Asia/Pacific/Perspectives. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2012. xii, 219 pp. (B&W illus.) US$39.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-7425-5679-9.
More than fifty years after its foundation, North Korea continues to command the attention of scholars and elude current paradigms and theories of social development. Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung’s North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics endeavours to call some of these paradigms into question through an engaging analysis of the country’s changing socio-political system. Drawing on Max Weber’s notion of charismatic authority, the two anthropologists set out to resolve why the North Korean case of charismatic revolutionary rule seems to defy the Weberian model, which assigns it a role of historical ephemerality.
The study is largely concerned with the issue of what Weber calls routinization of political charisma and hereditary transfer of personal charismatic authority from one political leader to another. In trying to understand how this process played out in the North Korean scenario, the authors employ Clifford Geertz’s concept of the theatre state, originally applied to the analysis of a traditional polity, in their effort to extend it to modern revolutionary states such as North Korea. In fact, Kwon and Chung are following in the steps of Wada Haruki, who was the first to apply Geertz’s notion of the theatre state to North Korea. Our authors, however, emphasize that the idea must be situated “more squarely in the context of what Weber calls conflicts between personal and hereditary charisma” in order to grasp its full implications for the field of North Korean studies (45). Pursuant to this objective, Kwon and Chung undertake a series of forays into a kaleidoscopic array of material related to the concept of the theatre state, spanning visual art, architecture, drama, music and cinema to convey the scope of this concept at work. Much of this information, however, comprising the book’s second chapter, is hardly new, derived mostly from well-known secondary scholarship on the subject, although Kwon and Chung do an admirable job presenting it with a fresh new spin.
The work’s more interesting and original insights, however, come from the authors’ elaboration on the culture of gift exchange and its constitutive nature in North Korea’s political economy in chapter 5. Kwon and Chung suggest that the gifts presented to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il by foreign heads of state and individuals, which are housed in two museums in the vicinity of the scenic Myohyang mountains, play a crucial role in the state’s “theatrical politics” (128). They argue that the very organizing principle of North Korea’s modern political sovereignty is based on an idea of the gift in relation to the international community. Thus, the tokens of international protocol courtesy become routinely reinvented as objects of foreign admiration and diplomatic tribute, adding to the domestic prestige and political charisma of the country’s leaders. Above all, the gifts signify North Korea’s aspiring role as the leader of the postcolonial world, providing material evidence of the country’s respected place in the family of nations.
Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is a consistently careful and thoughtful analysis of a number of key indigenous concepts, essential for our understanding of contemporary processes in North Korea, such as sŏn’gun (“military-first”) and ch’ongdae (“barrel of a gun”). Kwon and Chung identify the sŏn’gun politics, inaugurated by Kim Jong Il in the wake of his father’s death in 1994, as another key element in the drama of charismatic succession. Chapter 3 carefully documents this retroactive “production of historicity” (88) by showing us how the renewed efforts since the mid-1990s to reanimate the myth of the partisan state (which, perhaps, could be more accurately rendered as a guerrilla state) have both enabled and validated the institutional transfer of charismatic authority between the three generations of the Kim dynasty, ensuring its unprecedented longevity. According to Kwon and Chung, the hereditary transfer of charismatic authority was made possible through being vested in a material relic—a gun—which had been handed down from father to son over several generations. In this manner, the legendary revolutionary gun becomes both a transcendental symbol and an actual vehicle for charisma, so that its legitimate owner can wield his charm while in possession of it.
In the book’s closing chapter on North Korea’s moral economy, the scholars discuss the inherent contradictions between the theatre state and the partisan state models operative in the North Korean political system, which were eventually made manifest by the dire economic crises of the mid-1990s, euphemistically referred to as the “Arduous March” in official parlance. The symptomatic failure of the government distribution system during the crisis to provide for the population’s economic needs, which led to a widespread famine, they argue, betrayed the nation’s foundational telos based on the paternalistic idea of a family state, effectively compromising the state’s political legitimacy. As the work’s title suggests, the authors harbour skepticism as regards the future of North Korea’s charismatic politics, which they so masterfully dissect in this study, calling upon Pyongyang to move beyond its narrow confines.
While North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics sets out by taking up an apparent challenge to the Weberian model, in the end, it concludes that an exception only proves the rule, arguing that even North Korea cannot much longer resist “the natural mortality of charismatic power” and escape its inevitable end (192). The authors seem to assume that charismatic authority has been the sole motor of North Korean political life and the real glue that has kept the nation together for the past half-century without giving much consideration to the thought that it may have actually existed alongside and been buttressed all this time by other forms of political authority, such as traditional and legal-bureaucratic. Unfortunately, the majority of primary sources on which the authors rely are mostly limited to the last decade, which makes it difficult to see through the self-devised smokescreen of charismatic politics installed by the North Korean state. If, however, postsocialist studies are any indication, there must be, at least, some legal-bureaucratic mechanism in place behind the dazzling façade of charismatic politics to be accounted for, on which the authors remain silent.
Dima Mironenko
Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
pp. 619-621