Page 99 of my dissertation appears in a section exploring how immunity is communicated and understood across different domains of the Korean ginseng industry. The page opens with two revealing excerpts: one from a ginseng farmer and another from an agri-tech expert. Each excerpt offers distinct perspectives on what immunity means and why it matters for both cultivating and consuming this prized root. 

In South Korea, immunity operates simultaneously as a folk concept and a scientific technology. For scientists, it serves as shorthand for the clinically validated health benefits attributed to Korean ginseng, backed by peer-reviewed research and laboratory data. For farmers, immunity represents not only the plant’s medicinal efficacy but also the embodied agricultural knowledge necessary to raise robust crops through careful attention to plants, seasonal timing, and cultivation techniques. For branding managers and marketing professionals, immunity becomes a culturally resonant concept that bridges traditional Korean medicine and modern wellness trends, making ginseng legible and desirable to diverse consumer audiences. 

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in South Korea between 2021 and 2023, my dissertation traces how various actors in the Korean ginseng industry, including government officials, scientists, farmers, and branding/marketing managers, translate scientific evidence of ginseng’s efficacy across different linguistic registers, professional contexts, and communicative modalities. These acts of translation, I argue, reveal shifting language ideologies that fundamentally shape how health, agriculture, and what is understood as Korean tradition are conceptualized and, crucially, made meaningful and communicable to both domestic and global publics. 

Page 99 captures one essential piece of this larger analytical puzzle: the complex pathways through which immunity travels between scientific discourse, agricultural practice, and commercial branding. While this single page cannot represent the dissertation’s full scope, it exemplifies the productive tensions and unexpected overlaps that animate my broader analysis of ideologies of communicability, both expressed and implicit, in the Korean ginseng industry. 

Lee, Hyemin. 2025. Evidence Doesn’t Speak For Itself: Translation, Communicability, and Scientization in the South Korean Ginseng Industry. New York University, Ph.D.