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| From the November 2003
Anthropology News
Teaching North Korea, Anthropologically, Now
Several articles in the May 2003 issue of Anthropology News charted a course for a discipline engaged in public issues of central importance since 9/11, the “axis of evil” speech and the Iraq war. As 2003 draws to a close, North Korea has been atop the agenda for a US administration committed to unilateralism and military (including nuclear) compellence—the more aggressive conceptual complement to deterrence, an attempt to influence another to alter actions through the threat of force—more than any other in recent memory. The start of multi-party talks on the North Korean nuclear program brings at least some hope for a peaceful resolution of the situation. However, it remains possible that, again, hawks could win out in debate internal to the Bush administration. Many experts on Korean and international affairs believe that the non-accomodationist hard line that would thus prevail on the US side is likely to be, by design, productive only of escalation. At the beginning of the summer, some even foresaw the possibility of a new war on the Korean peninsula as soon as late autumn or winter. That timetable could be wrong, but as I write the potential for military conflict in Korea in 2003-04 remains very real.
Past and potential future Korean wars may not seem the sort of issue to which anthropologists qua anthropologists can usefully speak, in public or in the classroom. It is the kind of thing often left to political science. Yet while, of course, specific knowledge of modern Korean history and politics can only be helpful, a situation driven by assumptions about irrationality and radical otherness cries out also for a broad, and quite “classical,” anthropological perspective. The range of topics relevant to public debate about the unfolding confrontation with North Korea is quite broad. Genealogists of discourse and students of linguistic efficacy might consider other constituent elements of the official and public perception of North Korea that are based on assumptions about “rogue nations” and, to go back a bit further, about “totalitarianism.” Legal experts argue over whether North Korea’s uranium enrichment program, which when revealed in the fall of 2002 precipitated the current crisis, was in fact a violation of the letter of the 1994 Agreed Framework that concluded the last nearly- disastrous round of escalating concern over nuclear developments on the peninsula. For that matter, whether the US has not itself been in violation of the letter or spirit of that bilateral agreement is also an importantly open question. A non-reductive analysis must furthermore acknowledge the salience and non-equivalence of technical issues—such as whether North Korea has produced nuclear weapons from plutonium or uranium (quite possibly), whether it has the capacity to deliver them at all (altogether more difficult), and whether it might successfully marry them to its only partially-tested missile technology (by no means a given). These issues do not go away, however much North Korean representatives trumpet their infinite capability, and however much we hear out of interested Washington parties “nuclear weapons” and “missiles” in the same sentence.
Yet what many of us do, centrally, is teach, and what many of us most naturally teach is anthropology. It is my purpose here to suggest that the North Korean situation makes a productive, and obviously topical, focus of discussion, not only in special subjects courses or those devoted to East Asia, but across the anthropological curriculum. A political regime demonized as totalitarian, Stalinist, weird or creepy, and a leader likened by Newsweek to Dr Evil of the Austin Powers films, make at the very least for a challenging engagement with the project of contextualist verstehen so fundamental to the American disciplinary tradition. Courses aiming to foster a global perspective might examine the current nuclear non-proliferation mechanism, which, too, is a globalism premised upon, and productive of, relations of inequality. Furthermore, to begin to understand North Korea requires an understanding of the structuring dynamics of the division of the two Koreas. Strong theses, such as that of South Korean critic Paik Nak-chung, posit division as a “system.” But even without endorsing this encompassing framing, Korean identities and political formations can be seen as relationally organized across space and time in ways that recall familiar anthropological themes. Classes on ethnicity and related topics might consider ways in which Korean social memories, historical narratives and even patterns of linguistic usage have been refracted at and through material and ideological borders. A political anthropology course might aim to grasp other related polarizing logics: political scientist Peter Hayes has diagnosed a condition of “over-deterrence” on the Korean peninsula, in which military deployments ostensibly designed to deter the North are instead taken as provocative, leading to cycles of bilateral ratcheting up of aggressive posturing. In my own teaching I try to establish a context for the current tension, first by complexifying the most common narrative of the Korean War of 1950-53, namely the story of its beginning in a sudden Northern/Communist attack upon the South without precedent or provocation. Then, I move towards an anthropological understanding of division as a “total social fact.” And, of course, the implications of this fact go beyond the two Koreas— notwithstanding the rhetoric of exteriority that attaches to a “rogue” North Korea, the US approaches the present crisis not as a naïf coming upon malevolence in the woods. The US has been part of the relational dynamic that has conditioned North Korean perceptions and global actions from the start, literally and conceptually present at the creation of Korean division itself. An engaged anthropology can mean new concepts and new concerns. But it can also mean exploring the purchase of familiar ideas beyond their usual comfort zone. Teach North Korea, anthropologically, now. Robert Oppenheim is an assistant professor in the department of Asian studies at the U of Texas at Austin. His research interests range from networks of place and contemporary Korean civil society to histories of anthropology and of Korean military and Cold War cultures. |
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Robert
Oppenheim
