy Nick Hall)

[Originally Published in Anthropology News]