This paper examines the modern discourse of South Korean culture and its history to illustrate how methodological challenges and the use of ambiguous cultural terms have contributed to the development of dominant, essentializing narratives of South Korean cultural identity. In so doing, I scrutinize a variety of influences that have caused South Korean cultural characterizations to be othering, focusing on themes of cultural determinism, assumptions of homogeneity, cultural engineering, and concepts of “uniqueness.” Finally, I show how the dual nature of important cultural concepts such as han, hŭng, and chŏng—as emotions yet also as signals of Koreanness as a distinct and unified social category—contributes to (re-)generating culturally essentializing narratives of South Korea. By revealing how the essentialization of cultural terms diminishes their ability to fully and faithfully convey the nuances of a vast, intricate, and deeply historied people, this paper prompts renewed interest in the meanings and relevance of these terms in contemporary discourses.

The overall objective of my Honors Thesis Project was to examine the dynamics of contemporary South Korean education culture, specifically with regard to determining the amount of pressure placed upon students to succeed academically and the contradictions that may arise depending on the meaning of education at various periods throughout the nations' history. To investigate this research goal, my I begin with an overview of the significance education has held in Korea's history, leading into a discussion of various social phenomena that have arisen out of it and persist today. I then examined contemporary cultural representations of educational culture and school life through an analysis of both films and documentaries depicting varying views and meanings of education in Korea at different periods in its history. Lastly, a qualitative interview study exploring current student's attitudes and experiences with education was conducted on Arizona State University's Tempe campus. A total of thirteen Korean graduate students in Master's and PhD programs and four undergraduate American and other international students in Bachelor's degree programs were interviewed as part of the study. The purpose of this study was to examine 1) the contemporary social phenomenon of "education fever", defined as the national obsession with education, which has emerged due to various historical and social processes in South Korea and 2) the degree of pressure placed on Korean students to succeed academically and get accepted into one of the nations' top three most prestigious universities: Seoul University, Korea University and Yonsei University (acronym of SKY) (Seth 2002). The findings of this research project strongly support the idea that education holds a strong significance in Korean culture based on the development of education throughout its history and the implications it has held in each period. Taking into consideration the findings of both the historical and contemporary research completed, as well as the interview study conducted, the phenomenon of "education fever" does hold true. However, it proved to be determined more so by individual environmental factors, meaning that one is not necessarily predetermined to be faced with a great amount of pressure to succeed academically.