Technologies Of Self In Contemporary Korea- The Notion Of Suryŏn (修練) In GiCheon (氣天)

2015 ◽  
pp. 76-96
Author(s):  
Victoria Ten
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Individual Experience ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Empirical Material

GiCheon (氣天) is one of many contemporary South Korean mind-body disciplines focused on physical and moral self-cultivation. Utilizing a series of interviews with the adherents of this movement, this paper examines their individual experience and understanding of GiCheon praxis in the new social and political context, revealing the mechanisms of self-construction in modern and post-modern South Korea. Within my analysis of this empirical material, I focus on the notion of Suryŏn (修練, training), often referred to by the interviewees as central to GiCheon. The process and the goal of self-transformation, generally associated with Suryŏn, are further conceptualized within this paper through the framework of “technologies of self ” provided by Michel Foucault.

The Prison and the Postcolony: Contested Memory and the Museumification of Sŏdaemun Hyŏngmuso

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-67
Author(s):  
Russell Burge
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Japanese Empire ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
Run Up ◽  
A Site

Abstract Seoul’s Sŏdaemun Prison is famous in South Korea today as a site of heroic resistance where Korean anticolonial activists were martyred at the hands of Japanese colonial officials. This narrative is complicated, however, by the fact that the prison continued to be used after the fall of the Japanese Empire as a tool to suppress political dissent, right up until its final decommissioning in 1987. This study inquires into the political context surrounding Sŏdaemun Prison’s decommissioning and finds that the decision was made by the Chun Doo Hwan administration in the run-up to the Seoul Olympics and was more concerned with the erasure of contemporaneous political excesses than the preservation of colonial memory. Sŏdaemun Prison’s transformation into a site of colonial tourism in the following decade was carried out as part of a larger move in urban planning to overwrite the memory of the postcolonial authoritarian past, a process that reveals much about the limitations and contradictions of South Korean democratization.

The Korean Socio-Political Context of the 1970s in Robot Taekwon V (1976)

Animation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-159
Author(s):  
Hyunseok Lee
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Pop Culture ◽  
Political Context ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Korean Government ◽  
Character Design ◽  
The Military ◽  
Japanese Animation

As one of the masterpieces of early South Korean animation, the film Robot Taekwon V has instilled hopes and dreams in a younger generation of Koreans since the late 1970s when it was released, while critics have cited Robot Taekwon V as being influenced by American pop culture, particularly the Disney animation style, and have accused it of plagiarizing the designs of the popular Japanese animation Mazinger Z. In the 1970s, the Korean government actively promoted economic development for the ‘modernization of the country’ under the military regime’s inculcation of anti-communism. Robot Taekwon V was produced with the intent of being an anti-communist tool and, further, it sought the nationalism of postwar South Korea and promoted the country’s confidence in the future that eventually resulted in rapid economic development. This socio-political context is portrayed both in the form of a ‘gigantic robot’ and in the use of non-Korean appearances for Korean characters. Considering these aspects, the author examines how Robot Taekwon V navigates the intricacies of the postwar ideological framework, manages foreign cultural influences and suggests transnationalism through its character design and narrative.

scholarly journals Comparison Analysis of Developmentalism in Globalization Era: Indonesia Joko Widodo’s Presidency (2014-2019) and South Korea Moon Jae-In Presidency (2017-2020)

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Darynaufal Mulyaman ◽  
Achmad Ismail ◽  
Nadya Carollina ◽  
Morry Zefanya
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Political Context ◽  
New Order ◽  
Current Policy ◽  
Asian Countries ◽  
Comparison Analysis ◽  
Market Policy ◽  
South Korean ◽  
The World ◽  
The Government

In the globalized age, freedom in capital and workforce movement, self expression, and information openness become vital, including in Asian countries like Indonesia and South Korea. Thus innovation and creativity have become an important key in recent eras. New kinds of innovation and creativity that are established by Asian countries sometimes are nostalgic policies by the previous regime of the government. Therefore, Indonesia still comes up with a kind of centralistic governance and planning with a twist of free and liberal market policy, a developmental style of New Order governance to some extent. Hence, why is developmentalism in Indonesia still relevant? Even when there are shifts in the regimes and globalization process of the world. This paper argues that the policy series that has been initiated in Indonesia under President Joko Widodo is still part of developmentalism because of the historical and political context in a broader sense on developmentalism, therefore still relevant in Indonesia. This paper also uses the South Korean case of current policy under President Moon Jae-In to compare and assign Indonesian developmentalism relevancy as South Korea can be seen as one of the successful examples of developmentalism yet liberal country.

Elusive Belonging

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minjeong Kim
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Foreign Born ◽  
Multicultural Society ◽  
Projected Image ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Everyday Lives

With the unprecedented number of foreign-born population, South Korea has tried to reinvent itself as a multicultural society, but the intense multiculturalism efforts have focused exclusively on marriage immigrants. At the advent and height of South Korea’s eschewed multiculturalism, Elusive Belonging takes the readers to everyday lives of marriage immigrants in rural Korea where the projected image of a developed Korea which lured marriage immigrants and the gloomy reality of rural lives clashed. The intimate ethnographic account pays attention to emotional entanglements among Filipina wives, South Korean husbands, in-laws, and multicultural agents, with particular focus on such emotions as love, intimacy, anxiety, gratitude, and derision, which shape marriage immigrants’ fragmented citizenship and elusive sense of belonging to their new country. This investigation of the politics of belonging illuminates how marriage immigrants explore to mold a new identity in their new home, Korea.

The Emergence of Business Groups: Israel and South Korea Compared

2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (5) ◽  
pp. 737-758 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Maman
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Multinational Corporations ◽  
Business Groups ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Economic Organizations ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Korean State

This paper examines the emergence of business groups in Israel and South Korea. The paper questions how, in very different institutional contexts, similar economic organizations emerged. In contrast to the political, cultural and market perspectives, the comparative institutional analysis adopted in this research suggests that one factor alone could not explain the emergence of business groups. In Israel and South Korea, business groups emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, and there are common factors underlying their formation: state-society relations, the roles and beliefs of the elites, and the relative absence of multinational corporations in the economy. To a large extent, the chaebol are the result of an intended creation of the South Korean state, whereas the Israeli business groups are the outcome of state policies in the economic realm. In both countries, the state elite held a developmental ideology, did not rely on market forces for economic development, and had a desire for greater economic and military self-sufficiency. In addition, both states were recipients of large grants and loans from other countries, which made them less dependent on direct foreign investments. As a result, the emerging groups were protected from the intense competition of multinational corporations.

scholarly journals Engineering care in pandemic technogovernance: The politics of care in China and South Korea’s COVID-19 tracking apps

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110207
Author(s):  
Youngrim Kim ◽  
Yuchen Chen ◽  
Fan Liang
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Care Services ◽  
Ideological Dimension ◽  
And Control

This article critically examines South Korea and China’s COVID-19 tracking apps by bridging surveillance studies with feminist technoscience’s understanding of the “politics of care”. Conducting critical readings of the apps and textual analysis of discursive materials, we demonstrate how the ideological, relational, and material practices of the apps strategically deployed “care” to normalize a particular form of pandemic technogovernance in these two countries. In the ideological dimension, media and state discourse utilized a combination of vilifying and nationalist rhetoric that framed one’s acquiescence to surveillance as a demonstration of national belonging. Meanwhile, the apps also performed ambivalent roles in facilitating essential care services and mobilizing self-tracking activities, which contributed to the manufacturing of pseudonormality in these societies. In the end, we argue that the Chinese and South Korean governments managed to frame their aggressive surveillance infrastructure during COVID-19 as a form of paternalistic care by finessing the blurred boundaries between care and control.

scholarly journals Prevalence and socioeconomic burden of diabetes mellitus in South Korean adults: a population-based study using administrative data

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sung-Hee Oh ◽  
Hyemin Ku ◽  
Kang Seo Park
Keyword(s):  
South Korea ◽  
Diabetic Complications ◽  
Economic Burden ◽  
Productivity Loss ◽  
Diabetic Patients ◽  
Claims Database ◽  
South Korean ◽  
Subgroup Analyses ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Capita Cost

Abstract Background Diabetes leads to severe complications and imposes health and financial burdens on the society. However, currently existing domestic public health studies of diabetes in South Korea mainly focus on prevalence, and data on the nationwide burden of diabetes in South Korea are lacking. The study aimed to estimate the prevalence and economic burden of diabetes imposed on the South Korean society. Methods A prevalence-based cost-of-illness study was conducted using the Korean national claims database. Adult diabetic patients were defined as those aged ≥20 years with claim records containing diagnostic codes for diabetes (E10-E14) during at least two outpatient visits or one hospitalization. Direct costs included medical costs for the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes and transportation costs. Indirect costs included productivity loss costs due to morbidity and premature death and caregivers’ costs. Subgroup analyses were conducted according to the type of diabetes, age (< 65 vs. ≥65), diabetes medication, experience of hospitalization, and presence of diabetic complications or related comorbidities. Results A total of 4,472,133 patients were diagnosed with diabetes in Korea in 2017. The average annual prevalence of diabetes was estimated at 10.7%. The diabetes-related economic burden was USD 18,293 million, with an average per capita cost of USD 4090 in 2019. Medical costs accounted for the biggest portion of the total cost (69.5%), followed by productivity loss costs (17.9%), caregivers’ costs (10.2%), and transportation costs (2.4%). According to subgroup analyses, type 2 diabetes, presence of diabetic complications or related comorbidities, diabetes medication, and hospitalization represented the biggest portion of the economic burden for diabetes. As the number of complications increased from one to three or more, the per capita cost increased from USD 3991 to USD 11,965. In inpatient settings, the per capita cost was ~ 10.8 times higher than that of outpatient settings. Conclusions South Korea has a slightly high prevalence and economic burden of diabetes. These findings highlight the need for effective strategies to manage diabetic patients and suggest that policy makers allocate more health care resources to diabetes. This is the first study on this topic, conducted using a nationally representative claims database in South Korea.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document