Consuming Korean tradition in early and late modernity
Subtitle: commodification, tourism, and performance
By: edited by Laurel Kendall
Publisher: University of Hawaiʻi Press; University of Hawaii Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Honolulu
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780824833930
Description: Contributors to this volume explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional "us." They describe the multifaceted ways "tradition" is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditized goods and services first appeared in the colonial period in such spectacular and spectacularly foreign forms as department stores, restaurants, exhibitions, and staged performances. Today, these same forms have become the media through which many Koreans consume "tradition" in multiple forms. In the colonial period, commercial representations of Korea--tourist sites, postcard images, souvenir miniatures, and staged performances--were produced primarily for foreign consumption, often by non-Koreans. In late modernity, efficiencies of production, communication, and transportation combine with material wealth and new patterns of leisure activity and tourism to enable the localized consumption of Korean tradition in theme parks, at sites of alternative tourism, at cultural festivals and performances, as handicrafts, art, and cuisine, and in coffee table books, broadcast music, and works of popular folklore. -- Book jacket.
Notes: Papers from a conference held at the Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawaiʻi, October 13-15, 2006.

Includes bibliographical references and index.