By Omar Abdolall
Despite being an organization laboring to rectify what it believes are foreign misconceptions about Korea, the Voluntary Agency Network of Korea (VANK) has a few misconceptions of its own.
On its Web site (www.prkorea.com), under a section on cultural dissemination from Korea to Japan, it states that ``it is generally acknowledged that culture is transmitted from a more advanced to a lesser-advanced country.'' This premise, culture traveling from a point of high civilization to a point of low civilization is worth examining.
This statement, however, is plagued with several fundamental flaws. First, despite it being a ``generally acknowledged'' premise, citations are lacking. ``General" implies a majority. If it's a majority of historians, then it must be belatedly referencing 19th and early 20th century histories.
In fact, although there remain some, increasingly discredited, variations that advocate this idea, there are so many others that don't. Indeed, given the number of examples to the contrary, we must assume that this `historical fact' is nothing more than historical fancy espoused by those who entertain a certain ideological atavism.
Second, the issue of defining culture is also, of course, a point of contention. ``Culture'’’ is a vague concept, and it is complicated even more so by the fact that what constitutes it can change across space and time.
For example, while we may celebrate the works of famous dada artists now, at one point the movement was considered by the Nazis to be ``degenerative.’’ Of course the Nazis were a part of German (European, in fact) culture but were not representative of the total collective of German culture.
Bringing us to a third point: culture does not necessarily pit one country against another, as is implied in the quote from the Web site.
Culture is not a homogenous entity that resides in a culturally homogenous country. A country can be as culturally heterogeneous within itself as it is heterogeneous against another country.
In fact, often the countries that are most antagonistic to one another are the most culturally similar. Within a single country there are cultures, prominent and obscure, privileged and excluded as well as subcultures: some larger, some smaller, some peaceful, some antagonistic.
Most importantly, culture does not exist in isolation. It is not tightly bound within borders that define its independence and completeness. Here, of course, I'm referring to cultural flux.
But, more importantly, culture is defined against other cultures. Consider the example of colonial Europe. Similar to how the image of `madness' in Europe helped establish its own classical culture of `reason', so we find colonial Europe's images of non-Europeans constructing its own civilized self-imaging.
The ``barbarians'' and the ``blacks,'' ``primitives'' and ``cannibals'': countless prejudicial classifications given the cultural stamps of anthropology, sociology and philosophy. Additionally, there's the Freudian psychology whose concept of progressive psychic formation paralleled the European concept regarding the hierarchy of civilizations.
For colonial Europe, European culture was at the apex; for Freud, the European mind. At any rate, all of this allowed Europe to differentiate itself from the rest of the world, its culture of transcendent civilization from the monstrosities of wild men.
But not only was European culture formed in relation to and against what it perceived as low, but also that what it often characterized `low culture' was, in fact, not low at all, but politically resistant to its intrusions.
When, for example, the Spanish colonists described certain Caribbean and Mexicans as cannibals, it was not the truth of low culture they were describing _ these groups never practiced cannibalism. It was, rather, a tactic of rousing approval for the violent political subjugation of those natives daring enough to resist its imperialist hegemony.
Many argue that anti-colonial nationalisms, here we might include Korea, owe their formations to the ideals of national identity and liberty formulated elsewhere, particularly the West. Many subaltern intellectuals, it has been argued, drew upon an often romanticized language of nation and national belonging that did not necessarily pre-exist colonialism.
But here, as elsewhere, we are left with a fundamental problem: why was it left to third-world intellectuals educated with Western ideals of national freedom to fight for liberty from Western colonialism when Westerners were already well-versed in such ideals?
Or, putting it more bluntly, why couldn't Western imperialism stop itself from doing what its own high-culture advocated against? The answer may lie in the violent hypocrisies of `benevolent assimilation.' Regardless, we know that it took, in part, `low-cultured' subalterns to inform the West of its own internal chaos.
If culture has moved both ways, how do we even begin to acknowledge highness vs. lowness? If Korea received as it gave, could it have been simultaneously high and low?
Similarly, if Japan or Korea had cultural influence over each other, but each hybridized it according to their own localities, at what point does the culture incorporated retain either it's Japanese or Korean origins? Or, if `culture' moved from China to Korea to Japan, each movement marked by hybridization, can we even truly speak of origins?
Equally problematic, it attempts to expose the fallacies behind its own historical subjugation by inverting the imperial hierarchy: what was once Japanese highness to Korean lowness now becomes Korean highness to Japanese lowness.
This might be an acceptable step in a process of discrediting imperialist myths. Otherwise, fantasy and desire converge with this logic of cultural superiority to desperately abjure what will forever be the lingering specter of its own colonized haunting.
That is, discrediting imperialism with an imperialist vernacular, or, disputing only to romantically become what one disputes.
Omar Abdolall is an English instructor in Mapo, Seoul. The writer can be reached at o_abdolall@hotmail.com.