My 2nd year Korean textbook has this flattering view of Korea in its “culture” segment:
Koreans, especially women, are very sensitive to fashion. With seasonal changes, Koreans change their clothes (and shoes, in the case of women), conforming to the most fashionable trends. In the workplace too, men and women like to dress in a more or less uniform way. The quest for fashion and the wearing of similar formal attire are ubiquitous in Korean cities, perhaps because of Korean’ culture of uniformity and formalism.Although diluted to a certain extent by the American culture of diversity and pragmatism, Koreans still place a considerable value on traditional uniformity and formalism in social interactions. In general, a Korean’s mind is tied to his/her immediate family, organization, and community. Koreans are very much concerned about how others are behaving and what others think about their behavior.1
Am I the only one who finds this description, designed to introduce foreigners to Korean culture deeply problematic? These kinds of generalizations, which I was only happy to make when I first started studying Japanese and Chinese years ago now totally disgust me and I find them totally unhelpful. As evidence, the picture shows a bunch of Koreans walking down the street in business suits. Exactly how is this different than any business sector in Asia, New York, London, or anywhere else? And can anyone tell me a culture where we can not find people “conforming to the most fashionable trends”? I’m also amused by the use of the term diluted by American culture.
1. Cho, Young-mee et al Integrated Korean: Intermediate One (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) p. 49.
I agree entirely. Attempts to conjure up national cultures in textbooks of national languages are always simple-minded, misleading, and often irrelevant. It would be much better if they talked, not about fashion, but about an overweening concern with social hierarchy and how the latter directly affects language usage.
Write more about Korea. I’m going in January and I’m getting nervous. Lapis Lazuli formerly Duckling formerly Twisted Hazel formerly Hippo formerly not addicted to blogging ;)
I have mixed feelings about these kinds of generalizations. They are false, in the sense that any generalization is false, but they are important pieces of social and cultural data, as well. For an American student audience effectively ignorant of Korean culture, it is worth emphasizing the fundamental (but general) differences in culture: the ‘socio’ in ‘socio-linguistic.’
The problem is not that this is a starting place; the problem is that hardly anyone gets beyond this level.
Jonathan, I agree that generalizations are not entirely avoidable but as you say, the problem is that they hardly get beyond this. In a language textbook especially, you can’t get beyond it, so I see its inclusion more harmful than helpful, especially in a case like this, where the generalization tells us nothing about life in Korea which is unique to it. Even if we focused only on the claim of “formalism” which has more of a ring of truth to it, it wouldn’t be much of a claim unless we put it into context.
For example, they might be able to have a passage on, as Joel mentions, social hierarchy and its relationship to language. They could then mention how this is reflected in Korean language, but also note that this is the case with other languages such as Japanese etc. Again, this would be something you would have to take considerable care in wording, another reason to simply leave it out of a language textbook.