[KS] korean studies at the university of california in jeopardy

[J.Scott Burgeson]

--- On Fri, 4/25/08, gkl1 at columbia.edu <gkl1 at columbia.edu> wrote:

> Many people in Korea and in the
> overseas Korean communities tend 
> to see the existence of Korean Studies in the
> universities of the world as a
> validation of their worth and importance, but give little
> attention to the work we produce.


Although I received my undergraduate degree from UCB in English and Rhetoric, I have only a tangential point to make vis a vis the present topic at hand. As an independent critic unaffiliated with any academic institutions myself, I have also found Prof. Ledyard's statement above to be true, albeit with slightly different implications as far as my own work is concerned. In my dealings with Korea-based foundations here in Seoul over the years, both public and private, there seems to be little recognition that Western critics covering Korean culture also deserve some support, be it through language-study grants or publication assistance. If you are a critic (or even scholar) but are not with a graduate program somewhere or do not have an advanced degree, you simply are not taken seriously by grant-giving foundations here. But the fact of the matter is that it is almost impossible for a non-Korean critic to make a decent living writing about Korean culture
 for English-speaking readers. Thus, the lack of public or private grant assistance for Western critics covering Korean culture means that it is difficult to find commenters on Korean culture in the popular English-language press who actually know what they're talking about (or who are not simply hacks). I feel this is a short-sighted strategy and when you get right down to it, is not really based on lack of financial resources on the part of Korea-based foundations, but is simply based on some sort of irrational or status-linked prejudice that because you do not have an advanced degree behind your name, you are simply not useful as a tool that can be used in the cause of "validating the worth and importance" of Korean international prestige in the way that only institutions of higher learning apparently can (yes, this last statement is meant to be sarcastic).
   I remember when I interviewed the Japanese director Suzuki Seijun in Tokyo nearly ten years ago, the staff at the Japan Foundation were extremely happy to hear about my work and went out of their way to provide stills from his films to print in my magazine at no cost to myself. They did not care whether I had a degree behind my name or not, but were simply pleased that I was helping to promote Japanese culture to an English-speaking readership -- and I might note that an extremely transgressive director Suzuki is hardly a "respectable" standard-bearer of Japanese culture. My interactions with the Korea Foundation have been, well, in the interests of being diplomatic, quite the opposite. Perhaps I am burning bridges by posting this kind of message to the List, but since I gave up applying for grants here many years ago, I know that it will not affect me one way or the other so I really don't care anymore.
   There are many reasons why Korean culture is and shall continue to remain relatively obscure on the world stage, and my experiences as an independent critic here are just one more example of why this is so.
   --Scott Bug


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