The Bangudae Petroglyph: Whaling and Re-modernisation in a South Korean Industrial City

ABSTRACT

The commemoration of whaling is a recent form of consumer culture in the Korean city of Ulsan, where the utilisation of the Bangudae Petroglyph as the emblem of the city is part of a wider process of re-modernisation in Korea. Starting with the concept of re-modernisation, developed by Ulrich Beck, I consider the extension of the concept by Bruno Latour, who has endowed it with a materialist emphasis. From the Latourean perspective, the petroglyph can be viewed as a non-human actor (‘quasi-object’ or ‘actant’) that allies with other actors (such as humans and whales) to create far-flung material networks. I present evidence from the re-enactment of a Neolithic Era whale hunt at a tourist festival to argue that the Bangudae Petroglyph is not merely a representation of whaling, but a portrayal of the relation between past and present which is crucial for sustaining the social solidarities of industrial capitalism in South Korea. From this study, I suggest that purposive nostalgia, the human desires and moralities that motivate human actors to seek the revival of modernisation, exercises a more powerful influence over the work of mediation in comparison to the weaker influence of non-human actants.

KEYWORDS:

• Festival
• industrialisation
• modernity
• Korea
• timescape
• whaling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on Contributor

Bradley Tatar is a cultural anthropologist interested in society-nature relations and the politics surrounding whales in Korea and in Latin America. He is currently Associate Professor in Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, where he is a member of Science Walden (Convergence Research Center).

ORCID

Bradley Tatar http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4282-4297

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea [NRF-2015R1A5A7037825].