MBTI, Five Elements, Ketsueki-gata, and Urbanization in South Korea
The Chinese Five Element Model.
In a couple of previous blog posts I mentioned the way in which the personality profiling typology MBTI is big in South Korea, and how it reflects a specific techno-managerial mindset that has been adopted as part of the Westernizing-modernizing ‘package’. What is also interesting about Korean people’s use of MBTI is how it fundamentally differs from the previous models through which they have sought to stabilize and order personality identification. This difference reflects basic changes in the human geography of the country, most especially, the urbanization of society.
In pre-modern Korea a dominant model called ohaeng (오행), which derived from Chinese Taoism and Confucianism,, dominated. Here, there are said to be 5 personality types based on the five element cycle - Wood, Fire, Metal, Water, Earth. These in turn relate to the cyclical changing of the seasons each year. The Five Element Theory is also the basis for the 12 animals of the Chinese zodiac. It was said that people can be classified according to the five elements. Their body structure, tendencies, temperaments, emotions, positive and negative behaviour, moods and illnesses can all be considered in relation to them because the seasons correlate with human taste, emotion, internal organs, and parts of the body. Therefore, the Five Element theory is the basis for ‘Oriental’ or ‘Chinese’ medicine. The general goal was to devise a system that reflected the relationship and interdependence of everything, and it considered that human well-being fundamentally depended on finding a balance within the dynamic on-going and unfolding process of existence.
Apparently, I am classed as ‘Earth’. Here is what the International College of Oriental Medicine website says about me:
Earth type people have a yellowish complexion, round faces and big heads, big abdomens, small hands and feet and plenty of muscles. They have a sing-song voice. They are calm in temperament, fond of helping people and like to be involved and needed.
They love to associate with other people, seek harmony and togetherness and insist upon loyalty, security and predictability. They have a dislike of power. The emotion associated with the Earth element is Rumination. When a person is overly pensive and contemplative, he/she can easily become fixated on worrisome thoughts and ideas.
Earth type people can therefore often be tormented by their over-concern for details and can become caught up in circular thinking from which there is no escape. Other people can depend on this type of person because they are reliable, sympathetic, and good caretakers.
Without the demands of work or responsibility to others, they can become inert, dropping back into the well-worn trails of their own mind. In this state, their energy becomes stagnant and leads to poor digestion, heaviness and flabbiness. They need to balance their devotion to relationships with solitude and self-expression, developing self-reliance as well as building community.
They have a tendency for excess eating and good living that leads to obesity, stomach ulcers and diabetes. They may suffer from disorders of the joints, particularly arthritis, and especially involving the wrists and ankles. Woman often have irregular menstruation with weight gain from cycle to cycle and men are prone to early prostatitis.
I don’t recall any Korean talking to me about ohaeng as a way of discerning my personality type, but I do remember being asked by several Koreans when I first met them for my blood group, something I didn’t actually recall - a fact that dumbfounded them. This is because they believe you can classify personality types according to blood type, like this:
This personality typology derived from Japan, where it is called Ketsueki-gata. But its looks like the Blood Type model has now been superseded by MBTI, especially amongst young South Koreans.
What is especially striking about the evolution of personality typologies over the past one hundred years in Korea is that is reflects the systematic removal of notions of human identity from being embedded in nature. Whereas the traditional Chinese derived typology linked humanity to the four seasons and the idea of existence as process, and the Japanese Blood Type model linked it to the body, what HBTI effectively does is sever any such conception of personality from the natural world, rendering human personality abstract and autonomous.
In other words, South Koreans are following the West in assuming there is a fundamental division between the human and the non-human worlds – between ‘culture’ and ‘nature.’ The benefit of such dualism lie in the capacity it nurtures for a dominating and exploitative relationship to the non-human, a relationship in which humanity comes to see itself as standing apart from the rest of the world. This dualistic stance is fundamental to the techno-scientific mindset of modernization. As the philosopher and ecofeminist Val Plumwood noted of the rationalistic spirit that dominates Western culture: “Its ‘success-making’ characteristics, including its ruthlessness in dealing with the sphere it counts as ‘nature’, have allowed it to dominate both non-human nature and other peoples and cultures.”
In practical terms, this shift in the conception of human personality reflects the wholesale migration of people from the land and dependence on agriculture to the city and factory and office employment. One of the most striking features of contemporary South Korea is its relentless urbanization: 20 percent of the population lives in Seoul. Greater Seoul encompassed more than 50 percent of the total population. Over the past fifty years South Korea’s urbanization rate has exceeded 90 percent. This is what the National Atlas of Korea, published online by the Seoul Institute, says:
The government’s master plan for land development was put into action in the early 1960s. At that time, the government based its plan on the growth pole theory in order to maximize the development effect in as short a period of time as possible. Though wellintentioned, the growth pole approach only allowed for investment in the few central development areas that were most likely to succeed before development could be considered in other areas. This approach had the unfortunate result of causing both people and capital to flow to those few development centers. The resulting imbalance between those centers and all other areas in the country was later corrected with the implementation of a more balanced set of development policies.
…….
Urbanization has had major impacts on the country's demographics, its physical landscape, its socialbehavioral institutions, as well as the economy. Symbols that represented cities on the national map kept increasing, and as the number of cities increased, the population of rural areas declined, which also led to a decrease in the percentage of the population that was engaged in agriculture and fishery activities. New cities kept appearing on the national map as larger metropolitan areas continued to expand into rural land surrounding them. The emergence of metropolitan centers is a major feature of development in Korea and resulted primarily from the rural-to-urban migrations, especially in the capital area. After the 1960s, rapid urbanization and industrialization attracted secondary and tertiary industries to cities as well. More jobs were created prompting further mass migrations from rural to urban areas. The urbanization rate, which indicates the ratio of urban population as a percentage of the total population, increased rapidly in Korea until the 1980s, but the pace has slowed since then. Between the 1970s and 1980s urbanization occurred at a much faster rate than in many other countries. As a result, rural areas suffered from the lack of a labor force, a decrease in the coefficient of land utilization, and the rapid aging of its population; these factors ultimately contributed to the failure to meet the minimum requirements for sustaining a rural community in many instances. And at the same time urban areas were confronted with the need to mitigate the challenges of overcrowding. Additionally, the heavy concentration of industrial activity within the metropolitan areas resulted serious social and environmental issues such as housing shortages, traffic congestion, poor air quality, and overall environmental degradation.
It seems to me that this basic transformation in the physical environment caused by rapid modernizing development, in addition to the concomitant transformation in mindset entailed in adopting the Western model of a culture/nature dualism, goes a long way to explaining Korean people’s shift from what is an essentially agricultural and process-oriented model of human personality to a mechanistic, abstract, and ‘managerial’ one. In this context, Ketseuki-gata seems like a transitional typology in which the seemingly Western ‘scientific’ criteria of blood types, with its underlying assumption of fixed and mechanistic principles, were melded with residual principles from the Chinese Five Elements model based on the alternative process-based vision that pervaded East Asia.
Ironically, Western thinkers are now shifting their mindset to embrace just such a process-based vision so as to better confront climate change…..More on this in a future post.
Sources:
The Five Element diagram is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxing_%28Chinese_philosophy%29
The International College of Oriental Medicine quote is from: https://orientalmed.ac.uk/the-five-personality-types-by-galit-hughes/
The Ketsueki-gata illustration is from: https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-blood-type-personality-5191276
The Val Plumwood quote is from: Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, (Routledge, 2002), page 5
The quote from the National Atlas of Korea is from: http://nationalatlas.ngii.go.kr/pages/page_592.php