The Dialogic Culturation of Mother Mary in South Korea: Between Universal Aspirations and Local Footprints

Nancy Abelmann, The Melodrama of Mobility: Women, Talk, and Class in Contemporary South Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003, 376 pp. U.S. discourses on South Korea emphasize its rapid, economic development-the miracle of Han-to exclusion of almost everything else. South Korea is thus presented as either a neo-liberal, success story (during periods of economic growth) or as a country still held back by its legacy of Confucianism (in times of economic crisis). All of these tropes, of course, figure South Korea along a unilinear chain of modernization, wherein urbanization and consumption constitute modern and everything else is plugged into savage slot-an atavistic stumbling block to neo-liberal modernization. Anthropologists have been steadfast in contesting these monolithic representations with considerably more critical narratives, whether by exposing exploitative relations inherent in Korea's capitalist development (Kim 1997), articulating variable experiences of modernization (Kendall 2002), or by emphasizing resistance to neoliberal modernization below, e.g. 1980s minjung movement (Abelmann 1996). But one need only turn on a television to grasp ambivalence that lies at core of Korean experiences of modernity. kind of repetitive, symptomatic act characteristic of television programming around world, South Korean dramas invariably involve travails of related households, some of which toil in unjust poverty, while others revel in ill-gotten gains. Echoing political separation of families occasioned by partitioning of Korean peninsula (pundan), capitalism is shown to have turned families against one another in race for prosperity. this book, Nancy Abelmann looks to this melodrama of South Korea's mobility in narratives of eight, middle-aged women, whose polysemic accounts of success and failure, justice and injustice, form a rejoinder to neoliberal accounts of Korea, Inc. Like E.P. Thompson, Abelmann construes class as social, institutional, and dialogical practice: In sum-class-and social mobility-is not a thing to be catalogued and charted but is, rather, a project that happens partly through narrative, in families, and transgenerationally (20). The book's cover is particular telling: at least two women walk down a street at night, their silhouettes nearly occluded by bright lights of restaurants and bars, neatly raising questions of gender, social life, and practice that are obscured in economic and geopolitical discourses on South Korea. The stories that form core of this ethnography are drawn from interviews undertaken over course of almost ten years, from 1992 to 2001, although Abelmann's relationship with some (like Mi-yon's Mother) extend back into her own first encounters with South Korea in 1980s. Here, Abelmann adopts an initially jarring convention: for some of her interlocutors, she adopts pseudonyms consistent with Korean conventions-older women are (familiarly) known as Mother of their oldest child. For others, however, Abelmann invents quixotic nicknames-e.g., Education Mother, Moviegoer-that highlight some puissant trait in a way one might refer to someone unfamiliar (oh, her? The one who's always going to movies?). The effect of this is to suggest varying degrees of familiarity and formality and to self-reflexively underline life stories as partial truths; can we really know someone only as the Moviegoer? This also anticipates Abelmann's eclectic appropriation of cultural and ethnographic theory (James Clifford, Raymond Williams, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sherry Ortner, Vincent Crapanzano) that, in two, dense, initial chapters, is likely to send readers scurrying to notes from early 1990s graduate seminars. The third chapter looks to women's language as inherently heterglot, locating ambivalences of class, mobility, and modernity at very core of language. …

This article is composed of two parts. The first part presents a brief survey of cinematic and television melodramas in South Korea and describes how melodrama has unevenly reflected a range of socio-cultural transformations. It traces the ways melodrama has embodied the changing social and gender norms against the backdrop of highly compressed modernization and the persistent patriarchal authority in South Korea. The second part analyzes various textual strategies in Morae Sigye as a social melodrama by examining the generic specificity and radical differences seen in Morae Sigye versus mainstream television dramas. In particular, this article assesses Morae Sigye’s representation of actual historical events and its pedagogical usefulness as a vehicle of cultural remembering. The article as a whole explores the potential of social melodrama as a useful televisual subgenre that can articulate melodramatic pathos with desire to summon popular memory surrounding the traumatic historical events in the past.

Do members of different cultures express (or "encode") emotions in the same fashion? How well can members of distinct cultures recognize (or "decode") each other's emotion expressions? The question of cultural universality versus specificity in emotional expression has been a hot topic of debate for more than half a century, but, despite a sizeable amount of empirical research produced to date, no convincing answers have emerged. We suggest that this unsatisfactory state of affairs is due largely to a lack of concern with the precise mechanisms involved in emotion expression and perception, and propose to use a modified Brunswikian lens model as an appropriate framework for research in this area. On this basis we provide a comprehensive review of the existing literature and point to research paradigms that are likely to provide the evidence required to resolve the debate on universality vs. cultural specificity of emotional expression. Applying this fresh perspective, our analysis reveals that, given the paucity of pertinent data, no firm conclusions can be drawn on actual expression (encoding) patterns across cultures (although there appear to be more similarities than differences), but that there is compelling evidence for intercultural continuity in decoding, or recognition, ability. We also note a growing body of research on the notion of ingroup advantage due to expression "dialects," above and beyond the general encoding or decoding patterns. We furthermore suggest that these empirical patterns could be explained by both universality in the underlying mechanisms and cultural specificity in the input to, and the regulation of, these expression and perception mechanisms. Overall, more evidence is needed, both to further elucidate these mechanisms and to inventory the patterns of cultural effects. We strongly recommend using more solid conceptual and theoretical perspectives, as well as more ecologically valid approaches, in designing future studies in emotion expression and perception research.

Newcomers and Global Migration in Contemporary South Korea: Across National Boundaries examines the intersections of race, class, gender and inequalities in global migration in contemporary South Korea. The contributors explore South Korean migration policies and study diverse migrants living and working in South Korea as low-wage undocumented workers, refugees, Korean returnees, migrant women married to Korean men, and white professionals. The chapters in this collection make visible the differentiation and divergence of migration experiences due to race, class, gender, and place of origin, which are all also mediated by local inequalities in South Korea.

Newcomers and Global Migration in Contemporary South Korea: Across National Boundaries examines the intersections of race, class, gender and inequalities in global migration in contemporary South Korea. The contributors explore South Korean migration policies and study diverse migrants living and working in South Korea as low-wage undocumented workers, refugees, Korean returnees, migrant women married to Korean men, and white professionals. The chapters in this collection make visible the differentiation and divergence of migration experiences due to race, class, gender, and place of origin, which are all also mediated by local inequalities in South Korea.

President Yoon Suk-yeol's campaign for the presidency embraces the anti-feminism movement that has further fueled the misogynistic culture in South Korea. South Korea is quite thick with patriarchy and misogyny because there is a lot of criticism of women, especially feminists. This article analyses the phenomenon of misogynistic culture in South Korea using document-based research and internet-based research techniques. It employs Foucault's discourse of power and the concept of misogyny to analyse the impact of history on misogynist culture in contemporary South Korea. The findings show that as Confucian teachings are the basis of state ideology in South Korea, Korean society believes in the chastity of women. In the Koran history, a negative connotation was given to women who are considered to have damaged the country’s ‘Joseon-ness’ and the standard of femininity in South Korean society. Given South Korea's high level of sexism and low level of female empowerment, the representation of males in dramas as caring and empathetic is unfortunately not representative of the real world. Sexist behaviour in South Korea is founded on Confucian ideology.

ABSTRACT: In contemporary South Korea, the expectation that men should pay all, or the vast majority, of the costs of dating and courtship is shifting. Young women are increasingly achieving parity in educational achievement and employment with men, causing singles to see a more equal and individualized division of dating expenses align with their aspirations for an egalitarian and companionate romantic relationship. However, this seemingly equitable division belies the less obvious costs of dating, such as investments in cultivating body capital for women and men's often greater earning potential, reflected in South Korea's large gender wage gap, the highest among OECD countries. In this paper we draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and survey data to examine emergent ideologies and practices for sharing the costs of dating in South Korea and the implications for gender equality more broadly. We interpret these shifting practices and ideologies as part of a process of individualization in which the hegemony of certain patriarchal gender norms is wholly or partially rejected and new norms are negotiated by couples themselves. Ultimately, we argue that South Korean couples continue to struggle to establish gender equality in their romantic relationships despite the individualization of relationship norms. By further contextualizing decisions about the division of dating costs, we draw attention to the need for broader awareness of inequalities that continue to trouble the romantic pursuits of Seoul's youth. Our findings challenge more positive theorizations of the individualization of intimacy (e.g., Giddens 1992) and highlight how this process can just as easily reinforce, rather than challenge, existing patriarchal gender norms.

Revisiting Minjung: New Perspectives on the Cultural History of 1980s South Korea

In the mid-2000s, the figure of toenjangnyŏ appeared in South Korean popular culture, often depicted as a woman in her twenties or thirties who compulsively purchased luxury goods best exemplified by the Starbucks cup in her hand. This figure quickly became the center of controversy about class and gender in South Korea. In this article, using both Starbucks customers’ narratives and the representation of toenjangnyŏ in popular culture, I explore the cultural politics of this figure. The toenjangnyŏ controversy provides a window into understanding one of the major effects of Starbucks branding in South Korea: the construction of a new form of femininity and the consequent anxiety about how such overt consumerism reflects class dynamics as a performance of cosmopolitanism. In contrast to dominant understandings of consumption as a non-political and individual choice, this article demonstrates how coffee consumption becomes a key site of national anxiety about foreign cultural incursion and consumer-based femininity. This article considers the relation between Starbucks in South Korea and the construction of new forms of femininity, on the one hand, and the consequent anxiety about how such overt consumerism reflects class dynamics as performance of Americanism, on the other. In South Korea, Starbucks does not merely represent an incursion of Americanism but provides a space and a fulcrum through which to analyze the conflicting and changing aspects of South Korean identity formation

Since the late 1990s, adult adoptees who were sent for adoption from South Korea to Western nations as infants and young children have been returning by the thousands to visit South Korea, search for relatives, and explore Korean culture. A smaller number choose to live and work for extended periods of time in their country of birth. This article contextualizes this phenomenon in relation to the South Korean government's proactive globalization policies and the rise of "English fever," and analyzes the shifting receptions of adoptees by the state and everyday South Koreans as a window onto post-IMF neoliberal transformations in South Korea. I show how a shift in the signification of adoptees between the 1990s and the 2000s is suggestive of the increasing association of adoption with human capital, whether in the state's attempts to enroll adoptees as successful global citizens and cultural ambassadors or vernacular views of adoptees as lucky cosmopolitans. Drawing on ethnographic research with resident adoptee returnees who lived and worked in South Korea for extended periods of time at the turn of the millennium, I show how their social marginalization and discrepant cosmopolitanism reveal the ascendance of neoliberal values in contemporary South Korea. In conclusion, I assert that resident adoptee returnees offer important critiques of dominant discourses that celebrate transnational adoption as the fast track to cosmopolitan privilege or as a postnational model for transcending racial and national hierarchies.

Editorial Note

The process of migration and cross border mobility occurs for a number of reason or background such as politics, economics, education and so forth has made a number of Muslim leave their homeland to another countries. Due to this migration, a significant number of Muslims becomes a diasporic communities in other countries and sometimes lives as religious minority group in non-Muslim country. It is reported that one third of Muslims in the world live as minority in a number of countries both in the West and also in some Asian countries such as India, Japan, South Korea, etc. In general, the existing academic discourse and publication has focused more Muslim in the West, and overlooked the Muslims minority in Eastern countries which is also considered as non-Muslim land such as Japan, South Korea, and such. This article discusses the Muslim minorities in South Korea, with a specific focus on Indonesian Muslim as it made up a significant number of Muslim in South Korea recently. Their challenge, balancing their personal identity and loyal citizenship as well as integration issues will also discussed from fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) of minorities (fiqh al-aqaliyyat) point of view.

This study examines critical challenges associated with religious literacy in contemporary South Korea and educational approaches to address them. By analyzing data from the Religious Literacy Survey 2023 (n = 2022), we reveal that these paradoxical attitudes stem from a declining religious literacy, manifested as limited knowledge of religious traditions and their teachings. Amid the rise in the number of the religiously unaffiliated, our analysis indicates that this trend reflects not a rejection of religion but rather an urgent need for education to enhance religious literacy. Based on this analysis, we examine religious education curricula at Dongguk and Yonsei Universities as exemplars that not only deepen students’ understanding of specific religious traditions but also help them recognize religion’s enduring relevance in addressing contemporary societal challenges. Building on these cases, while recognizing their limitations as religiously affiliated institutions, we emphasize the need for an integrated educational approach to religious literacy—one that extends beyond specific traditions and incorporates religious studies examining various dimensions of religion itself. We further suggest the broader implementation of religious literacy education across higher education institutions. Such educational approaches provide insights into fostering social cohesion and meaningful interreligious engagement in South Korea and beyond.

This article explores community in contemporary South Korea's commercially saturated urban environments by investigating a recent government-run city improvement project in which the entanglement of institutional power and local commercial forces created a peculiar form of community that is fragmentary and heterogeneous rather than organic and harmonious. The case study involves an attempt by the city government in Gunpo City, South Korea, to collaborate with private enterprise to regulate the dense signage on one specific commercial building, Kwangrim Plaza. The meetings and conversations between the government officials in charge of regulating urban signage and the plaza's forty-five shopkeepers were recorded in a four-part documentary series that was televised on the Seoul Broadcasting System in 2007. The documentary was intended to exemplify the government's effectiveness as well as civic participation in producing an attractive cityscape. Though the film emphasizes reconciliation and synthesis following the shopkeepers' strenuous objections to the renovation project, its scenes reveal a series of conflicts and disagreements among shopkeepers and between shopkeepers and government officials. Though the narrative of the film treats those conflicts as temporary obstacles to the inevitable achievement of this ambitious project, the author argues that interruptions, suspensions, and instances of dissensus in the smooth narrative are the critical moments in which a sense of community manifests itself in everyday urban life.

This paper aims to examine to analyze the multidimensional effects of the public administration digitalization process on the state and society. Additionally, the benefits of this transformation, the challenges it faces, and successful implementations in different countries, as well as to foresee potential discussion topics and governance paradigms for the future. The scope of the research covers the theoretical foundations of e-government and e-governance concepts, and the fundamental gains digitalization provides in public services such as efficiency, transparency, and citizen-centricity. Furthermore, it discusses the main challenges, including the digital divide, cybersecurity threats, and concerns about data privacy, as well as institutional resistance. The scope includes case studies on the e-government implementations of Estonia,South Korea, and the United Kingdom. This study is based on a theoretical literature review and does not generate new empirical data. The analyses are conducted within the framework of existing academic articles and international reports. Therefore, the findings present a synthesis of the existing literature. The digitalization of public administration is not merely a technological transition but a multidimensional process that requires a comprehensive legal, institutional, and cultural transformation. The success of this transformation depends on building trust, including all citizens in the process, and continuously updating the legal framework, beyond just technological infrastructure investments. The findings indicate that digitalization has significantly increased operational efficiency and transparency in public administration,but it has also faced serious obstacles such as inequalities in technology access and cybersecurity risks. It has been determined that successful international examples have overcome these challenges through specific approaches like holistic integration (Estonia), robust infrastructure (South Korea), and user-centric service design (the United Kingdom). As a conclusion, the digitalization process should be managed by protecting and strengthening the fundamental values in the state's relationship with its citizens. The ultimate success of this transformation depends not only on technological competence but also on the protection of fundamental principles such as ethics, justice, and privacy.