This cultural-interpretive essay offers critical commentary on Koreanness, racial ideology, hegemonic racial power, and racialized cultural taste with the aim of interpreting the sport–music nexus by examining a case of the interface between music and sport: The authors focus on the case of the Olympic ice dance that the South Korean team performed for the Korean traditional folk song Arirang at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games. The authors argue that music and sport can be understood as a semiological system that shapes non-Whites’ ideological belief system. In addition, this essay engages with a discussion of cultural classification that often racializes skaters of color as the aforementioned are informed by Orientalism.

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In this essay, I overview Keyan Tomaselli’s contribution to the inaugural edition of The Ethnographic Edge; further some of his discussion of the sacred in terms of ethics; and make a call for ethnography “to be”. Ethnography “to be” prefaces hope; calls for ongoing contemplation about ideas of universalism-universality-universal; and critiques the dominance of the triumphal and utopian, for instance surrounding initiatives in peace and development in the humanities and ethnography. My influence for the critique and call for ethnography “to be” lies in influential works like that of Prashad, but also foundational readings such as Gregory Bateson and Susan Sontag. The work  Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity by Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon (2008), informs my conclusion/condensing.

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