A Pageant of the Vanities: Korean Studies Understood As Radical Epistemology

OK. Before we even get started using all kinds of fancy language and four-dollar words, I should do what most academics like to do and define terms. As in, what the Sam Hell is "epistemology"? One might wonder why I continue to use possibly scary and off-putting big words. Yet, if one of the points of reading is to learn new things, encountering a new word/concept doesn't have to be an intimidating experience. Especially if the writer doesn't act like a horse's ass and lord his or her upper hand in knowlegdge over the reader in some irritating, ongoing game of "nyah-nyah-nannie-nannie-boo-boo, I know more words than you doooo" intellectual stunting. But then again, this is the age of the Internet, of rolling down the "Internet superhighway" with ease and style, with supercomputers in our pockets, so we can easily look up unfamiliar terms. Wikipedia and DIctionary.com are friends here. I, as a writer trying to show you something new, have a responsibility to bring you up to speed naturally and comfortably, and as a teacher, should be judged by my ability to have the reader keep up with me, as long as that dear reader is meeting the writer halfway and putting some proverbial elbow grease into the reading. 

So I should explain simply by simply explaining that an "epistemology" can be thought of as a study or a close look at the way we know things. In other words, how do we know what we know? Yes, there are other, more specific ways the concept is used, such as a field or area of study in looking closely at the way knowledge is created. But here, it's enough to think about "epistemology" as a consideration of how we produce knowledge such as is found in approaches to understanding human nature -- do we look at biology or neurology, psychology or psychoanalytic models of personality? Rational considerations of logic and philosophy? Religion? The approach to answering the question affects the kind of answer we are going to get. Freud, the famous psychiatrist, came up with a markedly different answer than the Christian philosopher/theologian St. Augustine. Indeed, if you have marital problems, your pastor is going to give you totally different advice than your therapist will. It all boils down to the knowledge base you use to approach the problem. Indeed, as psychologist Abraham Maslov famously quipped, "It is tempting, if the only tool one has is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail." A hardened, career military man might tend to approach administrative control in an organization as a matter of control, disciplining and punishing; an educator might tend to think of the task of management as one of educating members to an adequate level of competence while providing assessments along the way. 

If all this is relatively clear so far, I would like to propose cut to the chase now by proposing that a look at Korea (Korean Studies) might be not just a mere area of study, but a way of knowing -- an epistemology -- in itself. And what are we trying to know, pray tell? I would humbly like to suggest that it has to do with the same reason we look at cases in history or sociology or even great literature.  We are trying to peer into a universal truth of human existence, to identify some truism that we can take with us to other places in our part of the human experience. And at times, this greater utility is obvious. The lesson of Hitler and the Holocaust is not one for just the German people or the Jews. To be sure, the poignancy, pain, and particular pertinence of the Holocaust is extra relevant to German nationals and members of the Jewish diaspora. But the history of the Holocaust is powerful to all of humanity because of the tough questions the existence of the Nazis pose to us all: What is the nature of Modernity? What does "Progress" even mean? And one of the best, taken straight from the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which asks the key question we should be asking more often: "Just because we can do a thing does it mean we must do that thing?" It might seem a bit trite put this way, but only because the question has become so seemingly obvious and necessary to consider since the Holocaust thrust just such modes of questioning into our species' consciousness. The question becomes most acutely felt when considering another legacy of humanity's most modern, brutal war, the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. 

But I digress. I think, dear reader, you get my point. A look at history often yields more than just an accounting of events for the specific interests of relevant or affected groups. The pained, existential questioning of the futility of it all is beautifully described in a sonnet that transcends time and individual circumstances:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?  

In short,

Should I just give up?
Is all this struggle worth it? Cuz life sucks.
But maybe I should push on through to the end
and quite possibly prevail?

This is a universal mental struggle. And why Shakespeare is important outside of just being a part of the development of the English language or the development of entires modes of drama. He's asking important, universal questions through the lenses of specific experience. Again, this is why not just Germans study the rise of Hitler and it's not just the English who read Shakespeare's plays. It is through the study of certain kinds of specific experience that we can walk away with universally useful lessons and insights.

Yes, I am slowly getting to Korea here, and the reason you're reading this book, along with the reason why you will hopefully recommend it to a good friend after you do. I am going to tell you why you and yours should be interested in the case of Korea; why you should find this geographically and culturally far-flung society society deeply and grandly fascinating a case and place to consider; why you should care about the way things go in Korean society. 

Put simply and succinctly, Korea is the future; it is the future of us all, as a race of beings, a species already hellbent and careening out of a particular gate of culture and with tendencies as specific as a particular vector as we hurtle in a set direction through historical space. We've already been shot out of the proverbial and figurative cannon -- we're flying. Korea, as a confluence of different human, historical currents of Industrialization, Urbanization, Mechanization, and a resultant Modernity, is a unique petri dish in which we can watch certain key elements of hypermodern culture, such as an unimaginably fast, ever-accessible, Internet that has produced new forms of media that the fractured and impure, hybridity-filled, postcolonial Korean culture on rapid development steroids adapted to without blinking an eye, which is why a society that didn't have running hot water in most public buildings even by 1980 dropped "Gangnam Style" on the world only 32 years later. The point here is that in 1994, Koreans didn't even know what the Internet was; five years later, Korean teens were destroying the world's competition in Starcraft with the aid of the fastest broadband Internet connections on Planet Earth. And that just makes sense in Korea. In 1953, the poorest, most hopeless country in the world, with the lowest GDP. A little more than half a century later,  it has become the society that is lleading the world into hypermodernity. Korea has taken mass consumption, along with the idea that identity itself can and should be found through consumptive acts and choices, and run with it to a point that has left even the West -- ground zero for Modernity -- in the dust and scratching its collective head. A virtual world of digital avatars, plastic surgery that is damn near as fast, easy, and exact as Photoshop,  a digital democracy, along with the tyranny of the virtual mob. Still, what you will see from the Korean example is the fact that, like most things here in South Korea, it isn't that these issues are categorically unique to Korea; it's a matter of scale and sheer intensity. There is almost no social issue or problem in Korea that no other country has; it's just that Korea has it in spades; whatever it is somewhere else, in Korea, it's on steroids -- it's hulked out. 

As we delve deeper into the society and culture, pausing along the way to pick up some critical, crucial theory, all this will become clearer -- and even more interesting. And I would like to do it while looking at new media, popular culture, and the approach of Cultural Studies while avoiding the usual suspect subjects of K-Pop and hallyu (the "Korean Wave") as much as possible.

eWe are going to first take a look at how to look at culture before getting to a tool with which to break down any cultural product -- a cultural text -- into it's constituent, itty-bitty parts for our close inspection. Then we are going to look at what those cultural texts say or symbolize about things going on in Korean society before we get right into the deep heart of some of the inner workings of things Korean and then consider what all this means as a preview of Things to Come. 

In the end, this is an unblinking, unflinching, and therefore possibly stinging critique of Korean society, but only because the exercise is inherently worth it. 

The "Urban Landscapes" of Seoul and the Ethnographic Practice of Street Fashion Photography

“urban landscape”

"Landscape": 

A cultural landscape, as defined by the World Heritage Committee, is the "cultural properties [that] represent the combined works of nature and of man."[1]

"a landscape designed and created intentionally by man"
an "organically evolved landscape" which may be a "relict (or fossil) landscape" or a "continuing landscape"
an "associative cultural landscape" which may be valued because of the "religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element."

There are two main meanings for the word landscape: it can refer to the visible features of an area of land, or to an example of the genre of painting that depicts such an area of land.[1] Landscape, in both senses, includes the physical elements of landforms such as (ice-capped) mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions.

By repurposing the concept “cultural landscape”, I propose a new direction, one partially (and minimally) explored by the century-old practice of street and the much younger genre of street fashion photography, in which physical landscapes are affected by their human geographies in a direct way, whether commercially through consumption (“ladification” in Seoul), governmentally through zoning or other kinds of use restrictions, or traditional/customary patterns in land/building usage or cultural practices within certain spaces. 

What i hope to do is demonstrate how fashion plays a discursive role in the consumptive sense in certain neighbourhoods in seoul, partially by using street fashion photography as part of an ethnographic profiling of certain neighbourhoods that have become greatly marked by processes of uniquely Seoulish “ladification” and how specific fashions become markers of certain kinds of people who are themselves representative consumers of certain cultures of seoul.

This is part of my bigger “Cultural Geographies of Seoul” project that I’m planning to launch with my Visual Sociology students from this semester, with outstanding final term ethnographic profiling assignments acting as some of its first studies. 

Some preliminary thoughts/field notes from a photographic perspective, from my body of around 15 years of street photography and 12 years of street fashion photography work in Seoul:

Shinchon:

Myeongdong:

Within the neighborhood known as Myeongdong, it is easy to see the tension that the many street itinerants within this space feel as the (sole?) players culturally contesting both its use and its inhabitants. As even a single visit to the space shows, Myeongdong, as an area full of shops catering to its primarily female clientele, is one of open and conspicuous consumption, and has become the very symbol of that deadly sin and vice to the many itinerants of faith who come to not just proseyletize there, but to conspicuously condemn and exhort what they see as a place of unabashed sin, especially in its perception as a place of heavily gendered sin, i.e. the unfettered consumptive, concupiscent desires of young women on parade . Consumption is the main mode here, and young female consumers its prophets. 

Towards a methodology:

Quantitative parameters: As much as possible, there should be an image of every type of representative social character (preferably recorded in the style of the environmental portrait, which is as much as record of the subject's relationship to the environment as it is of the subject him or herself, and the relationship between the surveyer  and the surveyed. A good environmental portrait makes a statement about these aspects and relationships. In addition to examples of social types, there should also be clear examples of the kind of social practices that define the area in the city, likely done in the candid genre of street photography. This sets the bar quite high in terms of the sheer amount of physical, in-person ethnographic engagement required of the researcher/photographer, and is both a visual proof-of-life as participant-observer, as well as a source of ethnographic data itself, as each picture is the result of social interaction, by definition. To truly document a neighborhood in all its conceivable parameters, there would likely be at least three to dozens of photohgraphs if experience is any guide. 

Qualitative parameters: The "write-up", being based on the restrictions of the photographic typology of social characters and social types, still begs extensive textual explanation. One might explain, first of all, how/why certain social type were identified, while providing written explanations of some off the elements in the visual texts, explications of social interactions with and between human subjects in the pictures, as well as variations/multiplicity of social characters and practices that may differ enough that additional explication is needed. Additionally, the photographs themselves can provide non-verbal, direct explication of what a given urban landscape is really, socially like, in terms of the way is peopled, which is why photographs are important at all as visual data, as they can provide a direct experience of places -- its social valence -- in a way that verbiage is often inadequate to express, which has defined an ongoing epistemological problem ever since the written word, especially as it finds expression in the highly stylized, academic form that inevitably privileges a very narrow, positivistic way of conveying social knowledge. 

The overall empirical logic: All qualitative, ethnographic research is inherently inductive and is but a small picture, a snapshot that is argued to be representative of a greater, whole reality. The analogue of street photography images in standard ethnographic practice is that of an ethnographer standing on a street corner counting the number of people sporting short haircuts from a significant distance. The traditional methodological analogue of a street fashion portrait in this new approach would be that of an ethnographer stopping each short haircut-sporting subject and asking them how they feel about their haircut and their motivations for getting it. This is the fine grain view, since there is significant social interaction involved to get to the taking of a street fashion portrait. By utilizing inter-dependent, multimedia and multi-modal angles of empirical inquiry that, taken in the aggregate, adequately conveys a complete,  compelling, and consilient social picture of the subject/s being studied, which also utilizes different levels of interaction between the investigator and complete strangers, the overall effect can be that of a great deal of coherence between the various approaches and interactional techniques that result in a level of epistemological consilience, ethnographic coherence, and overall compellingness that is rare to find in the social sciences. 

The "urban landscape" approach, broken down:

• a mix of the two most visceral, compelling, and data-rich forms of photography ethnographers can use: street photography and environmental portraiture
• overlapping, reinforcing streams of interaction -- photography, interviews, and some degree of quantitative analysis 

An example of place data gleaned from two environmental portraits taken at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul:

Data Analysis: In the two pictures above, one of a college-age young woman who felt comefortable not only smoking in public, but being photographed and published doing so -- a pretty significant social taboo only a decade ago in Korea -- and the other of a 17year-old high-school girl sporting a backwards checkered shirt in a way (inspired by the Korean media star Kim Na-young) that reveals not only a significant amount of bare shoulder, but a bare back and bra strap, reveal a great deal of social bravery for violating a taboo for young girls her age in public places. Aside from the fact that the checkered-shirt girl is almost certainly required to adhere to strict dress norms during the day (in her school uniform), for a girl her age, this attire would certainly be be deemed too risqué by anyone of authority whom she personally knows. However, both young women feel comfortable pushing the envelope of acceptability in the transiently wildly open space of Seoul Fashion Week (SFW) that takes place twice a year (in March and October) inside or in the immediate environs of the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP), which is also known as an area of relative sartorial and hence social freedom. What is significant from interviewing the "I'm Ladies" subject is the fact that she not only feels safe smoking in public immediately in the SFW/DDP area itself, but that she feels safe about her photo being taken and even published by me, the photographer. The same can be said for the backwards shirt-wearing girl, but whose sartorial precociousness itself being somewhat socially unusual should mean that her willingness to pose should perhaps not be too surprising, but it also helps define the FSW/DDP space as indeed one worthy of the "fashion district" moniker supported by the municipal government. Both young women are typical of the kind of social/sartorial bravery that is typically displayed in the area, for quite some time. 

The young lady in the pictures from 2008 is standing across the street from the finished structure in which the two women in the first pictures find themselves either in front of or inside, respectively, but the more open sartorial/social nature of the space became apparent to me more than a decade ago, as one of the first places I ever saw a Korean woman openly and proudly sporting a tattoo, which was much more of a social taboo then than it is today. 

Why Street Fashion Is Sociologically Important

An article you should take a look at and an idea worthy of your intellectual consideration:

Fashion and the ways people dress are not only decided by the weather: because there are clothes you must wear and others that you just cannot appear in public anymore with, these seemingly individual decisions are in fact some truly social facts, as Émile Durkheim would probably have said. Moreover, the studying of fashion as a social phenomenon that influences the clothes we decide to buy, wear, and even be proud of (at least for some time) is possibly one of the easiest examples of what sociology is all about; with, in the case of fashion, numerous references to culture, norms, representations, consumption, social roles and models. Whenever a social scientist has to explain to any newcomer or non-sociologist the basics and purpose of the sociological science as a discipline, the understanding of fashion movements should be among the first examples that come to mind. Being ‘fashionable’ or, on the contrary, ‘out-of-fashion’ are the immediate consequences of judgments that are determined and limited by the cultural norms to which one belongs, at a given moment. Hence, whenever some people look at photographs of their youth, they are often ashamed of their previous looks and clothes even though they thought then they were absolutely à la mode.

http://soc.sagepub.com/content/47/2/407.short

"Appearance Stratification and Identity: Fashion as the Clearest Example of What Sociology is All About" (Yves Laberge 2013 47: 407 Sociology)

"Passing Through: Existential Authenticity in the Korean Street Fashion Practices of Chinese Tourists"

Three Korean nationals wear the (now trendy) hanbok in Insadong, Seoul, which is a prime "arena of the authentic" in Korea, where the hanbok has long been a semiotic marker for Korean Tradition. In a Society of the Spectacle, even the Traditional has become just another referent in a sea of symbols that have become equivocated into meaninglessness, and just another element to be recycled into the relentless, all-consuming maw of the Trend Machine.

Ning Wang (1999) provides a lot of the theoretical undergirding for this paper in his explication of what he calls "existential authenticity" in tourism studies. In observing and interacting with young subjects as a street photographer in Seoul, I have increasingly come into contact with seemingly Korean subjects around popular tourist sites who turn out to be Chinese nationals who  are merely in Korean dress.

Unlike traditional Chinese tourists who seem content to sightsee the city of Seoul as a site of many toured objects, there is a sizeable number of tourists from China who actively engage in the much more participatory act of finding trendy Korean clothing, wearing them, and experiencing Korea as an apparent Korean. The act of passing -- no matter how superficially -- as a Korean seems to add quite a bit of existential authenticity to the tourism experience in Korea. Initial conversations with several subjects has yielded the existence of an industry  dedicated to providing Chinese tourists with this experience of passing through Korea as a Korean. 

Wang, N. (1999). "RETHINKING AUTHENTICITY IN TOURISM EXPERIENCE." Annals of Tourism Research 26(2): 349-370.

Background to the Study, from a Stunning Realization

I initially stumbled across the phenomenon of Chinese tourists “passing” as Korean locals as a street photographer shooting a story for the Huffington Post’s Style section, a story on the styles of the 2015 summer focusing on Ewha Women’s University in Seoul as a representative site of young female sartorial consumption. As an investigator and photographer, my goal was to identify the most common (frequently occurring) and representative examples of Korean summer 2015 fashions of the Seoul streets for the story. With my team of assistants/intern/students, we selected a young woman in an American football jersey dress who seemed the absolute epitome of that style of the time. 

However, I was surprised to learn from our short interaction in Korean that not only was she a Chinese national but that she was on a short trip for shopping, and was wearing the dress, shoes, and other items she had bought on the very trip she was on. It was, however, our very next subject, who brought about the moment of realization that was the impetus for the writing of the present article. 

On the same day and search for photographic subjects, we encountered two seemingly Korean young women dressed in matching trend items of the day, two sports jersey-style tops and a mass market approximation of the homemade “Daisy Duke” extremely short pants, made in the style of jean pants cut into shortsso short that the pockets extend below the home-hewn hemline, or alternatively, rolled up that short.

From "Existential" to "Performative" Authenticity

And upgrade from "existential authenticity" -- "performative authenticity": an integrated notion that draws heavily on Judith Butler’s notion of identity performance, and Bourdieu’s field theory and habitus, and conveys the “transposition of objective structures of the field into subjective practice of the individuals.”(Zhu)

This Is Where It Gets Queer

This is where I take a sharp departure into the seemingly unusual theoretical toolbox of psychology and what is now called queer studies. Important to the notion of “performative authenticity” is where the performance of particular acts imbued with identity-relevant symbolic meaning are the points through which individuals can reach — and actively maintain — a state of “existential authenticity”. It must be achieved and maintained through performative acts. In this sense, I argue that there is a hugely useful theoretical parallel between male-to-female transvestism and cosplay. 

Magnus Hirschfeld is the legendary physician/sexologistwho was a “key player in the development of taxonomies of sexual identities and who coined the terms “transvestite” and “transsexual.” This is where Hirschfeld’s data becomes useful as a parallel case of “performative authenticity”, where queer theory can combine with Butlerian critical theory and lead us to some useful insights regarding the question of dress and the performance of imagined identities. In this sense, the cases aren’t all that different (Chinese or even modern Koreans wearing a hanbok, cosplay, and transvestism) and stand in a relationship of useful parallel. So, it's time to talk about sex -- very queer sex -- as a performative act that defines a state of being.

This is where we get to the meat of the matter. Prior to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, Freudian psychology was too focused on "fetish" as the way of explaining (largely male) crossdressing; it was supposedly an act related to the sexual excitement had in response to an object that itself was imbibed with special sexual meaning due to its symbolic associations with the person it represented (often a mother, lover, or other object of sublimated sexual desire). But Hirschfeld had a different insight. He held that his largely "heterosexual" male interviewees didn't express symbolic, fetishistic desire to touch, wear, or masturbate upon certain physical objects (which were usually items of women's clothing), but they were actually objects that enabled fleeting yet intense moments of being women. Importantly, these were usually "women" in some idealized, fantasy form (an innocent child, prostitute, or respectable Lady) and often such women as engaged in fantastical moments of extreme being female in the context of hypersexualized, often pornographic notions of femininity, such as being forced into prostitution or being raped. Besides these fleeting instants of femininity, most men describing such sexually motivated feelings of authenticity as women emphasize their extreme distaste (or disgust at) for the idea of having sex with a man as a man. It is apparent that the pleasure in sexual congress comes from the pleasure in achieving authenticity as a woman through the performance of womanness as defined through clothing, as opposed to the sexual acts themselves.  

If the achievement of authenticity and the pleasure in passing is not something that is easy to maintain as a passive, static state, but is instead something that requires continuous effort though the constant performance of meaningful acts that actively define that existential state of being is something that nominally heterosexual male crossdressers do through clothing, the parallel to another situation in which sartorial practices define the achievement and maintenance of a state of pleasurable passing as defined through performativity -- Chinese tourists in Korea passing as Korean -- becomes clear. My own ethnographic interactions and interviews suggest this is a  major factor in why and how Chinese tourists come to Korea. 

Itaewon, Christmas Eve. I spy a trifecta of trendy Korean fashion items from the cab and my amazingly speedy and persuasive assistant Teenie is on the ground in an instant, and has them in a verbal headlock enough for me to swoop in with the camera and start shooting. But little did we know that the pair was a couple of Chinese tourists, and since TEENIE is from Hong Kong, well, everything fell into place from there. They initiated that "everybody" does like they do, which is hit the Korean streets shopping for clothes, put them on, then start touring kora AS Korean people.

Koreans, Tradition, and Arenas of the Authentic

It occurs to me that not only is there a well-defined notion of the Authentic in korean contemporary culture -- usually defined as things associated with a constructed notion of "Tradition" in Korea and with their many sartorial, fetish markers -- but there are actual arenas of the Authentic. These are geographic areas in Korea that are metonyms of the Traditional, such as Gyeongbuk Palace in Seoul. It is my argument that this explains the recent huge uptick in the sartorial practice of wearing hanbok in the vicinity of as well as inside traditional structures. In a tourist economy in which where natives and tourists are both engaged in a struggle to achieve a pleasure in performing an imagines Authentic (whether that be defined as a mere Korean or more ideally, a Traditional Korean), this points to a multi-layered kind of phenomenon involving objectivist notions of the authentic articulated somewhat separately from the concerns of the constructivist/existentialist notions of the authentic. But what about when the “arenas of authenticity" are increasingly occupied by natives engaging in the same performative practices as the tourists? It would be unusual to see this unless there were two levels of authenticity here, no?

Two Chinese tourists "perform" Korean Tradition in the ultimate arena of Authenticity, the souvenir shop. 

Two Korean visitors to the Gyeongbok Palace "perform" Korean Tradition in the ultimate arena of Authenticity, the “souvenir shop” of national tourist sites. 

In the midst of a “culture industry”-dominated society that has succeeded in commodifying culture as a major part of the economy, it makes sense that the natives take pleasure in consuming it, although the nature of the performative authenticity — the basis of authenticity itself — may be vastly different. But the forms of performing authenticity look largely the same, as do the end goals of achieving a state of existential authenticity. This is where what is now called “queer” identity, tourism studies, and visual sociology can come together …especially when these young women,from inside and outside Korea, are engaging in the same performative sartorial practices…

In a situation in which both natives and tourists are both engaging in performative authenticity within arenas of authenticity, really, who is impersonating whom, and which is any more "real" than than the other? Or, alternatively, is the Korean doing Traditional Korea any less other than the Other? 

Working Bibliography

Asphodel, Autumn. "Passing as Female | Male to Female Transgender / Transsexual" (YouTube Video). 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLTcwqfDKXE.

Hill, Darryl B. "Sexuality and Gender in Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten : A Case of the "Elusive Evidence of the Ordinary" " Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3, July (2005): 316-32.

Wang, N. (1999). "RETHINKING AUTHENTICITY IN TOURISM EXPERIENCE." Annals of Tourism Research 26(2): 349-370.

Zhu, Yujie. "Performing Heritage: Rethinking Authenticity in Tourism." Annals of Tourism Research 39 (2012): 1495-513. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.04.003.