Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

"Healing" is a common but vague concept in South Korea, opposing both everyday struggles and social expectations, while it creates new aspirations. With a focus on methodological questions, this paper studies what "healing" is, what it “heals,” and how it is performed and regulated on social media.

Paper long abstract

"Healing" has become a widespread yet ambiguous concept in South Korea, particularly on social media, expressing an opposition to the everyday struggles of lived reality. "Healing" can be seen as an alternative aspiration to the more-or-less collectively imagined social expectation of "good life" in South Korea’s highly hierarchical and competitive society, which eliminates the need to achieve those social expectations, at least in that very moment, while it creates new ideals of the proper ways of "getting better" from a similarly vague problem. As a result, it becomes performance itself through social media, creating new becoming in the form of "healing". The paper asks how South Koreans define "healing", what it addresses, and how they are regulated and performed on social media. I argue that "healing" functions as an aspirational project which creates new distinctions between what kinds of problems and their solutions are rewarded and which are not. The methodology consists of digital multi-sited ethnography by following the phenomenon of „healing” on South Korea’s social media and beyond, including online and offline spaces, long-term participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. This paper introduces the methodological questions, including constructing the field, defining personhood in a non-identity-based social media, examining the visual and sensory elements and their role, and dealing with ethics regarding often anonymous but intimate and vulnerable digital contents. This paper contributes to anthropological discussions of aspiration by reconceptualising "healing" as an aspirational project oriented toward "getting better" rather than "having a good life".