Government signalling during an epidemic

The officials’ outfits were among the most notable recurrent patterns in their media appearances to announce these actions. They used face masks and wore a light-yellow jacket, which is used only in emergency situations in Korea. In a society where wearing less than a formal suit in such media speeches is unthinkable, the casual pattern and outstanding colour of the jacket immediately drew viewers’ attention. Moreover, the fact that all the officials, regardless of gender and rank, from the President to the Secretary of the health department wore exactly the same jacket also signalled solidarity and unison in the face of danger rather than normative hierarchy. From February 2020, Mun Chae-in, the President, and other government officials were often shown visiting hospitals, factories and markets wearing masks and the yellow jackets, thus signalling that life can continue but attention must be paid to the prevention of the virus’ spread.
...
Seoul has a unique democratic protest culture and several mass protests in the early 21st
century achieved their goals; among them, the notorious weekly rally to impeach the president
in 2016-7. The commonly generalized view expressed in world media that Koreans are docile
citizens because of their Confucian heritage (for example, Escobar 2020; Purnell 2020) does
little to address the actual reality. As my recent ethnography about protest in Seoul shows
(Sarfati 2018), the Korean public has proved its power over policy makers through their mass
dissent practices, which made the current government especially sensitive to the outcomes of
dire conditions.( Read more... )

...
Obtaining extensive public cooperation proved no less crucial than the professional management of the health system and bio-science.


--- Liora Sarfati, Signalling ‘Crisis’ in an Affective Manner: Government, Media and Public Cooperation during COVID-19 in South Korea. Urbanities, Vol. 10 · Supplement 4 · September 2020.

https://www.anthrojournal-urbanities.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Vol.-10-Suppl.-4-September-2020.pdf#page=78

upd:

Deaths per million in South Korea through December 7, 2021 -- 76.52;

in the US -- 2,394.94.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

The invention of the glass slipper

“As with all of Perrault’s stories, the trouble with his “Cinderella” is that he took fairy-tale material—either Basile’s or some other “Cinderella” story known to him from oral tradition, or a combination of both sources—freed it of all content he considered vulgar, and refined its other features to make the product suitable to be told at court. Being an author of great skill and taste, he invented details and changed others to make the story conform to his aesthetic concepts. It was, for example, his invention that the fateful slipper was made of glass, which is in no other versions but those derived from his.”

--- Bruno Bettelheim. “The Uses of Enchantment.”

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