Pop Anthropology

I just recently finished a book about Korean culture, titled Korea Unmasked: In Search of the Country, The Society and the People, that I found interesting enough to post about here. It is a popular look at Korean history, people, and culture in cartoon form by Rhie Won-bok, a professor and one of Korea's most famous cartoonists. Pop anthropology can always be fun, and in this case I was surprised at how serious some of the observations were. Although Korean culture is now the focus of my research, I am still quite a novice and therefore I can't sufficiently measure the validity of the author's statements, and I am reluctant to take him at face value since he seems to have a clear agenda and there are moments of outright nationalistic blindness. Nonetheless, it is filled with useful information that anyone living in Korea will immediately recognize and anyone who is interested in Korea and Korean culture would benefit from reading. Originally published in Korea in 2002, the book was immensely popular in Korea and has now been translated into English. The book is divided into four chapters: the first offers comparisons between Korea and the other East Asian giants, China and Japan (as well as comparisons to the United States, the de facto global benchmark for many Koreans), part two describes some of the socio-cultural peculiarities of the Korean people, part three is a brief but dense overview of Korean history, and part four deals (quite even-handedly, actually) with the issue of reunification with North Korea. I'll just mention two aspects of Korean culture that I found particularly interesting here. First, the concept of choong, which comes from the Chinese character that represents the middle. In the Korean context, it stands for orthodoxy and pride in Korean originality. Choong in part explains what outsiders sometimes see as obstinacy and blind adherence to an "outdated" way of doing things, as well as preferences for all things Korean and mild disdain for non-Korean cultural goods. The other is jeong, the concept of "affection" that is at the center of the egalitarian and communal spirit of Koreans. According to Professor Rhie, this social attitude has always existed in an uneasy relationship with Confucian ideals of social hierarchy, and now lives in a strange harmony with rabid capitalist competition. Also included are the Korean penchant for taking everything to the extreme, a look at the Korean education system and at chaebols, the importance of age, family, and place in social relations, cultural psychology and the "peninsular mentality," and explanations of the competitive spirit and the notion of "keeping up with Joneses." Although I think Professor Rhie comes off as a bit too much of a nationalist at times, and he doesn't deal as critically with Park Chung-hee's regime as I would have liked to see, the book is definitely a fun and worthwhile read and I urge anyone who hasn't read it to check it out.