Korea Dispatch

UC Berkeley's new East Asian library

Not sure what this Korea Herald article has to do with making life in Korea more friendly for ex-pats, but it was interesting nonetheless. The first part discusses growing interest in Korean studies worldwide, though still overshadowed by Chinese and Japanese studies. I rememebr the old East Asian library at UC Berkeley, where the sections on China and Japan were enormous in compariosn to that of Korea.

“The availability of texts and reference materials about Korea has posed a problem,” said one doctoral student doing her thesis on Korean Buddhism.

As there is not very much research done yet in anthropology or sociology about Korean Buddhism, it is very exciting but at the same time… difficult to find more books or articles in social sciences about religion in Korea.

I’d also add the issue of the involvement of Korean communities around the world in furthering Korean studies. When Berkeley was getting set to build a new library to house its East Asian collection, very little in the way of support came from the nearby Korean community. Granted Berkeley places far more weight on its Chinese and Japanese studies programs, but more involvement from local Korean leaders may help to remedy this.

Another obstacle, according to the article, in advancing Korean studies is the difficulty for those new to Korean in learning the language.

The biggest challenge for Xu Liang, a Ph. D. candidate for Korean studies at the Institute of International Studies Affairs at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, was the acquisition of Korean language skills.

Xu suggests following the Chinese model by setting up what China calls Confucian schools, places around the world where those interested can learn Korean for free. A novel means of subsidizing this system came from Ross King, professor of Korean and head of Asian Studies department at University of British Columbia.

For Korea, globalization is understood as a one-way street: Koreans learning English… Korea’s crazed enthusiasm for English comes with an opportunity cost vis-a-vis its own language and culture – to offset this cost and to rectify some of the damage being done by Englishmania, the ESL industry in Korea should be taxed, with the proceeds going to a special fund to promote Korean language, both overseas and at home.

The most interesting section comes towards the end, and gets to the driving vision of what Korean studies is and should be. One professor of Korean studies in Germany says

he doubts institutions in Korea can train Korea experts for export to other countries. “The questions a Hungarian or Spaniard asks about Korea will differ from Korean self-analysis; which means that Korean studies experts for Hungary and Spain must be home-grown to some extent.

Exactly. Korean studies should not be the sole reserve of ethnic Koreans. It gets back to that question of whether or not non-Koreans can understand Korea, which seems to me to sort of lead away from the real question, which is do non-Koreans have anything important to add to the dialogue surrounding Korea, and the answer is most definitely YES!

John Lie, professor of the Sociology department at the University of California, Berkeley, says Korean studies needs to move away from its nationalist agenda of promoting the field only to gyopos, ethnic Koreans born abroad.

The Korean government may be effective in many things. However, there’s a natural limit of state power and wisdom in matters of academic and scientific research… The key is to promote Korean studies beyond the core audience of ethnic Koreans.

Yamamoto Miyabi, a Ph.D. candidate at the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department of California, Berkeley, disagrees, saying there is an “obsession” with promoting Korean studies to non-Koreans. I agree with her in that yes, gyopos do have a valuable role in Korean studies, but I’ve more than once seen qualified candidates in the field overlooked simply because they don’t have Korean last names, and that I do disagree with.