Description

The large-scale influx of Korean Chinese (or Chosǒnjok) migrants from northeastern China into South Korea in the last decades of the twentieth century conjures up images of formerly impassable Cold War borders suddenly rendered passable. Yet opportunities for legally crossing the border into South Korea at this historical juncture were highly circumscribed. Chosǒnjok who desired entry to South Korea responded by becoming experts in manipulating the kinship categories sanctioned by South Korea’s restrictive immigration laws. Faking kinship ironically turned out to be a more expedient means of entering South Korean than relying on real genealogies and the assistance of actual blood relatives. I explore how these tactics of faking kinship point to the tensions between kin-based versus document-based forms ethnic identification in South Korea, and more generally to the difficulties of defining what counts as kinship or ethnicity under contemporary conditions of transnational migration.

Caren Freeman has been teaching in the Anthropology Department as well as coordinating the Summer Language Institute at the University of Virginia since 2007. Freeman’s talk is based on her recent book, Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration between China and South Korea (Cornell 2011). The book explores how the large-scale migration of ethnic Korean brides and workers from China into South Korea unsettles the way kinship, gender, and ethnonational relations are imagined and practiced on both sides of the migration steam.