Track the historical development of "autoethnographic" (Pratt 1991) media and draw links between the real, material conditions of the cultural politics of adoption and the subjective feelings of adoptees and those that partake in the cultural politics of adoption. Broadly speaking, to investigate the historical socioeconomic factors and conditions - especially print media - which catalyzed the Korean imagined community (Anderson 1984), and how the development of the imagined community lead to the organic formation of a knowledge-producing intelligentsia.
Key Theories
1. What is an "autoethnographic" text? Pratt describes it as
"a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations of others have made of them. Thus if ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with those texts. ...[Autoethnography involves] a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror."There are more important theoretical nuances to this definition, but this is the main point. Ethnography is the description of people, a key methodology of anthropology. The -auto prefix denotes that such ethnography is done by the very people of study; people studying themselves, but in relation to and in conversation with others.
2. What is an "imagined community"? Wiki says: "The imagined community is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson which states that a nation is a community socially constructed, which is to say imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group." The concept of the imagined community is a crucial part in understanding how autoethnography is more than just "self-representation" (as Pratt puts it). The idea is that autoethnography is predicated upon and situated within an imagined community. One of those smaller nuances of Pratt's theory that I mentioned is that autoethnography requires collaboration between people. She gives the example of literate ex-slaves and abolitionist intellectuals, and this resonates wonderfully with intellectuals focused on adoption politics and birth mothers. Anyway, the message behind collaboration as a necessary part of autoethnography is two-fold: (1) that the imagined community is a group, and a group requires more than one person; and (2) that the physical relationships of people within groups is dependent upon an abstract understanding of one another's position, that is, the formation of a group is predicated upon meaning structures and modes of understanding that transcend a physical reality. Groups stabilize not just because people "are there", but because there is a greater meaning to why people are there.
3. What is a superstructure? From my understanding, Marx made a turn in the 19th century from Hegelian phenomenology by stating that physical reality is the basis for all of society. He said that the economy drove everything, it was the base of everything. Sociologists now just call it "the base" (the economy, the material conditions of society). While idealists like Hegel said that ideas were the driving force of society, Marx said that, in reverse, ideas were generated by material conditions, ie. to gain knowledge from a book you have to have the money to buy the book in the first place. Academics call this the "superstructure", and it encompasses things like political structures and ideology. In relation to imagined communities, groups need a material basis. For whatever reasons, people have to come together physically. But, for these reasons, whatever they are, they may give the situation an abstract dimension, that additional meaning. Thus the "superstructure" (imagined community) is generated by the material conditions of the group. The first general goal of this research would be to understand the "how" of imagined community formation.
4. What is an organic intellectual? - an organic intelligentsia? From what I've read, Gramsci was the first (or one of the first) to theorize upon the concept of the organic intellectual. Wiki:
An organic intellectual, unlike a traditional intellectual, is a bourgeoisie scholar who cultivates strong roots in his/her community, working to maintain links with local issues and struggles that connect to the people and their experiences. While traditional intellectuals imagine themselves as an autonomous group with an historical presence above and separate from political class struggle, they are in fact strongly allied with the dominant ideology and the ruling class. On the other hand, organic intellectuals openly recognize their location within the dominant ideology and their function in perpetuating it, and use their positionality to cultivate strategies for helping their communities to develop a self-inspired, organic consciousness.Hence, organic adoptee intellectuals help to perpetuate the organic consciousness (imagined community) of adoptees through print and digital media. Thus the second general goal of this research is to understand the "how" of imagined community propagation.
Overall, these are the larger, sociological theories that play a key role in informing the research.
Research Goals (defined more explicitly)
One part of this project would be to track the dominant structures in which the adoption community had to form. While traditional intellectuals wrote about adoption, they formed myths about adoptees and adoption, forming resilient representations against which organic intellectual adoptees have had to contest with their main weapon, autoethnography. These "dominant structures" include the publishing industry, adoption industry, church, state, and dominant discourse and representations on adoption and adoptees. Of course, as the adoption community has had time to coalesce, they have created points of entry into these very structures. These "points of entry" are also of high interest because they are structures which may be technically labeled the same as dominant structures, but they explicitly try to subvert the latent functions of dominant institutions. [By "latent functions", sociologists mean functions which institutions do not directly instigate - they are nasty side effects. One simplified example is universities: they are intended to educate people, but their latent function is to maintain the division of labor and class stratification by guaranteeing education only to the wealthy.] I think South End Press would be a good starting point into this line of research.
Perhaps more importantly, however, would be to get into the real nitty gritty; to document how imagined communities are manifested within the individual.This requires a lot of interviews. I'd have to interview people like editors of books, founders of nonprofits, executive directors of adoption organizations, writers of all stripes, readers, adoptees that don't care about their adoptedness, blog authors, educators, social workers, etc. The point of these interviews would be to understand how they all navigate the terrain of the imagined community, shaping it as they generate their own knowledge and share it with others. What exactly was an author thinking when they decided to write that memoir, or that essay? What exactly was that editor thinking when they wanted to put together a collection of essays written by adoptees? What was that entrepreneur thinking when they wanted to start an organization that strove to educate mothers about adoption? What were their goals, their visions about abstract purposes or ideals? How did they perceive themselves in relation to their goals? Did they feel the presence of an opposition? Can they describe their perception of the opposition - the Other? To those "key players" in charge of money and enterprises, how did they feel about this? Who was the editor and agent of the author of the first adoption memoir? Did they have any premonition of what was to come, of the historical significance of A First in a subfield of literature? And to these pioneers, the very first of the organic intellectuals, how did they feel? Were they aware of their positions, of their historical significance?
So, why Korean adoptees?
I take it from what I've read that Korean adoptees are "the first". Koreans after the armistice make up the first major diaspora intercountry adoptees. It's due to simple historical primacy that adoptee literature first arose out of Korean adoptees. [or so I'd think. If this hypothesis proves wrong it's either that Korean adoptees weren't really the first, or some other crazy reason I can't fathom.] However, once Koreans spoke up, all the other adoptees followed. Chinese, Vietnamese, African, European, American, etc. I'm not really at all fluent in autoethnographic writing by nationalities other than Korea and China though. The Korean adoptee community provides the optimal research setting because of their firstness and because the development of autoethnographic literature is a recent addition as well. Jae Ran provides some crucial information here, with the first Korean memoir being self-published (an important fact in itself) in 1998.
However, the relationship between Korean adoptee autoethnography and mainstream media on adoption runs much deeper. It's 3am and I'm tired and this part I haven't devoted much thought to so I'll have to write a part two later...
oh yeah, also, this would make for a cool undergrad thesis (I have to make a proposal for mine in March), but this really isn't what I want to culminate my undergrad years with. It seems too big for merely a side project though...I'm pretty sure I'd have to get a good amount of funding for travel expenses and interviews, books too maybe. No idea what a budget would look like. Do I have to go to Korea? I'm sure interviewing Trenka is an absolute must. She is, after all, my gateway author.
I'm sure she would do an interview with you. She has *good* connections in the U.S. (hint).
ReplyDeleteThis is really fascinating. Yesterday, for one of my courses, I was looking at PhD and Masters theses available on transracial adoption. There is an autoethnography by a Chinese (Hong Kong) adoptee from a few years ago, by her self-disclosure she is in her mid- to late-40s. I might order her dissertation because I am so curious (I could only get a partial for free).
It was interesting that Pratt said (or quoted) that autoethnography engages on the coloniser's terms.
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't think the writers had a premonition on what came first in literature, or even that they were creating a literature. And now it's taken 20 years, and involved other countries as well.
(I am looking forward to a strong literary presence from Russia, Romania and the ex-Soviet bloc countries as well as the Central Asian nations).
Are Koreans the first adoptees per se, or only the first transracial adoptees as that term is usually defined? Because I'm sure there were countries like England and mass child migration. That, too, has started to be written about.
Would be great to see the interviews, and how you research and code them, and build on the previous bodies of work before you respectfully and truthfully.
Adelaide, you are right on. Using the removal and movement of children as adoption/colonization has been done prior to the beginning of the Korean adoption phase. WWI and WWII saw this happening intra-country and throughout Europe for a long time (Spain, Germany - Franco and Hitler both did it), and it has also been done in several of south america's "dirty wars" ie. argentina, guatemala and el salvadore. And then don't forget the mass forcible removal and colonization of native children in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand which has been going on forever.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I thought different two weeks ago, but I wouldn't think that Koreans were "the first" in this general sense. Perhaps they are the first in the sense that they are transnational, interracial and largely commodified through an emerging consumer industry, but that says much more about society than the Korean adoptees themselves.
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