Korean Studies

The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a 250-kilometer long and four-kilometer wide buffer zone, was created after the armistice of the Korean War in 1953. One of the most globally recognized militarized landscapes, it is also a site where the incidental convergence of defense activity and environmental protection has taken place. Since its establishment the DMZ has remained terra nullius, only open to non-humans, apart from occasional local military crashes. As the recent designation of the DMZ as a UNESCO biosphere reserve illustrates, this product of Cold War conflict is now widely recognized as a haven for endangered animals and plants. In his research, Postdoctoral Fellow Jaehwan Hyun examines how environmentalism, science, and geopolitics became intertwined by the military-supported fieldworks during the Cold War, enabling a new ecological vision for the DMZ. tivity with natural history surveying to identify national fauna and flora that represented the unique nature of the nation. Under a materialistic and symbolic regime competition with North Korea, local scientists continued the mountaineering-tradition practices through collaborative US-South Korea fieldwork at the DMZ, despite the definition of the project as an "ecological survey." They searched for national animals and plants, such as tigers and pine trees that were supposed to have been threatened by Japanese colonialism, in the bushes of the DMZ. Neither the financial supporter-the US military-nor the US scientific collaborators were interested in such work, and they sometimes quarreled with the local scientists, blaming the Korean side for being ignorant of ecology and "primitive" naturalists. However, they soon conceded that the South Korean fieldworkers should be allowed to pursue their work: only Koreans could work in the long-term base, and only they possessed local knowledge about the field. Finally, the Korean scientists incorporated the results of field surveys into a government propagandist book, which described the DMZ as a showcase of "the restoration of the Korean nature (Kŭmsugangsan)." This therefore turned environmental cooperation into a means of nation-building. The Ambivalent Legacy of Military Ecology The DMZ has recently been under the spotlight for the "greening" of security diplomacy by local government and outside observers. The South Korean President Moon Jae-In pledged to transform the DMZ into a "peace(ful) and cooperating district" at the United Nations General Assembly in Sep-tember 2019. His proposal is another articulation of the DMZ diplomacy that his predecessors have promoted since the early 1990s: environmental cooperation and research and ecotourism within the zone are its main tactics for bringing North Korea to the table. Current environmental diplomacy counts on a particular version of the environmental conception of the DMZ that was created by military ecologists. Yet the other side of their scientific activities during the Cold War remains under-recognized. Jaehwan Hyun' s project tells us the ambivalent legacy of military ecology: while claiming natural protection of and research on the borderland, for instance, US ecologists advised its military to use Agent Orange to clear plants and trees. This project seeks to further illuminate this ambivalent nature of military environmentalism, and the place of science in the Cold War formation of militarized landscapes. More research topics are available at: www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/researchtopics T +49 30 22 667 0 RESEARCH TOPICS ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jaehwan Hyun is a Postdoctoral Fellow based in Department III (Arti-facts, Action, Knowledge), directed by Dagmar Schäfer. His current research project focuses on how global environmental concerns and related scientific collaborations were entangled with the postcolonial nation-building of South Korea and Japan during the Cold War period.

"Bone" as the Underlying Subject for Nobility in Koreans and Turks

In Silla (668-935), i.e. the first kingdom to unite the Korean Peninsula under a single roof, within the bone-rank system [kol-p'um] that discriminates the nobles from commoners, and among the nobles the dynasty from bureaucracy, "bone" manifests itself as the underlying subject of nobility. According to this bone-rank system, those who were born a "sacred bone" [sŏng-gol] consisted the highest stratum, those who were born a "true bone" [chin-gol] were of the second rank. Kings and queens were supposed to belong to the sacred bone caste. The relatives of the dynasty and the ministers constituted the true bone caste. And below them, and above the commoners [p'yŏng-min], there were the "head rank" [tu-p'um] caste that consisted of six levels. In like manner, white bone-dark bone dichotomy determines who is noble and who is not in Turks and in Genghis Khan Empire, i.e., nobility is an attribute of bone regarding being white or not. For in Turks and Genghis Han Empire, "white bone" signifies nobles; whereas "dark bone" signifies commoners. This remarkable similarity is a sign that the Turks and the Koreans have more in common, along with nomadism, the monotheistic belief in the God of Heaven(s) (i.e. Blue Sky or Tengri) and Altay language. This humble work aims at grounding this point mentioned Structured Abstract: Koreans and Turks are said to have many common aspects in terms of their culture. The most significant ones of these aspects are [i] nomadism, [ii] monotheistic belief in

This paper it is learning Korean language through cooking and culture. Foreign language learning becomes more efficient when it is based on cultural learning of the language. Among the cultures, language learning through the food culture that is good to enjoy is a good factor for straightening learners self-motivation.  Learning foreign language through  the cooking terminology for real life and understand Korean food culture through how to make representative dishes of Korea.

The Korean War (1950-53) changed the material and affective landscape of the Korean peninsula and ushered in a new era ruled by a military dictatorship dependent on US military power. With bases dotting the South Korean peninsula, former agricultural villages became camptowns that catered to the needs of American soldiers. This article focuses on the South Korean melodrama Chiokhwa (Hellflower, 1958), directed by Shin Sang-ok, which narrates a love triangle between two brothers and Sonya, a camptown prostitute or yanggong-ju. It examines the role of the postwar environment in constructing the spaces of the subject. Using the yanggongju figure as a technology of postwar memory, this work reevaluates the ecology of ruination left in the wake of the Korean War-as portrayed through Sonya, scenes of the city, the camptown, the base, and the surrounding fields and marshes-to explore the sense of loss and displacement of this period.

As culture appears in governmental policy when its disappearance starts, heritage becomes a concern when its local meaning vanishes. Moreover, globalisation usually reveals the ignorance on the cultural legacy accelerated by its instrumentalised branding. Moreover, this vision of economic trade fails to resolve these issues of intangible heritage. Above all, since there is no future without past, like the sustainability of environment, and that cities and territories of the silk road territories are defined by a good cohesion of these entities, the current critical issues are the establishment of good balances between the global world and the local heritage. Thus, the transverse degeneration of these geographical roots, territorial strategies, social management, and economic exchanges of the various globalisations seems exceptionally fragile in the 21st century. To the point that these counterexamples are now refused by responsible citizen movements considering such models of urban expansions that capitalistic corruption reigns over as the figures of ontological aberrations. To illustrate these phenomena in the Asian region, the following study takes three cases directly investigated on site: Japan as the symbol and symptom of the introduction of exogenous philosophy and practice which have altered its nature / culture relations of the 19th century to the point to entirely return to its indigenous environmental ethics; now stabilised, exports and reproduces the same errors in the heart of countries undergoing the similar drifts as rural Australasia.  The state Island of Singapore, rich of a multi-ethnic community evolving in a neoliberal socialism, combines the ontologies that move each society to develop its territory from culturally appropriate practices to the pressures of a standardised educational system. This paradoxically leads its experts towards a universality of cultural landscapes posing the problem of urban and landscape alienation to unique market aims. The rowdy reinvention of the traditions devoted to the western hegemonic submission has profoundly damaged the cultural identity of South Korea’s urban, natural, and social environment. Example of exogenous diktats on fragile autochthonous practices by a corporate malpractice, South Korea raises the question of political governance and ecosophical resistances always ignored in globalisation aims. From these three cases of territorial governance, we will consider what can be the sustainable growth and preservation policies within the vast Silk Road spaces.

The Pegasus Society is a non-profit, primarily online organisation organisation founded in 2010. Our aim is to provide platforms for Korean studies students, Korean artists, Korean activists, and more to share their work, ranging from academic papers and essays to videos and podcast discussions. We are unable to provide financial benefit for submissions. However, our primary aim is to promote free access to Korean studies and Korea-related topics for all. Our promise is to promote your work on all of our platforms, as well as keep your work in our archives for future, open access.

https://modernismmodernity.org/articles/smith-shuddering-century

This article examines the reception of European futurism in colonial Korea in the early-to- mid-1930s through the writings of Kim Ki-rim and O Chang-hwan, both of whom composed long modernist poems over the course of 1934 engaging with modern warfare and global imperialism—Kim’s “Weather Map” (Kisangdo, p. 1935) and O’s “War” (Chŏnjaeng, 1934, unpublished). My central proposition, based on close readings of these two poems in comparison with works by Italian and Japanese futurists, is that Korea’s unevenly developed colonial location and its experience with the violence of military occupation and with escalating warfare in China indirectly discouraged the celebratory posture adopted by the European futurists towards technology, speed, and mechanized violence.

Korea w oczach Polaków. Państwo – społeczeństwo – kultura jest kolejną pracą zbiorową poświęconą Azji Wschodniej, która jest efektem projektu badawczego realizowanego w ramach Centrum Studiów Azji Wschodniej UG pod kierunkiem J. Włodarskiego i K. Zeidlera, tu także M. Burdelskiego (obok wcześniejszych publikacji poświęconych Japonii i Chinom). Założenie badawcze opiera się na zasadzie fields studies, czyli obejmuje prace przedstawicieli różnych dziedzin i dyscyplin wiedzy, które łączy i spaja temat przewodni, jakim są studia nad społeczeństwem, kulturą, państwowością państw Półwyspu Koreańskiego. Efektem tak zarysowanego celu badawczego jest zbiór 30 tekstów zarówno wybitnych badaczy, jak i początkujących naukowców. Książka została dedykowana pamięci, zmarłego przedwcześnie w grudniu zeszłego roku, ks. prof. Antoniego Kościa z Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, który był jednym z najznakomitszych badaczy Korei w Polsce, członkiem Rady Naukowej CSAW UG.