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Korea as a multiethnic country(?)
Topic Started: Jan 24 2011, 08:56:28 PM (1,504 Views)
black man
The Right Hand
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Kim Eungi, Andrew 2010: The Origin of Ethnic Diversity in South Korea: Issues and Implications

Koreans outmarrying increased from 1,2% in 1990 to 11,4% in 2004 (p. 92). It's mostly farmers and fishermen who have to marry out because they don't look like prosperous partners to Korean women. In 2009 35,2% of rural men married non-Korean Asian women. These foreigners are primarily 朝鮮系中國人 (Chinese of Korean ancestry). Rankings in 2009 according to country (p. 93):
1) China
2) Vietnam
3) Philippines
4) Japan
5) Cambodia
6) Thailand
7) USA
8) Mongolia
9) Uzbekistan
10) Nepal
11) Russia

For a comparison, the order of the same nations in 2000:
1) China
2) Philippines
3) Japan
4) Thailand
5) USA
6) Vietnam
7) Mongolia
8) Russia
9) Uzbekistan
10) Nepal
11) Cambodia

Note that there were altogether 3 Nepalese and Cambodian wives back then. I.e., these nations only very recently became important wife-givers to Korea.

The descendants are called "Kosians", as if to emphasise the difference between Koreans on the one hand and "Asians" on the other, which might indicate the isolationist attitude of Korean mainstream. Yet, the author predicts an increased multiculturalisation of Korea due to their integration into Korean society and due to the consequences of sex imbalance in Koreans "over the next decade or so (i.e., more international marriages, see p. 94).




I don't know enough about Korean society to predict what could happen. So far, Korea has the reputation to homogenise according to the tastes its elites. Now, I wonder whether a "Kosian" class of blue-collar workers could stabilise a cultural milieu distinct from that of Korean middle class and elites.
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jay1
Member
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black man
Jan 24 2011, 08:56:28 PM
Kim Eungi, Andrew 2010: The Origin of Ethnic Diversity in South Korea: Issues and Implications

Koreans outmarrying increased from 1,2% in 1990 to 11,4% in 2004 (p. 92). It's mostly farmers and fishermen who have to marry out because they don't look like prosperous partners to Korean women. In 2009 35,2% of rural men married non-Korean Asian women. These foreigners are primarily ’©‘NŒn’†š l (Chinese of Korean ancestry). Rankings in 2009 according to country (p. 93):
1) China
2) Vietnam
3) Philippines
4) Japan
5) Cambodia
6) Thailand
7) USA
8) Mongolia
9) Uzbekistan
10) Nepal
11) Russia

For a comparison, the order of the same nations in 2000:
1) China
2) Philippines
3) Japan
4) Thailand
5) USA
6) Vietnam
7) Mongolia
8) Russia
9) Uzbekistan
10) Nepal
11) Cambodia

Note that there were altogether 3 Nepalese and Cambodian wives back then. I.e., these nations only very recently became important wife-givers to Korea.

The descendants are called "Kosians", as if to emphasise the difference between Koreans on the one hand and "Asians" on the other, which might indicate the isolationist attitude of Korean mainstream. Yet, the author predicts an increased multiculturalisation of Korea due to their integration into Korean society and due to the consequences of sex imbalance in Koreans "over the next decade or so (i.e., more international marriages, see p. 94).




I don't know enough about Korean society to predict what could happen. So far, Korea has the reputation to homogenise according to the tastes its elites. Now, I wonder whether a "Kosian" class of blue-collar workers could stabilise a cultural milieu distinct from that of Korean middle class and elites.
I do not think it will happen

the same thing has been happening in Japan for the last 20 years...Japan is still seen as a one ethnic country
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black man
The Right Hand
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Parrott and Cummings: Sexual enslavement of girls and women worldwide, p. 8:
Quote:
 
From 2002 to 2007, there were 43121 international marriages in South Korea. Of these, over 70 percent were South Korean men marrying non-Korean women, mostly from Southeast Asia and Mongolia, where known trafficking rings have a strong hold (US Department of State, 2007c). In central Asia, “marriage agencies” are responsible for trafficking women, and it has been reported that these agencies are particularly active in the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.


I don't know any ethnic statistics though I already found photos of alleged "Kazakh mail order brides". These are supposedly Muslims or descendants of Muslims.

Kettani 1986: Muslim minorities in the world today, p.17:
Quote:
 
In 1980, the entire village of Sang Yong, near the town of Kwangju, converted to Islam. They built the third mosque of Korea in 1981.


jay1, what do you know about the Filipinas who marry Koreans? Are there Moros among them?
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jay1
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black man
Mar 16 2011, 12:35:54 AM
Parrott and Cummings: Sexual enslavement of girls and women worldwide, p. 8:
Quote:
 
From 2002 to 2007, there were 43121 international marriages in South Korea. Of these, over 70 percent were South Korean men marrying non-Korean women, mostly from Southeast Asia and Mongolia, where known trafficking rings have a strong hold (US Department of State, 2007c). In central Asia, “marriage agencies” are responsible for trafficking women, and it has been reported that these agencies are particularly active in the Kyrgyz Republic, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.


I don't know any ethnic statistics though I already found photos of alleged "Kazakh mail order brides". These are supposedly Muslims or descendants of Muslims.

Kettani 1986: Muslim minorities in the world today, p.17:
Quote:
 
In 1980, the entire village of Sang Yong, near the town of Kwangju, converted to Islam. They built the third mosque of Korea in 1981.


jay1, what do you know about the Filipinas who marry Koreans? Are there Moros among them?
interesting enough majority of filipinas who marry koreans are from All parts of Visayas(Central Philippines) and Mindanao(SOuthern Philippines)

Which is the exact opposite of most filipinas who marry japanese come from Luzon( northern philippines and Manila)
...FYI....people fromLuzon( northern Philippines and Manila) are city/ urban type people
people from Visayas and Mindanao are farmer type/ rural people

I believe some of the filipina brides from Mindanao might have Moro(Muslim) Ancestry...as many people from Mindanao descend from Moros(Muslims) converted to christianity during colonial period
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Starbuck
Member
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Can we conclude that newer trends in international marriages will note class/phenotypic (the latter relative to a global comparison) affinity > ethnic/religious difference ? I.e. once a "metaethnic" grouping has been acknowledged, will people then pair off according to rural vs urban, higher/middle/blue-collar class, etc., or am I oversimplifying ?
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black man
The Right Hand
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Starbuck
May 19 2011, 11:25:38 AM
Can we conclude that newer trends in international marriages will note class/phenotypic (the latter relative to a global comparison) affinity > ethnic/religious difference ? I.e. once a "metaethnic" grouping has been acknowledged, will people then pair off according to rural vs urban, higher/middle/blue-collar class, etc., or am I oversimplifying ?
I'm prone to assume that there could be a "globalised India" (in the sense of a Hinduised globe, including all kinds of castes, some caste barriers being more fluid than others). It would just be more dynamic than India was so far. I.e., new castes would form quicker and not be restricted to one profession only.

Btw, it would be interesting to compare, e.g., the Anitsalagi with relatively recently developed (post-ethnic) castes on the one hand and traditional ethnic groups (prior to colonialisation) on the other. I didn't read the genesis of castes though. Maybe they aren't even what I suppose them to be. So I cannot contribute much about that topic on my own.
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Starbuck
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black man
May 19 2011, 05:01:06 PM
I'm prone to assume that there could be a "globalised India" (in the sense of a Hinduised globe, including all kinds of castes, some caste barriers being more fluid than others). It would just be more dynamic than India was so far. I.e., new castes would form quicker and not be restricted to one profession only.

^

Alan Watt had some interesting theories about that, and it sounds much like the ideas of the Fabian Society.

Quote:
 
Btw, it would be interesting to compare, e.g., the Anitsalagi with relatively recently developed (post-ethnic) castes on the one hand and traditional ethnic groups (prior to colonialisation) on the other. I didn't read the genesis of castes though. Maybe they aren't even what I suppose them to be. So I cannot contribute much about that topic on my own.


Yes, I would certain welcome the chance for analysis.

AFAIK the clan system had a ceremonial "hierarchy", but not rigid castes ; clan exogamy was the norm ; and the nation, in its heyday, had town rulers but not often really overarching rulers-of-nation. The clan (whichever one it happened to have been out of the seven) of a town ruler was sometimes slightly more favored in his town, but that didn't imply any sharp class distinction. The kinds of foreign input which came from American cultural invasiveness later (i.e. "chiefs" of the nation being more common, flags adopted, the decline of the traditional healers, the adoption of freemasonry, the acculturation towards American social binarisms, etc.) simply dissolved large parts of the community and absorbed or partially absorbed them into the American mainstream. The idea of tiered classism or castes, like f.e. the idea of treason, were unknown for the most part among my mother's people, originally. Caste-like traits do appear among the western branch of her people, where they divide, according to the suggestion of American-style freemasonry, by race. The effect is less pronounced IMO in the eastern branch, where there is yet in some quarters a hostility to this line of suggestion.
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black man
The Right Hand
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http://fsi.stanford.edu/events/breakdown_of_monoethnic_society_in_south_korea_the_influx_of_foreign_laborers_and_the_aging_of_the_population




Btw,

if you watch the English version of Arirang news, you'll notice that they refer to Korean immigrants from China to South Korea as "ethnic Koreans". This implies that...
- Korean natives perceive themselves as non-ethnic
- Koreans from China stay ethnic in South Korea

Moreover, they say that these ethnic Koreans don't want to stay ethnic. I.e., in Korea the social ladder is (as elsewhere) like this:
non-ethnic higher milieus > non-ethnic lower milieus > ethnic milieus.
Edited by black man, Mar 11 2012, 11:48:56 PM.
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skywalker
Advanced Member
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black man
Nov 12 2011, 07:59:30 AM
if you watch the English version of Arirang news, you'll notice that they refer to Korean immigrants from China to South Korea as "ethnic Koreans". This implies that...
- Korean natives perceive themselves as non-ethnic
- Koreans from China stay ethnic in South Korea

Moreover, they say that these ethnic Koreans don't want to stay ethnic. I.e., in Korea the social ladder is (as elsewhere) like this:
non-ethnic higher milieus > non-ethnic lower milieus > ethnic milieus.
When they are mentioning "ethnic Koreans" from China, I'm virtually 100% sure that they are simply adding the words "ethnic Korean" to distinguish them from regular Chinese. It does not mean that Koreans in Korea don't view themselves as ethnic Koreans and view Koreans from China as ethnic Koreans. Think about that. That's absurd. Koreans from Korea are very ethnically-conscious people. It's the Koreans in China who are often Sinicized and don't even consider themselves Korean. Joe Wong (that comedian I posted about) doesn't even report himself as ethnic Korean in America but simply Chinese.

The problem here is that your semantic understanding of the word "ethnic" is rather different from the accepted interchange, so misinterpretation arises. In the greater context, misinterpretation of verbal and non-verbal cues and subsequent mis-response leads to negative reactions from those who are misinterpreted. This has more to do another topic but I saw the chance to bring it up.




update
And I actually know what you mean by "ethnic" here.. that Korean in Korea just view themselves without a reference/contrast to a another ethnicity, so they can't be consciously ethnic within their mono-ethnic country. But this is wrong. Koreans are very ethnically conscious. Many examples can be given, for example, the fact that they usually only choose to buy Korean brands (cell phones, ncars, etc.), that they hate Japanese, etc. I'm sure there's studies documenting this.

Also, the use of "ethnic Korean" to describe Koreans from China is to underline the fact these Chinese nationals are not Han; it's not to state that these Chinese Koreans are in an ethnic state of existence. If you ask anyone, they will give you this interpretation. You can email the news writer to confirm what he meant.
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black man
The Right Hand
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zen disciple
Mar 12 2012, 01:15:55 AM
black man
Nov 12 2011, 07:59:30 AM
if you watch the English version of Arirang news, you'll notice that they refer to Korean immigrants from China to South Korea as "ethnic Koreans". This implies that...
- Korean natives perceive themselves as non-ethnic
- Koreans from China stay ethnic in South Korea

Moreover, they say that these ethnic Koreans don't want to stay ethnic. I.e., in Korea the social ladder is (as elsewhere) like this:
non-ethnic higher milieus > non-ethnic lower milieus > ethnic milieus.
When they are mentioning "ethnic Koreans" from China, I'm virtually 100% sure that they are simply adding the words "ethnic Korean" to distinguish them from regular Chinese. It does not mean that Koreans in Korea don't view themselves as ethnic Koreans and view Koreans from China as ethnic Koreans. Think about that. That's absurd. Koreans from Korea are very ethnically-conscious people. It's the Koreans in China who are often Sinicized and don't even consider themselves Korean. Joe Wong (that comedian I posted about) doesn't even report himself as ethnic Korean in America but simply Chinese.

The problem here is that your semantic understanding of the word "ethnic" is rather different from the accepted interchange, so misinterpretation arises. In the greater context, misinterpretation of verbal and non-verbal cues and subsequent mis-response leads to negative reactions from those who are misinterpreted. This has more to do another topic but I saw the chance to bring it up.
They actually don't use the word "ethnic" as I do. But it's neither the way of the American census. They clearly refer to "rootless" "ethnic" people as opposed to native Koreans. No matter whether they really misunderstood or just use a mistakable expression, it does imply that the language use of the American census is not universally valid.

For starters, you don't even to check yourselves. Even though English wikipedia is notoriously unreliable, they already managed to integrate the ethnological position, including its documentation.

Take a look at wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_group#Terminology_and_definition today:
Quote:
 
The modern usage of "ethnic group" further came to reflect the different kinds of encounters industrialised states have had with external groups, such as immigrants and indigenous peoples; "ethnic" thus came to stand in opposition to "national", to refer to people with distinct cultural identities who, through migration or conquest, had become subject to a state or "nation" with a different cultural mainstream.[14] — with the first usage of the term ethnic group in 1935,[15] and entering the Oxford English Dictionary in 1972.[16][17][18]

Writing about the usage of the term "ethnic" in the ordinary language of Great Britain and the United States, in 1977 Wallman noted that

The term 'ethnic' popularly connotes '[race]' in Britain, only less precisely, and with a lighter value load. In North America, by contrast, '[race]' most commonly means color, and 'ethnics' are the descendents of relatively recent immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. '[Ethnic]' is not a noun in Britain. In effect there are no 'ethnics'; there are only 'ethnic relations'.[19]

Thus, in today's everyday language, the words "ethnic" and "ethnicity" still have a ring of exotic peoples, minority issues and race relations.

(...)

14. Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, "ethnic, a. and n.". Cites Sir Daniel Wilson, The archæology and prehistoric annals of Scotland 1851' (1863)
15. Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, "ethnic, a. and n.". Citing Huxley & Hadden (1935), We Europeans, pp. 136,181
16. Cohen, Ronald. (1978) "Ethnicity: Problem and Focus in Anthropology", Ann. Rev. Anthropol. 1978. 7:379-403
17. Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P. Moynihan (1975) Ethnicity - Theory and Experience, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press
18. The modern usage definition of the Oxford English Dictionary is:

a[djective]

...
2.a. Pertaining to race; peculiar to a race or nation; ethnological. Also, pertaining to or having common racial, cultural, religious, or linguistic characteristics, esp. designating a racial or other group within a larger system; hence (U.S. colloq.), foreign, exotic.
b ethnic minority (group), a group of people differentiated from the rest of the community by racial origins or cultural background, and usu. claiming or enjoying official recognition of their group identity. Also attrib.

n[oun]

...
3 A member of an ethnic group or minority. Equatorians

(Oxford English Dictionary Second edition, online version as of 2008-01-12, s.v. "ethnic, a. and n.")
19. Wallman, S. "Ethnicity research in Britain", Current Anthropology, v. 18, n. 3, 1977, pp. 531–532.


Because of this contextualisation of ethnics and ethnic groups many modernists don't want to be described as ethnics. They equate ethnics with "savages" or worse. As a consequence, they either become individualists (like many Westerners) or territorialists (like nationalists in, e.g., South Korea). See also the context of the Cantonese Tanka as described by Blake in his book "Ethnic groups and social change in a Chinese market town": the more "ethnic" they looked, the worse their chances to move up the social ladder. Once "ethnic" markers were removed, they could merge. After all, it was mainly occupation-related markers which distinguished the Cantonese-speaking Tanka from mainstream Cantonese. Koreans who lived in China haven't even witnessed mainstream South Korean developments for quite a while. They're sinicised. Not to mention Japanese Brazilians in Japan, who are sometimes claimed to have become totally Brazilian.

Quote:
 
update
And I actually know what you mean by "ethnic" here.. that Korean in Korea just view themselves without a reference/contrast to a another ethnicity, so they can't be consciously ethnic within their mono-ethnic country. But this is wrong. Koreans are very ethnically conscious. Many examples can be given, for example, the fact that they usually only choose to buy Korean brands (cell phones, ncars, etc.), that they hate Japanese, etc. I'm sure there's studies documenting this.


I was going to introduce the idea of milieu identities. Unlike ethnic groups, higher milieus are socially very static to the extent that they are exposed to heavy ethno-cultural uprooting because of superficial external cultural influences, such as fads. Mainstream people get obsessed with what the rich consume but stop caring about how reliable networks are created.

Quote:
 
they hate Japanese


Speaking of attitudes towards the Japanese as an ethnic marker, you can have it one way only. If you count attitudes towards the Japanese as an ethnic marker, you'll have to accept that my milieu group is non-Chinese, which you previously denied. If you don't count them as ethnic markers, you'll have one point less concerning your classification of Korean identity.

In my milieu they are rather acknowledged (if not appreciated) as civilised. The Nanjing massacre does not belong to our collective memory. Instead, the Japanese can be memorised as former potential liberators from oppression by people whom we consider to be savages (colonial masters and their native henchmen). It's a matter of (lack of) exposure and how we perceive manners and religious attitudes of these three groups of mainstream foreigners.

My generation feels pretty comfortable as potentially ethnic. The more ethnic our social markers, the more improved the chances to socialise according to our interests. This makes us savages from a Chinese territorialist POV. Actually, we (and my generation in particular) are treated worse than Westerners when entering Chinese shops etc. But the resulting lack of sinicisation is worth it since we can get more control over our social networks this way.
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