The Social Semiotics of Global Koreanness

This session aims to define and describe the increasingly nebulous notion of ‘Koreanness’, as it expands through the continued global flux of products, practices, and imagery of and from South Korea. Conceived in Peircean terms as a “hypostatic object” (Reese, 1982), Koreanness is the result of abstractive processes by which the qualities or properties describing an object (X is Y) are themselves transformed into an object of inquiry (X has Y-ness). By isolating it in this manner, panelists explore the various socio-symbolic relations through which material components (language, scripts, spaces, sounds, clothes, bodies, etc.), attain, maintain, and perpetuate Koreanness. These socio-semiotic processes are scaled and differently distributed, reflecting the dialectics of Koreanness as it operates in-between the nationally circumscribed conceptions of ‘Korea’, and its diverse local enactments within the “global space of approximation” (Lee, 2017: 108).

Situated between these two poles, Koreanness is explored as it emerges across different dimensions of social life via a range of socio-semiotic mechanisms which enable its multimodal and interactive deployment and recognition by social actors. The session seeks to capture this, often ephemeral and mundane, process in vivo and in situ, while also accounting for the structured and structuralizing presence of Koreanness in the collective imaginary of the nation-state, its subjects and products. Within this dual approach, neither site of socio-symbolic action is given precedence; rather, what is emphasized is the dynamic interplay between individual agency and communal structures which brings about variously competing, contesting, or converging conceptions of Koreanness.