This book is a fascinating study of the Vietnamese experience and memory of the Vietnam War through the lens of popular imaginings about the wandering souls of the war dead. These ghosts of war play ...an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination, and Heonik Kwon explores the intimate ritual ties with these unsettled identities which still survive in Vietnam today as well as the actions of those who hope to liberate these hidden but vital historical presences from their uprooted social existence. Taking a unique approach to the cultural history of war, he introduces gripping stories about spirits claiming social justice and about his own efforts to wrestle with the physical and spiritual presence of ghosts. Although these actions are fantastical, this book shows how examining their stories can illuminate critical issues of war and collective memory in Vietnam and the modern world more generally.
Revolution in the Afterlife Kwon, Heonik
Religions (Basel, Switzerland ),
08/2017, Letnik:
8, Številka:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The idea of an afterlife is formative of modern social scientific enquiry into the normative fabrics of human sociality. The idea also indicates how societies come to terms with their destructive ...past. Focusing on the legacies of the Vietnam War, this essay explores how the historical experience of generalized loss and displacement can radically change the traditional conception of an afterlife.
A notable feature of contemporary Hwanghae-do (now a region in North Korea) shamanism in Incheon, west of Seoul, is a body of material symbols of American power that are familiar to Koreans—such as ...the Stars and Stripes or the portrait of General Douglas MacArthur. Focusing on the small American flag that Kim Kum-hwa, a renowned Hwanghae-origin shaman, brought home from her tour of the United States in 1982 during which she performed kut, Korea’s shamanic rite, at the Knoxville World Fair and the Smithsonian Museum, this article investigates how this object came to join Kim’s spirit shrine as an auspicious artifact and what it says about her eminent yet turbulent career experience. It asks what sort of power the American flag displays and how this power is different from what we habitually understand as “American power.”
The Hill Fight of the Korean War constitutes an important chapter of the formative military conflict of the mid-twentieth century where the South Korean and other UN forces confronted the Chinese and ...North Korean forces. Currently, it has become a vital site of contested memory, especially in relation to the growing contest of power between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Describing South Korea’s recent initiative of missing in action (MIA)/killed in action (KIA) accounting activities on these old battlegrounds since 2000, this article looks at how public actions concerning the remains of war are intertwined with changing geopolitical conditions. This will be followed by a reflection on the limits of the prevailing art and technology of war-remains accounting.
The other Cold War Kwon, Heonik
2010., 20101201, 2010, 2010-12-06, 20100101
eBook
In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international ...events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history. Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends cherished ideas about the global and their hold on contemporary social science. His narrative describes the slow decomposition of a complex social and political order involving a number of local and culturally creative processes. While the nations of Europe and North America experienced the cold war as a time of "long peace," postcolonial nations entered a different reality altogether, characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of violence. Arguing that these events should be integrated into any account of the era, Kwon captures the first sociocultural portrait of the cold war in all its subtlety and diversity.
North Korea Kwon, Heonik; Chung, Byung-Ho
2012., 2012, 2012-03-12, 20120101
eBook
This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and ...Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s charismatic power and his own hereditary authority. The result was the birth of a powerful modern theater state that sustains North Korean leaders’ sovereignty now to a third generation. In defiance of the instability to which so many revolutionary states eventually succumb, the durability of charismatic politics in North Korea defines its exceptional place in modern history. Kwon and Chung make an innovative contribution to comparative socialism and postsocialism as well as to the anthropology of the state. Their pioneering work is essential for all readers interested in understanding North Korea’s past and future, the destiny of charismatic power in modern politics, the role of art in enabling this power.
Religion has recently appeared as an important subject of inquiry in Cold War studies.
Referred to as religion and the Cold War, the rise of this research activity has since provoked interesting ...debates on the place of religion in Cold War power politics. Korea’s Cold War experience has much to say in these debates. This article reviews issues raised in recent religion and the Cold War scholarship and asks how studies on Korea’s religious culture can contribute to this rapidly growing research domain. The discussion will focus on the partition of the nation and the subsequent civil war, two important elements of Korea’s early Cold War history, and their impacts on the country’s Protestant movement and communities. The article argues that while dealing with such milieus in which the bipolarization of politics and the decolonization of the political order were concurrent processes and manifested in violent ways, the analysis may not ignore the forces of violence in propelling changes in religious culture and in shaping Cold War culture more broadly. KCI Citation Count: 1
Les fantômes de la guerre abondent dans les villages vietnamiens d’aujourd’hui. Les longues guerres que le pays a connues de 1945 à 1975 ont pris une dimension internationale et, de la même façon, ...les ruines qu’elles ont laissées parmi les vivants ont elles-mêmes un caractère transnational. Cet article explore l’art de vivre, au Vietnam, avec des identités historiquement spectrales et néanmoins culturellement bien réelles.
PDF
