The globalization of K-pop has spawned an inbound flow of tourists and shoppers to the country. As Korean popular culture functions as a window through which audiences come to know Korea, specific places have emerged as sites through which K-culture can be experienced. Beyond conventional tourist destinations, these sites are related to K-pop idols, such as music video shooting locations, cafés and restaurants that idols frequented, locales used as the background of album cover photos, shops that sell celebrity merchandise, K-pop agency buildings, even ordinary parks and bookstores that K-pop stars visited. Thus, “K-pop pilgrimage” has emerged as a new tourism trend, and Korean local governments and the tourist industry are busy creating, discovering, identifying, and publicizing K-pop-associated places. This chapter presents a detailed ethnography of K-pop tourism by ARMY, BTS’s fandom, and discusses how local municipalities and tourism agencies, which have discovered the market power of ARMY, actively promote BTS-themed destinations via social media. By combining the two analyses, this chapter examines the ways K-pop consumption is extended into urban places, thereby reconfiguring the tourist and urban landscapes in Korea.

K-pop agencies, or “entertainment companies,” are often described as “idol factories” or “boot camps” in which teenagers are selected to become K-pop idols, trained to acquire a set of skills and manners, evaluated regularly, and forced to conform regarding their looks, behavior, and relationships. The companies must acquire management skills for unexpected situations, such as idols’ dating scandals. In this chapter, the K-pop industry is seen not as a standardized culture built upon a Fordist business model of mass production but as a critical site where diverse social relations are created, negotiated, and contested. The industry sees the idol body as a profitable media text that is manageable, predictable, and available to any general audience. Nonetheless, the idol retains some degree of human agency. In an industry in which an idol body with agency become a volatile product through mediated presentations and representations, how do the companies produce idols at the most complete level? How do the idols cope with their multiple roles and the expectations placed upon them as producers, laborers, and commodities of intimacy? This chapter investigates the methods by which entertainment companies produce idols as incomplete commodities and intimate laborers through surveillance and regulation.

This chapter reconstructs how temple visitors engaged with idols, and the daily lives of idols. Some Roman reliefs represent encounters with statues in terms of epiphanies, and accounts of personal interactions with idols suggest that proximity to the idol itself was desirable. Varro, Ovid, and other writers describe interactions such as anointing, adorning, cleaning, bathing, and feeding idols, suggesting they had the same needs and pleasures of a human body. The veracity of these accounts, too often dismissed by historians of ancient religion, are confirmed by finds on the floor of a temple at Thun-Allmendingen. Idols could also accept gifts, such as coins, or pieces of jewelry to add to their wardrobes, and worshipers placed these offerings as close as possible to the idol. Sometimes, idols, or representative cult images, left their temples in processions, participating in public events. After examining the concept of darshan in contemporary India, it is suggested that Roman interactions with idols are understandable if the idol was regarded as an elite member of local society, endowed with agency, who participated in the life of the community. Idols made the gods accessible by allowing worshipers to interact with them in a human way.

The final chapter returns to the distinction between idols and other cult images that was proposed in the introduction. In each of the book’s main sections, clues have been observed that confirm a functional distinction between idols and other cult images. The status of both idols and cult images was also found to be flexible, with new images existing side-by-side with old ones in virtually all Roman temples. Since it was largely human interactions that transformed a cult image into an idol, it is rarely possible to identify individual objects as an idol on the basis of archaeological or art historical evidence alone. We never have the full biography of any surviving cult image, just glimpses and hints into particular moments in its life. The fact that idols were continually created, used, and destroyed in the ways discussed in this book for hundreds of years is itself an indication of their important role in Roman religion. So too is the continued use of specific strategies to retain agency for idols. The encounter with a temple’s idol was surely the most important reason for individuals to visit Roman temples.