Supernatural

In Religion in Chinese Society, from 1961, the scholar C.K. Yang does an admirable job of separating the idea of religion from Western preconceptions of what the term might mean based on our history of theistic Christianity, and particularly of strong church organizations overlaying relatively weak and fragmentary states -- the opposite in many ways of what one found historically in China.

But there is another term that creeps in, particularly in his discussion of Confucius and whether the ancient sage could be considered "agnostic" in terms of beliefs in gods and spirits. That term is supernatural.

There are, of course, other troubling terms -- "gods," for one -- but supernatural is a term that I have seen frequently in texts on religion, and it's problematic for a number of reasons. At its core, it means above nature, which suggests phenomena that don't follow any natural order. But historically the study of what we call supernatural phenomena -- spirits, gods, magic -- was not considered beyond the realm of the knowable. It was hard to know, and only wise scholars or profound mystics who devoted a great deal of study could truly understand these things, but that's pretty much how we think about physics today. Do you really know what goes on inside your smartphone? Or inside a particle accelerator?

So when we talk about a Korean shaman who feels herself to be possessed by different spirits, and who dances and "plays well" with them, and prescribes the right sacrifices to keep them happy, are we really talking about something that, from the shaman's perspective, transcends the laws of nature? Or are we talking about an extension of nature -- of how the world works -- that isn't normally visible, but that is discernible with study and insight? And if the latter, is the term supernatural merely an imposition of a Western scientific episteme anachronistically and aculturally onto other worldviews?

To demonstrate the awkwardness of supernatural as a category, let's think ourselves back into history, say, five hundred years. And now we will consider a series of beings in whose existence a Chinese scholar might believe, though he has never seen any of them: elephants, yetis, dragons, gods, the ghosts of ancestors, Heaven, giraffes, Indian people, qilin. Which of these is a belief in the supernatural? From the scholar's perspective, every single item on the list can have manifest, measurable impacts on the visible, physical world. Some can't be directly seen, but neither can radio waves, and they're not supernatural in our thinking. They are a part of nature, amenable to study, manipulable by various means -- like gods, spirits, etc.

As such, an enquiry into whether Confucius himself believed in the supernatural seems to me fundamentally misguided. One might enquire whether he believed in particular sorts of gods or spirits, and what his beliefs were about those beings. But the very idea of the supernatural depends on a modern distinction between a realm of superstition and falsehood and a realm of empirically measurable truth: science, in a word. (Ironically, many of the scholars who formulated this distinction would have found it absurdly superstitious to believe that a dead general could become an intercessionary god, yet believed profoundly in the redemptive power of the death and subsequent resurrection of a man who was born to a virgin mother and whose father was the God of Heaven. One man's superstition is another man's truth about the world.)

We might need a replacement term for the realm of spirits, or we might not. But it seems to me that supernatural is decidedly not the right word to use for scholars and practitioners who engage directly with that realm, based on knowledge, insight and experience.

Godzilla vs. Kim Jong-il

At the welcoming party for the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Columbia, I met a visiting scholar from Japan whose research focuses on Godzilla as a global phenomenon. Happily, I was able to tell her about Pulgasari, which she'd never heard of: a North Korean Godzilla movie from the 1980s. (The trailer is full of explosions and highlights the hwacha, a sort of primitive rocket launcher that Koreans are rather proud of.)

I have never actually watched Pulgasari -- I need to get to it one of these days -- but the story of the making of Pulgasari is one of the very weirdest tales in all of cinema. In 1978, North Korean agents kidnapped the Korean actress Choi Eun-hee in Hong Kong. Her ex-husband, the prominent director Shin Sang-ok, went to Hong Kong to investigate and was promptly kidnapped as well.

The kidnappings were the work of Kim Jong-il, whose father, Kim Il-sung, was then still the leader of North Korea. It took several years, and Shin spent some time in North Korean prison, but in 1983 he was reunited with his ex-wife in Pyongyang. Under pressure from Kim Jong-il, they remarried. From then until their eventual escape in 1986 at a film festival in Vienna, Shin worked on North Korean films, the most famous of which is Pulgasari.

The aftermath is almost as weird. Shin and Choi escaped to the US embassy, and they were granted asylum. Back then, South Korea was under the right-wing military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan, and Shin feared that the government wouldn't buy his kidnapping story, so he stayed in the US until 1994, when the politics in South Korea had changed. He eventually died of hepatitis, supposedly while working on Genghis Khan, a musical, which sounds like an Asian Springtime for Hitler.

The full Pulgasari film, with subtitles, is available on YouTube.

The role of government

It never fails to astonish me that the same conservatives who argue that every last aspect of big government is irreparably broken and corrupt inevitably see a capital punishment system that is perfect and just. If you genuinely believe that the state can’t even fix a pothole without self-dealing and corruption, how is it possible to imagine that police departments and prosecutors’ offices are beyond suspicion?

So asks an excellent Slate article about two mentally retarded teenagers who were falsely convicted of murder and have just been released, 30 years later. One could ask the same question about the military, which most conservatives also believe ought to be run by the state and properly funded.

And liberals like myself ought to ask ourselves carefully why we think a government that so badly mishandles justice ought to be trusted with our health care or our environmental protection. The same self-dealing and corruption that leads to false convictions and unnecessary military hardware might also lead to unfair over-regulation or mishandling of patient care.

These aren't questions with easy answers. They're questions we need to keep asking and asking. That's pretty much the whole point of a democracy with a free press.

Goryeo and the construction of tradition

I've been reading Martina Deuchler's The Confucian Transformation of Korea, which addresses the way that Neo-Confucian values came to play such a prominent role in Korean society during the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). To make sense of it, she tries to piece together a picture of social norms -- marriage, inheritance, mourning, and the like -- during the preceding Goryeo period (918-1392), which is exceedingly difficult because of limited sources.

Deuchler's scholarship is admirable. She's obviously put tremendous effort into reading a ton of Goryeo documents, and it's not like they're nicely indexed to let you know when they're going to start talking about marriage laws. Reading them is presumably difficult, since it means reading Koreanized medieval Chinese as preserved in some very old hand-written books. Furthermore, the existing evidence is almost entirely for the upper classes, as it is for Heian Japan (784-1195) around the same time, so we have to make do with a limited picture of the upper echelons of society.

What Deuchler finds is interesting. Though the evidence is fragmentary, it appears that women had far more power in Goryeo than in later Joseon, just as they did in Heian Japan and in Tang China (618-907). That is not to say that they were equal to men or that there was anything like a patriarchy. But inheritance laws meant that estates were divided at the discretion of their owners, and it seems that they were customarily split evenly among both sons and daughters. Matrilineal prestige was important in claiming oneself as an aristocrat, and men often moved in with their wives' families rather than vice versa. There also seems to have been a lot of what we would consider incest: marriages with cousins, even with half-siblings, which kept wealth contained in a tightly knit family unit.

There are two points that I want to make about all this. The first is about shamanism, where some theorists have claimed that shamans were probably men in an earlier period, and only later shifted to women when shamanic practice became disparaged. I find this idea unlikely, and there's little evidence for it. It seems far more likely to me that shamanism became a less diffuse, more specifically identified set of practices only when it was distinguished as heterodoxy, but that shamanic practices probably went on long before, and probably had plenty of female practitioners.

Secondly, the evidence about Goryeo and how different it was -- and about Heian too -- should remind us that "traditional" culture is generally a modern invention, developed in contradistinction to modernity. What's considered traditional culture in Korea -- hanbok, Chuseok, all the traditional music and dances -- is largely Joseon, and late Joseon at that. Typical presentations of traditional culture make it seem as though people lived a certain way statically since time began, and then suddenly they got modernized (European sailing ships, the first streetcar, an ethnic man in eyeglasses, a war of some kind, skyscrapers). And modernity does have certain distinct characteristics. But what's labeled as "traditional" is often something like "How I remember it from before modernity arrived," or "How my grandmother used to do things in the old days." Most of the scholars doing the remembering that established traditional cultures across Asia were doing it in the 1890s forward, which has meant that traditional culture is whatever people were doing in the mid-19th century. Those scholars, further, had particular motivations: to make their societies seem legitimate in the eyes of the West, to establish a national culture and character, to make the case for or against modernity. So certain things get kept in as legitimately traditional, and others get tossed as hillbilly nonsense.

This is important to remember no matter what culture you're looking at, including American culture, where pundits are often trying to reconstruct an imaginary 1950s or 1960s, or an imaginary time of glorious freedom back in the late 19th century. It's true in Judaism, where the Orthodox like to dress the way their rabbis did in 18th- and 19th-century Europe.

Tradition is a construction, always. The actual past is more complicated, and far more interesting -- and we can always plunder it to construct new traditions.

A short story in one picture

I happened to find these in the office, things that had been left behind during a major workspace reshuffle. Kind of fascinating, and a little sad when you put them in this order.

Surviving feedback

What makes receiving feedback so hard? The process strikes at the tension between two core human needs—the need to learn and grow, and the need to be accepted just the way you are. 

That's from a Harvard Business Review article on finding the coaching in criticism, and the authors provide some excellent strategies for responding to criticism even when it hits our emotional triggers.

Beyond their suggestions, you might also think of criticism and feedback -- all of it, whether you're giving or getting -- as a form of acknowledgement: the people giving you feedback are saying that you're worth their time, that what you do actually matters to them. In receiving feedback, even when it feels at first listen like it's little more than abuse, you can look for what impact you have on your critic (or at least what impact your critic perceives you to have). For the harshest criticism, that might give you a starting point for empathy; for more ordinary feedback, it might even make you feel good that you matter to that person.

And when it comes time to give feedback, you can keep the concept of acknowledgement in mind. Forget about the compliment sandwich. Acknowledgement is acknowledging what's so, without any bull, and at the same time expressing appreciation. That needs to be honest. (If you find that you're not able to say what's so with appreciation, even in a small way, it's probably not a good time to be giving feedback.) Through acknowledgement, it might be possible to support both the need to grow and the need to be accepted, all at the same time.

Eating deliciously

Yesterday a Korean professor showed me a paper by one of his students and asked me to guess whether it was written by a native speaker of English. Within one sentence, I knew not only that it was written by a foreigner, but that the writer was Korean.

Of course, with a Korean professor handing me a paper on Korean studies and asking me that question, I could guess before I read anything that it was written by a Korean student. But within one sentence, I knew. How?

Because the student wrote that a certain topic is "controversially debated." That phrasing, with the weird adverb, is a sure sign of Korean thinking. In Korean, adverbs have a much wider range of signification than they do in English. In English, an adverb modifies a verb, changing the way the verb's action is carried out. You can run, or you can run quickly, or you could even run stupidly, and however you do it, it's about the act of running. But in Korean, you can use an adverb to create a general sense or feeling around how a verb occurs. For example, Koreans have a set phrase for the beginning of a meal: 맛 있게 드세요 (mashitge teuseyo), which literally means "eat deliciously." In English, that makes no sense. The act of eating can't be done in a delicious way. But in Korean, it's perfectly normal: "deliciously" is the feeling that should accompany the action.

So back to that "controversially debated." In native English, you'd probably need to say that the topic "is the subject of debate and controversy," or that it's "hotly debated." "Controversially," when it modifies the action of debating, means that the very act of debating engenders controversy -- that someone thinks there shouldn't be any debating -- when the intended meaning is that there is an atmosphere or feeling of controversy that accompanies the debate.

So in English, adverbs tell you how an action occurs, while in Korean, they can tell you what feeling an action engenders. Which makes sense, when you know Korean and Anglo-American culture. English is set up to give you precision about external action, while Korean is set up to give you nuanced precision about social relations. It makes sense that a grammar construction that's used in English to tell you what's happening is used in Korean to tell you how it feels.