Revised and edited version forthcoming in Focaal 1998. Electronic text copyright Rob Shields 1997.
Ethnography in the Crowd: The Body, Sociality and Globalization in Seoul
Abstract
Rodeo Street, an alley in south central Seoul has developed into a 'globalized' consumption site for the young and fashionable. The methodological problems of a white male Canadian as foreign ethnographer are examined and a focus on embodied participation as a basis for intercorporeal understanding is proposed. It remains necessary, however, to engage in interpretation of others motives, showing that the problems os intersubjectivity are not entirely resolved in a corporeal approach. The site is discussed as a liminal zone in which norms of Korean 'flexible sociality' are suspended and hybridized with a European type of 'civil sociality'. Globalization is show to be a process of local hybridization: a local-local nexus as well as a global-local nexus.
There is a long tradition in ethnography of paying close attention to place as a cipher of the organisation and structuring of everyday life. From Malinowski's first works through, for example, Bourdieu's studies of the cosmological layout of the Berber village and home, ethnographers have set out,
...to decipher, from the way the place is organised (the frontier always postulated and marked out between wild nature and cultivated nature, the permanent or temporary allotment of cultivable land or fishing grounds, the layout of villages, the arrangement of housing and rules of residence-in short, the group's economic, social, political, and religious geography), an order which is all the more restrictive-in any case, the more obvious-because its transcription in space gives it the appearance of a second nature (Augé 1995).
As a globalised consumption site within the specific, local-historical context of metropolitan Seoul, Apkujong-no is a site of cultural tension and contradiction. It is a liminal zone, both distinctively 'Korean' and thoroughly critiqued in the local media as un- and even anti-Korean. If not 'globlised', for locals, the area has come to serve as a metaphor for a certain alterity, cast as 'foreign' by the media.
In 1995, I carried out fieldwork on consumption in a place which has become particularly well known in Seoul, Apkujong-no's so-called 'Rodeo Street'. Unlike much traditional ethnography which Augé refers to, I was not concerned with detecting the position of a local society with respect to civilisation and the wilderness frontier. Rather, my interest was the organisation of the borderzone between the local and global, and the 'englobing' of global consumer culture by a local society fully involved in sustaining that globalisation, even while it seemed to struggle to master and come to terms with it. Through the 1980s and 1990s, in places such as 'Rodeo Street', a visible youth subculture, and visibly consumption-oriented set of lifestyles, has blossomed. This further fuelled the development of a range of demographic- and lifestyle-specific urban consumption sites which continue to support these consumption patterns and forms of sociality. The Korean media has often portrayed these patterns as immoral 'Western over-consumption'. The materialistic orientation and pleasure of signs and commodities is a significant departure from the post-Korean War type of austerity and institutionalised discipline. This article considers the importance of the body in Rodeo Street and the status of the ethnographer as a reflexive participant. This site will be considered as an exemplary Korean space of local-global tension, interconnection and liminality. Moral outrage in the Korean media at the phenomenon will be discussed in terms of the transgressive qualities of intercorporeal contact and the breaking of norms of 'flexible sociality' to adopt forms of 'civil sociality'.
Rodeo Street
The only, and unofficial, name of this cul-de-sac is 'Rodeo Street'. The use of English is an index of the 'elsewhereness' of the place. For now, this is considered trendy. Where once wealth was associated with Americanness, now, it is evoked by this type of elsewhereness - a generalised 'Western-ness' of the English language, American motorcycles, German cars, Italian fashion and design, Japanese and Korean consumer appliances. However, many of the gadgets and devices which abound in European and North American homes are made, and more significantly, designed there - most notably, the domestic microwave oven. Thus, on the one hand, this is Seoul at its 'Wannabe'-best: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Milan... Rodeo Street is anywhere but in Seoul. But, on the other hand, this 'centre-stage' of the urban theatre that is Apkujong-no, is quite at home in Seoul.
Consumer capitalism is not a new arrival here, fitting easily with the tradition of local markets and Confucian regard for public formality and respect. Even from first impressions, Rodeo Street does not appear as a simple combination of one or more Western urban scenes plunked down in Seoul. But it is a distinctively East Asian consumption space (Clammer 1992; Chua 1992). This is not a Disneyland-like pastiche of Western consumption spaces and behaviours onto an antediluvian, reserved Oriental back-alley. Rodeo Street is thus distinct from many such 'globalized' sites in North America, which reproduce specific icons of wealth or civilisation (for example, the West Edmonton Mall which includes reproductions of Parisian streetscapes and scaled-down versions of far-off tourist sites). Here, there is none of the nostalgia of North American postmodernism. In the mid-morning, as shops are just re-opening, there is nothing at all to distinguish this small street except the generic 1970s, 1980s, 1990s construction of the buildings - in short its standardisation to 'Western' material culture and the architecture common everywhere in Apkujong-no and to most of metropolitan Seoul. In contrast, this and other Korean sites import a generalised cosmopolitanism rather than references to specific places, signs or buildings.
Western designer boutiques, stores selling designer-label fashions and stores simply selling Western-looking apparel are packed together with second floor Coffee shops (pronounced copyshop). By mid-day, their satellite TV-screens can be seen through the large windows, tuned to Hong Kong's Star TV, showing Indian rock-dance dramas. By early-evening, the entrances and signs for basement Soju-bars (pronounced Sojubung)(1), Norebang (the improved, Korean-style of Karaoke in private suites), restaurants, electronic games arcades and third floor 'pocket ball' or billiards halls, jostle together. 'Though surrounded by residential areas, the alley, Rodeo Street, is packed with posh cafes, bars, restaurants and other entertainment facilities, attracting young people seeking fun and flamboyant nightlife,' comments Kwak Young-Sup in the English-language Korea Herald (1992:np).
For those of the right age, with eligible bodies but without wealthy parents, Apkujong is reputed to be the place to meet a wealthy boyfriend or girlfriend - and wealth is the X-Gen ticket to entry into Seoul's signifiers of the good life: European cars, over-priced restaurants, coffee-shops, and dance clubs. At night, almost every member of this crowd wears jeans and a short-sleeved polo shirt. Bars and coffee shops line the adjacent alleys off of Rodeo Street. Cars jam the dead-end street in a symbolic display of stationary mobility. Motorcycles are mostly absent, save for a lone and out-of-place Harley reproduction prominently parked in front of the large plate glass windows of 'Coffee Coffee'.(2) The 'round up' is not only of people. Pedestrians swarm in Rodeo Street, forced to weave their way along the metal flanks of BMWs, Mercedes and expensive Kia 'Grandeur's. Gawkers, pubescent girls and boys, Vogue-model women, and unpractised male flâneurs (see Shields 1994) participate in a spectacular form of crowd practice where even the surrogate encounters of persons and cars result in verbal and tactile negotiations. As denim rubs on lacquered fenders, every obstacle, be it a body or a vehicle is an opportunity for introduction and 'breaking the ice'. Excited but otherwise reserved youth of opposite sexes exchange ritual insults, which might provide a pretext for striking up a later conversation in a Coffee shop. How to put this into North European terms? Imagine a gay, pre-AIDS, street party, nothing could come closer.
Of course, this betrays the inadequacy of comparisons. To try again, I would quote a 1980s pop song by The Pet Shop Boys, here, 'East-end boys meet West end girls'. Young men simply accost the small knots of young women to invite them to 'enjoy the evening together.' There is little of the shyness, gendered- or cross-class barriers that one might expect in, say, Canada. While the 'pick-up line' may be a euphemism, for most it usually leads only to conversations and drinks. What is of most significance is the non-traditional quality of these encounters: they are independent, unintroduced and unchaperoned. However, even though the flirting agents are quite individual, they act as groups: groups of young women, and (generally, but not always) groups of young men. The evening and the liaisons that could result are quite tame, social not sexual, but 'Korea' is scandalised at the display of libido and pleasure in the urban crowd.
These possibilities for pleasure, the 'frisson' of innuendo, the entertainment and service functions are crucial to the status of Rodeo Street. Not only are fashions or commodities being consumed, but an atmosphere and site of diffuse desires. A spectacle of desire and the Street in toto are 'on offer'. Thus one of the simplest pleasures of the street is simply being there - whether walking through, strolling aimlessly, standing watching the crowd or bumping into people while pushing through the mass of bodies (Shields 1996d). This pleasure can be precisely defined as the coordination of the body with itself and with other bodies and its milieu. As a result, anyone this space can become not only a prop, but a surprise to be enjoyed, consumed, as part of the experience. A Canadian, an ethnographer, is as much a spectacle as the television crew which occupied one end of the street for the afternoon. In effect, the consumption space of Rodeo Street itself needs to be rethought as a service or an environment to be consumed through embodied participation (Lefebvre 1981).
The Spectacle of Ethnography
Given the privileged status accorded to the body, where am I in the 'scene' I have described in Rodeo Street? So much happens, so quickly that 180 degree vision would be necessary to begin to 'observe' such a scene (on scenes and situations, see Bech forthcoming). Participant observation is impossible, for critical distance is achieved only in retrospect, in writing as a kind of 'participant-reflection' (see Shields 1996a). So participation takes over:
My 'native informants', who insist on sporting Anglicized nicknames - Jim and Charlie Brown - introduce me to anyone who will listen as a Canadian ethnographer. I go with the flow, in a dazed state because one must set one's body onto its own autopilot of balance and inertial drift in one direction or the other in an attempt to free up one's consciousness to concentrate on 'taking in' events, picking out people, commodities and landmarks (on the body in urban space, see Shields 1996d). I rapidly become part of the spectacle. Disbelieving the reports of 'easy' introductions, I keep asking about how these young hetero men meet the women they refer to as 'cool-girls'? With the next small clutch we are pushed into by the traffic, I learn that it is easy, especially when a Canadian sociologist is there who will be made into the liminal 'excuse'. A non-American but English-speaking, male companion is prima facie evidence of cosmopolitanism. Jim and Charlie Brown (I remain jealous of their globalised nicknames) appeared to enjoy their 'cool guy' status.
But one reason that women here are eager to meet foreigners and particularly to speak English, is that this is a rare opportunity. It is a glimpse beyond a patristic society that socially and geographically has restricted them to traditional wifely roles. Nonetheless, women have experienced enormous change in their roles and status. Contemporary Seoul is a living testimony to their move out of traditional marriages to being independent entrepreneurs. They read Cosmopolitan and Italian Vogue in Korean and dream of 'having it all'. While young men serve three years in the army (which only appears to reinforce traditional authority patterns), single young women form a cultural vanguard, adopting new styles, norms, and consumption patterns, on the one hand; but establishing the limits of cultural change by challenging the terms of globalisation. They are assertive in determining where we go and aggressive in their questioning when talk turns to North American common-law marriage rates. There is thus a gendered gap in the sophistication and degree of cosmopolitan outlook which appears to split the new X-Generation internally.
The only 'observation' that is cool, disengaged and weighed against the historical corpus of ethnography, is reflective and after-the-fact. It helps to begin by admitting the post hoc quality of ethnographic research, in which narratives written later tidy-up the messiness and tension of the lived situation with an inevitably idealised story of engaged cross-cultural (or inter-group) contact and interaction.(3) While it has defined the ethnography for more than a century, this problem was also taken up long ago in technical terms in sociology by Gouldner (1970:493 ) and more recently by Bourdieu under the problematic of a 'reflexive sociology'. Alvin Gouldner highlighted the implication of observers in social action and the importance of a 'reflexive' self-awareness: 'To know others... [the observer] cannot simply study them [subjects] but must also listen to and confront himself [sic]' (Gouldner 1970:493). Despite this attempt to factor the presence of the observer into a positivist sociology (McHugh 1974:51), complete self-knowledge is, as Watson (1977:3) pointed out, unattainable, and hence can never be made fully explicit (Dawe 1973). Nor should it confer any special privilege or more trustworthy status on the observer (Linstead 1994:1325).
By contrast to the positivistic concern with reflexivity as a correction for observer bias, Garfinkel argued that 'researchers interrogate their own world as well as that of...subjects... Their research is neither self nor subject oriented, but is concerned with the dialectics of the relationship (Garfinkel 1967 cited in Linstead 1994:1327; Shields 1996a). Paul Willis later advanced a similar focus on the contribution a reflexive stance made to developing the 'surprise' divergence of world views, expectations and presuppositions, between observer and observed: 'this is a time of maximum disturbance to researchers, whose own meanings are being thoroughly contested. It is precisely at this point that the researcher must assume an unrestrained and hazardous self-interrogation. And it is the turning away from a full commitment, at this point, which finally limits the methods of traditional sociology' (Willis 1980:92).
To this, Hammersley has sounded a critical note of caution, accusing the emphasis on researchers' personal experience of leading to 'false cultural assumptions' (1992a; 1992b:192). Grosz echoes Linstead but maintains the positivist tradition in which explanations master and displace the primacy of research subjects and materials:(4)
experience cannot be taken as an unproblematic given, a position through which one can judge knowledges, for experience is of course implicated in and produced by various knowledges and social practices... Experience is not outside of social, political, historical and cultural forces and in this sense cannot provide an outside vantage point from which to judge them.... it demands explanation (Grosz 1994:94).
Is it possible to deal with empirical material without subscribing to the 'doctrine of explanation'? One answer focuses on the representation of material in social science texts, and the importance of positioning the observer within the text, to produce what might be called a documentary, onto which can be grafted an interpretation; rather than assembling evidence which is not of importance in and of itself except as a datum for an explanation. Explanations often take the form of generalising to a model or ideal-type, while interpretation often works in the reverse direction by assimilating general models to specific, contingent conditions.
I have discussed critically the dialogue-oriented work of Clifford and Marcus (1986) in detail elsewhere (Shields 1996a). Other attempts have been made to develop narrative styles which position the observer and research subjects in an open framework such that the reader is able to see the passage from sensual action and perception to an organised, professional representation. At best, these reflexive styles also expose the implication of the reader into the construction of interpretations of particular events and of the ethnography as a text. As Rosen comments: 'The text constructed here, the one your eyes are now focused on, is built with the conviction that there is no absolute comprehending of any cultural experience. Only degrees. ... Their worlds are as we described them, with description as construction and error as flaw. We are not (purposefully) writing fiction, certainly. We are pursuing truth, not entertainment. Certainly' (Rosen and Mullen cited in Linstead 1994:1340-41).
The difficulty of maintaining a clear position for author, reader and subjects (they interweave) reminds us of the problems above in adequately describing the crowd in Rodeo Street, without reducing it to my own stereotypes. I might have proceeded by multivariate analysis on the one hand and ethnographic documentation, on the other. Such situations have been captured through quantification, through the reduction of process into forms of interaction or by incorporating insider accounts and interpretations (cf. Clifford and Marcus 1986). Any other approach, it would appear, must proceed from the moment of em-bodied encounter. Hence the role and status of the body is of paramount importance. This is also foregrounded in the case of Rodeo Street and Korea in general, where the contact with - touching - the surfaces of other bodies is both more and less taboo than in the range of European and North American cultures. In the dense crowds of the urban markets, contact is routine and dis-interested.
An interest in the body brings us to the work of Goffman, in sociology, and Merleau Ponty, in philosophy. Both attempt to develop a body-centred vision of interaction, which focuses on 'intercorporeality' (Crossley 1995:142-5). Goffman may be read as offering a vision of embodied interaction which acknowledges the other-orientedness of behaviour and its variability depending on the contingencies of social and spatial context. Thus competence is directly tied to performance, and the practical order of everyday 'body techniques' is linked to a moral order of social norms, habitual routines, and scripted exchanges. The subjective and intersubjective 'meanings' of interaction (which are presumably the ethnographer's interest) is not separated from action itself (Goffman 1972). Crossley argues:
embodied action not only provides the necessary information for the social/practical coordination of action, but also provides the information upon which judgements about self-hood and moral worth are made. Our actions are the only effective token of our moral and psychological 'disposition' and are thus the key to our social identity (1995:139).
Merleau-Ponty provides a further critique of the separation of intersubjective mental states and embodied actions (1962; 1963). Behaviour is simultaneously meaningful, embodied and intelligent; subjectivity is not private and inaccessible, it is worldly and publicly available in the form of others behaviour - and similarly our own self-understanding is predicated on and accessible only through the route of behaviour (Crossley 1995:143)
However, as Willis intimates, above, interpretation and forms of aesthetic reason are still necessary: the meaning of behaviour - how to respond - is always debatable and its degree of authenticity even more so. The issue is even more complex: we attempt to decipher our own and others' scripted or improvised sets of actions and gestures as we or they engage with their social and spatial milieu. Understanding is located at the level of this 'narrative' (DeCerteau 1984) or sequence rather than at the simple level of single actions or gestures. Thus when we perceive a departure from the expected script or when interaction defies expectation we interrogate not only our behaviour and its 'fit' with context but our self-certainty. The effect of such perceptions is to open up a gap or interesse between consciousness and role which exposes the constructedness of self-identity (Grosz 1994:28; Merleau-Ponty 1963).
By destabilising, for even a short moment, the identity between thought (Mind) and body-self, authenticity is disturbed. But we routinely resolve such problems through mental experiments in which we imaginatively place ourselves tentatively in the situation of others to examine the flow and course of perceptions they might experience and actions they might respond with. Without such flexibility in our subject position, we would be ultimately absolutely self-coincident and unable to invent, perform, or respond to most situations other than those which are already present to us.(5) However, the resort to interpretation and mental experiment suggests that intercorporeality does not displace the concerns which have traditionally be put into sharpest focus by debates on intersubjectivity. Intercorporeality should not be seen as supplanting interpretation but of maintaining the problematic status of understanding, which is often too simplistically resolved by theorists of intersubjective understanding (Shields 1996a).
This loss of certainty often appears to be the case in cross-cultural interactions. But, the vilification of Rodeo Street suggests that not only is it a novel scene for a foreign ethnographer; it defies the expectations of everyday street interaction for the culturally local. In the sense that even local Koreans are not natives of the global-local 'scene' unfolding there, Rodeo Street can be partly deciphered as a liminal zone in which local norms are suspended.(6) The experience of an evening in Rodeo Street is time spent in a space of liminality (Turner 1974) which is staged, not by entrepreneurs, but by the crowds themselves. Rodeo Street is the site of a type of rodeo. And all bodies and vehicles present are participants in the round-up - as one might expect in a liminal situation. Seoul's shops remain open late into the night, but Rodeo Street's are merely a supportive commercial backdrop to the milling throng. The are more than a pretext, but in the evenings, this is not a shopping street, unlike some other areas of Seoul. Rather it is a consumption space in which commodities are incidental. For example, in 1995 at least, no one had thought of selling souvenirs of the jouissance and satisfaction of the crowd with itself, and of individuals with each other.
Orange-jo
The embodied liminality of Rodeo Street is overlain with its mythologised status as a haven for outsiders and moral degenerates. Even though they are hard to find, the discourse of 'Orange-ness' continues. What Cohen and Taylor (1976) call a 'moral panic' has continued over 4 years in the Korean media concerning the 'Orange-jo' (pronounced Or-angijo - 'jo' means tribe or group).
Home to the Orange tribe, the Apkujong-dong area has been recently criticised as a hotbed of teenage overconsumption and deviation. One of the most striking characteristics of the Orange tribe is that they reportedly get their money from their well-heeled parents and spend it "like water." It is not uncommon for an Orange to spend 1 million won [about 2000 Canadian dollars] a night in a bar.... Rumours also have it that many of them are addicted to drugs and have a minimum of sexual scruples (Kwak 1992). The Orange-jo or literally the 'Orange tribe' is a 'folk devil' (Cohen and Taylor 1976) whose name has been said to derive from the way they,
used to sit and idle away the hours in bars and cafes. When they spotted some girls at nearby tables, the men ordered glasses of orange juice for them. If the girls drank the juice, it meant they were willing to go out with the men and "have fun" (Lee Kyu-tae, Chosun Ilbo (Korean daily) cited in Kwak 1992).
Most travel to Rodeo Street by bus due to the lack of parking, rendezvous with old friends, and head off to cheaper entertainment or activities elsewhere. In this sense Rodeo Street thrives on the liminal moment of choice between tasks and activities - what shall we do tonight? This degree of choice is a new leisure freedom in the last decade, and is tied directly to generationally-specific lifestyles of those with the possibility of disengaging momentarily from family and work ties (ie. students). The trendiest and slightly older youth who do have their wealthy parents' cars to drive, moved almost immediately to other areas such as Hongik-tae in the west-end and north of the river (Chun 1995) once the media launched a campaign to label youth as moral and sexual degenerates. However, the local discourse on Rodeo Street continues to stress its 'orange-ness', its globalized otherness, as a way of framing the forms of interaction there. There are other 'orange' streets in Seoul. Cars are an essential technology which allows small groups to circulate between perhaps twelve key sites in the city. Rodeo Street thus contains only one part of the new set of social forms hosted by all the sites together. These places draw on both Korean tradition and commercial renditions of non-Korean (ie. globalized) forms. These places are characteristic of processes of social spatialisation in general: a specific site (a stage, or context with specific props, landmarks and meanings attached to different parts of the material environment) is knit together with a set of relatively new behaviours and forms of interaction (Shields 1991). Often, as in Rodeo Street, the site becomes a metaphor and idiomatic shorthand for the behaviours. In Seoul, this set of sites together support a varied, flexible repertoire of forms of 'globalised' Korean sociality (Shields 1997) quite separate from the Orange-jo stereotype.
What is not brought out in such media reports is that, although this specific Orange-jo-practice is clearly male, the condemned attitudes transcend gender. While men solicit, women engage with them. The columnist concludes disapprovingly, 'It is from this rather inane and uninspiring practice that they came to be called the Orange tribe.' Yet, no one interviewed reported ever knowing any of the 'Orange-jo': these are composite portraits of the Korean demons of Americanised social behaviour. The true scandal of the Orange-jo lies elsewhere.
In the media, the discourse of 'Orange-ness' can be seen as an intervention to counter non-discursive consumption practices. But, why is the condemnation of 'overconsumption' made in terms of traditional morality rather than in terms of the commodification of cosmopolitanism and the intensive marketing of a fake or simulated global ethos? While such behaviour is functional from a retail point of view, sanctions (usually never implemented) are not directed at retailers but at consumers and at the site itself.(7) Proposals have included:
...restricting the entry of cars into so-called Rodeo Alley during late-night hours, to keep these affluent young people away....
The city government has also decided on the forced removal of signs...written in foreign or "obscene" languages. The authorities hope to create an environment free from "unsavoury" messages which may do harm to teenagers' ethos.
...the central government has recently decided to crack down on profligate youths who it says can be found marauding in the Apkujong-dong area, abusing drugs and dissipating themselves in a decadent fashion. ...the parents of the Orange kids may also be probed by tax officials in regards to their wealth (Kwak 1992)
English language shop signs are a direct and thus contentious 'address' to post-Korean War generations who have been taught English at school.(8) English is a symbol of 'global culture' and the power of transnational business, to which there is an attempt to interpellate the consumer. For example, tee-shirts with Hangul slogans or rubrics are non-existent. In the signage of the apparel industry, English rules.
"Why only us? You can see signboards written in foreign languages all over Seoul. It's extremely unfair and nothing but a makeshift solution for a broader social problem," says Kim Song-tae 37, who runs a bar in Rodeo... (cited in Kwak 1992).
English slogans and Italian designer logos heighten the neurasthenic daze of flashing neon signs and distracting window displays. Rodeo Street is thus a site of distraction for ethnographer and native alike - if that dualism still has any meaning in the crowd. The neurasthenic quality of this form of sociality comes from the distraction from self in favour of an interest in others. Rodeo Street is a place where one is most likely to bump into others - into another inattentive body - with the resulting profuse apologies, curious glances, and momentarily unalienated sociality of contact between not only bodies but groups. These are not intentional or instrumental, despite some being in the scene for instrumental reasons (ie. as flâneurs who carefully disguise themselves as distracted participants while remaining covertly alert, monadic observers - as many ethnographers are instructed to (for a critique see Shields 1996a)).
If we trust the local explanations, this is a crowd practice as foreign to Seoul as the lonely Harley-Davidson, standing in contrast to other, indigenous crowd practices in Seoul where one is carried along by the crowd - in contact with multiple bodies, none of which once can afford to give full attention to - in, for example, the more traditional Namdaemun Market. There, one can buy anything - 'anything', one should add, that is manufactured in Korea (which often means Seoul, and if not Seoul, then Pusan or Ulsan). There, full-into the material culture and ambience of local and traditional practices of petit-capitalisme, one is patient with the press of bodies just as a fish is patient with the friction of water. One has no choice, for they are not, in general, individuated bodies, nor sets of bodies in groups, but rather a single crowd. And, one is unselective about one's contacts, just as a fish is unselective about which water molecules it encounters. In Rodeo Street, contact is fortuitous and governed by randomness but provides a pretext for sociable interaction. This is the prize: not sex for a night, nor a partner for life, but the tingle of contact sociality for a second, the intermingling of groups and tribes. Rodeo Street is a contact community (Shields 1992), where groups of men, women and automobiles are roped into a rodeo of collisions and glances. This is the scandal.
The Sin of Directness
In a society where almost all social relationships are based on the introduction of parties by a third-party intermediator, waitresses often match single youth in dance clubs.(9) Similarly, subcontracting relationships and professional contacts proceed through introduction rather than direct contact or 'cold-calling'. This is a quite different sociality, or form of social relation (Simmel 1958), than, for example, the stereotype of the European public square. Cuddihy (1987) argues that 'Western' forms of social relation or 'civil sociality' are normatively constrained by 'civility': politesse, modesty, and inhibitions which restrict social contacts into affinities of class, neighbourhood, ethnicity or language, skin colour, age and gender, rather than into a hierarchical and relatively 'tribal' network (Maffesoli 1995; Cho and Shields 1995).
The links of Korean sociality fix households into a hierarchical network of stable relationships and friends-of-friends. These networks often have a regional, or school alumni identification, and are also to be found amongst the minor forms of social interaction in any 'Western' country. Although we will return to the importance of sociality, from these initial comments it should be clear that we are advancing an argument that forms of sociality are central. Sociality is, in a sense, a coordinating medium as well as the structuring precondition for social categories or identities, including the cultural actualisation and performance of social class. The substratum (local forms of sociality) out of which such identifications are built in Western societies, is quite different in East Asia.
By implication this leads to the creation of quite culturally-specific social identities, making the application of European social theory (generally constructed in terms of European social categories) treacherous. If one focuses at the level of bodies, then a paradox is immediately apparent: bodies in Rodeo Street are constantly being assembled into larger units through sociality. People engage as groups; even 'native informants' come in pairs despite their own self-awareness of their individuality.
In Korea, direct approaches in any field of social relations appear as brazen and threatening to the system of sociality, which is constrained from becoming a social 'free-for-all' despite the multitudinous and bustling stereotype of East Asian cities. In Seoul, interactions appear channelled by a set of unstated rules that they be purposive and by invitation (for example, asking directions and continuing on one's way, and, vendors who 'invite' buyers into shops for the specific purpose of purchasing). Furthermore, they should ideally conform to a 'habitus' of stereotypical interactions (cf. Bourdieu 1981; Goffman 1963) and contacts or inquiries should be made according to a preferential hierarchy within a network of acquaintances and associates to whom one ought to be loyal. Like gendered and generational norms in a kinship system, this preferential structure overdetermines the cultural process of social, economic and political interaction in East Asian cities.
The groups and networks that intermingle in Rodeo Street are the media of Korean flexible sociality (Cho and Shields 1995), named for its cultural role in stabilising patterns of flexible accumulation. Such 'flexibility' is characterised by individual social and economic actor's dependence on a 'hierarchical network' for status, resources (also understood as power), competitive advantage and opportunity. In this ideal-typical form of sociality there is no necessary division between public and private life, as the network of loyalty and dependence crosses any possible dividing lines which might separate out a private sphere and protect it from a public sphere.
A pervasive code of quasi-Confucianism spells out the logic of hierarchical differentiation and loyalty in the networks of flexible sociality. Acceptance of one's position in the hierarchical network (stratified by age, family, and the hard-earned respect of one's acquaintances) is crucial. Rodeo Street's rejection of this hierarchy and its mediations is the fundamental reason that it is spatialised as a liminal, and furthermore outcast zone. The risk, for Korean social order, is that this locally-rooted flexible sociality will loose its grip on Gen-Xers who will form their own disembedded networks on the cusp of the global as importers of economic opportunity and cultural change.
While globalisation has operated at the level of capital, integration into global trade, and at the level of style and, more slowly, morals, it becomes tangible in the things, configurations and behaviours which are generally dubbed 'modern' in everyday talk in Seoul.(10) If 'civility' can be indicative of globalisation, it is because it is not merely regulative of behaviour; but is an order of, '"appearance" constitutive of that behaviour' (Cuddihy 1987:14). Thus,
...civility is the medium of Western social interaction; and it presupposes the different structures of a modernising "civil society" .... civility... minimally requires differentiation between private affect and public demeanour (Robertson 1992: 126).
Robertson stresses that this behaviour rests on the separation of private life from 'civil society'.(11) Personal opinion and the family come to be understood as a reserved zone of 'private life', and civil society is understood as the pre-political, communitarian grassroots public sphere. As in Habermas' usage, this public sphere is 'colonised' by economics and by politics (1989). Indeed, one of the most notable recent challenges to the terms of globalisation as the dissemination of civility has been Islam's opposition to the legitimacy of a diversity of private opinions and affects separate from public norms of behaviour (Turner 1991 cited in Robertson 1992). Civility thus presumes some form of private, individual freedom from social constraint. This notion reproduces the conceptual division of private consciousness from a exterior behaviour and interaction in the form of sociality. Thus, one may speak of a 'civil sociality' in which private attitudes, affects or interests are repressed in the name of public decorum. One despises but does not voice condemnation; one lusts but does not shatter the illusion of public disinterest. As Goffman shows, this dissembling of private motives and attitudes does not diminish the importance of publicly observable behaviour, but merely raises the 'presentation of self' to a self-conscious level in which both authenticity and inauthenticity, the manner in which past actions fit into a scripted routine which will play itself out or lead on to further scripts and actions must be engaged with.
In Apkujong-no, and Rodeo Street in particular, there is evidence of the dissemblance of private thoughts from visible, bodily conduct or audible comment. However, it does not appear to take the form of civility, in which 'individuals' (a political-psychological fiction) suppress their affect in accordance with a social contract governing sociality. Rather, affect is hidden or dissembled for private reasons of 'face' and group cohesion. Rather than showing emotion (for example becoming, angry), one acts on the basis of hidden emotion (emotionlessly firing an incompetent employee). This is a form of honour or chivalry (which can be both positive and negative) rather than civility. If civility is also intimately bound up with the operation of a public sphere. Yet, Apkujong-no does not appear to even approximate such a public sphere - even if it is, in retrospect, exemplary as an ideal speech situation for some types of heterosexual introduction. For this is a liminal site, regulated more by norms which appear suspended than by civil sociality.
Liminal Sites and Identifications
'Limen' is literally 'threshold', a doorway where one stands 'betwixt and between' social worlds and statuses. At this point, the social norms of one side of the 'doorway' meet those of the other and a borderline at the threshold can be distinguished at which social norms are momentarily suspended. The status of liminal places and liminal identifications has long been used in rituals of inclusion and exclusion, notably in rites of passage such as the transition from youth to adulthood (Turner 1974). Rodeo Street can be rendered intelligible as a liminoid site constituted by the intense provision of commodities and consumption opportunities which contrast with Korean customs (as they do for every nation in the global cultural-economic system) and its recent state-ideology of frugality and austerity. In Apkujong-no, one is betwixt and between the local-traditional and the global-modern. The spectacle of Rodeo Street itself, bedecked with its commodities which exude the 'smell' of elsewhereness and cosmopolitanism, involves as one element, a type of escapism from the local and the traditional.
The liminality of the Orange-jo refers to their borderline or Janus-faced status. They are both inside and outside of the Korean 'social body' whose performative norms of enactment and morals they violate but whose visual and imaginary norms they continue to embody and enact.(12) The resulting Orange-jo 'Stranger' (cf. Simmel 1958) is an unstable and transgressive, border-line or status. Movement outside of the circle of Korean identities is made to effect a arrival back at a new point on the liminal threshold of Korean society.
The Orange-jo would seem to be one response to Korea's own cultural liminality betwixt and between East and West. However, this is to locate Korea in terms of a map of Eurocentric preoccupations. The significance of liminal 'between-ness' is that it is an unstable position in which there is the possibility of change in another direction from the expected. Korea, and the Orange-jo are perhaps less 'between' than in an entirely new and unanticipated location. In this case inside and outside can also be understood as 'within' and 'without', respectively. Within is the social landscape of the Korean nation, without is the globe beyond, whether the negative memory of Japanese colonialism, the luxurious images of Europe or the brutal but powerful image of the United States. Understood as liminality, globalisation does not lead to cultural homogenisation, but rather to new local-global and local-local cultural hybrids. Local 'flexible sociality' is suspended to allow globalized forms of 'civil sociality' to operate, mature and provide elements of a new, hybrid form of sociality.
Nonetheless, despite the freedom from both Korean and Western norms (say, the American legacy of puritanism), which is a hallmark of liminal status, the Orange-jo are at least one group that is pushed over the threshold by moralists and cast as Outsiders by opinion-makers in the Korean media. These writers act as moral guardians and spokespersons, replacing the traditional guardians of social norms such as Buddhist and Confucian monks and scholars. In being categorised as moral outsiders, the critique of the Orange-jo is made in terms of their immorality and undisciplined 'overconsumption.' Their borderline, liminal status is rejected in a purification of categories.
In the scandal of the Orange-jo, their transgression of networks of sociability through direct contact is added to sexual liberalism. Pre- or extra-marital sexual activities are said to be conducted at hotels which make this practice economically visible. The so-called 'love hotels' (one, the Valentine Hotel, is a replica of an Austrian chateau) line the highway from Kangnam east to Chincheon. However, these are as likely to cater to older, relatively wealthy Koreans' sexual practices. The most visibly 'sexual' practice is only the brazen encounter observed on Rodeo Street at the time of writing. A young man of 23-28 may approach a group of 23-25 year old women to invite them to 'enjoy the evening together' by going to a bar, dancing or singing in the ubiquitous Norebang. This is not 'sexual' in the pragmatic sense, but erotic in the social sense of eros - the libidinal power of sociality - the need to be with others, to 'rub shoulders and keep warm together', as the saying goes (see Maffesoli 1995). Despite appearances, and the reputation maintained by the discourse of 'Orange-ness', the tactility of bodies, their intercorporeal contact and grouping is given a privileged status in local discussions of this 'hotspot' of local-global liminality.
In Apkujong-no generally, and Rodeo Street in particular, globalisation (as it is often referred to by European social scientists) and postmodernisation (as it would be called if it were a scene or situation in North America or Europe, cf. Jameson 1984) are reduced to a dramatic moment - a flash of embodied contact in which the 'lineages' of sociality and group affiliation are blurred. In this 'moment' a process of cultural recombination takes place, reinterpreting traditional forms of interaction: local and global as well as East-end and West-end, traditional North bank and modern South bank Seoul are stitched together. This is neither local nor global; neither traditional nor modern, but postmodern in its momentary, liminal mixing of such binary opposites. It seems always 'both-and'; a comfortably generic-modern streetscape overtaken by a surging evening crowd operating with local knowledges but foreign rules of engagement.
Local social geographies and lineages of interaction are reworked using a foreign medium of interaction. The result is a hybrid sociality in which the local rearticulates itself and is rearranged - not by a global order, nor for immediately globalized needs but rather by local agents for their own diversion. We might label this a local-local nexus, to balance the emphasis usually placed on globalization as a local-global nexus. This process is only detectable in the embodied interaction in sites such as Rodeo Street: it cannot be deduced nor predicted from any literature on globalization. Missing from my emphasis has been a fuller discussion of the political economy of the shops and bars, hinted at in the debates over regulation, charges of over-consumption, and threats of inquiry into personal profits (but see Cho 1995). However, Rodeo Street clearly defies text-book definitions of globalisation: the importing of non-traditional lifestyles, ideas and tastes based on export to global markets with subsequent social transformation and the emergence of new classes. In a situation of in-corporated bodies and a liminal milieu which is neither local nor 'global' a simple model of globalisation is unhelpful. Globalization more properly involves processes of hybridisation relative to and within localities and specific social situations in local and national contexts. Rodeo Street itself transcends both the local networks of flexible sociality and the simple accusations of Western overconsumption.
The various 'orange' streets of Seoul are so many crucibles in which a process akin to fermentation takes place, producing an effervescent sociality of excess (Maffesoli 1995). These present opportunities to explore the epistemological and methodological problems that happen to the 'post-participant observer' (Shields 1996a). These occur when attempting to integrate the body, and its role as a tactile vehicle or medium of social interaction, into ethnographic narratives. In the press of bodies, the round-up of cars and bodies, one finds a challenge to the distant gaze and voice of the ethnographer and cultural cartographer, mapping Rodeo Street onto the global map of culture and consumption.
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0 Soju is a type of inexpensive, traditional Korean vodka. Served cold in elaborate cocktails it has gone from being the drink of the poor labourer to the 1980s toast of a wealthy 'X-Gen' of students and youth.
0 The place to meet because of its no-nonsense service, central location, the visibility of the patrons to each other and from the street, and relatively low prices of about US$3 per coffee.
0 In a previous article I have discussed the theoretical problems of such situations for participant-observation methods. In addition to arguing that such ethnographic practices violate professional codes of conduct, I have considered the well known work of Clifford and Marcus who propose a dialogical model based on Bakhtin's theorization of the speech-situations between individuals engaged in conversation, and also in the context of public sphere interaction in situations such as marketplaces. However, a fully ethnographic appropriation of Bakhtin must go beyond the methodological use of dialogical models of cross-cultural encounter to recognize the ethical implications of Bakhtin's theorization of the importance of outsider-status and alterity (Shields 1996a).
0 This is one shortcoming in Grosz's presentation of Merleau Ponty as well. In privileging, for example, explanations as separate concepts and discourses independent of their ennunciation and context, She presents the possibility of an embodied, 'corporeal feminism' while continuing to acknowledge a split between a reflective Mind and milieu, thereby smuggling in a distanciated, Cartesian ego which has 'certain relations to our body or corporeal schema' but remains, in her text, analytically separable (Grosz 1994:90). By contrast Merleau-Ponty (1962) takes the more radical step of showing the mutual articulation of the field of action (body, milieu) and perception (Mind), resolving subject-object dualisms into embodied behaviour which unifies both motivation and responsiveness. Mindedness and embodiment are inseparable (Merleau Ponty 1965; see also Crossley 1995: 143). Wittgenstein similarly argues that inner mental predicates refer to publicly verifiable actions and comportment (1953). Thus (contra the claim of J.Butler) while Grosz provides a useful survey of options she does not appear to make an advance on Merleau-Ponty and even limits his work.
0 See Merleau-Ponty's discussion of aphasia (1962:134-5).
0 The notion that norms are suspended or held in abeyance is carefully considered. The inversion or reversal of norms (black for white) appears more specifically carnivalesque, in the Bakhtinian sense (1986). This distinction emerged in a historical study of the British seaside (Shields 1991:83-4; 89-90).
0 Mistaking the place as responsible for peoples' behaviour is an example of social spatialisation at work as supposedly clear-thinking and rational policy-makers direct their attention to extinguishing the acquired reputation of Rodeo Street as a 'social site', spatialised as a place for particular behaviours and cast as a site with the power to guarantee the success or high quality of certain types of social interaction and event (see Shields 1991)
0 To those familiar with the bitter language politics of the Wales, Belgium, Swiss cantons, Quebec, and Korean minorities in Japan, the dubbing of any foreign language as 'obscene' is alarming. The trendy use of English business names (for example 'Coffee and Coffee' with no Hangul transliteration) on shop signs is equated with other, 'signboards written in "vulgar and bawdy" terms,' which might, '"instigate other young people to fall prey to a decadent lifestyle," according to the officials,' (Kwak 1992).
0 Bartenders may play a similar role in a pub by fulfilling the traditional role of 'anchor person' to the fluctuating crowd at the bar. This is unlike many Western bars where the bar itself has been turned into a workstation and the bartender into a frantic drinks mixer who has no time to pass with the patrons along the bar, on the model of the old North American soda- or lunch-bar 'counter' .
0 This Korean notion of modernity signifies the post 1956 Korean War reconstruction of South Korean material culture on the basis of industrialised production and materials (stainless steel, plastics). If the very 'look' and 'feel' of everyday life changed, so to did its political and moral qualities as a generation of progressive change took Korea from Japanese colonisation and enslavement to military dictatorship, bureaucratic authoritarianism and finally after the 1987 riots and middle class revolution, to a rule by still-consolidating democratic institutions. Looking back over 40 years, from 1996, it appears that Korea's modernity is best expressed in its exports and the reorganisation of wage-labour necessary to maintain the Chaebols (or corporate conglomerates) responsible for these exports, and also in the 1988 Olympics in which Korea attempted to project its own culture onto the global media stage. Thus if globalisation was once merely colonial rule, then military clientism to the United States; globalisation now includes imports from, for example, Japan, India and China, and exports from Korea, including commodity exports such as the ubiquitous Korean-made microwave ovens in most American kitchens for which Korean firms (eg. Samsung and Lucky-Goldstar) control key patents and thereby the knowledge components of a device disseminated worldwide.
0 Civil society is defined by Gramsci as the integral social system outside of the state and economic production but integral to both. Civil society is the originating ground of new social movements, religions, identity politics and 'grassroots' organisations, all of which debate the reigning ideological consensus or hegemony. However, civil society itself is permeated and colonised by state intervention through, for example, the welfare state and its limbs in the form of various voluntary organisations. Civil society is thus separable only theoretically as a complex set of private interests, estates and corporate, community organisations.
0 Visual norms like physique (even the maximum North American size 10 shoes carried by most of Seoul's shoe stores attest to this), physiognomy, hair type and skin colour are 'read' as racist short-hands of membership and pushed further into speculative and stereotyped myths of cultural personality-types.