An Asian Frontier: American Anthropology and Korea, 1882-1945
450
An Asian Frontier: American Anthropology and Korea, 1882-1945
450Hardcover
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Overview
Drawing on notebooks and personal correspondence as well as the publications of anthropologists of the day, Robert Oppenheim shows how and why Korea became an important object of study-with, for instance, more published about Korea in the pages of American Anthropologist before 1900 than would be seen for decades after. Oppenheim chronicles the actions of American collectors, Korean mediators, and metropolitan curators who first created Korean anthropological exhibitions for the public. He moves on to examine anthropologists-such as Aleš Hrdlicka, Walter Hough, Stewart Culin, Frederick Starr, and Frank Hamilton Cushing-who fit Korea into frameworks of evolution, culture, and race even as they engaged questions of imperialism that were raised by Japan's colonization of the country. In tracing the development of American anthropology's understanding of Korea, Oppenheim discloses the legacy present in our ongoing understanding of Korea and of anthropology's past.
Robert Oppenheim is an associate professor of Asian studies and anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Kyongju Things: Assembling Place.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803285613 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2016 |
| Series: | Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology |
| Pages: | 450 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Robert Oppenheim is an associate professor of Asian studies and anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Kyongju Things: Assembling Place.
Read an Excerpt
An Asian Frontier
American Anthropology and Korea, 1882â"1945
By Robert Oppenheim
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8881-2
CHAPTER 1
Anthropological Collecting Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Korea
I know nothing about anthropological science.
— Yu Kilchun to George Clayton Foulk, November 29, 1884
At 10:48 on the morning of May 22, 1882, the sloop USS Swatara, anchored off Chemulp'o, received from shore a prearranged signal indicating that Commodore Robert Wilson Shufeldt and his Korean counterparties had signed the Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce, and Navigation. The ship responded with a twenty-one-gun salute to the Korean king, followed by a fifteen-gun salute to the Chinese admiral who had led it to Korea from Chefoo (Yantai). The Chinese flagship answered with fifteen guns in honor of Commodore Shufeldt, "which salute was returned, gun for gun," by the Swatara. At the tail end of this dance of protocol, a half an hour after the United States and the Kingdom of Choson had formally established relations, "a junk came alongside [the Swatara] with presents of articles of Corean manufacture for the Commodore, Com[manding] officer, and officers of the ship." Late in his world-spanning career, Shufeldt was not unaccustomed to such moments or such gifts. Four years later in 1886, returning to East Asia in his retirement, he determined to lighten his load. Before departing, Shufeldt gave to the Smithsonian Institution a Damascus sword and eight gold-and-ivory-laden knives "of Arab manufacture," presents from the sultan of Zanzibar in 1880.
The circulation of material objects was often an undercurrent of interactions between Korea and encroaching foreign powers at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on one aspect of that circulation: the movement of Korean things into American museums to constitute the first Korean anthropological collections in the United States along with the networks of actors that facilitated that movement. At the receiving end were several institutions, but chief among them was the Smithsonian Institution and especially its U.S. National Museum. For many historians of the discipline, the practices of this nexus and the narratives of unilinear evolution and (often) racial difference that Smithsonian scholarship and museum arrangement engendered are taken to epitomize, in shorthand, the "Washington anthropology" that was, intellectually and otherwise, superseded by twentieth-century developments. Yet Smithsonian anthropology had its own debates, tensions, and historical shifts. At an institutional level, the post-1882 conjuncture at which Korea became newly collectable was simultaneously structured locally by both a general increase in the National Museum's anthropological activity and the establishment of new cooperative ties between the Smithsonian and other government agencies — including, importantly, the U.S. Navy. Korea thus instantiated, perhaps more than any other foreign area of concern, what I here call Smithsonian anthropology's new "naval frontier," on analogy to the complex cohabitation of anthropological investigations with projects of expansion and governance on the land frontier of the American West. This land frontier and its specific power-knowledge formation gave birth to a scientific and social type of some importance to the formation of American anthropology in the mid- to late nineteenth century: the soldier-scholar paradigmatically operating in the shadow of the Western forts. In comparison, the naval frontier in Korea licensed at its very beginning an expeditionary mode in which anthropological collecting, investigation of natural history, survey, intelligence-gathering, diplomacy, and force comingled. John Baptiste Bernadou and George Clayton Foulk offer an exemplary dyad; the first Smithsonian Korean materials arrived courtesy of the former.
In the following years, a broader variety of individuals were involved in the transmission of objects from the peninsula to their new homes in U.S. museums. Some were dedicated Smithsonian agents, but others spanned the full range of foreign types present in Korea from the 1880s: officials, missionaries, entrepreneurs, purveyors of influence, amateur scholars, hangers-on, and various hybrids of these roles. This chapter concentrates on several important Smithsonian collectors, notably Horace N. Allen, William Woodville Rockhill, and indeed Robert W. Shufeldt and his children taken as a group. Others feature in chapter 2, which extends themes of this chapter while focusing especially on the collection of grave ceramics. Many of these figures are quite familiar to Korean historiography for other actions. Anthropological collecting, again, appears as an undercurrent that transected careers in revealing and, at moments, formative ways.
While institutional and biographical histories centered on the Smithsonian form the basis of the discussion, it aims to expand a usual focus of museum studies, particularly with respect to the interpretive sovereignty that is often assumed to reside in the arrangement and display choices of curation. Interpretation is, rather, an effect I take to be dispersed throughout networks in the made availability, offering, acquisition, and transmission of selected objects and not only in their ultimate organization. For this reason, in this and the following chapter, I seek to maintain the connection between anthropological collecting and other circulations of things — metonymically, to keep in view the boat at the Swatara, some of the items offered by which likely did end up in Smithsonian display cases and storerooms. In the assemblage of Korean anthropological collections themselves, as an effect of this interpenetration, I argue that there was at multiple sites a tension between ethnological and diplomatic deployments of objects. One resulting dynamic recalls theoretical considerations of the varying character of things that shift between gift and commodity, or art object and artifact, over their "careers": some objects that settled in the National Museum as ethnological tokens of Korea had prehistories as diplomatic gifts, as individuated items meant to constitute and perpetuate a social relationship. Yet there is also evidence of at least one major attempt, through objects, to extend this diplomatic frame into the museum itself, to bend the Smithsonian collections into a form that would offer a more positive and sympathetic image of Korea than would otherwise be the case.
If it thus becomes necessary to consider the permeability of the museum space to diplomatic effort, it is also true that the ethnological, evolutionary positioning of Korea as backward in developmental time was by no means the sole prerogative of foreign observers. Some Korean intellectuals of the late nineteenth century adopted similar assumptions, if often with differing political conclusions. In this light it is an interesting small fact of history that four of the first Koreans to reside and study in the United States for extended periods worked directly with American museum anthropologists on the cataloging, arrangement, and labeling of Korean items and helped in their understanding of Korean custom and society. Yu Kilchun's remark about his ignorance of "anthropological science" was occasioned by his encounter with it, in dialogue with Edward Morse at the Salem Peabody Museum; their relationship is treated briefly in chapter 2. Pyon Su, So Chaep'il (Philip Jaisohn), and So Kwangbom, meanwhile, were driven to exile in the United States after the failed 1884 Kapsin Coup. All worked, for shorter or longer periods, assisting National Museum curators Otis Tufton Mason and Walter Hough with their new Korean collections. Together these Korean interpreters represent a third set of nodes in the anthropological collecting networks of this chapter as well as an embodiment of the conceptual overlap between evolutionary anthropology and Korean "enlightenment" thought.
The Naval Frontier
The U.S. treaty with Korea coincided with a transitional institutional moment in the history of American anthropology. In 1881, the National Museum had completed a reorganization driven by an increased commitment to collecting and public education as among its core functions. This resulted also in an increase of its staff and a diversification and formalization of its administrative divisions. Otis Tufton Mason, long an unpaid volunteer working mostly on anthropological matters, would finally be appointed as the first curator of ethnology in 1884. Yet the museum remained understaffed, with many of its curators and assistants seconded from other government agencies, including the army, the Department of the Interior, and the U.S. Geological Survey.
All of these relationships embodied the existing focus of the museum on collecting and research related to North America, and in the case of anthropology, on Native Americans. The Bureau of (American) Ethnology, the research body established in 1879 under U.S. Army major John Wesley Powell and the museum's sibling organization in Washington anthropology, demonstrated this focus even more explicitly. Yet in 1881, the National Museum also inaugurated a new cooperative arrangement with the navy. It, too, was in the midst of a transformation that, over the course of decades, brought it new commercial, diplomatic, survey, and (eventually) military roles, largely associated with U.S. expansion in the Pacific. Under the agreement between the navy and the Smithsonian, an annual group of six young graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy was assigned for duty at the museum, where they worked with its materials and learned the scientific techniques of collecting, or to other duties on the Smithsonian's behalf. For the museum, this enlistment of naval personnel had the benefit of enlarging the scope of its activities. For the navy, it brought officers with a new degree of scientific experience.
The object of this measure of the Department was to impart to a body of young naval officers such training as might enlarge their sphere of mental activity, and enable them to utilize in the interests of the Department and of science the many opportunities of research and investigation presenting themselves in the course of their cruises and other duties.
After their initial training at the museum, several of the first generation of ensigns were assigned to the USS Albatross, a specially built research ship commissioned in 1882.
Korea would be the first terrestrial target of this new Smithsonian-navy joint venture outside the United States itself. Among the ensigns assigned to the Smithsonian in the second program group of 1882 was John Baptiste Bernadou, an 1880 Annapolis graduate. Writing to Assistant Secretary Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian on receiving his posting, Bernadou expressed an initial strong interest in "the subjects of organic chemistry and assaying." Yet unlike many of the navy interns, his time would not be spent in the lab. At some intersection of museum officials' desire to investigate a country just "opened" and his own enthusiasm — Bernadou is said to have volunteered — he was ordered to Korea in late 1883 aboard the USS Alert, there to collect specimens under the authority of Baird. He carried his orders, a special passport, and an introduction to U.S. minister in Korea Lucius Foote written by Second Assistant Secretary of State William Hunter.
In other respects, Bernadou was outfitted for an expedition. He planned to collect not only ethnographic materials but a full range of natural history specimens, notably including tiger skins. Accordingly, before leaving the United States, Bernadou purchased and billed the Smithsonian for some additional supplies he thought he would need, including a blowpipe for mineralogical testing, a .50 caliber Winchester Express rifle with an octagonal barrel, and a double-barreled shotgun. Then there were alcohol tanks for fish. The supplies were sent separately and met him in Seoul in March 1884, none the worse for wear with the exception of one tank that had sprung a leak.
Another piece of equipment stood between Bernadou and his eventual colleague and doppelgänger in Korea, George Clayton Foulk. Foulk was himself a navy ensign and indeed had served aboard the Alert in the Pacific squadron from the late 1870s. On his way home in the summer of 1882, he and two other junior officers surveyed the Korean coast, called in Korean and Japanese ports, and eventually traveled across Siberia; their observations would be published under the auspices of the Office of Naval Intelligence. Attached to the Navy Department library on his arrival, Foulk improved his Japanese and acquired some knowledge of Korean, and as a result he was called upon to assist with the Korean delegation led by Min Yongik sent to the United States in 1883. Pyon Su, Yu Kilchun, and So Kwangbom were among its other members, and with So in particular Foulk formed a close friendship. Min requested that Foulk return to Korea with the mission, and so Foulk was appointed to the invented position of U.S. "naval attaché" in Seoul, with overlapping sets of orders from the navy and State Department. Foulk made the trip back from December 1883 to June 1884 with Min, So, and Pyon. On the way, they discussed Confucius over dinner with the daughter of the U.S. consul in the Azores, visited Egyptian pyramids, and (with Foulk interpreting) debated Buddhism at a religious college in Ceylon, among other diversions.
Although never associated with the Smithsonian-navy program, in early November 1883, while still in the United States, Foulk had initiated contact with the National Museum, depositing there samples of Korean medical materials he had obtained from Min's party. The curator in charge invited any further collections Foulk might make in Korea itself. While the details are murky, this seems to have led to Foulk's broader recruitment by the Smithsonian. A few weeks later, Spencer Baird asked to see him before his departure and provided Foulk with a camera so he could record images of Korea for the museum. When Bernadou requested his own camera, Baird (likely due to the expense) suggested he share Foulk's. Bernadou protested, noting that "Mr. Foulke's [sic] work is for a different purpose, and as we will not be together all the time, I will be unable to take what pictures I wish, besides being compelled to depend on Mr. Foulk, which I would not care to do." Not long after, Bernadou, seemingly resigned, pronounced himself "fully satisfied" with the sharing arrangement in another letter to Baird; Chang-su Cho Houchins, however, notes that Bernadou was still rather pointedly regretting the lack of photographic equipment after his arrival in Korea. Since Bernadou and Foulk were, in the latter's words, "not congenial," possibly to the point of mutual avoidance, it is unsurprising that no photographs of Korea by Bernadou exist.
The connection of Bernadou and Foulk is revealing because it shows, kaleidescopically, the range of roles that could be expected at the naval frontier; it helps to overcome the retrospective pigeonholing of Bernadou as a collector and Foulk as a diplomat. Throughout 1884, they shared an expeditionary style. Foulk intended to make three journeys to the countryside in 1884; he made two in the fall, one confined to the area of Seoul and one a long swing through the southern Cholla and Kyongsang regions. In the summer of 1884 Bernadou had made the trip Foulk could not: north, to Songdo (Kaesong), P'yongyang, Unsan, and Uiju. They mirrored each other in the intertwined relationship of ethnographic, survey, reconnaissance, and military responsibilities that they each bore. During his travels, Foulk took pictures for Baird, but his orders were to collect information and report to both the navy and State Department. Certainly by his own estimation, but probably also actually by skill and inclination, Foulk would have made a better general observer of Korean life than Bernadou had he not been forced into an onerous, primarily diplomatic role as chargé d'affaires at the U.S. legation after Foote's precipitous departure in late December 1884. Bernadou's main job was to collect for Baird and the Smithsonian, but he clearly also paid close attention to physical geography and natural resources. He was also, at times, armed muscle on the spot.
The military role that accompanied Bernadou's anthropological activity is best illustrated by a letter he wrote shortly after the Kapsin Coup, excerpted in a 1917 bequest to the Smithsonian by his widow, Florence, of two Japanese bronze vases he had received "in recognition of the services rendered by him to Japanese citizens at the outbreak at Seoul, Korea, in December, 1884." Engrossed in a study of Korean medicine on the night of December 4, he received from a messenger the (erroneous) news that Min Yongik had been murdered. Bernadou came to the rather telling conclusion that "the Koreans had risen against us" — against, he seems to have meant, the collective Japanese and Western presence in the city.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Asian Frontier by Robert Oppenheim. Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures
Series Editors’ Introduction
Acknowledgments
Note on Editorial Method
Introduction: Tracings of Discipline and Shadows of Area
1. Anthropological Collecting Networks in Late Nineteenth-Century Korea
2. Ceramic Economies
3. From China in America to Korea in Chicago
4. Orientalist against Orientalism
5. The Anthropologist without Qualities
6. Worlding Korea from Without and Within
7. Interwar Asymmetries of Race and Anti-imperialism
Conclusion: Legacies
Source Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index