The essay reviews the trajectories of cultural sociology in three East Asian societies, namely Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, which show interesting parallels and distinctive developments within their respective social and historical contexts. Sociologists in these societies in general, and cultural sociologists in particular, have endeavored to reflect on the cultural ramifications of the social and political changes wrought by the processes of modernization, (de-)colonization and democratization. By building on the efforts of their predecessors and taking inspiration from new theoretical ideas from the West, cultural sociologists in these Asian societies have blazed a long trail beyond the conventional approach of the sociology of culture. By seriously considering the analytic autonomy of culture, their works have sought to wrestle with the issues of meaning, identity, morality, trust, everyday life, collective consciousness, community and resistance under the increasing influences of state power, markets and global hegemony.
Recently, women-only public places have emerged rapidly and become widespread all over South Korea, but very little empirical research has been conducted on how women construct interaction order in such places. This article is a Goffmanian ethnography of how Korean women construct interaction order in a women-only public place. It presents ‘sacred game’ as a conceptual scheme to inform ethnographic research on interaction order. By using this conceptual scheme, we conduct an ethnography of a women-only yoga studio in South Korea. This research shows that women actively engage in sacred game when they appear in a women-only public place where situational proprieties are ambiguous and actions are inconsequential. This research suggests that creating this kind of public place would be better than merely creating a women-only public place itself in order to empower women to form a modern sociability.
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