ABSTRACT
In 1984, I began a research project that, in the fullness of time, would become a book, Getting Married in Korea (Kendall 1996), an exploration of courtship, matchmaking, weddings, and related practices and how they had all changed over the course of the twentieth century. At the start of this project, I spent a great deal of time in the four commercial wedding halls of a Korean town where brides marched down the aisle in white lace dresses and veils to a pianist’s rendering of “The Wedding March.” Then the couple was whisked away and dressed in traditional Korean wedding costumes in order to kowtow to members of the groom’s family to whom they offered cups of wine and by whom they were pelted with dates and chestnuts as a wish for fertility. When I explained what I, an anthropologist studying contemporary Korean weddings, was up to, everyone — the wedding hall staff, the brides and grooms, the members of the wedding parties — inevitably scratched their heads in bemusement. Shouldn’t an anthropologist be out in the villages seeking the rare traditional Confucian wedding rite? Isn’t that what anthropologists were supposed to do? Weren’t the weddings that I was so diligently recording “Western” and therefore exactly what I was used to at home?
