Softer soju in South Korea

Abstract

This paper explores the ascendancy of 'softness' in South Korea as it is experienced through the qualia of one of Korea's most important social rituals: drinking soju. I combine an analysis of ethnographic evidence with widely-distributed advertisements to show how the experience of an abstract quality, softness, is made concrete by the cultural-semiotic renderings -and genderings -of alcohol consumption in various sensory modalities, including gustation, audition, kinaesthesis, and states of overall drunkenness. I introduce the concept of 'qualic transitivity' to account for the crossmodal perception of qualia as instances of the same quality. I argue that dramatic shifts in the qualia of soju and its consumption are emblematic of a higher-order change in how the ideal relationship between liquor and gender is being reconceptualized in contemporary South Korean society.

The National Anthem in Warao: Semiotic Ground and Performative Affordances of Indigenous Language Texts in Venezuela

“… For a recent treatment of the importance of qualia in semiotic analysis, see, for example, Chumley (), Chumley and Harkness (), Hankins (), Harkness (), Lemon (), and Gal (). …”

Sensaciones a través del tiempo

“…y ¿qué es la pureza? Lily Chumley y Nicholas Harkness (2013) elaboran -a partir del importante trabajo de Nancy Munn (1986) entre los Gawan en Papúa Nueva Guinea Revista Realidad 153, 2019 • ISSN 1991-3516e-ISSN 2520-0526 y el uso de la propuesta teórica de C. S. Peirce que Munn realiza-una reflexión sobre la concepción del qualia. Los autores lo entienden como "experiencias sensoriales (como el color, la textura, el sonido y el olor) y de sentimientos ( feelings) (como la ansiedad, saciedad, proximidad y otredad), en los cuales esas qualias están imbricadas en valores culturales, ya sean positivos o negativos" (Chumley y Harkness, 2013, p. 3).…”

The Open Throat: Deceptive Sounds, Facts of Firstness, and the Interactional Emergence of Voice

“…They form raw semiotic material for predicating properties of entities and activities in the world according to, on the one hand, culturally conceptualized qualities and, on the other hand, feelings of these qualities in the form of conventional qualisigns. When these sensuous pragmatic signals are assimilated to conventional qualisigns of value, they can be "downshifted" (rhematized) from the indexical mode to the iconic mode (Parmentier 1994), appearing as the realia or properties of entities available to sensory experience (see, e.g., Harkness [2013] on the various qualia assimilated to "softness" as a qualisign of soju in South Korea). And when assimilated as rhematized indexes, qualia can focus attention on the "feeling of doing," providing the pragmatic material for organizing and valorizing genred activity-"practice"-according to culturally valorized qualisigns (Harkness 2015).…”