Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. vi, 231 pp. US$29.99, cloth. ISBN 9781108487924.
After the Korean War is a sobering and intimate account of the violence of the Korean War told from the perspectives of the people, families, and communities that, in many ways, continue to endure it. It is not, however, a book just about the logic of political violence or the harrowing consequences of civil war. Kwon, writing as a cultural anthropologist, has a broader and more substantive point to make. The focus of his book is on the violence not only perpetrated on the physical body but also on “the morality and spirituality of intimate human ties” (3). Kwon’s evocative and quietly passionate intimate history of the impact and enduring legacy of the Korean War is a critique of the modern concept of kinship, as something wrongly relegated to the private sphere.
Drawing from a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Kwon includes personal memoirs, autobiographies, films, and site visits, with his own ethnographic research. Work from South Korean scholars and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports are used as secondary sources, as is research on civil wars in Greece, Vietnam, and Indonesia. There are six chapters in total. Chapters 1 and 2 explore how, first, civil war violence ripped apart communities through state and communal violence, and then how postwar politics would complicate life, death commemorative-rites, and mourning for anyone associated with the “enemy”—dead or alive. The next two chapters build on the concept of associative guilt and “how the experience of state violence is transmitted within families and across generations” (93) by looking at “red villages” (chapter 3) and what having a “red bloodline” meant (chapter 4). Chapter 5 looks at how Korean War narratives have varied in cultural studies of the event and in literature, focusing on depictions of kinship. Chapter 6 concludes with an exploration of how communities seek reconciliation through testimonies, ritual practices, and other commemorative means.
Recounting the “chaotic, generalized violence against society” created by the separation of families during the war and the “acute existential and moral crisis in family and kin groups” (6) that faced those who wished to reunite with separated family and friends, or even mourn those who perished during and after the war’s end, Kwon shows how the polarization of society between pro- and anti-communist forces ruptured the intimacy of human relations. “Postcolonial state building advanced the idea of political community as a family writ large” and any resistance or opposition to this idea was “equal in meaning to that of betraying the family and punishable accordingly” (20). For Kwon, this is the “politics of kinship” (20) in the state- and nation-building process of Korea’s decolonization, and the Cold War environment in which it took place, that distorted the intimacy of interpersonal relations and the fabric of community. True kinship, or the mere act of being in someone’s life in the sense that one cares for someone and is cared for in return, became a subversive political act if the association was someone from the “wrong” side. Amity, then, and our deeper ties to others and community were shattered.
Kwon builds mainly on ideas from nineteenth-century anthropology, bringing to the fore ideas from the likes of anthropologist Lewis Morgan, who conceptualized society as that divided between “relations purely personal” (societas) and that rooted in “territory and property” guaranteed by the state (civitas). Morgan proposed the idea that “politics can exist as aspects of human relations without the benefit or the burden of the state” (11). Subsequent work by Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, which sought to build on Morgan’s idea more systematically and empirically, would best achieve what Kwon sees as anthropology’s promise in advancing an alternative theory of politics. Rescuing the concept of kinship from modernist misconceptions as something traditional and apolitical, Kwon argues it should be understood and studied as an integral part of politics. “It is one of the enduring myths of modern politics that the milieu of human kinship makes up a private sphere of life, having no remarkable place in the advancement of the structure of political society” (183), writes Kwon in the final paragraphs of the book.
As a book about legacies of the Cold War and the enduring trauma of the Korean War, Kwon’s book is an important contribution to the cultural anthropology canon with implications for other disciplines. For readers in political science or politics (in the modern sense), it will likely motivate a few questions. Kwon is clear in his position that politics “can exist as aspects of human relations without the benefit or the burden of the state” (11). This might leave one wondering what kind of political order is preferred. On this important question, Kwon is clear. He sees kinship as the basis of a more perfect democracy. Thus, South Korea’s democratization was notable not simply for the institutional changes it brought with it, but because it permitted “the community’s recovery of its freedom from moral judgement and its injurious and destructive consequences” (62).
There is much to be said about the relationship between democratic political systems and the reclamation of communal dignity and reconciliation following the violent social dislocations caused by state violence. As noted throughout the book, the conditions of democratic pluralism—that which authoritarian Cold War politics denied—opened opportunities for political and communal redress of past harms in South Korea. Kwon does not engage political science literature, only mentioning it somewhat dismissively as something “anchored in the institutions of the state” (15). But there is certainly room for meaningful engagement between cultural anthropology and political science, especially around conceptions of pluralism and civil society. As the world grapples with questions of democracy’s value today, After the Korean War provides some refreshing answers. To what extent democratic systems are adequate in supporting our ability to “nurture each other and mutually participate in each other’s lives” (6) in meaningful ways and without fearing political retribution is an immensely important question, and one worth addressing normatively and objectively across disciplines.
Steven Denney
University of Vienna, Vienna