When we think of constellations, we often turn our heads towards the night sky and picture images that the stars create for our visual pleasure. In fact, the constellations that we view in the clear night skies are totally imaginary phenomena that some poets, farmers, and astronomers have made up over the past thousands of years!
One reason for these phenomenal categorizations is that constellations help us tell which stars are which, and for some farmers been used to determine the best times of the year for planting and harvesting their rewards. They are used as mnemonics, or memory aids. Constellations became a strong part of many cultures. Maybe, the mystery of the night sky made people want to tell stories about the constellations.
For the past few years, the Korean government has been aggressively casting the star qualities of its own culture and trying to introduce them to the international community. The momentum of the K pop music scene has delivered a wide net over the rest of the world and created an avenue for other aspects of Korean culture to follow its lead. However, from a foreigner¡¯s perspective it appears to be coming in dribs and drabs, bits and pieces, fragmented at best.
If the Korean government wants to grab the attention of the world stage, then the Korean story needs to constellate in order to become more cohesive and coherent. Let¡¯s take a page from our grammar lessons, "cohesion elevates a random collection of sentences to the status of a text, and in the process imparts meaning, insight and purpose to those sentences. Without cohesion, the text can hardly be said to exist at all, for cohesion provides the textual means for initiating comprehension or sense." In addition, "Robert de Beaugrande and Wolfgang Dressler describe coherence as a "continuity of senses" and "mutual access and relevance within a configuration of concepts and relations"
Generally speaking, people rely on their schemata or building blocks of cognition, in order to relate to other cultures. The notion of creating a Constellation of Korean Culture would connect the stars of every aspect from Korea¡¯s rich history, for example food, music, fashion, art, and language to name a few. In addition, the unique Constellation of Korean Culture would bring the official organizations of government and business to work in unison, rather than compete amongst themselves for a piece of the world¡¯s sky.
They could invest their monetary efforts in a more efficient structure of cooperation rather than fragmented pieces of culture they so desperately want to control. So let¡¯s help the international community visualize and connect the stars of Korean culture. So when they turn their eyes to the world¡¯s sky they will see the Constellation of Korean Culture!