| Sociological studies on Korean masculinities? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: May 4 2006, 07:33:26 PM (197 Views) | |
| black man | May 4 2006, 07:33:26 PM Post #1 |
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The Right Hand
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I chose the heading above in order to point to what might turn out to be most interesting concerning Korean studies in the near future. Finding and making use of studies on Koreans as an "ethno-cultural" group or cluster is already very hard when one doesn't understand Korean language and just occasionally tries to get some overview from specifically masculine points of view. Therefore, ethnology might shed an unnecesarily blurry light on Korean men. E.g., when one takes a look at the literature about Taekkyeon in Western languages, one quickly notices that present-day Taekkyeon is a product of very recent socio-historical processes. And the lack of information about its possibly ancient roots in the Korean peninsula seems to be due to nationalist historiography which tends to not only Koreanise but also to standardise quite a lot of perspectives. This happens to the extent that Korean perspectives appear to lack diversity as if they were a product of recent colonial history only. As a consequence, there is a significant lack of ethnologically useful materials from different parts of Korea despite of the fact that the geographical features of the Korean peninsula itself might have provided a solid basis for the development of many different local cultures in premodern Korea. Those materials which nevertheless imply that developments in Korea could still be interesting in terms of masculine Asian cultural studies are sociographic rather than ethnographic sources. Judging from recent statistics, the religious Westernisation of Korean society already stopped. So Western values as such were obviously not attractive to Koreans. Rather, Koreans had been trying to catch up concerning material achievements by inflating their social networks. And Westernisation was an originally unwished by-product of that. So from a non-Korean perspective one could try to put the new sociographic data into the context of older sociographic and ethnographic materials which were already available and vice versa. |
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