Papers by Caren Freeman
Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, 2000
Making and Faking Kinship, 2011
Dissertation Reviews, May 22, 2014
The emergence and solidification of the Korean Chinese as a distinct ethnic group grows out of a ... more The emergence and solidification of the Korean Chinese as a distinct ethnic group grows out of a long and episodic history of back and forth, semi-illicit movement between (and within) China, the Korean peninsula, and Russia. If migration was an adaptive response to the cataclysmic geopolitical events that serially unfolded over the course of the twentieth century, the normalization of ties between China and South Korea in 1992 inaugurated a new era in which migration became more than a pragmatic life strategy. It became a lifestyle, the predominant one in fact, among Korean Chinese living not just in the Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian but across all three northeastern provinces in China. Kwon sets out to explain how it is that the Korean Chinese in Yanbian have come to conceptualize themselves—promote themselves even—as a “mobile ethnicity,” and with what unintended, morally ambivalent consequences.
Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia., 2005
Journal of International Migration and Integration / Revue De L'integration Et De La Migration Internationale, 2011
Books by Caren Freeman
Making and Faking Kinship examines the large-scale influx of ethic Korean (Chosǒnjok) brides and ... more Making and Faking Kinship examines the large-scale influx of ethic Korean (Chosǒnjok) brides and workers from China into South Korea beginning in the 1990s and offers new ways to think about the effects of transnational migration on definitions and practices of gender, kinship, and ethnonational identity. The “making kinship” portion of the ethnography examines the paradoxical interplay of gender and agency inside the marital homes of Chosǒnjok-South Korean couples, showing how Chosǒnjok women’s dreams of upward mobility are constrained by the very hierarchies of gender, class and nationality that enabled their marital mobility in the first place. In the “faking kinship” side of the narrative, the geographic focus shifts to Heilongjiang Province, China where I examine the struggles of “illegal” migrants to manipulate the kinship categories sanctioned by South Korea’s restrictive immigration laws. Formerly taken-for-granted linkages between kinship, blood and ethnonational identity quickly unravel in the ironic discovery that ethnic Koreans with fake papers stand a better chance of entry than those with real ones. Faking kinship practices were equally unsettling for actual family relationships. The flexible yet fragile dynamics involved when migrants leave families behind or make and fake them anew point to the moral dilemmas that characterize a social world riven by migration, a depiction that contrasts sharply with extant notions of transnational families as harmoniously stretched across borders.
Book Reviews by Caren Freeman
Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, 2021
Pacific Affairs: Volume 94.2, 2021
Itinerant People is the third volume in the trilogy, Asia Inside Out, an ambitious transdisciplin... more Itinerant People is the third volume in the trilogy, Asia Inside Out, an ambitious transdisciplinary project edited by two historians and an anthropologist with deep expertise in the region. Each volume in the series coheres around a fundamental conceptual rubric and seeks to subvert it, or turn it "inside out." The first volume, Changing Times (2015), upends conventional periodizations of Asian history. The second volume, Connected Places (2015), dislodges static categories of Asian geography. This third and final volume disrupts fixed analytic categories of many sorts, including geography, nation, ethnicity, religion, and language, by showing how different sets of boundaries and identities come to the fore (or recede) when tracing the movement of Asia's peripatetic people. The introduction orients the reader to the notion of Asia (conceptually and empirically) as an accordion-like space which waxes and wanes depending on who or what is in motion. The stated objective is not to present new paradigms for the study of Asia so much as to expose hidden crosscurrents elided by pre-existing ones. Each of the 12 case studies meticulously excavates, through ethnographic or archival research, hitherto unexamined, lesser studied, or historiographically hidden mobilities across the continent. Collectively, the chapters in the volume range over half a millennium of history and a vast swath of territory extending from Istanbul to Tokyo. It is the specialist's zoom lens deployed in each chapter, combined with the panoramic sweep of the volume as a whole, which give both concrete and lofty expression to the idea of Asia as an "incongruently organic entity" (21). The book invites the reader to follow the fascinating journeys of a diverse array of "sojourners and seekers." They decamp either voluntarily or under duress, crossing rivers and oceans, lingering in port cities, oasis towns and littoral regions, in pursuit of various and sundry endeavours, among them commerce, medicine, religious pilgrimage, political/religious activism, sport, music, entrepreneurship and sheer survival. In many cases the objects and ideas in circulation are as central to the analysis as (and sometimes more so than) the humans who carry them. Examples include Leung's examination of China's centuries-in-the-making materia medica and the medical knowledge it codified, Ludden's study of cowry shells exchanged on the frontiers of the Qing and Mughal empires, Teng's focus on a pioneering cookbook written BOOK REVIEWS
China Review International, 2018
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Papers by Caren Freeman
Books by Caren Freeman
Book Reviews by Caren Freeman