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Abstract:
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In Korea and most Asian NICs the cultural “other” has been effectively consigned to a reservation. Through lavish funding for the preservation of traditional dance, music, crafts, etc., “culture” has been reduced to the status of a museum artifact. This makes it politically impotent, which is the whole point. The same was accomplished by specious modernization projects like Park’s Saemaul Movement, which undertook to upgrade rural communities while razing their aesthetic traditions and treating their residents with cultural contempt. The timing of the movement suggested its real motive. Park was driven in this direction after the sordid 1971 election returns showed that support for his regime was rapidly declining in the rural sector (Jacobs 1985, 108). This was understandable, given his contemptuous attitude toward non-industrial Korea. Burmeister showed (in Research, Realpolitik, and Development in Korea: The State and the Green Revolution, 1988) how pervasive this attitude was. The rural sector, and by extension the Other Korea, had been consistently treated as a hindrance rather than contributor to Korea’s development. |