Suchergebnisse

Annotation, Since the late 1960s, the lives of south Koreans have been reconstructed on the shifting ground of urbanization, industrialization, military authoritarianism, democratic reform, and social liberalization. Class and gender identities have been modified in relation to a changing modernity and new definitions of home and family, work and leisure, husband and wife. Under Construction provides an illuminating portrait of south Koreans in the 1990s -- a decade that saw a return to civilian rule, a loosening of censorship and social control, and the emergence of a full-blown consumer culture. It shows how these changes impacted the lives of Korean men and women and the very definition of what it means to be "male" and "female" in Korea. In a series of provocative essays written by Korean and Western scholars, we see how Korean women and men actively engage, and at times openly contest, the limitations of gender

Contributors to this volume explore the irony of modern things made in the image of a traditional "us." They describe the multifaceted ways "tradition" is produced and consumed within the frame of contemporary Korean life and how these processes are enabled by different apparatuses of modernity that Koreans first encountered in the early twentieth century. Commoditized goods and services first appeared in the colonial period in such spectacular and spectacularly foreign forms as department stores, restaurants, exhibitions, and staged performances. Today, these same forms have become the media through which many Koreans consume "tradition" in multiple forms. In the colonial period, commercial representations of Korea--tourist sites, postcard images, souvenir miniatures, and staged performances--were produced primarily for foreign consumption, often by non-Koreans. In late modernity, efficiencies of production, communication, and transportation combine with material wealth and new patterns of leisure activity and tourism to enable the localized consumption of Korean tradition in theme parks, at sites of alternative tourism, at cultural festivals and performances, as handicrafts, art, and cuisine, and in coffee table books, broadcast music, and works of popular folklore. -- Book jacket

Shifting intellectual terrain: superstition becomes culture and religion -- Memory horizons: kut from two ethnographic presents -- Initiating performance: Chini's story -- The ambiguities of becoming: phony shamans and what are mudang after all? -- Korean shamans and the spirits of capitalism -- Of hungry ghosts and other matters of consumption -- Built landscapes and mobile gods

Introduction -- Shifting intellectual terrain : superstition becomes culture and religion -- Memory horizons : kut from two ethnographic presents -- Initiating performance : Chini's story -- The ambiguities of becoming : phony shamans and what are mudang after all? -- Korean shamans and the spirits of capitalism -- Of hungry ghosts and other matters of consumption -- Built landscapes and mobile gods -- Conclusion

Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking. Alice Beck Kehoe. Prospect Heights, 1L: Waveland Press, 2000. 125 pp.

The Hands Feel It. Edith Turner. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. 260 pp.

ABSTRACTSRecent studies have taught us that "religion" is not a fixed category but an instrument of popular consciousness. While the studies' subjects have often been victims of colonialism and capitalist exploitation, cultural production through magical means need not be restricted to a society's most oppressed elements. Counter to the expectations of Max Weber, for whom capitalism marched to the drumbeat of "rationalization," many of the clients who patronize the shaman shrines of Seoul, Republic of Korea, are engaged in high‐risk petty‐capitalist enterprises. Shamans, clients, and spirits address the seemingly arbitrary fluctuations of good and bad fortune that can bring sudden wealth or ruin, and offer wry commentary upon what their world has become.

Women, mobility, and desire: narrating class and gender in South Korea Nancy Abelmann -- Discourses of illness, meanings of modernity: a gendered construction of Sŏnginbyŏng June J.H. Lee -- The production and subversion of hegemonic masculinity: reconfiguring gender hierarchy in contemporary South Korea Seungsook Moon -- Gender construction in the offices of a South Korean conglomerate Roger L. Janelli Dawnhee Yim -- The concept of female sexuality in Korean popular culture So-Hee Lee -- Living with conflicting subjectivities: mother, motherly wife, and sexy woman in the transition from colonial-modern to postmodern Korea Cho Haejoang