Who Owns a Culture: Summary before Finishing

OK. It was a long, long time ago that I started writing this series, and it's just embarrassing that I haven't finished it yet...

I have excuses, but you probably don't care to hear them anyway.  I got married, too.  However, I'd like to re-summarize what I've said in the previous articles, just to get everybody back to speed, before I go to my final point, which is of particular point during the holiday season.

However, in the comments to my "OK, Hyori Gets It," post, I'm getting comments from some of the same people who participated in that discussion back then, and who, in my opinion, are still off the mark in some respects.

So I'm finishing off this series, and while I do, I'll include another response to some of them.

The summary then:



The whole thing started back before I got married, with a post Jason, at Kimchi Ice Cream wrote, which was a strong reaction to a Korean wedding hall wedding.  Jason didn't like a lot of what he saw in that wedding, particularly the way people acted, and the way the wedding seemed to imitate, but then mock the traditional western wedding.

-I wrote an introduction to the series here. 

Part one was my response to the older Koreans who like to argue that Korea is losing its culture.  Basically, I argued that it's problematic to draw a definition of "Our Culture" because such definitions are always backward looking and inflexible; I argued that we should use the word culture to describe what's happening, and how people are living, not to prescribe what they can and can't do, and then accuse people of not being "pure" Korean anymore.  Why does the old guy in my conversation class get to decide that Korea's "true" culture just happened to reach its peak during the time he was in his 20s?   Fact is, nostalgia changes our view of how the past really was, or cultural myths distort the way things really were, and choosing a time period to define culture that's in the past (and usually not TOO far in the past: never farther back than when gramps was a kid) is problematic, because culture was changing up to that point, too, and old people in those days were also complaining that kids were losing the old, true ways.

Part two argued that in a world of instant communication, the idea of culture is getting more slippery, and that we should stop thinking that one group or another "owns" culture.  Food, film, music, and literature from different cultures are mingling, mixing and interacting in ways that are too complex to say "this is Korean culture; this is German culture."  If a Korean invents a new kind of spaghetti sauce, there's no arbiter to decide whether it's Italian food or Korean food, or just food.  I submit that culture is something people do, consume, and create, not something people own.  Nobody can own culture.

I spent a long time looking at why Korean wedding hall weddings are so popular, despite themselves, and despite the fact that even most Koreans I know find them distasteful.


Here's the final post: