Describe a cultural product or practice and reflect upon the cultural perspective(s) it illustrates.
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Describe a cultural product or practice and reflect upon the cultural perspective(s) it illustrates.
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For the cultural post on a topic of my choice, I watched Johan Oppenheimer's Indonesian movie “The Act of Killing” and an read an article on it by Slavoj Zizek, entitled “Welcome to the Spiritual Kingdom of Animals”. The movie disturbingly confronts the issue of the 1965-66 counter revolution when 2.5 million alleged sympathizers of the communist party(PKI), many of them ethnic Chinese, were brutally murdered by local gangsters with the help of paramilitary forces all across Indonesia. Oppenheimer notices that a leader of a death squad in Medan (a city in the westernmost island of Sumatra) had risen to power and felt no shame about his actions. To this realization, Oppenheimer reacted with an artistic impulse to explore the killer's astounding boastfulness and test the limits of their pride by giving the gangsters the opportunity to film dramatized re-enactments of the massacres.
From watching this movie I learnt a lot about the historical context that the movie references. To summarize, Indonesia's independence in 1949 also roughly coincided with the emergence of the Cold War. The communist party (PKI) was popular, comprising a coalition government in Sukarno's (first president of Indonesia) 1950s government and was slowly gaining popularity. In 1965, there was an attempted coup against the Sukarno government that was only thwarted by the intervention of troops loyal to Army Chief of Staff Suharto. Suharto forced Sukarno to relinquish executive power to himself, pinned the coup on the communist party and began an anti-communist purge. While it is true that the massacres of alleged PKI sympathizers was carried out in the name of Islam on a pan-Indonesia scale and that these massacres were also motivated by built-up ethnic hatred towards Indonesian Chinese, the massacres were most brutal in PKI strongholds of Sumatra and Sulawesi.
As the movie focuses on the role of a single individual in an historic event, I was able to focus on the individual level of Indonesian culture by raising two interesting questions related to Indonesian identity.
First, it was clear in the film that the persona of the leader of the death squad along with his henchmen, who were involved in the business of selling western cinema tickets in the black market before 1965, shared a direct relation to the personas that they saw in Hollywood cinema. One of Zizek's claims is that the gangsters embody the personas of the hero and experience reality as a fictional narrative in order to cope with their horrid actions. However, my counterclaim to this is that the relationship is more complex because the leader of the death squad were also enabled to be efficient murderers because of their love of cinema. This discussion on identity and Hollywood becomes doubly interesting in light of the western colonization of Indonesia. Then one will need to talk about a phenomenon amongst the colonized called the fantasy of imagined other.
Second, it is common for the viewer to simply blame the violence in Hollywood or the primitive ethnic nature of Indonesian society to be the trigger for the outbreak of the massacres. However, the question still remains: why was the Chinese specifically targeted? I claim that the ethnic violence against the Chinese resembled Nazi anti-Semitism in so far as the symbol of the Chinese became a placeholder for all the evils experienced by the others. I rest this claim on the fact that contrary to the image of Mao's China, the ethnically Chinese diaspora of Indonesia consisted of middle-class shopkeepers. The movie shows shows us some of the Chinese shopkeepers being bullied into paying “protection money”, adding weight to the claim that communism was against the interests of the Chinese middle-class. Furthermore, I believe that the symbol of the Chinese would have been instantly recognizable to all Indonesians because unlike regionally centered ethnic groups, the Chinese diaspora had migrated into all parts of Indonesia adding another resembelence between anti-Chinese and anti-Semitic violence.
By looking at brushing teeth in Korean, I found it was really interesting how Korean females view beauty. Korean people normally brush their teeth after every single meal. At school, it is common to see girls brushing their teeth in the toilets and no one will say it is awkward. Girls would even ask friends to join and brush teeth together.
This cultural practice closely links with the plastic surgery cultural phenomenon in Korea. A staggering one in five Korean women has had cosmetic work done. Many girls have had plastic surgery after graduating from high school as a parent's gift. How people place beauty and how do people view beauty gradually change Korean girls obsession with cosmetic surgery.
By looking at shopping in Korea, we get to know many important cultural aspects. First and foremost, it’s really useful to know the popular places to go for shopping. For example, the most famous shopping street is called Myongdong. A lot of tourists booming at there, including foreigners. The shops in Myongdong has a lot of international brands such as H&M. shopkeepers there provide multilingual customer service includingenglish/korean/chinese/Japanese. Another great place to go is called Dongdaemun. At there, Cloths are very cheap but without brands.
Talking about brands, some famous electronic brands are like Samsung and LG. Also, the makeup brands in Korea are getting more and more popular recently. Many of my friends gave up using Dior and start to use Etude House instead.
Another thing to notice is that Korea is one of the countries that use credit cards the most. Still, shops in Korea definitely prefer cash in order to underreport their tax. So, many shops provide 5% discount if people pay in cash.
In addition to the cultural aspects of shopping in Korea, there is a practical perspective for me to learn around this topic. For instance, how to greet shopkeepers, make introduction in formal Korean, talk to my friend in informal Korean, ask for direction, colors, numbers, etc. Also, I could learn some basic conversation about payment, such as too expensive.
The social standing of women is really interesting to me. They are seen as inferior in Korean culture. When meeting non-Koreans, Korean women are not suppose to make eye contact or physically touch them in any way. This shows how conservative the culture still is even though Korea is a developed nation. Another thing that stuck out to me was something that Korean women are expected to do during meals. Korean women are suppose to pour the tea for the men first and then themselves. They never pour for other women and are always expected to pour the tea. In my culture, we have a similar practice. Instead of women, it's usually the younger person pouring the tea instead.
Although every culture is complex, the complexity of Indian culture in particular has always fascinated me. Much of its complexity is due to historical factors. Before the British rule, the Indian subcontinent was made up of hundreds of "princedoms," or small monarchies that each spoke their own language and maintained their own customs. When the British took over the area, many of the ruling princes succumbed willingly to British rule, while others resisted until they were ultimately forced militarily.
Hyderabad, the area that I lived in last year, was one of the last princedoms to fall to the British, so many aspects of the Muslim-ruled city and its culture remain prominent despite British influence. For this reason, many more Urdu terms are used in both the local language of Telugu and the local dialect of Hindi. For instance, the Urdu word for thank you, "Shukriya", is used more frequently in Hyderabad, but in less Muslim-influenced areas of India, "dhanyavad" is used.
These regional differences are also true of local dishes, which Indians often say change every 50 kilometers. Of course, many of the food choices in a particular area have to do with access to vegetables, meats, spices, etc. However, each princedom was so isolated before British rule, that the process of cooking, tastes, and number of spices used still varies widely from region to region even though nationwide communication is easy. I also found it interesting that I was often told that people of different castes have different tastes in food. Being vegetarian, vegan, meat-eating, or Jain depends largely on religion, but I was also told that these differences in eating habits show caste divides as well. I was also told that lower-castes and rural communities eat spicier dishes, perhaps because they have not become accustomed to the blander Western foods that urban communities have gotten used to.