초록
South Korean television dramas, K-Dramas, initiated the Korean Wave, Hallyu, in the late 1990s. Nowadays, a global viewership gathers online to stream K-Dramas live, watch them with subtitles, and discuss them on specialized blogs and message boards. However, most research still concentrates on East Asia as the main realm of K-Dramas’ diffusion, and online communities that watch K-Dramas on the Internet have rarely been considered. Furthermore, most researchers analyze K-Dramas as products inscribed by “Korean culture” or “society,” an approach that relies on an under-standing of “cultures” and “societies” as discrete, homogenous, locally bounded entities. Expanding upon the nascent online audience research on K-Dramas, I propose in this article a shift of perspective by focusing on how international fans themselves account for K-Dramas (or elements thereof) as socially and culturally “Korean” or operate a rupture with such a culturalist viewpoint.
키워드
Korean television dramas, international fandom, culture making, virtual ethnography
INTRODUCTION
I am watching a South Korean
This way of watching, sitting on the edge of one’s chair, anticipating what comes next, and at the same time accounting for ways of behaving, interacting, eating, talking, or walking—in short, ways of doing things—is common to all international fans of Korean television dramas (K-Dramas) as discussions on their blogs and message boards attest. During this process of accounting, some things are referred to as Korean ways of doing things, just as my friend did. But when and how exactly are interactions, behaviors, objects, or social institutions accounted for as being “Korean?” This is what I want to explore in this article.
Researchers can adopt a number of possible stances when setting out to analyze the (global) reception of K-Dramas—especially in regard to culture. The dominant stance consists of analyzing K-Dramas as products that are clearly rooted in “Korean culture” or “society,” which is inscribed in these moving images and their narrative tropes. However, this approach relies on an understanding of “cultures” and “societies” as distinct, tangible, homogenous, locally bounded entities. It also takes for granted that viewers worldwide actually account for K-Dramas as being “Korean.” I propose a shift of perspective by focusing on how international fans themselves either account for K-Dramas (or elements thereof) as socially and culturally “Korean” or operate a rupture with such a culturalist reading. In doing this, I would like to draw attention to the daily processes of what
The results presented in this article are based on ongoing research on K-Dramas’ international fans through content analysis of blogs and message boards. I address the overall question of international fans’ culturalization of K-Dramas in three steps. I first show how international fans rarely culturalize what they see in K-Dramas in their discussions, but mainly interpret what happens in K-Dramas according to the conventions of K-Dramaland, a fictive world that represents a self-contained universe. Afterwards, I retrace how exactly international fans culturalize “Korean” dramas or elements and themes thereof in making reference in their understandings to “Korea” or “Korean culture.” I demonstrate how this culturalization usually includes not only a cultural labeling of the other, the “Korean,” but also a cultural (in the sense of national, regional cultures), social, or political (here feminist) self-positioning by viewers themselves. As I show, these culturalist understandings are highly negotiated among international fans. And finally, I demonstrate to what extent this process of cultural labeling and the negotiations that accompany them engender a “hierarchy of credibility”
HALLYU AND RESEARCHING K-DRAMAS
All scholars who study
The notion of “cultural proximity” was introduced by
Two trends in scholarship have dominated this research on K-Dramas’ reception in East Asia until now. One trend has focused on how K-Dramas have affected the perception of Korea and/or Koreans in other countries
When broadening the research to other regions or studying the worldwide diffusion of K-Dramas, it is a logical deduction that the cultural proximity thesis has difficulty accounting for the international viewership of K-Dramas outside of East Asia. First, Straubhaar’s argument regarding regional linguistic and thus cultural commonalities does not apply in such a research setting. In addition, the consumption patterns of international K-Drama fans contradict Straubhaar’s argument (1991, 51), which emphasizes the importance of linguistic commonalities and only takes into account programs that are broadcast by “preexisting international production and distributing systems”
But more fundamentally, the cultural proximity thesis relies on a specific conceptualization of culture that has been put into question since the 1970s. According to this conceptualization, (national) cultures/societies are understood as discrete, tangible, bounded, stable, and enduring entities (for a critical discussion, see, e.g.,
In regard to the media through which K-Dramas are consumed, previous research refers to television broadcasting, VHS cassettes, and DVDs, and it seldom mentions the Internet. It is thus a logical corollary that these researchers have assumed the
This article is intended to contribute to this nascent online research on the “interactive audience”
This analysis thus feeds into a much larger reflection on the nationalization or culturalization of behaviors, interactions, institutions, or objects. On a methodological level, this article therefore contributes to the deconstruction of methodological nationalism
5 Interestingly, a study by Lie indicates that this uniform historical account might be too simplistic. Lie shows that the music of Korean pop singer Cho Yong-p’il became very popular in Japan in the 1970s and refers to his songs as “something of a harbinger of the Korean Wave”
6 As a corollary of the cultural proximity thesis, viewership of K-Dramas has been conceptualized in previous research as restricted to East Asia and the Korean diaspora in the United States
7 A few scholars who study K-Dramas have questioned the cultural-proximity thesis’ ability to explain the success of K-Dramas in East Asia on its own. According to them, too much emphasis has been placed on the cultural similitudes of the different national cultures in East Asia, at the expense of intercultural disparities. To remedy this shortcoming, Chua (2010, 21) adopts a twoscale approach that focuses on two reasons for viewers’ attraction to K-Dramas—not only the cultural similitudes of a region, but also the differences between national cultures.
8 Some of them also learn Korean to be able to watch K-Dramas without subtitles and/or watch these television series before subtitles are released in order to have a sense of what is happening next.
9 For an exception to this tendency to conceptualize K-Dramas as cultural transmitters, see
METHODOLOGY
This article is based on ongoing online research that started in July 2012, since which time forty blogs and one message board have been followed on a daily basis. For this paper, I have concentrated on the data collected until August 2013. This data was hand coded and analyzed by following the three-step system of analysis of tagging, systematizing, and thematizing, as discussed by Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce, and Taylor (2012, 164ff).
The sample of blogs was selected according to five criteria that were established after following K-Dramas’ international fans during three years of blog “trawling” and “solicitation”
Because I concentrated my sample on blogs, I did not single out one or several K-Dramas for my research, but instead followed the K-Dramas that were discussed on the blogs during the time aforementioned—some of which are named in this article. Thus the television series discussed by international fans at any given time were those that were then being broadcast, as international fans usually discuss the latest episode of the K-Dramas being aired at the time. However, because of their archival character, the blogs and message board also allowed easy access to earlier discussions of K-Dramas. Some blogs that were analyzed cover nearly all K-Dramas that are being broadcast at a given time; others specialize in selected dramas for “recaps,” short summaries; and yet others discuss the specific dramas the bloggers follow. This is why older K-Dramas from the early 2000s that are accessible online were sometimes also discussed and were part of this research. Most blogs concentrate on shorter weekday dramas (sixteen to thirty episodes), and the longer weekend dramas (fifty or more episodes) were more frequently discussed on the message board. When time permitted, I also watched the K-Dramas to be able to better follow the discussions.
As might already be obvious, I also did not constitute my sample by trying to determine the ethnicity of the international fans. Thus I could avoid stereotyping informants as “belonging to” or “speaking for” a specific group of people because they “come from” a specific “ethnicity” or “culture”
I therefore conceived of these international fans as a world in the Beckerian sense
Furthermore, the majority of international fans use a “screen name” to identify themselves on blogs or message boards (often because of possible copyright infringements resulting from their subtitling activities or because an acquaintance may recognize them and make their “passion” or “addiction” for K-Dramas public, which, they fear, might lead to social sanctions or incomprehension
This imprecise information on the social and demographic background of the sample, which is rather common when doing research online, is often seen as a disadvantage of online research: since the body (the basis on which we usually perceive and label a person) is absent in online exchanges, it is often believed that anyone can impersonate anyone
10 That international fans understood these blogs in these terms was evident from the fact that the blogs were linked to by other blogs that concentrate only on K-Dramas in their “link listings.”
11 See
12 See, for example,
13 This is why I decided against a total anonymization by changing user names or citations: international fans who want to remain unknown do so. In addition, these blogs are publicly accessible, and the topics discussed in this article are not sensitive
14 The binary description of gender I employ here is not an analytical
15
K-DRAMAS ONLINE AND K-DRAMALAND: HOW INTERNATIONAL FANS CULTURALIZE “KOREAN” DRAMAS
From international K-Drama viewers’ discussions, a very specific way of perceiving K-Dramas can be outlined. Avid K-Drama viewers will discuss the storyline of a drama, its development, its possible endings, the motivations of certain protagonists, characters’ (in)consistencies (cf. Young Lee 2014), and the way the story is conveyed by the writers or actors in a very detailed way. Although rather rarely, these discussions do sometimes include a comparison with personal experiences or information about the author or the actors, or other “background information.”
It is this interpretation according to the rules of K-Dramaland that highlights how much international fans understand the story that develops before them as taking place in a self-contained universe. This understanding of K-Dramaland also explains international fans’ ethno-hermeneutic interpretations, which aim to understand and follow the actions and motivations of the characters in their context, i.e. the world the drama itself presents through the (re)use of a collection of standardized clichés. Plotlines that differ from the “norm in K-Dramaland” are thus also highlighted. As TS comments on the drama
In sum, international fans do not systematically
However, some international fans will occasionally also consider explanations based on a culturalist perspective. These culturalist interpretations will usually be negotiated among international fans with the intervention of some of them that take on an expert position. K-Dramaland can thus be understood as a fictional world that occasionally becomes a screen onto which “cultures”—understood in their association with “place”
16 Most typically, these discussions take place in separate threads or blog posts.
17 In all citations, I have left spelling, punctuation, and grammar as they are in the original
18
19
20 Most international fans refer to the settings of K-Dramas with a
21
22
THE (UN)CERTAINTY OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: FOUR DIFFERENT WAYS OF READING
If discussions among international fans occasionally shift from K-Dramaland into “cultural territory,” they usually do so in two ways. First, it can happen on the introductory page of a blog or when writing about K-Dramas in general. Second —and this is what interests me here, as it occurs predominantly on the Internet— it can happen when discussing one particular K-Drama. A specific element in a K-Drama, whether a gesture, an object, a traffic rule, a way of communicating, or a special drink or food, will be connoted as being “Korean.” Or a theme that a K-Drama revolves around, like school, kinship, or marriage, can be discussed in terms of culture.
Most typically, a culturalist explanation is not made right off the bat. It will most likely start with an interrogation that is spurred by curiosity, astonishment, or a felt lack of understanding that arises about how situations are handled in K-Dramas or how things are displayed. Some viewers, to make sense of their reactions, question whether these can be explained by, on the one hand, K-Dramaland conventions or, on the other, their limited cultural understanding or knowledge of the other, the “Korean.” This questioning thus very rarely starts with an explicit statement that something
A common way for international fans to follow up this interrogation is to address co-viewers on blogs or message boards. “But that’s just a cultural thing, right?” “Is there really a significance to relationship hair clips or is it purely a kdrama thing?” “Is it really that important for Korean women having lots of expensive ‘designer bags’?” “do they have that much coffee shop in korea?” These are just a few examples of these interrogations.
Even if, as shown above, most avid international K-Drama viewers refer to recurrent themes and ways of doings things as K-Dramaland laws, it can be exactly this repetition of certain laws or narrative tropes that makes some of these viewers believe that there could be a “cultural truth” behind them, as the following statement shows:
We are aware that k-drama is entertaining and at most times is fictional & beyond realistic/logical but with this constant abuse of both physical and emotional nature of the victim/heroine it brings the question as to is this how they (the country) see and really treat their women.
However, these attempts at a culturalist explanation are also very often eschewed in favor of a “K-Dramaland” perspective. “I first suspected it might be a cultural thing,” states Kakeshi regarding the drama
A fan’s interpretational doubt about the possible “Koreanness” of ways of doing things in K-Dramas is thus usually first stated as a probability and shared with other viewers on blogs and message boards. This “reluctance to culturalize” is the main tendency in international fans’ interpretation of K-Dramas. Other viewers are thus offered the role of cultural judges who either confirm the Koreanness of elements and/or themes or relegate them back to K-Dramaland. Often, these questions are not directed to a specific person, but to whomever may wish to reply. The questions are not always answered, or somebody might respond with a culturalist explanation that in turn may be questioned, supported, or refuted by subsequent commentators. Other times, a specific person—the author of a blog or a member of a message board—will be addressed directly, as that person is esteemed as being knowledgeable about “Korean” culture and society. These questions, however, are not always answered, and the next comment may just pass on to a new topic, which also underlines the fact that international K-Drama fans usually relegate culturalist interpretations to the periphery of the discussion.
In a similar modus of culturalization that is also characterized by reluctance, the astonishment about how things play out in K-Dramas or the felt lack of understanding are addressed by some international fans by linking them not only to a (possible) other culture, but also to their own cultural situatedness and belonging—an approach that is based on taking into account one’s own potential ethnocentrism that remains latent in the first modus. For these viewers, who position themselves as “not native,” having “not a drop of Asian blood,” or being “not Korean,” “Westerners,” “Western European,” “from a different culture,” or from “the U.S,” K-Dramas initiate a form of institutional reflexivity
This tendency often goes hand in hand with these fans’ construction of K-Dramas as a mirror, or at least a partial mirror, of “Korean culture.” Simultaneously, their own cultural or social belonging is constructed as different from the culture that is transmitted to them through K-Dramas. It is this cultural difference that is sometimes foregrounded by international fans as a probable explanation for their astonishment or felt lack of understanding and thus their possible misinterpretations in their reading of the K-Drama text. This lack of understanding is thus made into a possible lack of
But maybe having grown up in the US, I don’t quite understand some of the characters. [...] I am sure there is a cultural element I am missing [...] and somehow it befuddles me as to why Ha Kyung [one of the students of Seungri High School—where the drama mainly takes place] is getting so shit upon for trying so hard.
In their interpretational doubt, it is, in the eyes of these fans, their own cultural situatedness and perceived cultural differences that may be able to explain why they cannot fully decode the signs mediated through the screens of their computers, laptops, or smart phones. To verify which interpretation—the one referring to “Korean culture” or the one making reference to K-Dramaland—is correct, they also address their co-viewers. In these cases, the reluctance to interpret what they see is not based on a hesitation between a K-Dramaland explanation and a “Korean culture” explanation, but on how they perceive their own cultural belonging.
Some viewers—and this is a third modus of interpreting some K-Drama elements or themes—are more direct and don’t hesitate to attribute the label “Korean” to something they watch. Here, in contrast to the two other modi of interpretation, a specific element or way of doing things will clearly and directly be accounted for as Korean. Most of the time, this labeling will also be done with elements viewers who position themselves outside “Korean culture” have difficulties interpreting. These difficulties are often linked to a personal disagreement and/or dislike of how situations are played out. It is this personal distantiation from the happenings in K-Dramas that will be explained by a geographical and cultural distance and difference, as these international fans often believe that “Korean culture” is (partially) transmitted via K-Dramas. “I know things are differently socially in Korea so I might be totally misinterpreting her reactions,” says of when discussing the K-Drama
These culturalist statements, however, are not always taken for granted by other viewers and can be questioned, relativized, or put into a larger context, as is revealed by the following succession of comments by different international fans on dramabeans.com regarding the K-Drama
— ck1Oz: You know what? Somehow not seeing the screaming mother in laws. But knowing how class and education and family plays a huge part in Korean society- that is seriously scary.
— Windsun33: While class and education—especially “class” are more important in Korea and many other Asian countries than in the US, I would hardly take this or any other drama as a true reflection of Korean culture. [...]
— luvs: i think its more of poor vs rich instead of ‘class’ or education snobbery.
— Lilly: Class is iron clad in the USA. The USA ties with the UK as having the worst chance to ever move up from the class you are born into in the Western world. [...]
Here ck1Oz’s statement about the importance of family and education in Korean society is first relativized and criticized as
This discussion is quite representative of the exchanges between international fans once a culturalist probability or statement is posted on a message board or blog. Rarely is a culturalist statement directly and univocally accepted. Instead (if taken seriously enough to respond to), these statements are questioned, contradicted, and supported. In short, their cultural signifier is negotiated among international fans.
One other example of these negotiations over the cultural reality/verity of elements and/or themes exposed in K-Dramas and the different ways of approaching them is the recurrent discussion of the wrist-grab. I’d like to focus on this example for a bit. The majority of K-Drama viewers will agree that the wrist-grab constitutes a “staple of K-Dramas.” Among international fans, the term “wrist-grab” is usually intended to denote a man dragging a woman away from a place by grabbing her wrist. This gesture is recurrently approached with “reluctant culturalization.” Viewers are often not sure if this gesture can be explained by K-Dramaland on the one hand or Korean culture and/or society on the other. “I’m just getting into Kdramas and I’m not really sure on the culture,” states, for example, a viewer in a discussion about the drama
Another recurrent reaction to the wrist-grab is a strong dislike that is made sense of through a culturalist reading. This dislike is thus often explained by defining the wrist-grab as a product of a different culture and, simultaneously, through one’s own different cultural belonging. “I hate them, hate them, hate them!!” writes Kakeshi, who goes on: “Not that I try to be a feminist when watching KDrama, since I’ve noticed early that the two things don’t go together well, but the forceful, even abusive wrist-grabbing and wrist-dragging are really too much for my Western European taste buds. KDramas are products of a different culture, produced not only but probably mainly for that specific culture.”
As already shown above, these statements might be either confirmed or challenged by other viewers in a follow-up discussion. The counter-arguments also often adopt a culturalist perspective, as an anonymous comment on Kakeshi’s statement, cited above, demonstrates: “Wow I didn’t know wrist grabbing was something that could be seen as offensive especially to women because in Korea, it can happen to either side as an expression of intimacy or anger. I personally experienced a forceful wristgrab from my ex-boyfriend in the past and I just thought ‘What’s all this about? Why is he angry?’ It was irritating, but I didn’t take it seriously.”
In particular, topics around heterosexual relationships and the portrayal of heroes and heroines are, as has already been seen to some extent in the comments on the wrist-grab, often discussed in ways that combine a culturalist positioning with a feminist one. Here, things seen in K-Dramas are made sense of through intersecting viewpoints—the last way of understanding elements or themes of K-Dramas that I want to discuss here. On her blog
I’ve always considered myself to be a feminist, which can be a difficult thing to reconcile with a love of Korean drama. As much as fun as I have watching these shows, I often find myself cringing when it comes to their depictions of relationships between men and women.
This self-positioning as a feminist when discussing K-Dramas occurs mainly among international fans when topics or elements of K-Dramas are mentioned with which viewers cannot agree or feel offended by, as seen earlier in Kakeshi’s comment on the wrist-grab. This feminist stance is clearly linked by these international fans to an upbringing in a “Western culture” that collides with “patriarchal Korean culture/society.” In this double differentiation and distantiation, Korean society/culture is often described not only as culturally different but also as “patriarchal,” and “predominantly male chauvinistic,” and therefore as having “gender-equality issues.” Again, K-Dramas, in the eyes of these fans, (partially) reflect this. “Don’t think that fiction in a patriarchal society doesn’t reflect the values that are deemed to be right in that culture,”
Among the East Asian countries, Korea is at present the one with the strictest adherence to the Confucian ethical tradition; this fact has a direct relationship with gender roles in Korean society and therefore influences the image of women in media.
However, this double differentiation and distantiation is also contested as being too simple a construct and a miscomprehension of social reality in Korea – and, in this context, Korea’s gender order. This contestation can take different forms. Some insist that certain elements like the wrist-grab must be understood in their social and cultural context, in which they have different connotations. Others criticize an overly simplified view of Korean society and culture, which are described as actually being much more layered and diversified. Still others relativize claims about Korean culture by highlighting the similitudes (instead of the differences) between it and others “cultures” and pointing out that K-Dramas do not realistically mirror Korean culture. The two following comments are examples of these types of contestations:
[...] the whole wrist-grabbing thing is a long overused and familiar trope that’s been in countless other K-dramas (Nice Guy for one) and really is more of a cultural thing than a sign that this particular character is a sexist, dominating “jackass.” It’s almost become predictable now to expect a backlash from viewers against the male characters that exhibit this behaviour every time the trope is used in a drama. You’d think by now, k-drama watchers would find it a non-issue [...].
K-drama’s do not equal K-culture necessarily. Sexism is defiantly a global problem, and Im sure k-dramas is not a good representation of what the average Korean is okay with just like the US media is not a representation of how everyone feels and acts, and we still have are problems with sexism here as well.
23 In this article, I exclude
24 With the term “doing culture,” I refer to a constructivist understanding of culture—to culture as something that is continuously done through interactional work. This understanding can be read as a theoretical translation of the concept “doing gender”
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
THE USE OF SINGLED-OUT SIGNIFIERS IN THE COLLECTIVE CONSTRUCTION OF “KOREAN CULTURE”
What connects all these ways of culturalizing—whether it is done reluctantly, directly, or in intersection with other self-positionings—is that one rather minor, rather arbitrary element or theme in K-Dramaland can be made by international fans to stand for a whole, specific social group, “Koreans,” or a whole culture/society, “Korean culture/society.” Even though direct comparison is difficult, Collette
This
“HIERARCHY OF CREDIBILITY”: SINGLING OUT “EXPERTS OF KOREA”
What I have demonstrated so far is that when international fans cannot make sense of something they see in a K-Drama, they seek explanations primarily in K-Dramaland and its clichés and much less frequently in their understanding of what “Korean culture/society”
Viewers thus seek out people they define as experts on “Korean culture.” The resources to verify whether something is “Korean” or can be interpreted as part of K-Dramaland, i.e. is purely imagined, require in their view a person who is “as close to Korean culture as possible.” Those who are addressed as experts on Korean culture or position themselves as such have a transversal characteristic,
What is considered a legitimate lived experience, however, varies considerably among international fans. Some will ask a member of their extended family who lives in Korea, a “Korean friend,” a “Korean Expat friend,” or somebody who is married to a Korean. Others refer to a “non-Korean” who has visited, lives, or has lived in Korea, or to their own lived experience in Korea, be it on vacation or for a longer period of time. The important factor here is having first-hand experience of “Korean culture” through participation. Central to this understanding, therefore, is the belief that people are the most important vectors of “Korean culture.”
International fans thus conceptualize Korean culture in a very Herderian way
It is this importance of “lived there, been there, seen it” among international fans that engenders a hierarchy of credibility between K-Drama viewers that is most often based on how well one knows “Korean culture.” People who are close to this “culture” through lived experience are thought to have “a more complete picture of what is going on than anyone else” and their interpretations are regarded as “the most credible account obtainable,” as Becker shows for organizations (1998, 90). Lacking this lived experience will make viewers have “incomplete information, and their view of reality will be partial and distorted in consequence” (ibid.).
The existence of birth secrets in family dramas is one of those things I suspect may have people rolling their eyes, but funny enough, it’s an element I have no trouble with. [...] Maybe it’s because this is just a thing that happens in Korean families? I can only draw upon my own experiences so I don’t speak for the society at large, but I have seen several (yup, plural) birth secret instances in my extended family, and it just seems like a normal part of the fabric of life.
Along these lines, three types of experts are accepted among K-Dramas’ international fans. Most of the time, the most highly regarded experts among international fans are those who identify as “Korean-Americans” or “KoreanCanadians,” as they come with two assets in the eyes of most international fans: they are perfectly bilingual—in a linguistic but also in a cultural sense. This “cultural hybridity” causes them to be seen as perfect cultural and linguistic mediators between the world of Anglophone international fans and “Korean culture.”
Some international fans can nevertheless circumvent this hierarchy of credibility based on lived experience. They can gain authority as legitimate commentators on K-Dramas that can extend to “Korean culture/society” in general through active participation in and a longtime commitment to this world. These fans, in their logic, thus cannot foreground any lived experience in Korea, as they have never been to Korea, don’t speak Korean, and have no other relationship with Korea or Koreans. However, their remarks on “Korean culture” and society are taken more seriously and are less contested than those of other international fans.
The final type of expert accepted by international fans is not someone who has lived experience in Korea or its diaspora, but someone who has lived experience in “Asia” or
— dexter8010: There is something i want the ask from @hkana I read eralier you are an asian. I am from Hungary (central europe). I saw many dramas when the wife has become the husband’s shadow. They are reffering the woman is not equal the men. This so strange for me. Is this standrad thing in asia?
— sonny: [...] Asian families are like that unfortuneately. It’s better to marry someone who is in your social rank. Life is just easier that way. My parents stress compatibility and equal footing and I can see where they’re coming from.
— kdramafan469: I agree with some but not all of what you said. I don’t think that Asians have a strangle hold on not wanting mismatched relationships. To some extinct all cultures have that point of view. My parents would often say, “You can do bad on your own.” [...]
— hkana: As for your question regarding the females being the shadow of men in Asian [...] In the old days, mostly the male (father) was the sole bread winner of the family so they decided almost anything. Women’s action were limited and mostly they stayed home. However it’s not always the same for all families. [...]
40 See, for example,
41
42
43 For example, the success of the blog dramabeans.com is certainly due partly to this hierarchy of credibility between fans, since the two bloggers, girlfriday and javabeans, repeatedly position themselves as Korean Americans and therefore as legitimate commentators on “Korean culture.”
44 Knowledge of the language is another important factor that is usually linked to these lived experiences.
45
46
SOME FINAL REMARKS
When writing about their “passion” for or “addiction” to K-Dramas, quite a number of international fans state that before they encountered their first K-Drama, they were not even aware of the existence of South Korea, let alone able to situate it geographically. Some also state that these moving images were for them an encounter with an exotic, new, and different world. A superficial analysis could easily single out such descriptions and show that international fans perceive K-Dramas as products of a specific culture with clearly decodable cultural characteristics. But a detailed and thorough analysis of international fans’ blogs and message boards reveals that such a view is untenable. When analyzing the comments on and interpretations of K-Dramas by international fans, it quickly becomes obvious that culturalist interpretations are extremely rare. Most interpretations center around an in-depth reading, which I have called an ethnohermeneutic reading, of the discussed K-Drama by focusing on, among other things, the storyline of a drama, its development and possible endings, the motivations of certain protagonists, and character (in)consistencies. This way of reading K-Dramas is enforced by recurrent narrative patterns deployed by the writers, directors, and producers of K-Dramas that form, in the eyes of international fans, a world of its own, K-Dramaland.
Thus, my aim in this article has been to propose a different way of looking at culture. Following the constructivist research on culture pioneered by
By foregrounding the logics of interpretation of the international fans themselves, I have demonstrated that K-Dramas do not transmit a set definition of “Korean culture” that is also received as such, but that, instead, Korean culture is an imagined and negotiated product constructed by an international audience through the mediations of interlocutors who are defined as cultural experts. This analysis has also demonstrated that the taken-for-granted hypotheses of most previous research—that K-Dramas necessarily transmit Korean culture, and that viewers can easily decode this culture—have to be treated with caution, especially because these moving images are messages that are decoded by international fans mainly in the realm of a fictive world, K-Dramaland, and not a specific “culture.”
참고문헌(51)
-
[단행본]
1998 [1969]
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Cultural Difference . -
[단행본]
1996
Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London .Cambridge University Press
-
[단행본]
2003 [2000]
What is Globalization? Polity Press
-
[단행본]
1998
Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research while You’re Doing It .University of Chicago Press
-
[단행본]
2008 [1982]
Art Worlds. 25 Anniversary Edition .University of California Press
-
[단행본]
1969
Symbolic Interactionism; Perspective and Method .Prentice-Hall
-
[단행본]
1991
De la justification: les économies de la grandeur .Gallimard
-
[참고문헌]
2011
“Of Prince Charming and Male Chauvinist Pigs: Singaporean Female Viewers and the Dream-world of Korean Television Dramas.”
International Journal of Cultural Studies 14(3) : 291 - 305
10.1177/1367877910391868
- [인터넷자료]http://congress.aks.ac.kr/korean/files/2_1357266442.pdf
-
[참고문헌]
2009
“Japanese Surfing the Korean Wave: Drama Tourism, Nationalism, and Gender via Ethnic Eroticisms.”
Southeast Review of Asian Studies 31 : 10 - 38
-
[단행본]
2002
“Hermeneutics and Art Theory.” In
A Companion to Art Theory , ed. Smith, Paul, and Carolyn Wilde436
Blackwell
-
[참고문헌]
1992
“The Mythology about Globalization.”
European Journal of Communication 7 : 69 - 93
10.1177/0267323192007001004
-
[참고문헌]
2002
“Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-state Building, Migration and the Social Sciences.”
Global Networks 2(4) : 301 - 334
10.1111/1471-0374.00043
-
[참고문헌]
1977
“The Arrangement between the Sexes.”
Theory and Society 4(3) : 301 - 331
10.1007/BF00206983
-
[참고문헌]
2003
“Cultural Essentialism and Cultural Anxiety.”
Anthropological Theory 3(2) : 157 - 173
10.1177/1463499603003002002
-
[단행본]
2002 [1972]
L
’idéologie raciste .Gallimard
-
[단행본]
1999
“Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” In
Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology , eds. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson33
Duke University Press
-
[참고문헌]
2007
“Hanryu Sweeps East Asia. How Winter Sonata is Gripping Japan.”
The International Communication Gazette 69(3) : 281 - 294
10.1177/1748048507076581
-
[참고문헌]
2007
“The Potential of Fandom and the Limits of Soft Power: Media Representations on the Popularity of a Korean Melodrama in Japan.”
Social Science Japan Journal 10(2) : 197 - 216
10.1093/ssjj/jym049
-
[단행본]
2001
“Das Vergessen des Geschlechts. Zur Praxeologie einer Kategorie sozialer Ordnung.” In
Geschlechtersoziologie. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie. Sonderheft 41, ed. Bettina Heintz208
Westdeutscher Verlag
-
[참고문헌]
2012
“Découvrir les séries télé de l’ Asie de l’est en France: le drama au coeur d’une contre-culture féminine à l’ère numérique.”
Anthropologie Et Sociétés 36(1?2) : 201 - 222
10.7202/1011724ar
-
[참고문헌]
2008
“‘Entering the blogosphere’: Some Strategies for Using Blogs in Social Research.”
In
Qualitative Research 8(1) : 91 - 113
10.1177/1468794107085298
-
[단행본]
2002
Recentering Globalization. Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism .Duke University Press
-
[단행본]
2008
“When the Korean Wave Meets Resident Koreans in Japan: Intersection of the Transnational, the Postcolonial and the Multicultural.” In
East Asian Pop Culture: Approaching the Korean Wave , 243–264, eds. Chua Beng Huat, and Koichi Iwabuchi.Hong Kong University Press
-
[참고문헌]
2009
“Transnational Korea: A Critical Assessment of the Korean Wave in Asia and the United States.”
Southeast Review of Asian Studies 31 : 69 - 80
-
[참고문헌]
2005
“Korean TV Dramas in Taiwan: With an Emphasis on the Localization Process.”
Korea Journal 45(4) : 183 - 205
-
[참고문헌]
2009
“Interpreting Transnational Cultural Practices. Social Discourses on a Korean Drama in Japan, Hong Kong, and China.”
Cultural Studies 23(5?6) : 736 - 755
10.1080/09502380903132348
- [인터넷자료]http://asiafuture.org/csps2006/50pdf/csps2006_5c.pdf
-
[단행본]
2005
Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-network Theory .Oxford University Press
-
[단행본]
2003 [1990]
“Women Watching Together. An Ethnographic Study of Korean Soap Opera Fans in the United States.” In
Gender Race and Class in Media. A Text-reader , 482–487, eds. Dines, Gail, and Jean M. Humez.Sage Publications
-
[단행본]
2014
“As Seen on the Internet: The Recap as Translation in English-language K-drama Fandoms.” In
The Korean Popular Culture Reader , eds. Kim, Kyung Hyun, and Youngmin Choe76
Duke University Press
-
[참고문헌]
2010
“Korean Television Dramas in Japan: Imagining ‘East Asianness’ and Consuming ‘Nostalgia’.”
Asian Women 26(2) : 77 - 104
-
[참고문헌]
2012
“What is the K in K-pop? South Korean Popular Music, the Culture Industry, and National Identity.”
Korea Obeserver 43(3) : 339 - 363
-
[참고문헌]
2007
“Crossing Boundaries: Male Consumption of Korean TV Dramas and Negotiation of Gender Relations in Modern Day Hong Kong.”
Journal of Gender Studies 16(3) : 217 - 232
10.1080/09589230701562905
-
[단행본]
2003
“The Changing Nature of Audiences: From the Mass Audience to the Interactive Media User.” In
Companion to Media Studies. Blackwell Companions in Cultural Studies 6, eds. Valdivia, Angharad N.337
Blackwell Publishing
-
[단행본]
1965
Le musée imaginaire .Gallimard
-
[단행본]
2008
“The Methods, Politics, and Ethics of Representation in Online Ethnography.” In
Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials , eds. Denzin, Norman K., and Yvonna S. Lincoln247
Sage Publications
-
[참고문헌]
2006
“Popular Culture Transcending National Borders and Genres in East Asia.”
Journal of Environmental Studies 9(1) : 15 - 22
-
[단행본]
1968
Social Theory and Social Structure .Free Press
-
[단행본]
2008
Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary .Duke University Press
-
[단행본]
2009
Foundation. B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-hop Culture in New York .Oxford University Press
- [인터넷자료]http://asiafuture.org/ csps2006/50pdf/csps2006_3d.pdf
-
[참고문헌]
2008
“Behind the Korean Broadcasting Boom.”
NHK Broadcasting Studies 6 : 205 - 232
-
[참고문헌]
1991
“Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural Proximity.”
Critical Studies in Mass Communication 8(1) : 39 - 59
10.1080/15295039109366779
-
[참고문헌]
2002
“Research Ethics in Internet-enabled Research: Human Subjects Issues and Methodological Myopia.”
In
Ethics and Information Technology 4 : 205 - 216
10.1023/A:1021368426115
-
[참고문헌]
1987
“Doing Gender.”
Gender and Society 1(2) : 125 - 151
10.1177/0891243287001002002
-
[참고문헌]
2011
“Researching Personal Information on the Public Web: Methods and Ethics.”
Social Science Computer Review 29 : 387 - 401
10.1177/0894439310378979
-
[단행본]
2005
Kultur als Prozess. Zur Dynamik des Aushandelns von Bedeutungen .VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften
-
[참고문헌]
2009
“Herder’s Heritage and the Boundary-making Approach: Studying Ethnicity in Immigrant Societies.”
Sociological Theory 27(3) : 244 - 270
10.1111/j.1467-9558.2009.01347.x
-
[참고문헌]
2008
“Engaging with Korean Dramas: Discourses of Gender, Media, and Class Formation in Taiwan.”
Asian Journal of Communication 18(1) : 64 - 79
10.1080/01292980701823773
-
[참고문헌]
2012
“The Korean Wave (Hallyu) in East Asia: A Comparison of Chinese, Japanese, and Taiwanese Audiences Who Watch Korean TV Dramas.”
Development and Society 41(1) : 103 - 147
1 In the following, “Korea” refers to South Korea.
2 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers atActa Koreana for their valuable comments.
3 I use the English titles of the K-Dramas I discuss to reflect the way they are known and named by the international fans I am interested in here. The same goes for the names of the protagonists of the K-Dramas. I also use the term “international fans” in the emic sense, i.e. how these fans call themselves and not in an analytical sense.
4 The term “culturalization” is thus employed throughout this paper in the sense of continuous, on-going processes of “making culture”(see for example Grillo 2003) .