Commodification, Tourism, and Performance

Consuming KoreanContributors to Consuming Korean Tradition in Early and Late Modernity: Commodification, Tourism, and Performance, edited by Laurel Kendall, 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.

September 2010 / ISBN 978-0-8248-3393-0 / $46.00 (CLOTH)