Wedding Citizenship and Culture:

Abstract

On a hot August afternoon in a bucolic setting on the outskirts of Kwangju, South Korea, a palanquin was hoisted up and brought to the site of a canopy tent, under which a table, laden with food, alcohol, and two live chickens, rested.An elderly Korean man intoned directions into a microphone and an interpreter called out the translation in English.Around fifty Koreans, the women dressed in Korean hanbok, surrounded the tent, and all eyes were on the heavily made up bride as she was helped out of the palanquin, her face turned down into her hands, elbows raised to either side of her head.She and the bridegroom knelt on opposite sides of the table, rising awkwardly to kowtow several times, pouring and ceremoniously sipping alcohol from carved out gourds -and thus endured the elaborate ritual of a traditional Korean wedding ceremony.In this pastoral location, the authenticity of the ritual performance was made conspicuous by tennis shoes and sports sandals peeking out from beneath the hanbok (which were poorly fitted--some too large and some too small for their wearers) and by men in tank tops and shorts looking on from a distance.As the spectators stood on tiptoe and craned their necks to observe the careful gestures of the bride and groom, their gazes were frequently interrupted by the aggressive movements of television camera crews.Some onlookers were elbowed out of the way by camerapeople getting into position, another was hit in the head more than once by a camera being wielded on a cameraperson's shoulder.This was not, by any means, a typical Korean wedding--in fact, it was not even a legitimate union between a man and a woman. 1 The presence of the cameras and their intrusiveness on the experience of those watching suggested that the real intended audience was elsewhere, on the other side of the lens.The audience here was being captured as part of the same spectacle -for ultimate consumption by the Korean public.In fact, the "wedding" was staged for a group of overseas Korean adoptees, invited and hosted by the South Korean government under the auspices of the Overseas Koreans Foundation (OKF), a division of South Korea's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.The roles of bride and groom were played by Korean adoptees, and the onlookers were, for the most part, other adoptees or, like myself, camp counselors. 2 It was the seventh day of a ten-day program in which thirty adoptees, ranging in age Eleana

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.