Korean Studies Carousel Lecture
Winter Semester 2021, bi-weekly on Fridays, 9:45–13:00
ASK/CARL2 & DAS/CARL2
Korea Corner (SV-2.44)
15 October 2021
Antti Läppänen (University of Turku)
Rice Cake Manufacturing as Livelihood, Business, and Tradition
This lecture uses the case of manufacturers of a traditional Korean foodstuff, rice cakes (tteok) to give an ethnography-based presentation and analysis of self-employment in South Korea as livelihood, business, and tradition. The lecture is based on my extensive fieldwork among practitioners in the sector: individual producers and producer couples in their shops; local group of tteok makers in their monthly meetings and alumni organizations of the training institute of the national association; elected officials and office managers of various levels of the trade association; and participants in various functions and events of rice cake trade. The themes of the lecture will be presented from various angles of ethnographic narrative, keeping the focus mainly on individual practitioners and portraying them both in their shop spaces and in their organizational functions as well as adding to the narrative with glimpses to personal histories. The discussion will extend from the single trade of small-scale foodstuff manufacturing to wider perspectives on Korean culture and society in regards with self-employment as livelihood, social category in South Korea, and its relation to what is considered as tradition.
Antti Leppänen received his doctorate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Helsinki with a study discussing and analyzing the lived worlds of the self-employed in a Seoul neighborhood and published with the title Neighborhood Shopkeepers in Contemporary South Korea: Household, Work, and Locality. His current research project investigates the organizations of the self-employed in South Korea as Korean culture of economy, for which he has conducted ethnographic research among rice cake (tteok) manufacturers. He is currently preparing a monograph manuscript tentatively titled Organization, skill, and taste of rice cakes: Culture of local and national economy in South Korea. He has been teaching and researching in the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, Finland since 2013.
