汉城奥运会开幕式与韩国传统文化中的“Dae-dae”理念、大竞争时代的城市形象
汉城奥运会开幕式与韩国传统文化中的“Dae-dae”理念
汉城奥运会开幕式与韩国传统文化中的“Dae-dae”理念
Kang Shin-pyo
Professor of Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences, Inje University
Abstract: The Opening/Closing ceremonies of respective Olympic Games held previously so far have very significant meanings to both nationally and internationally. The organizing committee of hosting the Olympic Games has very limited time allocated under control during the ceremonies.
The limited time under control is the important opportunity to reconfirm and introduce “the Core of Chineseness : Culture and History” to the people of China and the World at the same time, 2008.
For designing the Seoul Olympic Games Opening/Closing ceremony, scholars, artists, officials, composers, choreographers, and sports teachers were mobilized to put various ideas on “defining what are the Koreanness and how to translate it in terms of internationally communicable means.” It was painstaking collaboration month after month and year after year.
The end-result of the Seoul Olympic Opening/Closing Ceremonies were organized by the traditional Korean cultural grammar, “Dae-dae cultural grammar.” My paper examines the Ceremonies in terms of Dae-dae cultural grammar which is embedded in the Chinese ideographic writing systems. The cultural grammar originated from ancient Chinese socio-cultural traditions. The core of the grammar consists of categorical thinking of yin and yang ideology. The traditional cultural grammar has been immensely revitalized afterward by the Seoul Olympic Games Opening/Closing Ceremonies, 1988.
The meanings of the Seoul Olympic Gamesare manifold and still in the process of being discovered and articulated. There can be no question in a short paper of doing justice to them. Some general facts of the Korean historical and social context became widely known throughout the world because of the 1988 Summer Olympic Games. Koreans have not yet fully recovered from the bitter experiences of the Japanese colonialization (1910-45) and a destructive civil war (1950-53). Today the nation remains divided under an armistice agreement still insured by the presence of United Nations forces. Hence, Korea has not yet fully attained its independence. In the self-estimation of most Koreans, the nation is considered small and still emergent, neither the so-caUed "Hermit Kingdom" of the past nor yet a full player on the world stage. At the same time Korea's phenomenal economic growth since the 1960s and external recognition of such development achievements as the Saemul undong (New Village Movement) encouraged Koreans in their hope of organizing something of worldwide significance and in the process changing Korea's self-image from 'q~ird World" to a "First World" country.
Well-publicized difficulties at previous Olympic Games left Korea in the fortuitous position of having only Nagoya as a serious rival for the privilege of hosting the 1988 Games. South Korea was also fortunate in being chosen as host of the 1986 Asian Games, in competition with north Korea, which gave Seoul the chance to prepare facilities and to gain experience for 1988. These opportunities were accompanied by their share of domestic controversy. Many Koreans perceived the initial offer of Seoul as olympic host to be too closely associated with the mih'tary-inspired governments of the late Park Chung-hee and Chun Du-hwan. After award of the Games, many local anti-olympic campaigns were mounted, some with considerable militancy. Talk about co-hosting the Games with the north presented echoes of the Cold War, and calls for reunification of the divided peninsula assumed greater prominence among the populace. These developments were well-publicized internationally and threatened to reinforce the foreign view of Korea as a land of war, political strife, anO mmtary mctamrsmp. Korean experiments with economic reform and political democratization, them-selves hastened by hostingthe Olympic Games, were placed into additional tension and sometimes undervalued because of these conflicts. Meanwhile Korea's strong cultural tradition remained hidden behind a curtain both domestically and internationally. In the end, all these difficulties were overcome, with the exception of north Korean participation. Whatever their social stations and political attitudes, south Koreans eventually united in wishing for olympic success as an important moment in the nation's history.
The eventual success of the Seoul Olympic Games became manifest to all who participated, and an atmosphere of general satisfaction seems to have pervaded the world audience. Only now, however, are we beginning to appreciate the impact of the Seoul Games in such matters as hastening the end of the Cold War, altering the situation between north and south Korea, transforming the Korean people's view of themselves, and increasing the diplomatic prestige of the Olympic Movement and the IOC. The Olympic Games played a great role in the reinvention and revitalization of traditional Korean culture. Obviously, a great volume of cultural imagery and information was transmitted between East and West through this occasion, but the problem of estimating in a scholarly way the degree and value of this intercultural communication is a complex and ongoing challenge. Intercultural communication is no simple matter of conveying neutral and context-independent information between various points on the globe. Encoding cultural messages into public texts, transmitting them through the filtering and reinterpretive agencies of highly culture-bound broadcast and print media, and fmally the decoding of meanings by mass audiences through local schemes and communities of interpretation are processes involving the fundamen- tal anthropological problem of translation of culture.
The purpose of this thematic session here in Quebec is to expose and explore aspects of this process by considering some successes and failures of intercultural communication between Korea and other parts of the world in the context of the Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies. A comparative focus will be placed on two segments of the ceremonies: the entry of Sohn Kee-chung with the olympic flame, a part of the official ceremony mandated by the IOC; and the segment stretching from the Kang-bok and Cha-il dances through the Hondon (Chaos) and Taekwando displays, part of the Korean cultural performances designed by the SLOOC. These segments will be contextualized in the overall intentions of the Korean scenographers and organizers4, then an analysis will follow from the point of view of Korean culture. Korean meanings encoded into these performances can then be compared and contrasted with the meanings presented and decoded by a number of Western national television agencies, which my colleagues will subsequently discuss.
However, a complex cultural performance like the Seoul Opening Ceremonies is not a mere catalogue or congeries of independent scenes and cultural items, any more than spoken language is a mere lexicon of words. One cannot analyze symbolic systems, or follow a translation and communication process, without close attention to the underlying grammatical rules by which units of signification are consciously or unconsciously composed into meaningful utterances. It is the special task of the anthropologist to expose these underlying cultural codes. This presentation begins with a general depiction of the Korean Dae-dae cultural grammar, then its operation is shown in the overall logic and selected segments of the Opening Ceremony. It is emphasized that Dae-dae cultural grammar formed the backbone in the management of the olympic event from conception to completion. This is not to suggest that the olympic spectacle witnessed in Seoul was not without powerful constitutive elements best understood by cultural grammars imported from outside Korea. Indeed, the olympic institution itself represented unfamiliar territory for Koreans. However, the Olympic Games took on unique significance after being placed on Korean soil. The key to grasping this significance is found by understanding Dae-dae cultural grammar, which itself is not to be taken as something static but is always in a creative process of becoming.
Dae-dae Cultural Grammar
There is a well-known story by Chuang Tzu. In it he dreamed he was a butterfly. Waking, he asked himself whether, if a few moments earlier he was a man dreaming of being a butterfly, he could not now be a butterfly dreaming of being a man. Which, he asked himself, was the reality? The message of the story is that actuality is less important than the way of thinking, of cons~ucting and breaking down ideas. In just this way, Koreans do not give an either/or construction: they prefer "yes and no" to "yes or no." In effect, "yes" sometimes means "no" and "no" sometimes means "yes". This is Dae-dae (McCune~Reischauer romanization, Taedae) cultural grammar, which may also be translated into English as the "Con/Pro" logical organization of being, thought, and action.
Korean culture has three principal aspects: hierarchy, group, and drama-ritual. Hierarchy emphasizes an orderly rank of seniority in which the higher morally encompasses the lower. Superordinate and subordinate stand in com-plementary position5. For example, the authority of the senior businessman, politician, or teacher is ideally dependent upon his moral sincerity in favor of the group as a whole. Groupness emphasizes membership and creates a kind of family which, in turn, generates responsibility. For example, at New Year, every Korean gains one year despite his or her actual birth date, a practice which creates age-sets. Ritual drama prescribes appropriate behavior toward members of the group for the sake of harmony. Thus, for example, a son has the right to withhold the truth from the father to avoid unnecessary worry on the latter's part. In ritual drama, "no" and "yes", "con" and "pro", go together.
Western sport prefers clear winners and losers, yet in Korean tradition, winners are also losers and losers winners, depending on the context and occasion. For the sake of the group, individuals may take the role of loser and vice versa6. This kind of logic is fundamental to Korean practice and performance but is largely incompatible with the Western Aristotelian tradition. In Korean culture, perfor-mance becomes transformative, with its own peculiar grammar underpined by the three cultural aspects. The dramatic ritual of performance allows the group to grow or become smaller, and it transforms hierarchical positions. Man is the key here, as ageht, practitioner, transformer, and "Awakened Man". Human beings have a mind and a body, matching dream, vision, and ideal to performance and practice7. Fear of failure is absent here, because failure is not a concern in the moment of practices. Failure itself is viewed as a stepping stone in the process of endless practice toward completion, life as a continuous evolution to its own conclusion.
To explain further, reference is made to China. Chinese philosophy creates harmony through an orderly hierarchy of opposing but equally essential and complementary constituent components. Harmony comes from the oscillation between two poles, commonly expressed as yin (urn in Korean) and yang, such that the dialectic of interaction involves the resolution of conflict. That binary conflict is expressed in terms of man and universe, heaven and earth, Being and non-Being, male and female, self and others, Ii (form) and chi (content), hsing (reason) and ching (emotion), knowledge and conduct, one and many, good and evil, and so on, patterns of thought laid down during the Zhou dynasty (1100-220 BC). Scholars have variously accounted for the roots of this mode of thought. Some have pointed to a pre-existing social dualism between rural and urban as witnessed in the Shang archaeological record. Urbanites were sometimes explained as having a different racial origin than peasants and there was little common ground between high and low cultures9. For his part, Eberhard explains the dual society in terms of religion (the formalistic and almost abstract heavenly way as against popular demonic belief), literature (dry annalistic-statistical court records as against earthy folksongs and tales), law (moral code of the nobility against the criminal code of the peasants), and settlement (location of an ownership or property). Gernet focuses on the division among the peasants, isolating male and female distinctions on both the temporal and spatial levels11. Whatever the precise history of these views, taken together we can see that there is posited a profound metaphorical relationship between social regularity and the dualistic principle of categorical classification. This world view is neatly represented by yin and yang, a "dualism of ideology", a balance and harmony that provides an all-inclusive schema showing how "yes" can be "no" and vice versa in the related Korean cultural code12.
History itself is not a universal factual given but a contextualized understanding constructed according to determinate cultural codes. As mentioned above, a world audience came to know certain "facts" about the changing Korean social order: that Korea has moved or is moving from dynasty to republic, from agrarian to industrial economy, from a rural to an urban society, from extended to nuclear family groups, from hierarchical to egalitarian relationships, from ascribed to achieved status, and, even, from family to individual. But the overall story is quite different when it is constructed according to a logic of linear "progress" or "modernization"--as in Western cultural commonsense, academic sociology, and among some Korean groups these days--than when the account is composed according to Dae-dae cultural grammar.
The latter sort of account stresses transformations of hierarchical relations seeking balanced complementarity and reciprocity in contexts of unequal power. Three historical moments of transformation have been previously identified in which Koreans were forced to accept and adjust to a new world order imposed upon them from outside~3. The basal stage one can call "Korea in East Asia", or perhaps more correctly "Korea in China", which allowed for the continuation of the Confucian relation with her huge and immediate neighbor to the geographical west. Then from 1876 to 1905, Korea began to open her frontiers, fmally signing a protectorate agreement that would lead to her annexation by Japan. "Korea in Transition" under Japanese rule coincided with a forced opening to that other West, that is to Europe. Again, a struggle was made to see the Western way as a complement to the Eastern tradition, as Korean powers welcomed Western materialism while rejecting Western learning. Liberation from the Japanese in 1945 brought on the third moment, "Korea in the World", or perhaps better, "Korea in America". A bitter civil war, turmoil in student rebellion (1960), military coups, and finally the 1987 summer of discontent marked attempts to match economic growth with political reordering. Korea is now entering a new transformation in her history, one in which she ventures out into the world without the constraints imposed upon her by the USA and the USSR. Hosting the Olympic Games allowed Koreans the opportunity to reflect on their own place in the world system. It remains difficult, nonetheless, for Koreans to comprehend the new world order in which they live. Yet the more they understand the West and can reproduce its points of view, the more Koreans value their own unique traditions.
This double process was apparent in the making of the olympic ceremonies.
Codes and Performances
In the preparation of the scenarios for the opening and closing ceremonies, literally hundreds of scholars and artists were invited to participate in order to realize "Saegye nun Seoul to, Seoul un Saegye to", The World to Seoul, Seoul to the World. For over three years, they studied, reviewed, and analyzed ceremonies which had accompanied previous Olympic Games in other counties. It was felt that the Olympic Games are less a national matter than an international event; hence lessons were to be learned from past hosts. It became apparent that the main issue was how to synthesize a universalizing cultural code with particular cultural codesTM. Those involved had to determine what was the particular Korean cultural code that would provide the basic guiding logic and principles. Whereas anthropologists normally look for underlying cultural codes which are largely unconscious in operation and practice, here they were to create and even "invent" the scenario culture. At the same time, it is probably beyond the capacities of even such a dedicated and resourceful army of scholars, artists, and cultural specialists to produce out of whole cloth a logic of cultural representation that would have sufficient depth and would be both coherent and persuasive to Korean audiences. Whether drawn from cultural repertoires widely accepted as "traditional" or created afresh through a process of bricolage, particular performances and the symbolic forms which composed them had certainly to be arranged and altered to fit the radically novel situation of the Opening Ceremony, the stadium site, open-air choreography, television constraints, international expectations, and so on. The issue is rather the grammatical code that would draw these various components into an ordered unity, acutely depicting and performing, at this more fundamental level, the character of Korea's cultural heritage.
The code which was mobilized, in a combination of self-conscious reflection and unconscious emergence, was the code of Dae-dae~5. It was hardly the only cultural code engaged in these ceremonies. As Kapferer has strongly pointed out, in non complex literate civilization today, and perhaps in no society whatever, is there only one ontology or deep cultural grammar operating16. Logics labelled "Western" for convenience now have Korean proveniences as well, and as already pointed out, the scenarists of the olympic ceremonies found it necessary and desirable to accommodate them. Indeed, some of the planners thought to do so through an explicitly "post-modernist" strategy, Derrida and Lyotard being sometimes cited in discussions as frequently as the great scholars in Korean tradition~7. At the same time, Dae-dae was not just one code among others. Because of the specific properties of its logic, it served as a kind of metacode in drawing "the Olympic" and "the Korean" into relations of contrast, complemen-tarity, and harmony, a claim that shall now be demonstrated with specific examples.
Saegye nun Seoul ro, Seoul un Saegye ro
The overall theme of the Seoul Olympic Games, the ideal to be accomplished, was "Harmony and Progress". Here one sees a complementary pair. Harmony means "space", the synchronic and paradigmatic dimension. Progress means '~ime", the dlachronic, syntagmatic dimension. This binary set is composed according to a yin/yang logic, setting the issue for Korea and the world of creating a balance and a synthesis between harmony and progress. A second binary pair, Seoul/World, forms the center of complex semantic relations in the official motto of the Olympic Games. "Seoul Toward World, World Toward Seoul". Alternative English translations of the motto bring out the creative doubleness of the Koreanverb form and the optative, subjunctive, and imperative possibilities of mood. "Let Seoul Come/Go Out to the World, Let the World Come/Go Out to Seoul"; or, from the point of view of Korean speakers, "Bring the World to Seoul, Send Seoul Out Into the World". In Dae-dae grammar, going and coming, bringing and sending are not opposed but two aspects of the same dialectical process. In the olympic and historical context, the Seoul/World pair is associated with further oppositions seeking mediation in the new order of things.
Seoul World
Particularity Universality
National History and Culture Global History and Culture
"The Third World" 'q'he Advanced World"
Reality (Within the Barrier) Ideal (Beyond all Barriers)
"Beyond all Barriers" was the title and the organizing theme of the Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies, whose scenario sought through Dae-dae cultural code to bring olympic universality and Korean particularity into dynamic, dialectical reciprocity and emergent harmony. To further appreciate how the various episodes of the ceremony were related grammatically and syntactically from a Korean point of view, an additional general feature of Dae-dae logic must be indicated. Yang and yin stand to one another as template to transformation. In Figure 1, this process is illustrated visually in the form of Korea's national taeguk symbol, omnipresent in the ceremonies as a kind of code key reminding all of the logic orgapizirlg them. Each template (yang), for example in a particular ceremony scene, calls out and joins with its transformation (yin), which in turn serves as template for a subsequent scene which incorporates its own transformation, and so on, in an endless series of transformations which are nonetheless harmonically balanced at each moment. Thus is created the simultaneous impression of movement and non-movement, or better, movement in non-movement and non-movement in movement, which is an essential feature of Korean aesthetics and their underlying ontologies, here especially Mahayana Buddhism. Also included in Figure 1 is a more complete structural diagram of this East Asian cultural grammar, the full explication of which may be found in my book
.
The Entry of the Olympic Flame into the Stadium
The arrival of the Olympic song hwa (sacred fire) is both the culmination of the earlier ritual process of the Greek flame-lighting and the torch relay across the host country and the high point of the official part of the Olympic Opening Ceremony in the stadium. A majority of Koreans watched the television coverage of the initial ceremony at Ancient Olympia in Greece, where the bringing down of the fire from Heaven to Earth through the medium of a female spiritual figure, the priestess of Hera, happened to match Korean cultural conceptions quite neatly. In Athens, the fire was handed over by Greek officials to a Korean delegation composed of representatives of all social strata and a famous Korean art troupe. Listening to the thousands of Greeks assembled in the Panathenaic stadium shouting "Korea-Seoul" led Korean commentators and audiences to search for connections between the Balkan and Korean peninsulas, two areas from opposite sides of the earth. The difference between East and West compares to the difference between day and night. As the Earth is round, one nation has daylight while the other has night, a constant cycling of life activity. Just as Ancient Greece was a point where East and West met, where Middle Eastern and Chinese wisdom were transmitted to Europe and European culture to the East, so too Korea has served and continues to serve as a crossroads between Asia and the West. By representing the Hellenistic roots of European civilization, the olympic flame came to symbolize a kind of Western essence for Koreans, an essence now willingly entrusted to Korea and accepted by her gratefully in equal partnership.Lingering Greek resentment of the American treatment of the flame on the occasion of the previous Los Angeles Olympic Games added a situational factor with Korean resonances as well. In 1988, this process of mutually respectful cooperation between East and West, Korea and Greece, could be seen in paired contrast with the earlier invasion of Korea by Western capitalism, iron ships and weaponry, followed by Christianity which treated the tradition of ancestor worship as superstition and thereby sought to destroy an integral East Asian cultural tradition. Koreans were reminded that the original Olympic Games were destroyed by the colonization of Greece from her west by Romans and Christians. Additional space/time complementarities and transformations were set into the logical motion of Dae-dae, for example, relations between the past measured in millennia and the changes of the late 20th century measured in decades, years, and days. Greek civilization, coming along Alexander's route along the Silk Road, took a hundred years to reach the center of Korean civilization, Kyongju and the Sokkuram Grotto. Now the flame as a symbol of Western civilization arrived on Korean soil overnight by airplane and was carried to these same centers by Korean torchbearers. As the olympic fire and flame ritual were Koreanized, Koreans were reminded of their past sufferings, of what adapting to the West had meant, and yet of how they had triumphed: the West need no longer represent military strength, but intercultural cooperation, peace, and harmony among civilizations newly portrayed as complementary and even equal.
In Seoul, the organizers faced the challenge of respecting and celebrating the universalizing olympic meanings of the sacred flame and the IOC's rigid protocol for its stadium arrival while at the same time adapting it through the Korean cultural code organizing the ceremony as a whole. As the flame had descended vertically from Heaven to Earth and then had been carried horizontally across the land of and by Human Society, so the linkages and boundary-openings between these three traditional Korean cosmological spaces and principles were continued and elaborated in new transformations in the stadium. The torch was carried into the arena by the "highly respected senior" (Korean Broadcast System commentary) Sohn Kee-chung, marathon gold medalist at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games and nationalist hero for his powerful protest against the Japanese emblems he was forced to wear and listen to on the victory stand because of the colonial occupation. In the Seoul Opening Ceremonies, Mr. Sohn passed the torch to Lim Chun-ac, the young nineteen-year-old girl who was triple gold medalist at the 1986 Asian Games and was here '~epresenting the female athletes of the country (urinam)". Relations between senior/junior, male/female, past suffering/bright fu0are, destruction/construction, imperislized and enslaved, Korea/free and autonomous Korea, were set into yang/urn binary complementarity as well as into historical succession by the handing on of the torch from one generation to the next.
As the flame circled the stadium, the Korean broadcast commentary reproduced and emphasized the Dae-dae relation of dialectical contrast between the processes of destructive purification and constructive harmonization and blessing, the complementary relation between going out and coming in we saw earlier in discussing the olympic motto. "[The song hwa has] appeared in front of our eyes. The Sacred Flame, it will burn as a sacred flame ignited in every one of our hearts. The Sacred Flame will burn out evil and injustice, division and conflict, corruption and misfortune. It will bring goodness and peace, harmony and progress, prosperity, happiness, and material well-being".
Then, in the way of Dae-dae outlined above, a further transformation of these symbolic relations was achieved. It is visually diagrammed in F/gure 2. The triad of Heaven, Earth, and Man was joined with and transformed into another triad. President Park Seh-jik of the SLOOC had always emphasized that Seoul must be the Olympic Games of academics, sport, and art, so as to be a Games of 'qotal culture".
At the base of the torch brazier, "designed by Mr. Kim Soo-keun... [in] the shape of the Korean traditional candle holder", Lim Chun-ae handed the flame to three torchbearers who would light the cauldron in unison. These were: Chung Sun-man (rural middle school teacher, academic, male), Kim Won-tak (mara- thoner/employee, sport, male), and Sohn Mi-chung (Korean traditional dance student, art, female). Next, as the KBS commentator solemnly described it: '"rhe three are going up in a circular lift, twelve meters in diameter, climbing a stand twenty meters high as if they are going to heaven". The movement of the flame in Human hands back from Earth toward the Heaven from whence it came, thus symbolically completing its journey through traditional Korean cosmology, was in this way seamlessly joined with the wonders of modern technology, the contemporary pride in "firsts" ("the first time in olympic history that three participated in the kindling of the flame"), and the ooh-and-aah surprise and are required by the modern spectacle for stadium and television audiences alike.
That the torch stand with its innovative mechanical apparatus itself further represented a joining of social elites and ordinary Koreans in sincere common effort was made plain in the later publication of Park Seh-jik's olympic memoirs in a series of newspaper articles. In the fifth installment, he recounted the efforts of the factory workers who made the flame pillar: "Fifteen men abstained from alcohol and made the pillar for the olympic fire at an iron foundry. Every day and night they worked.., people volunteered for extended shifts". Park quotes his own words to the workers:
Indeed, all of you have much work to do. Talking about the Olympics may seem to you as if it is talk of great and magnificent things for splendid and great people to take part in. But this is not the whole story. Little things put together, including the thing you are working on now, create the Olympics. Of all the Olympic facilities and constructions, the making of this most sacred pillar for the Olympic fire on this foundry's dirt floor has the deepest meaning. I ask you to make it with the utmost sincerity.
While President Park's commentaries on "The Ceremonies: An Integration of Heaven, Earth, and Man" were published after the event, Western broadcasters and press journalists were provided in advance with a detailed scenario containing these exegeses and interpretations of the ceremonies by the scholars and artists who designed them22. My colleagues on this panel will describe the degree to which foreign broadcasters chose to communicate these Korean explanations to their Western audiences, or instead substituted their own interpretations. As you consider these research results, you are urged to keep in mind the difference between explaining particular vignettes and symbols and communicating the cultural code which organized them into a whole from the Korean point of view.
Understandably, the KBS broadcasters stuck quite closely to the scenarists own interpretations. This was not only because they were "official", "author-itative'', and "scholarly" but also because the deep Dae-dae cultural grammar in its three aspects of hierarchy, groupness, and ritual drama was--at some level and among the other cultural codes present--recognizable and comprehensible to KBS broadcasters as Koreans. As the cameras focused on the olympic flame billowing from the cauldron toward the sky, the announcer concluded the segment by saying: “ The global village stage, the epic drama performed by the entire global family. Its highlight is the kindling of the Sacred Flame. The Sacred Flame is focusing everyone's eyes on one point and also bringing everyone's mind and spirit into one mind and spirit. Now we must all be one. Now we must all be together". Again, this is Dae-dae, the generation of the one from the many and unity from diversity through a series of transformations of binary oppositions, here reaching out to encompass not only a particular ground of common Korean understanding but also the idioms of a universalizing global culture embodied in the Olympic Games. For a moment, in other words, the World/Seoul opposition is transcended.
But, as prescribed by Dae-dae logic, things rest only for a moment and then the process begins again. Being begets becoming, as moving beyond boundaries begets a new awareness of boundaries, as yang begets yin. The conclusion, with the flame-lighting, of the "official" olympic part of the ceremonies begins again the host country's cultural performances, the boundary between the two being marked by the exit of the assembled athletes from the stadium. From the project of discovering and representing the Korean in the Olympic, the challenge for the ceremonies designers shifts to representing the Global in the Korean. And the challenge for foreign broadcasters and mass media consumers shifts to seeing and understanding something deeper and more substantive than "pretty dances and folklore" in these representations of Korean culture.
A New Dawn and Chaos
The segment called "A Great Day" with its Kang-bok (Blessings from Heaven), Cha-il (Sunshade), and Hwagwanmu (Flower Crown) dances, the parachutists descent, and the Hondon (Chaos) performance--reproduces in various keys the paradigmatic code of Heaven, Earth, and Man. At the same time, the active opening of the boundaries and mediation among these realms is composed into a syntagmatic narrative of a cosmological drama. The KBS announcer's first comment invokes a mythological state of being: "At the beginning when the world opened, a great day when all mankind lived together peacefully is depicted in this scene. This [kang-bok] dance is praying for heavenly blessing and expressing earthly joy upon receiving mysterious forces from heaven". The announcer immediately proceeds to name the choreographers and composer and to identify the 800 dancers as students from the Yeungdeungpo Girls' High School, thus juxtaposing primordial time and contemporary time, transhistorical cultural imagery on the level of the ritual code and the creative invention of tradition on the level of the historical performance.
These temporal contrasts and complementarities are joined with spatial ones according to the formula of Dae-dae logic diagrammed in Figure 1. Prayers go up to Heaven fxom a joyful Earth through the agency of the female dancers. Blessings then come down from Heaven to Earth in the form of the male parachutists, bearing the colors of traditional Korean shamanic ritual which happen also to be the colors of the rings in the olympic emblem. The parachutists are not only Korean but multinational, and they land to form the olympic rings with a fast surrounding circle of all-Korean female dancers, which is in turn encompassed by the ring of multinational stadium spectators both male and female, which is in turn encompassed by the wider circle of the global television audience. In these symbolic ways, the global, the national, and the local are once again placed into moving harmony through transformative association with the Heaven, Earth, and Man triad through the agency of Dae-dae cultural grammar. Human society is representationally cosmologized, while a traditional Korean cosmology is revitalized under contemporary and particular social conditions. "Korean Fantasia", the musical accompaniment to the parachutists' descent from Heaven, joins Korean idioms with Western symphonic form and incorporates themes from the Korean national anthem. Korean national aspirations and political independence are thus marked and asserted in a way which represents them as in harmony with the global order represented by the olympic gathering. Just as the nationalist aspirations of a particular society are encompassed within a world of nations, so too the military references of the parachutes, skyjumpers, and helicopters are performatively domesticated and encompassed by civil society represented by the dancers who flowingly engulf them on the field.
This leads to another visual and semantic transformation, this time of high technology to local festivity, physical danger to domestic sociability. As the KBS announcer said: "Eight hundred Cha-il dancers are performing a Blessing Dance, welcoming the high-altitude skydivers. The parachutes are seemingly transformed into Cha-il [sunshades] by the dancers' blue sheets [of cloth]. Whenever, there is a festival, we prepare for it with Cha-il. A billowing Cha-il means heavenly blessing and represents the excitement of man's mind brought about by the festival. The entire field is full with blowing Cha-il, like a sea of Cha-il". Though not mentioned by the KBS announcers, the scenario exegesis provided to all broadcasters clearly mentions a further reference intended by the designers. The Cha-il were intended additionally to evoke the smaller cloths with which Koreans wrap and carry parcels, an ubiquitous feature of Korean everyday life. Thus through the material symbol of squares of cloth, the interpenetration of ritual drama and everyday life was carried out through the mediation of popular festivity.
The Flower Crown Dance (hwagwanmu) which followed in the sequence reproduces the configuration of space/time meanings all over again, but in another transformation of context. Itwagwanmu is a court dance, probably Korea's most famous and most performed, invoking the past of dynastic kingship as well as the present Korean efforts at cultural preservation and revitalization. Again, the KBS announcer marks this paired relation by first identifying by name the present choreographers and composer of the dance, and the dancers themselves by their school affiliation. (In Korean practice, these public acknowledgements always convey the competitive struggle for distinction and honor). Then he proceeds to point out that: "Hwagwan dance as a court dance is characterized by its strong emphasis on ritual and serf-control. The costumes, hair decorations, and various props of the dancers express the typical decorative traditions. The colors used in the dance come from the traditional color combination in Tanchung (red and blue), Samtaeguk (Triple Taichi), and Sa&dong (Children's multicolored dress)".
The court dance was usually performed around the king, who mediates between Heaven and Earth in traditional conception. Without the one mediating person, there can be no synthesis of two opposite poles. The highly stylized movement of the dance and music invoke the dignity and richness of Korea's recorded cultural history, thus standing in conceptual juxtaposition to the fantasized primordial time which opened the whole segment while moving its narrative along. Of course, the king is today absent, and thus the past is once more juxtaposed with the present, destruction with construction, an abiding cultural code with the search for a new model of political legitimacy in contemporary Korea. Again, in Dae-dae form, struggle and order, yes and no, are conceived not in either/or relation but as dialectical aspects of the same process of transformation.
The following Hondon performance, quite unique in olympic ceremonial history, transforms these relationships by turning them inside out. In Hwag-wanmu, struggle is concealed within stylized ritual order; in Hondon, order is hidden with chaos. The KBS commentator announces this change in the narrative context of the overall performative construction. "Now the Golden Ages are gone,
the Age of Chaos is coming where discord and conflict are dominant". Tranquility is smashed by dancers, mostly male, racing madly around carrying affixed to poles "838 masks consisting of 108 various kinds from 60 different countries", even breaking the boundaries between performers and audience by running up into the stands. “This masked dance", the announcer continues, "symbolizes chaotic dances representing respectively 'good and evil, love and hatred, creation and destruction, and antagonism and division emanating from different values and personalities. Discord emerged from conflict among different ideologies, ethnicity, and sex".
Openly acknowledged here are the powerful boundaries, discords, misunderstandings, and dangers among all the different cultures brought together into common activity in the Olympic Games, the other side of the olympic project of harmony and peace, the realism necessarily to be paired with the idealism. For Koreans, the performance invokes all the invasions from outside in past history, the darker and more terrifying sides of opening the country to the world in the context of the Olympic Games, and more generally the doubts and fears of the new world Koreans must now enter and be entered by. Even aestheticized in a cultural performance, this episode is a daring acknowledgement of the dangers and difficulties of the projects of global intercultural communication and of "Seoul to the World, The World To Seoul". But Dae-dae demands that darkness be dramatically represented with light, evil with good, chaos with harmony, destruction with construction, otherwise flue completion and unity cannot be achieved.
Dae-dae grammar also shows the way out of the chaos. If Hondon forms the yin transformation of the yang template of the previous representations of the previous representations of cosmic and global harmony, in the next transformation Hondon becomes the yang template calling out its own yin complement in a new balance. At the very top of the stadium, new masks rise to look down on the dance, taking top place in a vertical hierarchy. The KBS announcer points them out as the cameras focus upward: "Above the roof of the stadium, the typical Korean masks, Chuyong (the legendary figure in the Shilla Kingdom), Mukchung (Buddhist monk), Maldooki (young man), Yangban (traditional upper class), Halmi (grandmother), Toryung (upper class youth) and Musam (servant) are watching. Over the fence they are watching us while we are also watching the mask dance". Here many meanings are assembled through deployment in Dae-dae form of the categorical pair watching/being watched. Unmoving, much larger than the other masks, and situated hierarchically above them, the roof masks are comfortingly familiar features of the mask dances of traditional Korean folk culture. They assert a confidence in the power of indigenous Korean culture to domesticate, contain, and encompass the shock of invasion by and new relations with so many strange and foreign cultures. Added to the conflict between nation and inter-nation is now the above-nation which mediates and begins to bring harmony once again to the chaos. The roof masks also belong with the field masks as together opposed to and watching all the people from different ideologies, ethnicities, and sexes, an assertion perhaps of the power of universally shared cultural form~---indigenous ones like masks, emergent ones like the Olympic Game~ :Oa balance social division and overcome it in a new, higher-order for transcending boundaries. As the announcer comments to the Korean television audience, 'Whe world of chaos is waning. Our will is toward overcoming this chaos".
The Chanllenge of Intercultural Communication
Of course, the Opening Ceremony did not end here. The next episode was the mass taekwando performance, presented as returning order to human chaos and representing the breaking of political, ideological, and social boundaries, "the brick wails" as the scenario puts it, in the dramatic form of the taekwandoists, old and young, male and female, smashing hundreds of boards. This performance introduced further transformations of semantic relations between Korea and the world, sport and art, discipline and creativity again according to the logic of Korean Dae-dae cultural grammar deployed alongside, but also as a metacode organizing and perhaps even encompassing, other logics more familiar to Westerners.
In these ceremonies, Koreans interpreted the new olympic world to themselves while at the same time inventively portraying the new situation of Korea in the world. The representations by which this was accomplished were a mix of scholarly and artistic adaptation, invention, bricolage, and historicism. In so doing, Koreans remobilized and revitalized their traditional cultural code as the main mechanism by which diverse cultural elements were combined into a coherent, beautiful, and moving whole, impressive to outsiders and recognizable to insiders. I have tried to show in the analysis of selected performance episodes how Dae-dae cultural grammar provided the logic of coherence linking the various segments into a whole that was unified structurally and paradigmatically as well as narratively and syntagmatically.
The ceremonies designers sought to create an event that was first and foremost international, while creatively accommodating national and transnational meanings within it. What remains is to estimate how foreign broadcasters responded to these messages, what they were willing or able to perceive, understand, and communicate to their respective audiences. How much of the explicitly Korean character of the performance came into focus in foreign coverage? How much use did foreign media make of the carefully prepared cenario interpretation provided to them in advance by the Korean organizers? Did broadcasters translate the ceremonies into their own cultural codes and idioms to such a degree that their commentaries suppressed and replaced Koreans' attempts to translate and communicate their culture to the world? In more technical and sophisticated ways, one must look for patterns in the complex project of translation and misl~nslation of culture. For example, was narrative emphasized at the expense of structure, melody over harmony? Did foreign broadcasters recognize the presence of a distinct East Asian cultural code in the performance, or did they treat it as perfectly transparent to Western logics alone? How with reference to the Korean meanings did Western national broadcasts differ from one another?
These questions bear an importance beyond the communication of the Seoul Games alone. Only by such comparative research can the success of the Olympic Movement in intercultural communication and mutual understanding, its highest aims, truly be evaluated. Translation and communication of cultures will be of increasing importance in the new world order. Through the Opening Ceremonies, Koreans offered an alternative cultural code to peoples both East and West, North and South, for coping with the many problems of the 21st century. In considering whether the mass media contribute to or interfere with the process of exchange of cultural resources, one should not forget that television audiences are not passive consumers of the interpretations broadcasters explicitly provide. Audiences bring their own resources to decoding the messages inherent in what they see and hear through the media. Perhaps the mass appeal of the Seoul Olympic Games Opening Ceremonies to world audiences was based in part on their recognition of and interest in the presence of a different cultural code, even where broadcasters themselves failed to articulate it.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1. Mulling C (1990) Dissidents' critique of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. In Koh B-i (ed) Toward one world beyond all barriers. Vol I Keynote speeches; Cultural exchange and Cultural Nationalism. The Seoul Olympiad Anniversary Conference. Seoul Olympic Sports Promotion Foundation. Seoul: Poong Nam p 394-407
2. See MacAloon [this volume]
3. Kang S-p, MacAloon J J, DaMatta' R (eds) (1988) The Olympics and cultural exchange. Seoul: Hanyang University Institute for Ethnological Studies. Koh B-i (ed) (1990) Toward one world beyond all barriers. Vol I II IN The Seoul Olympiad Anniversary Conference. Seoul Olympic Sports Promotion Foundation. Seoul: Poong Nam. [A further volume of papers by international scholars collaborating on this topic is in preparation: MacAloon J J, Kang S-p (eds) The 1988 Seoul Olympic Games: intercultural perspectives]
4. For a detailed account, see Walker D'flling M (1990) The familiar and the foreign: music as medium of exchange in the Seoul olympic ceremonies. In Koh B-i (ed) (1990) Toward one world beyond all barriers. Vol I Keynote speeches; Cultural exchange and Cultural Nationalism. The Seoul Olympiad Anniversary Conference. Seoul Olympic Sports Promotion Foundation. Seoul: Poong Nam p 357-77. Also see Kim M-h (1988) The aesthetic character of the Olympic Opening and Closing Ceremonies. In Hand in hand, beyond all barriers. Seoui: Korean Broadcasting System (1988). ["Kae-P'yehwoe Shik ul Mihakchok Songgyok," Son e Son Chapko, Pyogul Nomoso. Seoul: Hanguk Pangsong Saopdan (1988)]
5. This understanding of hierarchy is thus quite different from the commonsense meaning of simple inequality given the term in Western cultures. See Kapferer B (1988) Legends of people, myths of state. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press
6. Kang S-p (1988) Korean culture, the olympic and world order. In Kang S-p, MacAloon J J, DaMatta R (eds) The Olympics and cultural exchange. Seoul: Hanyang University Institute for Ethnological Studies p 97-99
7. Turner V (1977) The ritual process. Ithaca: Cornell University Press
8. Brown R (1964) Discussion of the conference. In Romney .AK, D'Andrade RG (eds) Transcultural studies in cognition. American Anthropologist 66 H 243-53
9. Gernet J (1968) Ancient China: fxom the beginning to the Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chang K-c (1968) The archeology of ancient China. New Haven: Yale University Press. Granet M (1959) Danse et l~gendes de la Chine ancienne. Paris: Presses Universitalres de France
10. Eberhard W (1965) Conquerors and rulers: social forces in medieval China" Leiden Brill
11. Gernet J (1968) op cit p 51-52
12. Kang S-p (1972) The East Asian culture and its transformation in the West. Seoul: Seoul National University American Studies Institute
13. Kang S-p (1988) op eit p 86-91
14. Kim M-h (1988) op cit
15. Our position, therefore, is neither exactly that of "the modernity of tradition" [eg Rudolph L, Rudolph S (1984) The modernity of tradition: political development in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press] nor that of "the invention of tradition" [eg Hobsbawm E, Ranger T (ods) (1983) The invention of tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press], neither of which consider the level of cultural codes and ontologies while preserving in different ways the opposition between culture authentic and invented. For other recent anthropological attempts to break out of this straightjacket, see Wagner R (1981) The invention of culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Herzfeld M (1982) Ours once more: folklore, ideology, and the making of modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kapferer B (1988) op cit
16. Kapferer B (1988) op cit p 3-48
17. Walker Dffiing M (1990) op cit
18. Kang S-p (1972) op cit
19. My colleague John Mac,Moon and I made a special study of the Korean torch relays for the Asian Games in 1986 and the Olympic Games in 1988, traveling day after day with the flame as it made its progress around the Korean peninsula. Our analysis of the Koreanization of this Western ritual form and its connection with the social and political transformation of Korea will be the subject of a separate monograph [inpreparation]
20. See MacAloon JJ (1984) Olympic Games and the theory of spectacle in modern societies. In MacAloon JJ (ed) Rite, drama, spectacle, festival: rehearsals toward a theory of culture performance. Philadelphia: ISHI Press. [In MacAloon's categories, the special achievement of the designers of the Seoul Opening Ceremonies was their successful integration of the performance genres of ritual and spectacle]
21. Translated by the present author from the Korean text. A slightly different translation will be found in the English version in Park S-j (1990) The stories of Seoul Olympics. Seouh Chosun-Ilbo p 14-15
22. Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee (1988) Beyond all barriers: the opening and closing ceremonies. Seoul: SLOOC
大竞争时代的城市形象