Technologies of 'the Korean family': Population crisis and the politics of reproduction in contemporary South Korea

This dissertation is an anthropological engagement of the state and popular anxieties about the future sparked by this depopulation crisis in contemporary South Korea. The recent falling birth rate has increased the anxieties about the future of the Korean nation in South Korea, especially in the context of Post-IMF Economic Crisis. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul and Incheon, South Korea, this dissertation investigates the ways in which these anxieties have shaped and reshaped the current South Korean reproductive practices and politics.;In contrast to the objectified languages of population in the policy world, the state and popular anxieties about depopulation cannot be solely understood as a response to a certain set of demographic data. Rather, the anxieties about the decreasing number of childbirths have been about the future of the Korean nation and the proper Korean family in contemporary South Korea. In this context, I take the South Korean policies on multicultural families, families of Koreans and marriage migrants and their children as a crucial site where the boundaries of "Korean-ness" are intensely negotiated and the future of the South Korean state and the Korean nation is being re-imagined. Then, I demonstrate how the discourse of national population crisis has framed policy concerns and public debates on bioethical issues in contemporary South Korea by creating a sense of urgency to produce more citizens in South Korea. Finally, I trace the ways in which the notion of traditional Korean family has been emerged, produced and circulated in different domains of social sciences in South Korea. While various parties have just assumed the normative characteristics of the Korean society and attributed these norms to "tradition," this dissertation attends the enormous burden of normativity that the state and popular anxieties about depopulation crisis has placed on the familial lives.