Korean Anthropology - Field Notes 1

Some days it seems I’m here to work. Other days I’m convinced that I’m actually here on a anthropological field trip. Studying Koreans.  Although on the surface most appear to fit the type of middle class, middle age, middle of the road, there is a strange side to the country.  Centuries of isolation, conquest, war, and sandwiched between two powerful neighbours and a nearly homogeneous society have taken their toll. It’s no accident that the weirdest country in the world is North Korean, i.e. populated by Koreans.

So from my anthropology field notes….

 

The use of Toothbrushes

The people of most western industrialised nations have an unspoken rule that the use of toothbrushes, like most other orifice cleansing activities, should take place in the privacy of one’s bathroom.  Occasionally catching a glimpse of someone other than one’s partner or child, toothbrush inserted, mouth foaming, dripping down the chin, does no lasting damage to either voyeur or voyee. However, the rarity of those revealing moments probably accounts for Western indifference on the subject.

 

The people of Korea have bravely removed this false taboo.  When I first arrived, I would notice the odd person standing in an office foyer, nonchalantly taking care of lunchtime debris. With no obvious sense of embarrassment, a junior employee would not bother to interrupt a cleaning job in progress to answer a question from a co-worker or manager.  I thought this to be simply coincidental encounters with a few eccentrics. The longer I have been here, the more places I notice that many ordinary Koreans indulge in their practise of public dental hygiene.

 

I am uncertain about the origins and reason for this practise.  I just haven’t been brave enough yet to bring this up as a topic with my Korean friends and I don’t yet see an entry for this activity in Wikipedia. My suspicion is that it is related to the astronomical quantities of garlic consumed on an hourly basis in this country. I have done some informal testing of the garlic content of Korea using the unrestrained inhaling test on early Monday morning journeys on the metro – seemed at the time like a consumption level that the French can only dream of.  Other evidence: in the supermarket, it is simply not possible to buy a parsimonious single clove – the minimum buying quantity is a kilo sack. These are stacked shoulder high. The food that keeps on working.

 

The demographics of the practice of brushing one’s teeth in public seem to be uneven. It doesn’t seem to be an issue with the very elderly, possibly because there is less teeth involved.  The peak is definitely in the 18 to 30 age group (a.k.a the ‘I need to look good’ generation, see later article on 'hair touching').  The middle aged group sample size is too small to be conclusive that the practise either fades with age or that it is a recent phenomenon. There is certainly a prevalence of males doing this, enough to indicate it as a possibly macho practice, but it is more likely due to the prevalence of males in the workplace (see later article on the polarisation of gender politics).  Still, there are enough women who publicly brush, for example in the lifts in the building where I live, to indicate only  a slight gender bias.  It is not unusual to see a well dressed, otherwise-attractive and fashionable woman – i.e. make-up, high heels, short dress, various other expensive branded things hanging off – with a toothbrush in her mouth and an elegant but detectable trail of left corner drool wending its way down her chin.