Congrats Leppänen!
A big congrats to anthro-blogger Antti Leppänen whose dissertation on South Korean shopkeepers is done and available online from the University of Helsinki’s electronic publications archive.
This is an ethnographic study of the lived worlds of the keepers of small shops in a residential neighborhood in Seoul, South Korea. It outlines, discusses, and analyses the categories and conceptualizations of South Korean capitalism at the level of households, neighborhoods, and Korean society. These cultural categories were investigated through the neighborhood shopkeepers’ practices of work and reciprocal interaction as well as through the shopkeepers’ articulations of their lived experience. In South Korea, the keepers of small businesses have continued to be a large occupational category despite of societal and economic changes, occupying approximately one fourth of the population in active work force. In spite of that, these people, their livelihoods and their cultural and social worlds have rarely been in the focus of social science inquiry.
(more at antropologi.info)
P. Kerim Friedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University, in Taiwan, where he teaches linguistic and visual anthropology. He is co-director of the film Please Don't Beat Me, Sir!, winner of the 2011 Jean Rouch Award from the Society of Visual Anthropology. Follow Kerim on Twitter.
I am happy to report that Antti performed admirably at his dissertation defense. The opponent, Nancy Abelmann, engaged Antti’s thesis quite seriously, looking at questions of class anxiety, pressures to perform, and more in the context of South Korea’s somewhat notoriously ‘obsessively’ modern economy. Readers from Europe and the U.S. may be unaware just how different the convention of the ‘dissertation defense’ is in different places. In Finland, the ritual actual involves a sword! Generally speaking it is more formal here than in the U.S., although apparently it is even more formal elsewhere in Europe. There are swords and such, or tuxedos, academic regalia, etc.
Antti also hosted an enormous banquet for colleagues and family following the defense, which is also a conventional practice here in Helsinki.
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I’d love to hear some thick description of PhD conferral by sword, involving academic regalia, etc.
Anthropologists in the states should start inventing some traditions… our graduations are so anticlimactic.
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