Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. viii, 274 pp. (B&W photos.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824889197.
Future Yet to Come offers a compelling assortment of articles focused on Korean science, technology, and medicine (STM). Further positioning the collection in alignment with science, technology, and society studies (STS), Sonja M. Kim’s introduction notes the relatively recent surge of STS research in the South Korean academy. Following Warwick Anderson (“Asia as Method in Science and Technology Studies,” EASTS 6, no. 4 [2012]), Kim suggests that STS is “inherently a postcolonial project” (5), bent in any case on discomfiting the received associations of science with Eurocentric modernity—a project that is only redoubled in and through a volume dedicated to Korean phenomena in wont of being de-peripheralized against the backdrop of the relative attention paid to Chinese, Japanese, and US science histories (4). Kim also employs Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s exploration of “sociotechnical imaginaries” (Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, University of Chicago Press, 2015; “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Regulation in the U.S. and South Korea,” Minerva 47, no. 2 [2009]) to highlight the linkage between STM and the question of possible futures. This orienting gesture underwrites one of the true distinguishing features of Future Yet to Come as an STS volume, namely its broad multidisciplinarity inclusive of perspectives from the arts. The book is unusual as well in its historical range, which treats the “modern” of its title expansively.
In this vein, Don Baker’s overview of Korean sciences during the Neo-Confucian Chosŏn period gets the first section of the book off to a fine start. While likening Chosŏn knowledge practices to natural philosophy and emphasizing the intertwinement of moral, social, material, and cosmological questions in Neo-Confucian metaphysics, Baker nonetheless insists that Chosŏn science was science, insofar as it grasped a world of “natural rather than supernatural forces” (31). Sonja M. Kim’s own chapter sets itself against the (Horace N.) “Allen myth” (45) in the history of Korean medicine by documenting continuities in the moral framing of medical practice between the Chosŏn and colonial periods instead of ascribing revolutionary effect to foreign (missionary and colonial) interventions. Presenting his own reframing of the scandal of Hwang Woo-suk’s scientific fraud, Inkyu Kang finds its causes as much in global neoliberal pressures imposed upon scientific research—forces that also potentiated the parallel scandal of Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos (83), for instance—as in any specificities of Korean developmentalism or scientific nationalism.
The second section of the volume begins with Theodore Jun Yoo’s examination of the problem of suicide in colonial Korea. Yoo traces the linkage of suicide to a variety of social ills in the Korean press and the colonial Japanese state’s view of it as a necessary concomitant to modernization before considering its medicalization by the new field of psychiatry. In two chapters on Cold War interactions of South Korean medical practice with outside actors, Jane S. H. Kim underscores the World Health Organization’s view of Korean public health as a means to social stability rather than a goal for its own sake (122), while John P. DiMoia surveys rehabilitative medicine from its wartime origins to its eventual focus on children and civilian patients. Anthropologist Jieun Lee’s fascinating chapter considers the emergence of “bio-insurance” and stem cell banking in South Korea. Lee traces the efforts of this new industry to translate existing desires and anxieties to cause Koreans to envision themselves as potential beneficiaries of this new medical technology, which promises “a chance to have a chance” (155) through undefined future treatments.
It is the final section that makes good on the engagement of the collection with more humanistic fields. Hye-ri Oh offers a conjunctural history of the shift of South Korean photography from pictorialism toward realism in the 1950s, one which emphasizes the contextual local commitments of these modes of envisioning. Steve Choe reads important works of the artist Nam June Paik in terms of the phenomenology and “prosthetics” of memory, asking over Paik’s shoulder the question of “whether archival images of Korea and Korean-ness can become part of the repertoire of the tertiary memory of universal humanity” (221). Closing the volume, Haerin Shin reads the three-film collection Doomsday Book as a departure in South Korean science fiction cinema, one which represents a move away from the dominant recuperative modernism of the genre in favour of a willingness to tarry with alterity (232).
As with any collection, individual chapters will be more to some academic tastes than others, and all the more so, perhaps, given the range of disciplines represented by the authors. I offer two potential critiques of the volume as a whole; both are likewise tempered and in their own ways backhanded. First, notwithstanding the variety of topics and time periods otherwise considered, there is no chapter devoted specifically to post-1945 North Korea. While STS scholarship on that country is to be welcomed, its omission did not for me rise to the level of a genuine absence. Too often the “North Korea chapter” in other Korea-focused collections, included for the sake of “coverage,” can be conceptually disconnected precisely to the extent that it is treated as obligatory. Second, it occasionally seemed that Jasanoff and Kim’s “sociotechnical imaginaries,” as an organizing rubric for the volume as a whole, was pushed to its breaking point. It is a tool better made for mapping collective cultural or discursive futurisms than for following in detail the agentive translation processes through which some futures are caused to incorporate others, as in Lee’s chapter, or for examining the affordances of technological prosthetics, as in Choe’s. Such moments would be more in tune with more sociological and materialist versions of STS theory. Still, in ultimately regarding sociotechnical imaginaries as a “heuristic” (6), the introduction at least acknowledges such issues, and it is not the worst problem for a collected volume to have if a framing concept cannot fully contain the multitudinous richness of its chapter selections. Future Yet to Come is an important and worthwhile contribution, with many chapters appropriate for both graduate and advanced undergraduate classroom use.
Robert Oppenheim
University of Texas at Austin, Austin