During the second half of the 20th Century, large portions of the world encountered three significant waves of South Korean cultural export. Prior to the massively successful Korean popular media, consumer products, and technology that are globally recognized today, Tae Kwon Do masters, Protestant missionaries, and classical musicians began representing South Korea to other countries. These specifically post-war domains of Korean culture manifest as highly specialized forms of learned expertise and authority, which passed through explicitly defined and sustained social relations. Unlike the mediatized movement of cultural commodities or the rapid rise and fall of mass consumer trends, the valorized cultural forms of these earlier waves traveled through face-to-face communication and embodied interaction in relatively intimate settings. This presentation draws out some sociopolitical connections among these three earlier waves of Korean cultural export in order to situate the broader phenomenon within a history of migration, transnational education, and the Cold War.

Nicholas Harkness is the Modern Korean Economy and Society Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Korea Institute at Harvard University. His long-term ethnographic research in South Korea has focused on language, music, and religion within the context of Korea’s massive engagement with Protestant Christianity in the 20th and 21st Centuries. He is the author of Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea (University of California Press, 2014) and Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (University of Chicago Press, 2021), as well as numerous papers in Korean Studies, linguistic anthropology, and semiotics. Harkness is the recipient of the Edward Sapir Book Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and many fellowships and grants, including from the Social Science Research Council, the National Humanities Center, the Academy of Korean Studies, and the Korea Foundation. At Harvard, Harkness also organizes the Roman Jakobson Symposium and the Harvard-Yenching Institute Field Development Program in Linguistic and Semiotic Anthropology.

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