Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea by Nicholas Harkness (review)

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1 Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea by Nicholas Harkness (review) Kyung-Nan Koh Journal of Korean Religions, Volume 6, Number 1, April 2015, pp (Review) Published by University of Hawai'i Press DOI: For additional information about this article Accessed 2 Dec :03 GMT

2 Book Reviews 269 History of Korean Christianity recognizes the Koreans women and men as the principal historical agents in the origins and growth of their faith. Sebastian C.H. Kim and Kirsteen Kim have written the definitive general history of Korean Christianity. No other work comes close in breadth, thoroughness, and quality. The book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars alike. On the one hand, it can serve as an ideal introduction to the topic of Korean Christianity. At the same time, it is filled with information and analysis that experts will also find useful. A seminal contribution to the fields of Korean history and religion, mission studies, and global Christianity, A History of Korean Christianity opens up a host of new possibilities for future research. Sean C. Kim Associate Professor, Department of History and Anthropology University of Central Missouri Songs of Seoul: An Ethnography of Voice and Voicing in Christian South Korea. By Nicholas Harkness, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014, xv, 303pp. Songs of Seoul, winner of the 2014 Edward Sapir Book Prize by the Society of Linguistic Anthropology, is a semiotically informed anthropology of voice and specifically of sŏngak, or European-style classical vocal music, in Evangelical Christian South Korea. Research for this work was carried out at a major Protestant church (Somang Presbyterian Church) located in the upscale district of Gangnam and at a top educational institution for voice (Department of Voice, Seoul National University) with mostly Christian singers and students. Through Songs of Seoul, we learn that the voice what Harkness analytically and methodologically conceptualizes as the phonosonic nexus, that which links and twines the phonic production, shaping, and organization of sound, on the one hand, and the sonic uptake and categorization of sound in the

3 270 Journal of Korean Religions 6/ world, on the other (12; see also Harkness 2011) is a medium of communicating culturally meaningful qualities; and that the sŏngak voice, which is predominantly the voicing of Korean Christian aspiration, is the outcome of church-centered and church-oriented practices to embody, exhibit, and emanate the sound of the clean that is ideologically construed as the sound of the spiritually enlightened and advanced. The book consists of two parts, The Qualities of Voice (Chapters 1 through 4) and The Sociality of Voice (Chapters 5 through 7). Part One is preceded by a theoretically and thematically grounding Introduction, which intriguingly begins with a detour into a cheap dish called pudae tchigae ( army stew ). This detour is helpful as a comparative illustration of a semiotic concept that is critical to the book, Charles Sanders Peirce s qualia, which is the actual, concrete, and experiential instantiation of abstract qualities such as hotness, greyness, fishiness, fuzziness, or cleanliness (14; see also Chumley and Harkness 2013; Harkness 2013). The dish is popularly narrated as having originated during or following the Korean War around U.S. Army bases; and Koreans may very well say that the taste that is, its qualia invokes qualities of past suffering with its unusual mix of ingredients (e.g., canned beans, Spam, sliced hot dogs, and Korean red pepper paste). Su-yŏn, Harkness s choir director, goes further to say that the dish evokes feelings of sadness. Similarly, for Christian sŏngak singers, the qualia of traditional Korean voice is a sound of suffering and thus sadness, which to quote Su-yŏn, should not be anymore in the God-graced, progressed, Korea (1). In Chapter 1, Transformation of Voice, we begin to discover how Korean Christians hear two different voices that comprise the contemporary professional soundscape of Korea the traditional Korean voice (e.g., p ansori) versus the European classical voice. Integrating observations from three different encounters, Harkness reveals how these two voices are heard not only as distinct and contrasting but also as a transformation from one to the other, from a rough and husky voice interpreted as expressing sadness and han ( deep-seated sorrow from feeling wronged ) to a clean and healthy voice. Chapter 2, Voicing an Advanced Korea, then discusses how the voice becomes a medium of Bakhtinian voicing. This chapter analyzes how voice and other linguistic features are used in chronotopic narratives of Korea to tropically figure

4 Book Reviews 271 the story of Korea s advancement as a story of Christian achievement. A highly revelatory method of voice analysis is provided of a sermon delivered by the head pastor of the Somang Church. Using transcripts and spectrograms, Harkness vividly reproduces how Pastor Kim Chi-ch ŏl manipulates his voice and links qualia to different characterological figures and different moral positions (71). Chapter 3, Cultivating the Christian Voice, examines the way in which the voice that is not raspy, buzzy, or harsh and thus not regarded backward, self-destructive, forced, undeveloped, and unclean but a gift from God is cultivated and produced (100). Using data pertaining to the anatomical dimensions of voice production, this chapter explains how sŏngak emerged and is reproduced in the institution of the church as a Christian register of communication. Here, we see how it is that to sing in a sŏngak style in Korea is, for most singers, to sing in a Christian style (81). Chapter 4, The Clean Voice, then, explicates how under the Christian ideology of Korean progress, voices described as clean and healthy are interpreted as standing for and embodying the general state of ethnonational advancement across different realms of sign interpretation (e.g., body, sound, affect, environment). The Church as one of the major ritual centers of semiosis (109) is where the quality of cleanliness is discursively and ritualistically made a conventional sign of aesthetic, spiritual, and ethical advancement (i.e., the enlightened maŭm ) (136). In Part Two, we move from the analysis of the voice and voice production to the social function of voice in the Korean Protestant Christian world. Chapter 5, Tuning the Voice, exposes how the voice mediates individual singers everyday lives at the church and the university. This chapter introduces the concept of qualic tuning (144), which effectively describes how qualia can be tuned differently for different socio-relational purposes. Sŏngak singers manipulate their voices as they navigate between the church where they free their voices and the university where they continue to enact traditional Confucianrelational roles. Some fascinating and keen observations are documented as to how individuals change their voices with respect to different interactional counterparts (e.g., switching from a flat unmarked pitch among peers to a highly marked and nasalized pitch with professors). Chapter 6, The Voice of Homecoming, examines how sŏngak mediates the singers relations with their

5 272 Journal of Korean Religions 6/ Christian social networks. To become a professional singer, a student typically studies abroad and returns to hold a transformative public recital in front of his or her own social network. This chapter analyzes these ritualistic events as poetically structured texts, focusing on how the Christian hymns sung as encores allow for a recasting of the entire event as thoroughly Christian and thoroughly Korean (178). Lastly, in Chapter 7, Feeling the Voice, Harkness traces the emergence of the term maŭm ( heart-mind ) as a Christian discursive register and discusses how the term helps individual singers align their personal experiences and emotions with what is a socially recognized and valued mode of expression (i.e., calmness and maturity, produced aesthetically with emphasis on a kind of vocal economy (14)). In singing with the maŭm (201, 224), singers not only orient themselves to God but also towards the Christian community that inhabit the same role within the Christian chronotope of progress. The book concludes with a brief discussion of a growing viewpoint, especially among the younger generation, which critically reflects upon the culture of constant striving in Korea. A view that is relevant to Evangelical Christian singers in that it questions whether the relentless endeavor to be cleaner, more advanced, or more refined might not be the very exact quality that Christian aspirations seek to eliminate and takes pride in silencing. Written with consistently intense intellectual rigor and with a sensitivity probably only possible from a former singer, as a text, Songs of Seoul shines as a pioneer of a very special, unique, and original anthropological focus the communicative medium of the human voice. This review was organized around the linguistic anthropology of voice and voicing but the qualitative information provided, which could not all be covered here, should engage a much broader audience interested in ethnomusicology, South Korean Protestantism, and modernity. Kyung-Nan Koh HK Assistant Professor, Semiosis Research Center Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

6 Book Reviews 273 References Chumley, Lily Hope, and Nicholas Harkness Introduction: QUALIA. Anthropological Theory 13 (1/2): Harkness, Nicholas Anthropology at the Phonosonic Nexus. Anthropology News 52 (1): Softer Soju in South Korea. Anthropological Theory 13 (1/2): Acknowledgement This review was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MOE) (NRF A00013) and the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2014.