The Need for a Local, Ethnographic Perspective and Method

Ethnography unravels the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world (Appadurai, 1991). Many people living in late modernity experience the global in their local life. Since the 1990s, international communication studies moved away from bullet magic and cultural imperialism theories and into cultural

globalization and more fragmented eclecticism. In this environment, an ethnographic approach to the global-local nexus provides fruitful understandings as it radically intercontextualizes different forms of hybridity (Kraidy, 2002) and moves toward a more necessarily context-sensitive approach to understand the structure of power in a lived experience of culture.

Geertz (1973) once asserted that “we do not study research sites, we study in them” (Murphy & Kraidy, 2003, p. 14). The situatedness of the local is not a site, but rather a point of reference through which to engage the emergent dimensions of globalization. This global interrogation through the lens of the local requires us not to rely on ‘canned’ visions of what the world historical system is like, but to take an appropriate ethnographic view that macro system terms of analysis should be radically reconsidered from the ground up (Marcus, 1998). It needs to take the micro-knowledge about places, spaces, sites, and performance derived from ethnographic inquiry and at the same time challenge macro-level theoretical framework of media. Globalization and culture demand that we risk making some broader claims about the relationship between micro ideology and micro experience. Carey (1975) encouraged communication researchers to make macro claims from micro matters by studying media use as particular rituals. Combination of micro and macro-levels of inquiry of power and culture is needed in media ethnography in the realm of global media studies. In other words, ethnographic inquiry with its base in local practices and the lived performative features of culture offers rich materials to bridge the gap between meaning and structure without losing sight of the complexity and power imbalances of cultural consumption. Inquiring

transformative power of globalization through local cultural practice without neglecting the global structural concerns is what media ethnography is positioned to address.

If global media studies is to establish a more grounded theoretical orientation toward globalization, then that theorizing essentially has to be informed by the materials produced through fieldwork (Geertz, 1973; Murphy & Kraidy, 2003). Then a question arises, how can one develop more contextually grounded ethnographies while expanding the notion of the field to address the unique dilemmas of localized research in relation to the global issues raised by transnational media processes? Martin-Barbero (1993) suggests that we can address the interplay between ideology and experience by seeking out the hegemony within popular culture. The convergence of popular culture and media reception studies has been successfully attempted by cultural scholars (Ang, 1985;

Livingstone, 1998; Morley, 1980; Nardi, 2010; Radway, 1984; Silverstone,1990), stressing the necessary importance of interpretive approach to audience reception studies, the politics of everyday life, and audience as not only decoder but also encoder, without neglecting the power inequities.

Understanding globalization in ethnographic depth necessitates new deployments of ethnography; that is locally based but globally engaged (Murphy & Kraidy, 2003). The process of globalization is best understood from a local perspective, one that takes into account particular contexts and the lived experience of local people (Ryoo, 2004). Media ethnography in critical cultural studies tends to take particular groups of people, such as audiences in specific subcultures or fandom, as an empirical starting point. Culture cannot be considered as a transparent object of empirical inquiry, a finished entity that

can be discovered and quantitatively documented by the ethnographer. Studying and writing about culture is a discursive construction (Lindlof & Taylor, 2010), which embeds a researcher’s personal point of view no matter how accurate the researcher is in data gathering and inference process. Clifford (1986) once said “‘cultures’ do not hold still for their portraits” (p. 10).

The goal of the ethnographer, therefore, is an intellectual and transparent commitment to talk about the necessarily complex relationships among multiple entities of communication—media, culture, audiences, and society—as compelling and persuasive as possible in the context of specific problems which arise from particular realm of cultural politics. Media ethnography has been the method par excellence for scholars whose interests lie in context-bound media cultural studies. However, globalization demands new ethnographic methods if we are to understand the articulation of local matrices with global processes. This direction of the ethnographic lens was advocated by Appadurai (1991) who invited ethnographers to investigate the

“micropolitics of locality.” The task of ethnography now becomes the unraveling of the following conundrum: What is the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized and the so-called deterritorialized—the idea of seemingly borderless flows of culture, economy, and people—world? How can we understand the complex process and mediation of the nexus of global and local?

Fans understand and deploy the objects or texts of another culture through the means they have at their disposal within their own popular cultural contexts. Yet, as media increasingly become implicated in intensifying patterns of distribution and

dissemination through mainly the Internet-based platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, or Tumblr, I find that these convergent transnational contexts are becoming increasingly global in scope: for example, oppa4, maknae5, hwaiting6, etc. The call for greater local contextualization of studies of transnationally circulating media is a valuable contribution to our attempts to grasp the complexity of such media flows and fandoms. Yet, I would argue that any consideration of the ways in which globalization plays out in fandom should proceed from both contexts and our informed understanding of fan behaviors, motivations, and processes of meaning-making as driven by affective pleasures and investments.

The theoretical approach of cultural hybridity to the Korean Wave phenomenon has de-emphasized the multiple process and practices international fans generate. Most of the previous studies of the Korean Wave addressed the whats, hows, and whys of international fans and audiences enjoyment of Korean popular culture and dealt with various potential implications and meanings of the phenomenon both within and outside of the Korean territory. While these studies conducted various methods such as surveys, interviews, textual and discourse analysis to examine the phenomenon, very few provides first-hand ethnographic empirical explorations and interpretations of media reception that are always context-bound (Geertz, 1973).

Based on previous studies, we already know that some international audiences or

4Oppa is a respectful Korean word used by females to call older males.

5Maknae refers to the youngest member in a K-pop group.

6Hwaitingis used as a cheer or word of encouragement like “let’s go” or “do your best.” It can also mean

fans enjoy interacting with Korean popular culture. However, what has been ignored so far in the realm of the Korean Wave studies are the mechanisms in which interaction occurs, continues, and intensifies. Any form of interaction and reception is constructed and functions in a specific social and historical context. The media ethnographic approach in my dissertation—a relatively long period of immersion in the scene where the actual reception of the Korean Wave among American fans occurs—provides appropriate tools to know these mechanisms as a living organism.

Hence, I do not attempt to provide generalizations about how American fans mediatize with Korean popular culture, but rather, by providing an in-depth, if necessary,

fragmented moment of the whole ecology of transcultural media and fandom, I attempt to uncover detailed analyses and possible conceptualizations based on connecting recurring patterns. I use the term mediatize in a sense that the broad consequences of media, media texts, and media platforms are embedded in the everyday life, context, and practice (Couldry & Hepp, 2013) of the U.S. fans of Korean popular culture I have interacted over the past two years as, I argue later in the Findings Chapter, the Korean Wave and its fans form ecology of transcultural media and fandom. Moreover, the past century of the Western-centered scholarship talking to itself about audiences has permitted it to take contextual factors for granted. My work is a reversed ethnographic approach, which is not necessarily the same as the often so-called de-Westernized approach (Livingstone, 2015). In other words, I perceive my work to be not only a de-Westernized approach, but more “reversed” in that the fans being studied are Westerners and the point of departure and the gaze placed upon them is from a non-Westerner’s perspective. The reception of

their media culture is non-Western—the globality, albeit arguable, of Korean popular culture—in their Western locality.