L1 Introduction Flashcards
3 Steps to read academic texts
Step 1: Identify the author - Historian? Anthropologist? Political Scientist? Media, Literature, or Cultural Studies scholar?
Step 2: Look for the argument/hypothesis. What does the article want to convince you of? What is the purpose of the argument? What does she want to change about the way you, the reader think?
Step 3: How does the author support the argument/hypothesis? What kind of evidence is provided? Historical documents/archival sources?
What is a culture? Where does it exist?
Culture is not an object. Culture is a set of practices, beliefs, and imaginaries. Culture is practiced in acts of translation, argumentation, interpretation, that is, the creating of meaning, by different agents, from individuals to institutions to societies.
What is “national culture”?
- It is conceived in empiricist or positivist, such that discrete cultural entities are believed to exist in more or less selfsame form, with their own proper customs, practices, and traditions.
How does “national culture” exist? And what is the relationship between national culture and culture?
- These cultures are encountered in everyday experience, and whose preeminent卓越的 modern form is national culture…everyday experience consists of encounters with objects that derive less from individual national cultures than from movements [between] cultures, and the movements actually precede and are thus constitutive of these individual cultures themselves.
- it is the result of dynamic interaction of larger, geopolitical forces
Is culture DISCOURSE?
Yes
What is DISCOURSE?
a mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts (such as history or institutions)
what does discourse produce?
Knowledge, knowledge is power/produces power
How to analyze discourse?
- What is being represented here as a truth or as a norm?
- How? What ‘evidence’ is used? What is left out? What is foregrounded and backgrounded? What alternative meanings/explanations are ignored?
- Whose interests are served by this and whose are not?
- How has this come to be? (what historical and social processes?)
- What identities, actions, or practices are made possible and /or desirable and/or required by this way of thinking/talking/understanding? What are disallowed?
What is HISTORY?
HISTORY = A NARRATIVE
What does narrative determines?
Narratives determine how historical change is understood and interpreted
What is historiography?
the study of how history has been written (which stories have been told and why).
what is the dilemmas of modern Korean historiography?
Who controls the narrative? For what ends?
Is a “neutral” story possible?
How was Korea able to maintain a distinct culture and political organization, despite a long history of invasion and subordination to larger, more powerful neighbors?
The key of maintaining a DISTINCT KOREAN CULTURE AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION lies in the transition Confucianization of Choson.
What factors contribute to the extraordinary longevity of the Choson dynasty (500 years)?
The Confucian world in 14th and 15th century, which was synonymous with the civilized Chinese antiquity
What is Confucianism and what are the characteristics?
- Confucianism asserts the perfectability of humanity through ritual/discipline and education
- Confucianism theorizes a non-antagonistic relationship between power and its subjects
