Scientific Expertise and the Threads of Storytelling in South Korean Anthropogenic Forests – Engagement

By Sumin Myung, Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka

Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2024 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the argument they made in their submission and to situate their work in relation to the field of environmental anthropology.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the role of storytelling in the making of scientific expertise in forest sciences in South Korea, a country once notorious for chronic deforestation until the 1970s due to the violence of local overuse, Japanese colonialism, and the Korean War, but now densely reforested. The paper focuses on how quotidian engagements with South Korean anthropogenic forests have given shape to specific forms of scientific narrativity. Either along or against the grain of scientific narrativity, forest scientists decenter the nationalist and statist narratives of “successful” forest regeneration in South Korea and inscribe the liveliness of trees, soils, and landscapes into their storytelling. Contrary to the dominant instrumentalist model of science storytelling, I suggest that scientific narrativity is not merely secondary or auxillary to scientific expertise but a constitutive element in the formation and distribution of knowledge claims about living forests. To better grasp such efforts, I develop the concept of “scientific emplotment,” drawing inspiration from Cheryl Mattingly’s notion of “therapeutic emplotment” and Veena Das’s polysemic idea of “plot.” Grounded in my 36 months of fieldwork across research forests, labs, and conference rooms, I illustrate how forest scientists carefully select and arrange “plots” that serve as both physical-ecological grounds and narrative strategies for articulating specific knowledge claims to differently situated stakeholders. Scientific emplotment captures how forest scientists stitch together the fragments of field research, historical residues, and ecological processes into compelling knowledge claims, while leaving room for the indeterminacy and plurality of scientific narratives about forests in a time of increasing ecological uncertainty.

On a chilly morning in early March 2020, I set out on a field trip with Professor Seo, a leading forest scientist in South Korea, and Sejun, a postdoctoral researcher from Southeast Asia (all pseudonyms). We were heading to an experimental site in Mt. Jiri, South Korea’s first national park. As we drove from Seoul, we listened to Sejun’s plans for writing and fieldwork over the year. Not entirely convinced by his response, Professor Seo referred to the “publish or perish” academic job market and gently pushed him to publish more. I asked Professor Seo how junior scientists could write better and more in such competitive situations. Then he emphasized that scientific papers require “good stories,” not just data. “Young researchers could extract data from experiments,” he emphasized, “but often don’t know how to weave them into meaningful narratives. Therefore, I have to create stories for them. That is what a professor is supposed to do.”

It was this moment when I first realized that I had largely disregarded what “stories” might mean for my interlocutors and their colleagues. Throughout my fieldwork (2017–2022) with forest scientists in South Korea, I came across numerous occasions where “stories” mattered in different yet interrelated ways. Engaging with these experiences closely, my Rappaport Prize paper suggests that storytelling may work not merely as a secondary or auxiliary feature of scientific expertise, but as a constitutive element in the production of knowledge and expertise among forest scientists in South Korea. To explore how scientific narrativity or storytelling emerges through everyday practices, this paper develops the concept of “scientific emplotment” to analyze how scientists weave together specific characters (tree species, human laborers, soils, etc.), settings (forest patches, experimental plots, etc.), and events (climate change, ecological processes, etc.) into what Professor Seo called “meaningful narratives” in science and beyond. In other words, scientific emplotment integrates two meanings of “plot,” ground (soil) and storyline, where trees and scientific practices grow together.

In doing so, the paper revisits two dominant understandings of storytelling in science. First, it shifts away from what may be called an “instrumentalist” model, which treats stories as tools for delivering scientific findings to non-specialists to increase the public awareness of today’s critical issues. Second, it adds one more dimension to dominant approaches that treat science stories merely as post-facto artifacts, constructed after scientific facts have been firmly established. Instead, I show how scientific emplotment is integral to knowledge production from the beginning, rather than simply in the middle or after the fact, shaping how scientists manage study plots, select focal species, conduct fieldwork and experiments, and interpret data, without being entirely subject to teleological storylines of forest futures or state-centric storylines of reforestation.

The paper focuses on three key aspects of scientific emplotment in practice: (1) forest typology as a plotting device that enables comparison and scaling between small research plots and broader forest ecosystems; (2) species selection as a narrative strategy that foregrounds particular tree species as scientific “characters” while excluding or marginalizing others; and (3) research infrastructure and field practices that transform “situations of life” in forests into “situations of science,” to use historian of science Robert Kohler’s term. To be more specific, scientists carefully select study plots in forests to represent broader forest ecosystems using various forest types, such as “the Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) plantation” and “secondary oak forests,” despite ongoing debates about the usefulness and scientific validity of such types. Their research infrastructures—living trees, ecological monitoring towers, a multitude of sensors, supporting equipment, and so on—work as “scientific stages” where their scientific narratives grow with the ever-changing forests. Species selection also plays a critical role in scientific emplotment. Scientists deliberately choose significant native species, such as the Korean red pine (Pinus densiflora), as the main characters in their storytelling. Such sieving processes in everyday life are not merely practical but also strategic, allowing them to craft compelling storylines with broader relevance to national concerns such as climate crises and forest regeneration. In various setting spanning labs, forests, experimental sites, conferences, and classrooms, acts of scientific emplotment took diverse and sophisticated forms in line with their research topics, methods, field conditions, audience, or even career stages.

This paper grows from a chapter in my Ph.D. dissertation that examines the politics of anthropogenic forests in postcolonial South Korea. As a heavily mountainous country, South Korea presents an interesting case of forest transition after 1945, as it has transformed from a severely deforested landscape largely due to colonialism, the Korean War, and local extraction to a densely forested one. The dissertation examines how forest scientists have positioned themselves as critical architects of anthropogenic forest regeneration, while both inheriting and redressing the violent legacies of Japanese and U.S. imperialism in the shaping of postcolonial forest futures. Placed between other chapters that discuss larger histories of the discipline and chapter that explore local scenes, this chapter also reveals how scientists claim their expertise in ways that transcend dominant nationalist/statist storylines of forest regeneration by foregrounding marginalized actors such as the pitch pine (Pinus rigida) or soils, allowing them to make more grounded knowledge claims about Korean forests.

My research is in conversation with growing interests in the politics of anthropogenic forests, ecological restoration, and tree planting in anthropology and the environmental humanities, while adding an ethnographic layer to the literature on storytelling in science and technology studies as well. By shedding light on scientific emplotment, a careful practice of both place and storyline, this Rappaport paper demonstrates how scientific and environmental expertise grows together with trees and soils in a time of ecological transition. The stories that forest scientists tell about forests across time cannot be severed from where they conduct their field research and from their nonhuman counterparts. In this way, I suggest, their narratives carry the seeds of alternative futures—ones in which human-disturbed landscapes might still afford the possibility of resilience and growth in the face of climate uncertainties and environmental degradations.