Session 175: The Poetics of Culture in Everyday Asia

Organizer and Chair: Frank J. Smith, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Discussant: Eleanor T. Lipat, University of California, Los Angeles

Keywords: working class aesthetics, folk culture, popular culture.

Contemporary Asian street-level culture provides myriad daily examples of expressive discourses between members of various marginalized groups and the dominant social order. These expressive discourses naturally give evidence of resistance and other reactions to domination, but also of seduction, anxiety, internal conflict and contradiction in terms of class, race, and gender, framed by the larger socioeconomic situation in which these discourses occur.

These everyday expressive discourses, furthermore, often underline a "political unconsciousness" among the various marginalized groups in question. Such an unawareness of the politics of their actions, however, does not render the often highly poignant and artistic expressions of these groups any less significant in a description and analysis of their respective contemporary social/cultural/political landscapes.

The papers in this panel examine several discrete moments of expressive discourse among marginalized groups, derived directly from the experience of the subjects. This constitutes a focus on contemporary folklore practices in general and in particular, urban expressive culture. Such a culture is expressed in diverse media ranging from music to theatrical performance, speech styles, the visual arts and fashion.

The sum of these practices can be read as a shared collective model where a community or group of people takes multiple readings of the same text and in doing so produces and enhances their collectivity, however unconsciously, while still allowing for differing individual perspectives.

A Localized Sound on the Road in South Korea, T’ûrot’û Medley

Min-Jung Son, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

A cassette of music in medley form, mostly known as a t’ûrot’û medley, has been one of the most popular cultural commodities among the South Korean working class since the late 1980s, such as taxi drivers, bus drivers, and tourists in highway buses. T’ûrot’û medley is a seamless rendition of a number of sentimental love song hits given in the style of t’ûrot’û (Korean pronunciation of trot) to the same rhythmic accompaniment. Generally speaking, the musical characteristics of t’ûrot’û medley include lots of echo effects, double-tracked vocal, danceable rhythm, and synthesizer-oriented small instrumentation. The question here is how and why this new sound was invented and kept as a local musical identity of the South Korean working class, particularly connected to the space of the highway.

In this paper, I first intend to explore the historical process in which t’ûrot’û medley has been formulated and standardized as the music of the South Korean working class. For instance, a specific South Korean cultural phenomenon, kwankwangbus-ch’um (dancing on the highway tourbus), played a key role in bolstering the fervor of this danceable medley music in the 1980s–90s. I then examine cultural and economic forces by which this new sound has been linked to the aesthetics of the South Korean working class, such as the formation of local marketplaces of cassette music—i.e., traditional marketplaces, parks, street markets, and highway rest areas. This study is based upon my fieldwork in Seoul and Kyônggi province (the surrounding area of Seoul) in 2002–2003.

When the Iron Rice Bowl Meets the Market: Falun Gong and the Cult(ivation) of Modernity in Post-Maoist China

Robert J. Shepherd, George Washington University

Understanding the Falun Gong movement and its suppression by the Chinese government from July 1999 until the present has been the subject of an increasing amount of research. Much of this work focuses on the structure of this movement, its aims and objectives, and its classification. Less attention has been paid to the cultural and aesthetic aspects of the movement, particularly in its early years, as a localized response to the Chinese state’s embrace of "opening up" to the world via radical economic and social reforms.

The appeal of Falun Gong is best understood through a careful reading of its founder Li Hongzhi’s Zhuan Falun (Turning the Dharma Wheel) within the context of the ideological template and language he was shaped within—a Maoist idealization of social morality combined with a philosophical tradition of cultivation and a Modernist deification of Science. The mainly late-middle-aged urban residents who made up the bulk of Li Hongzhi’s followers at the height of his popularity are Chinese who have not, in the main, benefited from the Chinese Communist Party’s turn to market reforms. As work units have gone bankrupt, the state health system has collapsed, and the last shred of broad belief in the value of state socialism has disappeared under the lure of money and the power of corruption, the claims of a Li Hongzhi, could, from their perspective, look not just reasonable but also attractive, as a means, however illusory, of gaining some control over one’s own life at a time of social chaos.

Politics, Performance, and the Experience of Meaning in Contemporary Performed Urdu Poetry

Christopher Lee, Canisius College

Poetry, it is said, is the form of expression that Muslims in North India value most. Appreciation of poetry is not defined by wealth, class or education; one is as likely to hear poetry being recited by a mechanic or weaver as a college professor. Poetry is shared and recited at the tea stand with friends, and performed at gatherings which attract audiences in the tens of thousands.

The ghazal—the most popular of the Urdu poetic forms—is traditionally understood to be syrupy love poetry, and casts the poet as the unrequited lover of an unfeeling beloved. However, contemporary poets are rehabilitating the tropes of this love poetry to better represent contemporary Muslim experience in India: ghazals often carry veiled political and social messages which run counter to dominant local and national discourses. By couching such messages within the ghazal, Urdu poets are able to make counterhegemonic statements without endangering ontological commitments, safe within the aestheticized beauty of poetry.

In this paper, based on several years of ethnographic research and an apprenticeship to a practicing poetry master, I explore various ways that everyday Muslim poets of Urdu in North India utilize the performed ghazal as a way to construct, negotiate and critique meaningful shared understandings of the social and political circumstances in which they find themselves.

Telling the Customer What to Do: A Thai Sex Worker Improvisational Folk Chant

Frank J. Smith, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Much research has been done on the economics of sex work in Thailand, the means by which women (and men) are recruited into the industry, and their relations/interactions with their customers. Precious little has been written, however, on the culture of sex workers themselves, on the informal social networks and aesthetic practices they create together which serve in part as a base and support for their working lives.

This paper will document, based on material gathered during participant observation of these in-group social and cultural interactions, one tangible product of Bangkok freelance sex workers’ interactions with each other: a partially improvised folk chant topically related to their work.

This particular chant is notable not only for the way that it makes light of the nature of the womens’ work, but also for the irreverence with which it treats their customers. Various implications of these two aspects of the chant are discussed in the paper. In addition to this discussion, an audio recording of the chant (with transcript and English translation provided) will be played, and slides of sex workers interacting with each other before work will be shown.