• Title/Summary/Keyword: Cultural anthropology

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Building up an academic discipline on material assemblages: modern Europe's museum developments and 'museology'

  • Kim, Seong Eun
    • Cross-Cultural Studies
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    • v.36
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    • pp.61-95
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    • 2014
  • At the turn of the century in which European colonialism was reaching its zenith and modernization was gathering speed, public museums were institutionalized. This paper looks into the part these European modern museums played in territorializing academic disciplines like anthropology and art history. The museums to deal with are the British Museum and the National Gallery in London, Mus?e du Louvre in Paris, and Museumsinsel in Berlin. Rather than in-depth detailed analysis of each museum, the aim is to explore the ways in which these museological institutions interacting with modern disciplines in the wider colonial context objectified other cultures and formulated a framework of the world through classification and comparison of material things, on the basis of the judgement of their artistic values. This exploration is also to rethink theoretical positions and perspectives on the museum in Korea. It is remarkable in Europe that such academic fields as history, art history, anthropology and cultural studies look for new possibilities of museology in conjunction with the recent proliferation of studies on the museum as a medium to construct and deconstruct knowledge. Meanwhile, the mammoth European museums which are often considered a stronghold of museology advocate the 'universal museum' themselves, quite the modern idea but in a revised rendering. Under these circumstances, this paper seeks to shed light on the definition of the museum as an arena in which scholarly discourses about art, culture and history can be created and contested, on the effectiveness of the museum as a communication medium in a postcolonial era, and on the need to pay trans-disciplinary attention to the museum in its broadest sense.

Cultural syndromes in Koreans and others - a medical anthropology in search for resolution and prevention

  • Lee, Sok Kyu
    • Journal of Medicine and Life Science
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    • v.16 no.3
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    • pp.76-79
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    • 2019
  • Korean Physicians encounter often the patients with cultural syndromes. This paper surveys those cultural syndromes in Korea, contrasted with those in other countries in five different domains; socio-cultural, sexual, psychological, psychosomatic and religio-spiritual. I discovered three natural consequences if not intervened; 1) healed and readjusted, 2) paradigmatically shifted for the better results and 3) mal-adjustment for the worse. In the hope to let the culture shifted toward better one, I propose to allow our Koreans to be educated, inspired by Park Wansoe's novel; 'Dreaming in an Incubator(꿈꾸는 인큐베이터)'.

T. S. Eliot's Modernized Myth (엘리엇의 현대화된 신화)

  • Kweon, Seunghyeok
    • English & American cultural studies
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    • v.9 no.1
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    • pp.1-25
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    • 2009
  • This paper attempts to illuminate the significance of the myth or mythical method used in The Waste Land, which Eliot adapted from Jessie L. Weston's From Rituals to Romance and Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough. While he was composing a modern epic, James Joyce's Ulysses and Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps made him sure that the mythical method would be the best way to make the non-relational and chaotic modern world into a work of art. Although he accepted F. H. Bradley's epistemology that one's actual experience is non-relational, he strongly put an emphasis on 'the unified sensibility' in John Donne's poetry with which a poet changes all the dissociated material into art. He also found another effective method to give the chaotic experiences an order, and to make them modern art: the mythical method in his contemporary anthropology. With the mythical method he incorporated the various barren, horrible and ugly aspects of modern world into a new unity in The Waste Land. In addition, he embraced his contemporary anthropological theory that a primitive life described in myths is a culture just different from modern culture, and heartily employed some aspects of primitive culture to make modern poetry as well as modern culture rich and exuberant.

Southeast Asia as Theoretical Laboratory for the World

  • Salemink, Oscar
    • SUVANNABHUMI
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    • v.10 no.2
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    • pp.121-142
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    • 2018
  • Area studies are sometimes framed as focused on specific localities, rooted in deep linguistic, cultural and historical knowledge, and hence empirically rich but, as a result, as yielding non-transferable/non-translatable findings and hence as theoretically poor. In Europe and North America some social science disciplines like sociology, economics and political science routinely dismiss any reference to local specifics as parochial "noise" interfering with their universalizing pretensions which in reality obscure their own Euro-American parochialism. For more qualitatively oriented disciplines like history, anthropology and cultural studies the inherent non-universality of (geographically constricted) area studies presents a predicament which is increasingly fought out by resorting to philosophical concepts which usually have a Eurocentric pedigree. In this paper, however, I argue that concepts with arguably European pedigree - like religion, culture, identity, heritage and art - travel around the world and are adopted through vernacular discourses that are specific to locally inflected histories and cultural contexts by annexing existing vocabularies as linguistic vehicles. In the process, these vernacularized "universal" concepts acquire different meanings or connotations, and can be used as powerful devices in local discursive fields. The study of these processes offer at once a powerful antidote against simplistic notions of "global"/"universal" and "local," and a potential corrective to localizing parochialism and blindly Eurocentric universalism. I develop this substantive argument with reference to my own professional, disciplinary and theoretical trajectory as an anthropologist and historian focusing on Vietnam, who used that experience - and the empirical puzzles and wonder encountered - in order to develop theoretical interests and questions that became the basis for larger-scale, comparative research projects in Japan, China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Europe. The subsequent challenge is to bring the results of such larger, comparative research "home" to Vietnam in a meaningful way, and thus overcome the limitations of both area studies and Eurocentric disciplines.

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The Clothing Life of Korean-Chinese in Yanbian Area (연변조선족의 의생활에 나타난 문화주변현상과 외래문화의 영향)

  • 정인희
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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    • v.28
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    • pp.85-98
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    • 1996
  • Yanbian is the area where many Korean-Chinese have settled and have undergone a unique culture. This study is intended to examine the clothing life of Korean-Chinese in Yanbian in the aspects of the cultural marginality and the effects of other cultures. Nowadays they have three kinds of dresses" Han-Bok In-Min-Bok and the western dress. han-Bok is the result of cultural marginal phenomenon so they pre-serve 1920s style which already disappeared in South Korea. In-Min-Bok is the production of Communism which is an 'invention' from the viewpoint of Cultural-Anthropology. However both Han-Bok and In-Min-Bok are gradually disappearing from the daily life. Today it is quite common for us to see a number of people wearing western dresses on the street. In their clothing life the acculturation to the Chinese wasn't traced which may be due to the strong 'National I dentity' of them.

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Hijacking Area Studies: Ethnographic Approaches to Southeast Asian Airlines

  • Ferguson, Jane M.
    • SUVANNABHUMI
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    • v.12 no.2
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    • pp.225-244
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    • 2020
  • Area Studies, by definition, conjure ideas of emplaced knowledge; in-depth interdisciplinary understanding of language, history, culture and politics of a nation or region. Where detractors might see this approach as overly empirical, therefore precluding theoretical sophistication, others argue that "places" are either artificially constructed, or that processes of globalisation have obliterated the cultural zone. But what if we turn an ethnographic eye to those very processes and technologies themselves? Can Area Studies take to the air, and if so, what are the attendant challenges and benefits? Based on insights from ethnography amongst airline customer service workers, ground and cabin crews in Thailand and Myanmar, this research examines the airline cabin as a field for ethnographic study, and as an emplaced site for political and cultural processes. With participant observation-based knowledge of Southeast Asian cabin crews, this paper examines the 1990 hijack of Thai Airways TG 305 from an emplaced cultural perspective.

Research on Housing History of Multi-Discipline (주거사에 관한 제학문의 연구성과)

  • 김대년
    • Journal of the Korean housing association
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    • v.1 no.2
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    • pp.67-80
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    • 1990
  • This study aims to analyze the reserch result about housing history of multi-disciplines especially archeology, cultural anthropology, folklore, geography, archtecture and dwelling science. Each discipline has acted an important role to develop the research on housing history, even though they have some limitations. They usually failed in clarfying the relationship among physical housing, habitants and social environment. In order to overcome these limitations, this study suggests microsociological approach, so called "Housing Adjustment Model".del".uot;.

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