Animal Rights vs. Cultural Rights: Exploring the Dog Meat Debate in South Korea from a World Polity Perspective

Abstract

What explains the persistence of what many in the West now consider a ‘backward’ or ‘archaic’ cultural practice: eating dog meat? How does such a tradition remain in place despite a widespread world outcry condemning it, especially in countries that are undergoing rapid processes of globalisation, such as China and South Korea? In this paper, we address these questions by exploring recent developments in the cultural practice of eating dog meat in South Korea. More specifically, we examine the South Korean case in light of globalisation theories that would largely predict the demise of such practices in response to external pressure brought by international organisations and NGOs seeking the expansion of universal standards and values such as ‘progress’, or in this case, ‘animal rights’. While the spread of universal values and cultural homogenisation are central elements of much theorising on globalisation, the world polity perspective (Boli and Thomas, American Sociological Review, 62 (2), 171–190, 1997) also leaves room for the persistence of particularisms within the world polity. Amid strident debates over the consumption of dog meat coinciding with the 1988 Olympic Games and 2002 World Cup, the Korean government had to negotiate the demands of competing groups of NGOs that were split on the dog meat issue. These groups followed and articulated two different ‘universal norms’: animal rights and cultural rights, but in the end, it appears that the cultural rights side has been more influential in shaping the Korean polity with respect to dog meat policy. We rethink the world polity theory by emphasising the way in which isomorphism and decoupling processes may overlap and occur simultaneously. Based on our exploration of the Korean debate and its consequences, we term the existence of this hybrid of decoupling and isomorphism as ‘tactful resistance’.