Culturalism - You Keep Using That Word 2: Some Q and A on Culturalism

I'm just going to assume that readers have all read part 1 of this series: What is Actual Culturalism? I'm tackling the idea of "culturalism" - which The Korean discussed, but has also been discussed by others in social sciences and policy discussions for a while. This comment points out that it isn't really taught as a method or framework in anthropology. Which is good to know. Thanks, commenter Nora!

So what are some other concepts related to culturalism?

Last post, we talked about Culturalism and Multiculturalism as it plays into policy discussions - particularly in Europe. Here in Kblogland, most people talking about culturalism are going on The Korean's definition, which mostly resembles the one used in Europe, but applying it to the area of cultural engagement rather than public policy. He defines it these two ways:

Culturalism is the unwarranted impulse to explain people's behavior with a "cultural difference", whether real or imagined. Because the culturalist impulse always attempts to explain more with culture than warranted, the "cultural difference" used in a cultural explanation is more often imagined than real. (source)

and as

...the impulse to explain minority people's behavior with a "cultural difference", real or imagined. (source)

Along those lines, here are some other rhetorical and philosophical concepts that The Korean and others might find useful in discussing "Culturalism". Rather than long descriptions here, I strongly encourage you to read the explanations I link. I also glossed over this in my previous post, "problems with citing culture"

• Fundamental Attribution Error - we tend to over-emphasize internal causes, and under-emphasize external (systemic or sometimes even random) causes of a phenomenon.
• Cultural Determinism - we tend to believe that culture determines our behavior...probably more than it actually does.
• Essentialism - we tend to think that there are certain traits that are fixed and unchangeable for certain groups - "Women are all like this" "Koreans are all this way" "White men all do this"
• Orientalism - a type of essentialism that focuses on other groups and cultures. When we look at certain cultures, we tend to make them out to be so different from us that we could never understand them (implied: so we may as well not try) - they will always be exotic, strange, and inscrutable to "us." Any time somebody uses the word "exotic," watch for this attitude.

Culturalism as The Korean defines it is bits of the four above in one, intellectually sloppy modge-podge, with a little ecological fallacy thrown in for flavor. And I say "intellectually sloppy" because people over-using culture to explain things are being sloppy, not because The Korean has been sloppy in describing it.

Meanwhile, commenter Dylan suggests we read more about Communitarianism -- which is another concept used by human rights scholars in discussing the ways people organize into communities.

So, is culturalism racism?

Not necessarily.

For one, racism has been discredited - the variety within members of each racial group is so great, that the variety from one racial group to another fades to insignificance. And we've all heard racism deniers tell us that "race is a social construct, therefore it doesn't exist"... As if social constructs don't exist. But society is also a social construct, so as people living in societies, we still have to talk about race sometimes.

Abstraction confuses me.

Culture has the benefit of being recognized by everyone as a social construct from the get-go, so at least we don't have deniers herp-derping that it does not exist because humans made it up (unlike all the other things humans made up, that DO exist, like the language they're using to make that argument). Anyone who's agreed to talk about culture has already agreed to talk about social constructs, so that's at least nice.

And race is hardware -- your pigment and bone structure are in your dna, and unchangeable, but culture is software - programmed patterns of behavior which can be changed. Culture is changing all the time. That's a crucial difference.

Strictly speaking then, culturalism isn't the same as racism.

Lemme tell you 'bout race, butthead...

However, if you take a person in the habit of lazy or sloppy thinking, and give them a phenomenon they don't understand, the same sloppiness that might have caused their 1955 self to explain it with race, might today cause them to explain it with culture.

It's all about culture, butthead!

Racism has been discredited, but while intellectual laziness is still in style, even most bigots generally realize you're not "supposed" to be openly racist anymore. So culturalism isn't the same as racism, but they are used in the same way by lazy thinkers and bigots. They are born of the same desire to generalize about those who are different, both are worsened by the same lack of curiosity and unwillingness to admit the variety and humanity of others, and both lead to the same kinds of sweeping and ignorant statements. And those are ample grounds for The Korean to call culturalism "racism of the 21st century"

So is culture off the table entirely?

No. Because it's human made, and learned, culture is changeable, and changing all the time. This means that, as long as we discuss it in terms that don't overestimate its usefulness as an analytical tool (which is easy to do), yeah, it's fair game for discussion, but even kept in perspective, it's still easy to get it wrong when talking about culture, because when talking about culture, you're also talking about the way a bunch of people live, and those people deserve to be approached with respect, and in a way that recognizes their humanity, intelligence, free will, and so forth. And there are lots of ways to talk about culture that does not do those things. Be respectful, and don't be a dick.

Beep boop beep boop! Why am I not surprised the politically correct police have shown up to stop me from expressing my free speech?

OK. I'm going to write a whole extra unplanned post in this series to talk about this, because the more I think about it, the weirder it is to me that somehow political correctness has been framed as a bad thing... so if you're champing at the bit to start arguing about that, kindly hold your horses and save it for the comments under a future post.

Coming up next at Roboseyo: some ways to talk about culture without coming across as a shit. Stay tuned!

Culturalism - You Keep Using That Word 1: What is Actual Culturalism?

Last summer, when The Korean from Ask a Korean! wrote his bit about Malcolm Gladwell, the Asiana crash, and culturalism -- a tour de force piece that managed to get Malcolm Gladwell himself over to The Korean's site to answer criticisms, one of my friends who's in Anthropology got very frustrated with the whole thing.

Because before The Korean started using the word "culturalism" with the meaning he gave it (in this post)... it was kind of already an actual thing.

It happens from time to time that academic terms get co-opted, or re-"coined" or re-conceptualized by someone who isn't part of the conversation where it first came up (for example, Soft Power has suffered a lot of meaning creep since being co-opted by China's "Peaceful Rise" narrative, and now it can mean anything from all non-military nation-to-nation bullying, to nation branding) or a word gets so much baggage piled onto it in the public imagination, that it's hard to use it academically anymore. (For an example, look at The Metropolitician's attempt to re-explain racism in such a way that it's possible to discuss it again without knee-jerk defensiveness.)

And here's a definition of culturalism, as per Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt, who are the two names that come up a lot when you search it on Google Scholar and stuff: 

Culturalism is the idea that individuals are determined by their culture, that these cultures form closed, organic wholes, and that the individual is unable to leave his or her own culture but rather can only realise him or herself within it. [One type of] Culturalism also maintains that cultures have a claim to special rights and protections – even if at the same time they violate individual rights.

Basically, to develop public policy, or understand social structures, as a bureaucrat or anthropologist might want to do, one must decide how to group together the subjects of your study, and class, income, age, region, education -- these can all be useful. But if you decide culture is more important than all these other groupings, that, in its broadest definition, is culturalism.

Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt back away from the definition above by separating culturalism into two kinds: hard and soft. (explanation in this summary)

Hard culturalism is the one above -- where culture is constructed as the be-all and end-all, and cultural lines are imagined to be rigid and impassable. I can't define myself outside of the culture I was raised in. Taken far enough, Hard Culturalism is the basis of arguments that cultural groups should be allowed to put their community's laws above the laws of the land they live in, or that anybody unwilling to assimilate into their host country should be sent "back where they came from." This is where Eriksen and Stjernfelt's critique lies. Hard culturalism becomes politicized, and they describe it in places as an ideology, arguing that individual and human rights should always come before cultural rights.

And where exactly to draw those lines between respecting a cultural or religious group, and ensuring the human rights of members of that group? Does a doctor violate one's religious rights by saying, "I respect your religion, but I'm still giving your child a blood transfusion!" What if it's not the child, but the parent?

Soft culturalism, according to Eriksen and Stjernfelt, aren't incompatible with a modern cosmopolitan society. In soft culturalism, we can find our identity or self-expression in a culture, but the standards and norms of a culture don't supersede the values of a modern secular society -- human rights, rule of law, etc..

To over-simplify, Eriksen and Stjernfelt would probably say that you should be allowed to wear a cross or a hijab in school as a symbol of your identity (soft culturalism), but would reject a domestic abuse defense that "where I'm from, it's normal for parents to hit their kids," and oppose Muslim communities in Europe following Sharia law.

If you take Eriksen and Stjernfelt's definition of culturalism above: "that individuals are determined by their culture, that they have no free will to influence the course of their lives," I don't think The Korean would take issue with it. The difference is how each applies it: E&S explain how putting people into overly rigid groups leads to problematic policies and "culture wars," and The Korean explains how that same conception of culture causes problems in cross-cultural personal experiences and judgments, where it results in "Racism of the 21st Century."

It's just too bad they're giving different meanings to the same word, as they discuss two different, but interesting and important ideas.

If you're interested in Eriksen and Stjernfelt's concept of culturalism, here's more reading material:
This excellent article by Milan Vukomanovic hits most of the important points.
This is another good summary be Eriksen and Stjernfelt themselves.
This article, and the six recorded interviews below it expand on the key issues.
This article about the Anders Breivik verdict (that Norwegian mass-murderer) also talks about the tension between culture and human rights.

And if anyone wants to send me a gift copy of Eriksen and Stjernfelt's book, "The Democratic Contradictions of Multiculturalism" I'd be thrilled.

Culturalism's place in the history of ideas is kind of mixed: one of the earlier cases of culture being used as a level of analysis was among colonizing countries, which used academic rhetoric to justify colonizing civilizations they had deemed "primitive," in order to "civilize" them. (cf: The White Man's Burden). Culturalism is usually not used in quite such a patronizing way these days. Arguably.

Culturalism is also a required prerequisite to multiculturalism: you can't construct a policy of respecting cultural differences, if you don't first imagine that cultural groupings exist, and are important enough to warrant specific policies and programs.

So while I have to take issue with The Korean using the term "Culturalism" because that's already a thing, the thing that he wishes to describe with his term is something very much worthy of discussion, and I'll talk about that in an upcoming post.

Tumblr Feminists: So What?

This is a re-worked version of a post I wrote last month. If you read that one, don't bother with this one. I don't like editing posts after people have already left comments, so instead of just editing that one, on the advice of a friend, I'm putting this one out as the version of record.

Removed: a bunch of stuff about gendered spaces, which I blundered through last year, and, on the advice of said friend, which I'm going to leave alone until I have the tools and background to write on it more credibly. To sum up: I got it wrong before, perhaps got it less wrong with that last post, and I'm still working on getting it right.

Last week I came across a new term in my internettings: "Tumblr Feminist" -- this is a very obnoxious description of what that is (and the phrase's possible origin). This is the search of "tumblr feminist" on Reddit, where I came across the term. And the reddit thread "Explain Like I'm 5 What a Tumblr Feminist is" has this as the "top" (most upvotes) comment - a pretty good at-length description - and for its "best" comment (highest ratio of upvotes), a concise one:
"The perception is that tumblr users are passionate but not very informed on gender issues, so the term is used derogatively."

Tumblr feminist probably fits in a category with pejoratives like "armchair quarterback" and "slacktivist" and "Randroid"... but the term, strikes me as mean-spirited - more than those others.

To be clear now, not every feminist on tumblr is a "tumblr feminist," just like not everybody linking events and causes on facebook are slacktivists (some back the "likes" up with action). The term seems reserved for the bottom rung or two of the hierarchy of disagreement (source), and not writers and thinkers who ply in the top section of the pyramid, those who've done their background reading, invested time and thought into making a meaningful contribution. But then, the term is not clearly defined, which makes it more useful for name-calling -- moving goalposts is an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for making generalizations.

The term "tumblr feminist" set off alarms right from the start. Google tricks (a keyword timeline search mostly) confirmed my suspicion: "tumblr feminist" was probably coined in that obnoxious youtube clip above: the first time that exact word combination appears is the month he published it. Subsequent mentions up until last month, when I suddenly came across it four or five independent times, had that same tone: contemptuous, and originating almost entirely in men's rights-type forums. It ventured outside of those realms mostly in response to comments or potshots from within it.

Since the start, the term has been used as a "straw man" (straw person) to whom people have ascribed the views they want to argue against -- basically, the Men's Rights folks have been using "tumblr feminist" the same way Fox News uses "the liberal media" or "the gay agenda" as a boogeyman. And that'd be the Men's Rights folks who use that flag to mostly act like sexist pricks, not the group that are said to exist, who have done all the same gender studies reading as feminists have, but are picking up the stories and issues on the male end of the gender spectrum. (As a side note, that latter group might do well to find a different name for themselves that doesn't confuse them with the former group. Perhaps one with enough jargon, or long enough, that online misogynists find it cumbersome to co-opt.)

In the last month though, people outside of Men's Rights forums have been using it in name-calling exchanges, in "am I really a TF?" "why ____ is a TF" or "I'm not a TF because" type blog posts. It's gained a little traction. Personally, I don't like that: labels are useful for introspection -- asking myself "is there mansplaining in this blog post/comment? Am I gaslighting?" But this label has been weaponized from the start, and using labels as weapons leads to defensiveness (follow-up with gaslighting), or anger (follow-up with tone policing) to derail conversations.

Along with its troublesome origins, my other problem with the term is this:

Every topic on the internet draws responses ranging from knee-jerk reactions to clear, informed reasoning, and discussion on every topic features too much knee-jerk and not enough clear, informed reasoning. Every single one.

Naturally, the same is true of women's issues. Writing that lacks clarity, rigor, or perspective? That's about 70% of the entire internet, isn't it? (That statistic is made-up. It might be more.) "Tumblr feminists" may or may not be an actual thing, but I know for sure I haven't heard a satisfying reason why they should be singled out over everybody else also using the internet less like this...

(Plato and Aristotle, by Raphael)

and more like this...
(Statler and Waldorf, by the Muppets)

or this.

(source - via google images)

Everybody's using the internet this way. Lots and lots and lots of men do. Every discourse has a few worthwhile voices and a lot of noise and people simply out of their depth. So if the group that becomes a target for derision is a subset of feminist writers (though if the term becomes common, wanna bet it remains reserved only for those feminist writers it originally applied to?) and they're simply acting the way most people (most men included) on the internet act, it's time for a motivation check. Does the simple existence of the term automatically indicate feminists, or women online in general, are singled out for persecution? Not all by itself, though given the term's origin (first yellow flag) and patterns of sexism on the internet (Food for thought.  --Patterns which trace right back to the origins of the internet, when the photo used to test compression algorithms was part of a playboy centerfold) it'd be worth looking into. A cursory look around suggests that we might be onto something.

To tie this to Korea: it's like the __ __ 녀 or "ladygate" videos (more about Korea's online misogyny at Koreabang and Yonhap News): after a while, it stops seeming like a coincidence that every viral video about shameful public behavior features a woman behaving unacceptably, and we have to ask what's behind the singling out of women for shaming. You think men never fight, smoke, or act out drunk on subway cars? (You've never been on line 1, have you?) Yet it's the women doing the above whose videos go viral. Weeeird. Or maybe not.

I remember my first blog posts about Korea culture... they're painful to read, and full of mistakes and signs that I was way out of my depth, talking about stuff I didn't really know much about. My enthusiasm far outstripped my understanding. I got better: I learned more, and my comments got more moderate and thoughtful. I'm glad I didn't get too badly bullied, shamed, or disparaged, back there during my starting point... that would've sucked. If I had been using my blog for emotional catharsis, I hope nobody would have mistaken my writing for attempts at elevated discourse: that mismatch of expectations leads to misunderstandings, and people forget that not everybody who writes on the internet is actually doing it for an audience. I hope that as so-called "Tumblr feminists" use the internet to sort through, hash out, and ripen their ideas about gender issues, or just to vent pent-up emotions that their everyday life doesn't let them, their readers are as patient as mine were, or are discreet enough to look the other way, rather than singling them out for bullying and disparagement, the way a phrase like "Tumblr feminist" does. The internet is big enough, and there are enough people writing thoughtful, well-reasoned things about gender issues, that we don't have to seek out the "tumblr feminists" to pick on them, do we?

No. No. Nope. No, we don't.

Survey 2: Survey for Multi-ethnic Koreans in Korea

Hi everyone. As part of my ongoing work studying and writing about multiculturalism in Korea, I've created a pair of surveys. The data collected is anonymous, and it will be used in future work about multiculturalism in Korea.

Right now, I'm focusing on "multi-racial" or "multi-ethnic" Koreans -- people living in Korea who have one, but not two, Korean parents. I've looked before, and will be looking at other groups of various types of Korean heritage, at different times.

This is a survey for multi-ethnic people.
Do you have one parent who is Korean, but not two?
Do you live in Korea?
(Or did you live in Korea for a significant amount of time?)

Please take ten minutes to fill out this survey: it'll help me a lot. Or take 20 minutes and answer the optional questions, too.

If you have friends who are multi-ethnic Koreans who do, or have, lived in Korea, please send this link on to them as well. (Or if the embedded form below isn't working... click on this link) https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ZPKhckiFWboZ4e_6JsCY_MhCtEssokCZbpqbcX9W2Ys/viewform

Survey 1: Parents of Multicultural Korean Children

Hi everyone. As part of my ongoing work studying and writing about multiculturalism in Korea, I've created a pair of surveys. The data collected is anonymous, and it will be used in future work about multiculturalism in Korea.

Right now, I'm focusing on "multi-racial" or "multi-ethnic" Koreans -- people living in Korea who have one Korean parent, and one non-Korean parent. I've looked before, and will be looking at other groups of various types of Korean heritage, at different times.

This is a survey for the parents of multicultural children.
Do you have a kid?
Was one parent Korean, but not both?
Do you live in Korea? (Or did you live in Korea for a significant amount of time?)
Please take ten minutes to fill out this survey: it'll help me a lot.

All survey data is anonymous.

If you have friends who are parents of a multi-ethnic Korean kid, please send this link on to them as well. (Or if the embedded form below isn't working... click on this link)
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1OdSK4auIhKQUielCUicnD14CQh65AiLoMe18cMsaQEg/viewform

North Korea. Lankov. Royal Asiatic Society. YouTube. Wow.

This is just one of the best ideas I've come across, and I have to share it.

The Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch is a group I like a lot, whose events I wish I could attend more often.

Andrei Lankov is one of the North Korea experts whose word I respect the most.

YouTube is a place where you can watch videos for free.

If you put them together, you get this:
A Youtube lecture of Andrei Lankov on the topic "What does China Want with North Korea and What Can be Done About It?" --this is a fantastic topic that's intrigued me for a while. The lecture's a bit over an hour, so square away some free time to watch it, if you're interested in this topic. If the Royal Asiatic Society is going to do this more often, they might want to look into finding ways to improve the sound quality of the speaker's voice - it sounds like they're using the camera microphone, so there's a bit of ambient noise and the speaker's voice doesn't come across beautifully. However... I DO think it's a GREAT idea for the Royal Asiatic Society to put their lectures - or at least a few of their lectures - online.

Anyway... watch it! And maybe join the Royal Asiatic Society.

Racist MBC Video: Some Perspective and Marching Orders

Scroozle has posted a subtitled (translated) version of a video made by MBC, one of Korea's major broadcasting corporations, about "The Shocking Reality About Relationships With Foreigners."

The video is exploding on Facebook, and I dare not open my twitter stream...

I have a few thoughts about this piece, and a few ideas about how to respond effectively. I'll try to be as brief as I can.

But first...

Meet Babyseyo. I don't want him to grow up in a country that tells him his mother was a victim of his father.

1. Things are getting better.

As upset as we all are, things are getting better here in Korea, when it comes to this kind of race-baiting.

In 2005, SBS ran an episode of a show based on a controversial post at a website called "English Spectrum" (that post) (that episode)

And this happened. (Chosun Ilbo)

Immediately after the broadcast, the bulletin board on the program's website was flooded with over 1,000 furious posts. "I was so infuriated after the broadcast that I couldn't sleep," one read. "I'm frightened to send my children to an English academy," read another. "Foreign language institutes must do some soul-searching," said a user giving their name as Han Seon-yeong. "We must quickly deport all those low-quality foreign English teachers who try to pick up girls near Hongik University or Apgujeong." 

The extreme nature of some of the attacks has led to concerns for the safety of foreign residents in Korea. "After watching the broadcast, I began to look differently at the native English speaker who teaches in the elementary school where I work and the Korean English teacher who works in the same classroom," a user giving her name as Yun Eun-hwa said.

This time, when MBC does another hit piece, according to Busan Haps, "The video has spawned thousands of comments, overwhelmingly negative, against the broadcaster, with thousands of views and over 600 video shares in a matter of hours."

Comparing the release of photos from 2005's "Playboy Party," which inspired the Anti-English Spectrum, and for example, the appearance of the "See These Rocks" video, which got a week or so of coverage, maximum, and then kind of faded from memory as After School released a new video or something... things are getting a LOT better. Let's remember that, and be willing to mention that when we talk with people about this video.

When the awful awful Suwon rape/murder/dismemberment story was in the news, we got "Half of Foreigners Still Not Fingerprinted" (Chosun), but we also got "Don't Paint All Foreign Workers With Same Brush"

That said... a video like this is still bad, and wrong, and DOES merit a response, every time, until MBC and other outlets figure out that "Korea doesn't roll that way anymore."

Interestingly, a quick scan of headlines shows that the Chosun (the conservative paper) is more likely to  race-bait than the Hankyoreh, the most influential progressive paper.

Oh... and Scroozle mentions the 2018 Olympics, as in "Korea's on the global stage now... this kind of thing won't wash anymore" ... sorry to say it, but the 1988 Olympics were awarded to Seoul barely more than a year after Chun Doo-hwan had massacred hundreds and maybe thousands of democracy protesters in Gwangju, and a mere two years after Tiannanmen Square, the head of the IOC was encouraging China to put in a bid for the 2000 Olympic games that went to Sydney. As blind eyes go, the IOC clearly knows where their bread is buttered, and will cheerfully turn a blind eye to this, and secretly high-five each-other if this is the worst thing they have to ignore in the build-up to Pyeongchang 2018.

2. Let's not forget foreign men are not the only victim of this video...

Along with the old "Korea throwing Foreigners under the bus" thing, let's not forget, and let's be quite loud in voicing the other major problem with this video: the way it treats Korean women as if they are idiots with no self-agency, ripe and passive victims to the blue-eyed voodoo of white males. 

Because this video is just as much about women being easily duped and victimized, as it is about foreign men, and the idea that Korean women are helpless, faced with foreign men, is insulting to the intelligence and freedom of Korean women. It also has hints of possessiveness -- "they're OUR women..." which is also insulting and degrading to Korea's smart, dynamic, diverse, well-educated and self-determining females.

3. The ideal response (to this video)

There's a facebook group that appeared really suddenly, and has amassed over 4500 members as of this writing. They are talking about different ways foreigners could respond to this video. There aren't enough of us to make a boycott matter. E-visa holders run the risk of deportation if they protest something openly. Crashing MBC's website won't do much good in the long run.

So what IS needed?

Well, to begin with, it'd be awesome if there were a civic group in Korea, composed of expats and migrants, who basically acted as a watchdog for stuff like this. An anti-defamation league of language-savvy expats keeping an eye on media in general, publicizing cases, and making sure that racism in Korean media doesn't pass unchecked. But that doesn't exist yet.

I think the most powerful response to a video like this would be another video. A video that reminds MBC of the impact of spreading hateful messages. A video of long-term expats who speak Korean. Or who have families: multicultural families with kids who are Korean citizens, who attend Korean schools, who speak Korean, who have Korean grandmothers and grandfathers who adore them. Speaking to a MBC, and the rest, in Korean, saying, "Don't tell Koreans my father has HIV. Don't tell Koreans my mother is probably a criminal. Don't tell Koreans my wife is a victim. I CHOSE to marry my foreign wife. I CHOSE to marry my foreign husband, because we love each other. Pretending foreigners are all criminals hurts Korean families. It hurts your kid's teacher. It hurts the fathers and mothers of Korea's next generation. It teaches children to hate people, and hate hurts Korea."

Cue slideshow of cute biracial kids playing with their fathers, mothers, and grandparents.

It wouldn't take that much to put together such a video: the cooperation of a handful of multicultural families, a photo editor, a video editor, and someone who's bilingual and has a nice narrator's voice. That's it. If you're interested in being one of those people, e-mail me.

3.1 The ideal long-term response

The long-term response has to be two-pronged, because there are two main ways Koreans decide what they think about foreigners: the foreigners they hear about from politicians or TV shows (the macro level), and the foreigners they meet (the micro level).

I've written about expat marching orders before, btw.

3.1.1 At the macro-level (policy, laws, and media representations), here's what we need:

A. A group of expats, migrants and sympathetic Koreans who...

B. form an "anti-defamation league" or something like it, that... 

C. watches, and responds, to things like this. Every time. And... 

D. sends out press releases and communications in Korean,...

E. builds ongoing connections and relationships with the bureaucrats and politicians making policy choices about Korea's expat populations...

E. informs the expat community (in their languages) about what's going on, and...

F. perhaps also stages events or...

G. produces materials (classroom lessons, instructional videos, awareness PSAs) that...

H. raise awareness that expats in Korea have a voice, and are stakeholders in Korea, too.

It would be good if some members or allies of this group were long-term, well-connected expats. People who have published books about Korea, or who have sat across from government ministers or top policy makers to talk about these things.

If there were enough, nobody would have to carry the main part of the work load. And when the group is starting out, it wouldn't have to perform ALL those tasks: some would be for a future time when the group is better established. 

It would be good if this group were connected with the embassies of the various countries that send expats and migrants to Korea.

It is CRUCIAL that this group comprise members from EVERY country that sends a lot of expats to Korea. Canada, USA, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand? Yeah sure. Also Vietnam, Cambodia, Singapore, China, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. First world expats often forget our migrant/expat status makes gives us more in common with citizens of these other countries than we realize. Our voices are stronger if we're unified.

These kinds of organizations and movements will probably have to be organized and powered by long-term Korea residents: people with families here, for whom it's WORTH fighting the good fight. People with the language skill to complain in the language of the land, so it gets heard. Short-term residents will, I'm sure, be welcome to lend their energy to this kind of cause, but the stability needed to build the kinds of relationships that will lead to an expat anti-defamation league having a legitimate voice will be provided by long-termers.

3.1.2 At the micro level:

There have been other times I've written long lists of things that are good to do, or things that are bad to do, and ways to avoid alienating potential Korean friends (who are also potential allies). 

So have others. (best one by Paul Ajosshi: "Don't be a wanker")

Also: a quick reminder, especially for non-Asian males: NEVER talk about Korean women to a journalist. They won't necessarily identify themselves as a journalist, if crap as shady as this video gets made (it looks like they were holding the camera at their side, perhaps pretending it wasn't on, when interviewing a few of these people), so watch for hidden cameras and intrusive questions, and remember: in Korea, it's OK to do all kinds of fun stuff, as long as you don't talk about it.

So for now, I'll encourage you to check links, and just say again, that we're all ambassadors, wherever we go. For our home countries, and for the idea of multiculturalism and change in Korea in general. Just, kinda, remember that, maybe?

4. Who are our allies?

We have tons of potential allies, and the sooner we can get organized enough to start reaching out to these different groups, the better off it will be for us.

Among our potential allies:

Parents of english students.

Hogwan owners.

Members of the conservative party who are advocating for multiculturalism and globalization - multiculturalism policy is part of LMB's big plan for "Korea Branding."

Non-first-world expats and migrants living in Korea

The progressives who are arguing the social welfare and social support side of the multiculturalism issue, in terms of marriage migrants.

The ministry of gender equality and family (both on the scapegoating Korean women side, and the multicultural families side)

Chambers of Commerce from countries trying to run or establish foreign owned companies in Korea, or trying to employ foreign experts and professionals in Korea

The Canadian, American, South African, Australian, New Zealand, British, Irish, Indonesian, Philippine, Thai, Cambodian, Chinese, and Vietnamese embassies (all countries that send expats to Korea, and have to deal with expats who end up in bad situations because of racist acts or laws)

The National Human Rights Commission of Korea.

And more, I'm sure.

In closing

My views on Korea's expat community have changed over the years. I'm not as optimistic as I was before I joined ATEK, and before ATEK crapped the bed. 

We're a fractious and diffuse community, in a lot of ways, and too many of us are transient. I've written about expat community here, and here: I stand by most of my points in these two community self-assessment-ish posts.  The first one.  The second one.

But it doesn't take THAT many people to form an anti-defamation league, if the right skills (language, writing) are present. And if such a group turned out to have the moral support of tens of thousands of first and second-world migrant workers... that'd be a pretty powerful thing. And a useful thing. And a thing Korea needs, if Korea is to continue down the same road towards being an increasingly diverse society.

So why has posting been so sparse, Roboseyo? A SURVEY!

Hi, readers.

This is the first of a handful of surveys I’ll be running for research papers this semester.


If you’ve been wondering why my blog has been light on posting lately, this is part of it.

We’re studying Korean identity and multiculturalism, and looking for responses from people who have Korean ethnic background (a little or a lot), who have lived overseas, who were born overseas, who were adopted overseas… and who then had the experience of returning to Korea.

If that includes you, please do the survey! If it doesn’t, share it, and hang on: there’ll be more coming.

Slideshow of Panels at Olympic Museum in Olympic Park, Jamsil, Seoul

Academic writing is way different than blogging, readers. It's like the difference between building something out of clay, and carving blocks out of wood in order to build it.

Here's a slideshow of the pictures I took of the text panels at the Olympic Museum, in Olympic Park, Jamsil. As I've mentioned, I'm writing about representation in the Olympic games, and how a country tells the story of an event... this makes these kinds of text panels very interesting to me.

In Studying the '88 Olympics

a few things I've learned that might not make it into the papers, but were interesting to learn nonetheless.

from "The Games Within The Games" by Vincent J Ricquart (Hantong Books 1988)

1. The Olympic Museum in Jamsil is an awesome encapsulation of the Olympic narrative as told by the Korean government, and that narrative is followed by people who have talked with me about the Olympics with surprising consistency.

2. Before the '88 Olympics, South Korea didn't have diplomatic relations with many socialist countries.  After the Olympics many of those countries established diplomatic relations with Seoul.  That they committed to attending may or may not have been because Seoul was at least engaged in talks with Pyongyang about holding some events in the North, though that didn't pan out.

It didn't pan out because North Korea was being over-demanding, intransigent, and arrogant.  They wanted to host either the opening or closing ceremonies (pretty damn big deal) and started building a stadium before having confirmed shared hosting duties. NK also assumed the North Korean team soccer would be granted an automatic berth in the Olympic tournament, as a host country, so didn't even bother to send their team to a qualifying tournament in (I think it was) Malaysia. FIFA, miffed at the arrogance, disqualified them from the Olympics.

Ever since the humiliation of that disqualification, North Korea has been a humbled state, and has engaged in international discussions with much less pride, willing to be flexible, and compromise.  It's been impressive to see them back off from that off-putting, screeching brinksmanship they used to do.

(source)

(source)

3. My own thoughts, in regards to the "'88 Olympics made Seoul an advanced nation" meme:

IF we accept the eurocentric model of "development into an advanced nation" and the eurocentric definition of what an "advanced nation" is... (after all, the IOC and FIFA and the like are western institutions - it's no surprise they use Western criteria to determine which nations are "advanced" and award them hosting rights)

Landing an event like this DOES require a certain level of achievement/skill in two main areas: infrastructure development (to build facilities and handle logistics) and diplomacy (to 'sell' my country to the committees that choose the next host).  That's all that hosting rights proves for SURE about a country.

But my own analogy is this:

Hosting the olympics for a developing country is like an adolescent buying a car with his/her own money. It doesn't CAUSE them to become an adult, and it doesn't automatically make them an adult, nor is it a prerequisite: another kid who never buys their own car isn't thereby disqualified from becoming an adult...

The official Olympic poster: 

but it certainly can be a powerful sign of a kid's intentions to act, and probably also desire to be treated like an adult, and it makes a strong statement of that to everyone around.  Sure, uncle Vernon might grumble that little Annie's not mature enough to own a car, and there might be a family discussion about Annie's shortcomings along the way (just as people grumbled about Korea's dictatorial political culture, and street protests, and North Korea stuff, just like they grumbled about Tibet and political prisoners in 2008), and young Annie might wrap the thing around a telephone pole... but the way she pays for, maintains, and uses her car might also be a way for all the adults around her to note, and recognize, that she's an adult, and for some adults, and many of Annie's peers, and maybe for Annie herself, that'll be a sure sign she's crossed the threshhold.

If you want to learn, literally EVERYTHING about the '88 games, you can go here, and download the two-volume, 1500+ page official report written by the Korean Olympic Organizing Committee, in .pdf form. Pictures in this post are screenshots taken from the .pdf.

I like these versions of "Hodori" the Seoul Olympic mascot.

Korea did an interesting job of presenting itself as a modern, developing, and also ancient culture, all at the same time, during the Olympics.


The Olympics have had a pretty troubled history of scandals, boycotts, tragedies, dumb moves, more scandals, and the like... but the fact that countries on both sides of the Cold War attended the Seoul Games (only Cuba, Ethiopia, and North Korea boycotted) might have been the beginning of the era we now experience, where Olympic attendance is pretty much taken as a given.

It used to be that who hosts the olympics was the stage for national rivalries (hence the cold war boycotts) but now, it seems that rather than hosting and boycotting the olympics, the main arena for international competition and bragging comes from who wins the most medals.  At least that's how it looks from here.

Performing Nation-ness... Google Scholar Brings It!

So... with my grad school courses, I have access to all kinds of badass academic databases like EbscoHost (which generally rocks) and Jstor and whatnot... they don't quite pool EVERY journal and article, but they cover most of the bases between them, and the journal stuff is fun. You know: for nerds like me.

Well... the topic I'd like to write on for one of my classes is this:

During mega-events like the Olympics or the FIFA World Cup, host nations get a huge stage on which to present their cultures.  That's all well and good... but especially when those countries aren't part of the commonly accepted "West" (and sometimes even then), such events are also seen as opportunities for those countries to demonstrate that they're a "major player" and to prove their nation's level of "advancement" (whatever that means) -- think about how Beijing used the Olympics as much as a showcase of "rising China" as it was a showcase for athletes and sports and stuff.  Part of Seoul 1988 was the Seoul "Look How Far We've Come" Olympics, and such a practice goes all the way back to Mexico (1968) (where folks were trying to get Mexicans to behave to "international standards" as well "Teaching Mexicans How To Behave: Public Education on the Eve of the Olympics").

Add to that the way sports are a GREAT arena to generate nationalist feeling, and to put together nationalist stories, and a country hosting a big event like the olympics is in a unique situation where the leaders/event organizers can work on changing the behavior of their citizens in order to meet "international standards" -- I'm working on digging up material about China's attempts to curb "rude" behaviors during the Beijing olympics, so as not to offend international guests, and I'd like to talk about Korea's own attempts to "meet international standards" (whatever that means, and whatever those are), in order to put Korea's best foot forward to the world, in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and the 2002 Korea/Japan world cup. I think it's interesting that part of creating one's own national story can (in the case of such a mega-event) be a kind of performance for an imagined audience (not all of it was, but part of it was)... and that the performance of one's own culture can, at the same time, change one's own culture.

For my paper, one of the articles I really wanted to look up was titled "Performing Nation-ness in South Korea During the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup"... for obvious reasons.

But Ebscohost didn't have the full text available.  Crap.

...but Google Scholar did!  I never expected in a decade that Google Scholar would have, for free, something the very extensive (and expensive, university sponsored) database didn't have.

So... cool.  And you can read it yourself here.

And these are the things that make me excited these days.  Also, the dog farted yesterday. It was funny.

The comments are open. You're free to call me a nerd.

Or even better, if you have links to Korean editorials, video clips of PSA's about "representing Korea to the world" during the 2002 World Cup or 1988 Olympics, or buzzwords, key phrases or slogans that'll bring them up for me while I search, you know, you can tell me about them, too.  I'll find them on my own if you don't, but if you have that stuff at your fingertips/in your memory anyway... cool.

Been taking things too seriously lately.

But I finished midterms today!  Wrote three huge pages, double-sided, on modernity, theoretical discussions of construction of history, narrative methods, sources of meaning, and various human interactions with dominant and peripheral cultures.

Hella fun.

My favorite articles from the first half of the semester:
Stephen Tambiah Transnationalism, Diaspora and Multiple Modernities (subscription needed to access the full articles. sorry) -- summary: though we think of diasporic communities as moving to the "developed" world and becoming assimilated, often that is not the case.  Diasporic communities find really interesting ways to connect with their homelands, with each other, with their host cultures, and with other diasporic communities, in ways that can redraw their new home landscapes.  Their flows of affinity, connection, and resources can also greatly benefit the home land, as community members abroad use their new talents connections and resources to help preserve the way of life of those who remained in their ancestral homes.  Modernity does not take the shapes we expect it to.

Isn't this a Korea blog?  Tie it in, Roboseyo!
The disaporic communities of Koreans around the world add an interesting dimension to Korea here, in the "center" of Korean culture: the worldwide network provides an interesting variety of relations with the home culture, and each inform and add life to each other.

Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everday Life -- Though dominant cultural forces are indeed impressing their will on populations and cultures outside of the main power/influence centers, those "receiving" cultures do not find themselves disenfranchised, or with their cultures suddenly co-opted, subverted, or vanished.  Rather, the technologies ideas, etc. of the dominant cultures and power centers are taken into the local cultural matrices in unique ways, and are adapted to the ways of life already practiced by people.

Isn't this a Korea blog?  Tie it in, Roboseyo!

Korean Culture Is Not Disappearing.  It's taking new forms, and it's re-forming the cultural elements that come to it, in order to fit them into the systems and ways Koreans already live.

Wheee!

Somebody must be studying for midterms...

'cause he keeps posting random weird stuff on his blog.



Seriously, though, it's intellectually dishonest of many Korean scholars reinterpret their colonial history through the false binaries of (Japanese) exploitation/ (Korean attempts at) development, Japan/Korea, Imperialist repression/Nationalist modernization.  The hegemonic strategies Japan deployed were not monolithic, but nuanced, changing over time, and a complex mix of different cultural forces, interactions, and negotiations, while Korean responses to colonization were likewise.