• Journal of The Korean Association For Science Education
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.331-340
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• 2003

This paper presents a case study of the student's culture as a component of conceptual ecology that affects discussions and discourses in the science classroom. The present study was conducted using a naturalistic approach, mainly through observing a science class of a middle school in Seoul, Korea, and through semistructured interviews. The case showed that the science classroom culture can be identified in four aspects: (1) knowledge; (2) the teacher; (3) classmates; and (4) self. These cultural aspects were strongly related to each other and functioned as constraints in discussions and discourses of the science classroom. For successful discussions and discourses, it is necessary to consider students' cultural aspects: epistemological views on knowledge, the teacher-student and student-student relationships, and the role of self in the discussions and discourses.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
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• v.29 no.1 s.139
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• pp.114-123
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• 2005

The purpose of this study is to see how Korean American people use and negotiate appearance in the US. 22 Korean American women at the age of 20s to 50s were interviewed and the verbatim texts from the interviews were interpreted. Discourses on appearance style followed by consumer stories such as American vs. Korean culture, gender, class, generation as well as personal background were recorded. The results of this study revealed that Korean Americans had diverse interpretations about their appearance and styling to fit the condition of their everyday lives. Korean immigrants did not simply assimilate dominant culture over time but maintained transcultural identities depending on contexts. This study showed that researches dealing with cultural variables could have more insights about personal experiences and social meaning processes through interpretative approach.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.217-235
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• 2011

On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of a Translator" in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin's theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its "primitive" others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology, newly emergent discourses of cultural translation actively adopts Benjamin's notion of translation that does not prioritize the original text's claim on authenticity. Benjamin theorizes each text-translation as well as the original-as an incomplete representation of the pure language. Eschewing formalistic views propounded by deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man, who tend to regard Benjamin's notion of the untranslatable purely in terms of the failure inherent in the language system per se, such postcolonialist critics as Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, and Homi Bhabha, each in his/her unique way, recuperate the significatory potential of historicity embedded in Benjamin's text. Their further appropriation of the concept of the "untranslatable" depends on a radically political turn that, instead of focusing on the failure of translation, salvages historical as well as cultural potentiality that lies between disparate cultural entities, signifying differences, or disjunctures, that do not easily render themselves to existing systems of representation. It may therefore be concluded that postcolonial discourses on cultural translation of Niranhana, Chow, and Bhabha, inspired by Benjamin, each translate the latter's theory into highly politicized understandings of translation, and this leads to an extensive rethinking of the act of translation itself to include all forms of cultural exchange and communicative activities between cultures. The disjunctures between these discourses and Benjamin's text, in that sense, enable them to form a sort of theoretical constellation, which aspires to an impossible yet necessary utopian ideal of critical thinking.

• Korean Journal of Social Welfare
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• v.63 no.3
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• pp.239-260
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• 2011

It is very interesting phenomenon that despite a broad consensus on the need for social worker to take cultural aspects into professional practice, thus to be a culturally competent, a number of materials criticising the concept of cultural competence have emerged in these days simultaneously. The main purpose of the study is to clarify such phenomenon, which means that this article is trying to analyze the contents of such critical discourse on cultural competence and the validity of those contents. The result of the study finds out that most of the arguments can be categorized into three aspects: epistemological, ethical, ontological, and that most of the main ideas of the critical discourses have been borrowed from a branch of critical social work theories, especially highly influenced from Foucault and Derrida. This article argues that critical discourses have some significant problems which make a conflict with traditional values and tenets in social work as a human service profession. First, epistemologically, the critical discourse fails to differentiate the matter of discovery from that of justification, which brings the cultural competence to the brink of agnosticism. Second, ethically, insisting that there should be no foundational criteria for cultural hierarchy in term of rightness or goodness, the critical discourses reveal their intrinsic limitations in solving ethical dilemmas and conflict in real world, which can be considered as a kind of evasion of responsibility in disguise of cultural relativism. Third, in practical vein, critical discourses are largely in effective in specifying the concrete model to realize their own ideas, and furthermore they unintentionally promote context-blind perspectives that eclipses the significance of structural and systematical impacts on the cultural identity.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.35 no.4
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• pp.1-15
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• 2007

The purpose of this study is to mate a basic foundation for the discourse of Koreanness of contemporary Korean landscape architecture by way of searching the conceptual definitions of Koreanness through analysis of Koreanness discourses. The results are that discourses of Koreanness are to be classified in aesthetics type, spatial-temporal type, and cultural type. Aesthetics type is understood as style in terms of formal and design representation planning principles of spatial composition and immanence in terms of philosophy. Spatial-temporal type is understood as contemporaneity. This is classified as the concept of connoting of tradition, and separating and keeping a distance from tradition. Cultural type is prescribed as cultural identity. This is classified as unity, generality and individuality. The intension of Koreanness of these types is represented as an aspect changing and shifting from one regulation to another regulation. First, in the concerns of substantial archetypes like Korean original form, decorative element, spatial composition aesthetic perception and philosophy, Koreanness shifts to the point of view of contemporaniety which is created and defined in history. Second, Koreanness as contemporaniety shows a trend of shifting the point of view which is to be found through the reconsideration on modem history and modernism. Third, Koreanness defined as cultural identity shows a trend to emphasize the differences in other cultures and includes all the modem cultural agents. The number of views understood as individuality and denial are small but provide important points. Programmatic definition of Koreanness is not suitable. This basic study uses a stipulative or operational definition of Koreanness in many ways such as spatial and regional identity. Koreanness study for Korean contemporary landscape architecture requires a systematic understanding of modernity and colonization relating to identity. Also, it is needed to elaborate on the discourse to divide the meaning of a concept of identity.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.53-70
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• 2022

This article compares archetypal heroes in Nguyễn Huy Thiệp's "The Tiger's Heart" and John Steinbeck's The Pearl. It aims to explore the voices of marginalized groups and ethnic minorities who suffer amidst the clash of civilizations. In exploring cultural communication between minority and mainstream communities as embodied by the archetypal heroes in the two works, this article highlights implications of resistance against values of the dominant. The method of "mythization" in modern Eastern and Western Literature, as this article argues, demonstrates the importance of minority discourses in as far as cultural conflicts in the globalizing world are concerned.

• Health Policy and Management
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.1-19
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• 2000

We have witnessed several kinds of new discourses and practices in health and medicine since the 1970s, such as popular concerns with alternative or complementary medicine, inordinate attention to the promotion of 'healthy' living, rapid resurrection of traditional medicine and ecological management of health. Four structural and situational factors are discussed to underlie these new trends：(i) as 'crisis' in health care of the 1970s was translated into health care reform of the 1980s backed up by neo-liberal political philosophy, the state responsibility for nation's health is being transferred to the individual ；(ii) it resulted from the limits of biomedical paradigm in dealing with chronic diseases；(iii) medico-scientific knowledge of disease is transformed into the subjective discourses and technologies of health in postmodern society ； and (iv) it is deeply associated with the considerable increase in environmental risk perception of health and disease. There are some inherent countervailing forces in these new discourses and practices. First, while they derive from lifestyle-oriented behavioral change, medicalization of life and death is still consolidated in the new trends. Second, inasmuch as new tides are reliant upon science, they. are likely to be remote from techne that means not the practical application of theoretical knowing but a special form of practical knowing. Third, as new discourses and activities accomplished＇in the name of health＇increasingly occupy important strategies in forming the self-identity, they serve as moral apparatus which involves prescriptions about how we should live our lives and conduct our bodies, both individually and collectively. Therefore, two points are suggested to consider seriously whether these streams will succeed in improving the‘healthy’living of all the people. Instead of limiting tile perspective to medicine, healing and health care, a new matrix that interweave welfare, ecology and labor along with them is timely needed for enhancing the health for all. In addition, as the World Health Report fm strongly shows, inequality in health heavily depends upon socio-economic development of a society, and it is not the richest countries that have the best health status, but those that have the smallest income differences between rich and poor.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.24
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• pp.84-98
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• 2011

This paper aims to analyze the influences of the socio-cultural environment on discourse in translation. To illustrate a deep connection between discourses and societies in which they were produced, communicative patterns of high- and low-context cultures are examined. Though the original version of the translated text comes from a different culture, the translation reflects communicative preferences of the target culture. To uncover some of these preferences, a comparative study of two translations from Russian into English and from English into Russian is conducted. This study, together with further investigation of some more recent translations into Russian, revealed a number of choices affected by translators' cultural background (for example, making the translation more emotionally charged) and current ideological preferences in the society (excessive use of anglicisms).

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.21
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• pp.189-211
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• 2010

The purpose of this paper is to 1)examine the current state of cultural studies in Korea with a focus on recent discourses about its 'crisis' and 2)attempt to find some ways out of these dilemmas in drama/theatre/performance studies. As Raymond Williams redefined 'culture' as 'a whole way of life,' performance studies has expanded the boundary of 'performance' from traditional performing arts onto almost everything that can be studied and analyzed 'as' performance. Performance is not only the final product on display but a whole process that includes training, workshop, and rehearsal of culture. According to Richard Schechner, workshop and rehearsal are the most critical and creative 'liminal' phases that allow traditional knowledge and alternative challenges to coexist in conflict and intentionally delay the final decision by putting itself in a perpetual process. From this view, this essay attempts to find an-no matter how limited and temporary-answer to or a possible exit from political and theoretical aporias of cultural studies.

• 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.