Korea ethnography please
January 5, 2010 8:31 PM Subscribe
I'm looking for a good Korean ethnography. I'm interested in anything; however, I'm more focused on anything unique, strange, in depth, and generally more unknown to the West. Any subject would be great, but extra points for food culture (double extra points for dog consumption and practices).
Not an ethnography, but a great article titled Possession Sickness and Women Shamans in Korea was included in the book Unspoken Worlds: Women's Religious Lives. Sadly, the author of the article died in the early 80's, but I think she had written at least one book of her own. Her first name was Youngsook, but I don't remember her last name.
(I included this article in a term paper 10 years ago, and it has stayed in my mind. Equal parts sponge brain and amazing cultural differences/similarities. This article shed a lot of light for me on my life as an American woman.)
Since this was a textbook, this article may not appear in all editions. Mine might have been third edition, but memail if you want me to check.
posted by bilabial at 10:14 PM on January 5, 2010
(I included this article in a term paper 10 years ago, and it has stayed in my mind. Equal parts sponge brain and amazing cultural differences/similarities. This article shed a lot of light for me on my life as an American woman.)
Since this was a textbook, this article may not appear in all editions. Mine might have been third edition, but memail if you want me to check.
posted by bilabial at 10:14 PM on January 5, 2010
Oh, and this was a book for an anthropology of religion course. So it is anthro relevant.
posted by bilabial at 10:15 PM on January 5, 2010
posted by bilabial at 10:15 PM on January 5, 2010
a french animator lived in north korea for a year and then made a memoir graphic novel called Pyongyang. it's available on amazon, some libraries, and bookstores. while not strictly an ethnography it does do a great job of exploring all the quirks culture and history of north korea. it's style is accessible - more storyboard with occasional detailed full page illustration than comic book gimmicky. i found it insightful and i highly recommend it.
posted by beardlace at 11:55 PM on January 5, 2010
posted by beardlace at 11:55 PM on January 5, 2010
Well hey, I can offer my family's perspective on food culture.
Those Korean barbecue restaurants you like? That's usually been a once a week deal while I was growing up (at home, not going out).
My mom grew up in taegu, (like driving from the sf bay to I dunno, san jose twice from Seoul (?)). Meat once every couple weeks, and it was a big deal. All those little side dishes with the sprouts and kimchi and whatever was more about the appearance of abundance rather than actually having any, what with the five thousand little plates and such. I guess since meat made such rare appearances at her dinner table it was important for me to eat everything. Even to this day whenever my family eats short ribs together we eat everything no matter how full we are or how much more we can't eat. Makes me think of the five monkeys in a cage story but anyway.
As an attempt to assert some racial authority, I'd just like to say that if you see Koreans eating barbecued short ribs in a Korean restaurant, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good restaurant, they're just there for the grill since it's a big deal. If you see them eating not barbecue, that's probably a good sign.
There's another dish that also involves cooking at the table, it involves boiling your meat and then using the water to make a soup. This way you could either just eat the meat with whatever and that would be your dinner. Or you could just eat the soup that had meat in it with your vegetables and stuff. Or both. The idea is that you somehow have two dishes at your table and you only made one. OMG
Uh.....
My grandmother used to prepare kimchi by putting it into huge clay pots (think tall dutch ovens) and burying the whole thing in our backyard for a week or two.
Making denjchang (my own spelling) also took about a week. Preparing the beans, shaping them into bricks, drying, individually wrapped in cloth, more clay pot action, and then after that one batch of soup at a time one brick at a time.
Uh....
Yeah that's about all I can think of at the moment.
Oh, I've never eaten dog. As far as I know. Dogs have short ribs, don't they?
posted by bam at 12:16 AM on January 6, 2010 [2 favorites]
Those Korean barbecue restaurants you like? That's usually been a once a week deal while I was growing up (at home, not going out).
My mom grew up in taegu, (like driving from the sf bay to I dunno, san jose twice from Seoul (?)). Meat once every couple weeks, and it was a big deal. All those little side dishes with the sprouts and kimchi and whatever was more about the appearance of abundance rather than actually having any, what with the five thousand little plates and such. I guess since meat made such rare appearances at her dinner table it was important for me to eat everything. Even to this day whenever my family eats short ribs together we eat everything no matter how full we are or how much more we can't eat. Makes me think of the five monkeys in a cage story but anyway.
As an attempt to assert some racial authority, I'd just like to say that if you see Koreans eating barbecued short ribs in a Korean restaurant, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a good restaurant, they're just there for the grill since it's a big deal. If you see them eating not barbecue, that's probably a good sign.
There's another dish that also involves cooking at the table, it involves boiling your meat and then using the water to make a soup. This way you could either just eat the meat with whatever and that would be your dinner. Or you could just eat the soup that had meat in it with your vegetables and stuff. Or both. The idea is that you somehow have two dishes at your table and you only made one. OMG
Uh.....
My grandmother used to prepare kimchi by putting it into huge clay pots (think tall dutch ovens) and burying the whole thing in our backyard for a week or two.
Making denjchang (my own spelling) also took about a week. Preparing the beans, shaping them into bricks, drying, individually wrapped in cloth, more clay pot action, and then after that one batch of soup at a time one brick at a time.
Uh....
Yeah that's about all I can think of at the moment.
Oh, I've never eaten dog. As far as I know. Dogs have short ribs, don't they?
posted by bam at 12:16 AM on January 6, 2010 [2 favorites]
and i'm almost certain the book i recommended goes into dog eating and poverty there in general.
posted by beardlace at 12:28 AM on January 6, 2010
posted by beardlace at 12:28 AM on January 6, 2010
There's a popular Korean 'dessert' made this way: Sometimes you get Bibimbap (Dul sot or 'Hot') in a stone pot. You'll usually scoop the rice out into a second dish and mix there. When the meal is done, the restaurant will provide a kettle of hot water. You add the water to you stone pot with the hard, cooked-on grains of rice in it. Steep and consume. It's not bad, but dessert it ain't. There's actually a candy with this flavor.
posted by GilloD at 1:40 AM on January 6, 2010
posted by GilloD at 1:40 AM on January 6, 2010
The main things that are interesting to me about different groups in Korea are also partially human rights issues.
Particularly interesting is the gay community in Korea, the main distinction being that they recently have started marrying each other in order to fulfill family and work related obligations. By this I mean that a gay couple will connect with a lesbian couple and arrange to marriage each other in a sort of sham wedding in which they lead separate lives except when the parents come to visit. They meet through online matchmaking sites such as Ivanworld (sorry I think the link is now being filtered in Korea so I can't find it).
Otherwise there are all the foreign laborers from east asian countries coming in and facing racism and exploitation (Vietnam, Philippines, China etc). The usual shenanigans that migrant workers are faced with.
Also there are the international weddings. Since all the women move to Seoul, men in the country (usually farmers) have no one to marry them. The same goes for men with physical disabilities. As such there are companies that arrange "marriage tours" of places like Thailand, Vietnam, and China, where the men basically go and pick out a woman and essentially buy her. In some cases the women move to Korea and the get married and things work out. But in other cases disputes arise due to cultural and communication barriers often leading to domestic violence and/or divorce.
The interesting (and sad) thing is that when this happens, the woman, who had to give up her original nationality to attain Korean citizenship, loses her Korean citizen ship as she is no longer married to a Korean national. As such there are a not-insignificant number of these women floating around in Korea.
Message me if you're interested in more detail and I can send you pdfs if I have them.
posted by kinakomochi at 2:39 AM on January 6, 2010 [1 favorite]
Particularly interesting is the gay community in Korea, the main distinction being that they recently have started marrying each other in order to fulfill family and work related obligations. By this I mean that a gay couple will connect with a lesbian couple and arrange to marriage each other in a sort of sham wedding in which they lead separate lives except when the parents come to visit. They meet through online matchmaking sites such as Ivanworld (sorry I think the link is now being filtered in Korea so I can't find it).
Otherwise there are all the foreign laborers from east asian countries coming in and facing racism and exploitation (Vietnam, Philippines, China etc). The usual shenanigans that migrant workers are faced with.
Also there are the international weddings. Since all the women move to Seoul, men in the country (usually farmers) have no one to marry them. The same goes for men with physical disabilities. As such there are companies that arrange "marriage tours" of places like Thailand, Vietnam, and China, where the men basically go and pick out a woman and essentially buy her. In some cases the women move to Korea and the get married and things work out. But in other cases disputes arise due to cultural and communication barriers often leading to domestic violence and/or divorce.
The interesting (and sad) thing is that when this happens, the woman, who had to give up her original nationality to attain Korean citizenship, loses her Korean citizen ship as she is no longer married to a Korean national. As such there are a not-insignificant number of these women floating around in Korea.
Message me if you're interested in more detail and I can send you pdfs if I have them.
posted by kinakomochi at 2:39 AM on January 6, 2010 [1 favorite]
Not precisely an ethnography, but a friend of mine blogs at http://thegrandnarrative.wordpress.com/ and talks a lot about psychological / sociological issues that Koreans / English teachers in Korea such as myself experience. There's a lot of material there to mine, and he may be worth e-mailing if you have a specific question.
posted by chrisinseoul at 8:41 AM on January 6, 2010
posted by chrisinseoul at 8:41 AM on January 6, 2010
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Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life by Laurel Kendall
posted by fullofragerie at 8:39 PM on January 5, 2010