timelets

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

Perhaps our most important finding is that the mobility gaps by race are far larger than the gaps by geography. We find that there is no region in the United States where it is better to be poor and black compared to being equally poor and white. The expected rank of a poor white child who grew up in the worst region of the country for whites (South Atlantic) would still be higher than for a poor black child growing up in the most advantaged region of the country for blacks (Mountain).

--- Davis, Jonathan and Mazumder, Bhashkar, Racial and Ethnic Differences in the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility (March 12, 2018).

https://ssrn.com/abstract=3138979

A most useful way of demonstrating the existence of a certain phenomenon is to examine the implications and consequences of its absence. As Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested, if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious.

The obvious methodological implication of this is that investigating the "pathological" might help us to discover, unveil, or simply bring into focus the "normal," which we usually take for granted and­ therefore tend to ignore.

--- Evitar Zerubavel. Hidden Rhythms, 1985.