An Asian Frontier: American Anthropology and Korea, 1882–1945 is a detailed account of North American anthropological interest in Korea from Korea's first treaty with the United States until the end of World War II. Robert Oppenheim traces the increasing salience of America's “Asian frontier” at a time when American anthropologists were concerned largely with the native peoples of North America. After running across the virtually untouched field notebooks on Korea and Japan compiled by Frederick Starr, who held the first faculty appointment in anthropology at the University of Chicago, Oppenheim came to discover that “more was published about Korea in the pages of American Anthropologist before 1900 than would be for decades afterwards” (p. 3). In this expansive and meticulous book, Oppenheim explains how Korea became an object of persistent analysis and theorization during the early decades of American anthropology.

An Asian Frontier unfolds chronologically and is organized thematically around specific anthropologists and their projects. Oppenheim situates these anthropologists and a nascent anthropological science within a sociopolitical history of transpacific connections, showing how individual trajectories of research, diplomacy, and collecting brought anthropologists to Korea and Korea to then-contemporary anthropological debates. Oppenheim asserts that his book “is intended to be a contribution to the history of science, and not merely to the history of ideas” (p. 5). As much as this book is about the history of scientific theory, data, and method, it is also about individual men, their personal ambitions, and their relations with one another.

Korea's purportedly unique “ossifications of custom that resisted the more general course of civilizational development, eddies in the flow of social progress” (p. 36) became valuable data within nineteenth-century anthropological theories of sociocultural evolution. Oppenheim shows this in the first two chapters by concentrating on what he calls “collecting networks” and “ceramic economies.” These are two ways that Oppenheim directs attention to the “object-based epistemology” (p. 61) of ethnological museums and the “politically significant ceramic taste” (p. 77) of Japanese and North American connoisseurs that blurred the lines between diplomacy, royal gift exchange, ethnological collecting, and the commercial antiquities market. Oppenheim follows the efforts of (often tomb-raiding) collectors in Korea, museum curators, and Korean residents in the United States to chart the circuits by which Korea (especially its Koryŏ celadon) emerged as anthropologically specific and valuable as a “land of survivals.”

Chapters 3 and 4 introduce us to the anthropologist Stewart Culin, following him from his early ethnographic research in Philadelphia's Chinatown to his role in organizing an exhibit on Korea for the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition. The theoretical significance of Culin's research is most obvious in his collaboration with Frank Hamilton Cushing, an anthropologist of Native North America. Together, they proposed that the Korean game of yut might be a “missing link” (p. 126) in a model of sociocultural evolution of divination over time that supported a theory of independent invention rather than diffusion across different sociocultural spaces.

The later chapters focus specifically on American anthropology of Korea during Japanese colonial rule, when theoretical emphasis shifted from issues of sociocultural evolution to biological notions of race and the emergence of an explicitly anti-racist Boasian concept of culture that insisted upon long-term ethnographic research. In chapters 5 and 6, Oppenheim examines Frederick Starr's shifting treatment of the culture concept as Starr navigated the reality of Japanese colonial rule. Here, Starr's status as a “weak theorist,” an anthropological “popularizer,” and the occasional buffoon is precisely the thread that allows Oppenheim to follow the political and intellectual contradictions between Starr's avowed pacifism and anti-imperialism on the one hand, and his support for Japan's imperial domination of Korea on the other. (Starr insisted on wearing, apparently “incorrectly most of the time” [p. 217], a kimono to nearly every formal event.) Finally, chapter 7 concentrates on the Smithsonian physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička's commitment to and modification of racialist theory to advocate for Korean independence from Japan by asserting the “unique race” of Koreans, and the “hybrid” character of the racial constitution of Japan.

Indebted to Actor-Network Theory, Oppenheim transforms the very marginal status of these men and their projects for contemporary anthropology into a methodological tool. Oppenheim writes convincingly in his conclusion:

With this methodological commitment evident in its pages, An Asian Frontier is an important resource for anyone interested in the early decades of Korean studies in North America, emergent transpacific networks between Korea and the United States, and the intellectual history of anthropological science in Asia.