Korean Contemporary History Communicating through Death

This book is a revised and edited version of the author Manabe Yuko's 1995 Ph.D. dissertation. The methodologies adopted by this book pioneer a perspective that merges cultural anthropology and sociology – more precisely, an integrative perspective that maximizes sociological implications based on anthropological thinking on how “martyrs” are socially constructed in the Korean people's movement. As the subtitle Dynamics of Han in Korean People's Movement shows, the book addresses serious questions and answers regarding the deep dynamics and prospects of Korea's democratization, which was triggered by a historical event involving the death of a worker. This book does not stop merely at chronologically recording the history of deaths or at analyzing them as one-off events. Rather, through the keywords of “martyr” and “dynamics of han 恨”, it seeks to investigate the mechanisms behind the social transposition of deaths and the socio-political dynamics that underlie the history of the Korean people's movement. How was this dynamic process constructed?

Social Construction of “Martyrs” and the Root Paradigm

The book has two parts. The major theme of Part 1 is “The Birth of ‘Martyrs’ and the Process of Their Creation”, while Part 2 analyzes the process of how “Bereaved Families of ‘Martyrs’” become involved in social movements. Firstly, Part 1 reconstructs the competing interpretations of the social implications surrounding the 1970 self-immolation of Jeon Tae-Il, a tailor working in Seoul's Dongdaemun Pyeonghwa Market. According to the author, it is impossible for Durkheim's hypotheses to capture Jeon's suicide. Not only is this because he set himself on fire, which was rather rare in Korean traditional society, but also because his suicide could be characterized as “suicide as a form of protest” or “suicide as communication”. This is why the narrower perspective of it being a “symbolic interaction” converges with the broader perspective of it being a “social drama”.Footnote ¹ From such a theoretical perspective, Part 1 aims to track the process of the martyr model being formed, through which the death of Jeon Tae-Il merges into the category of “martyrs” and made into a social myth.

What is characteristic in Manabe's analysis of how martyrs are created is the whirlpool of the three axes of representations surrounding Jeon's death. The three representations are “Jeon Tae-Il as written by Jeon Tae-Il” as can be seen in his diary, “Jeon Tae-Il described by Lee So-Sun”, Jeon's mother, and “Jeon Tae-Il as portrayed by Cho Young-Rae”, an intellectual well-known as the author of A Critical Biography of Jeon Tae-Il (Cho Yeong-Rae, Jeon Tae-Il Pyeongjeon). Through such cross-analysis, Manabe details the process of ideologies being bestowed upon the dead by three major actors – namely, the subject of death himself, the bereaved family member and an intellectual – and the emergent process of mutual solidarities. During this emergent process, Jeon's death is “made” into a form of a martyr model. The author captures this process as one of creating a “social drama” traversing “stigmatization → self-stigmatization → charismatization”. In short, Jeon's death was not naturally given as the death of a “martyr” from the beginning. Rather, under the intervention of various social actors, a social death led to the creation of a new meaning as a “martyr”, and such creation of meanings became the mold for forming later martyrs who repeatedly appeared in the Korean people's movement of the 1980s.

The author goes on to try to extract the “root paradigm unique to Korean society” from the process of martyrs being formed up to the 1980s. It is necessary to highlight, at this point, the emergence and mechanisms of the communitas or the “social anti-structure” as conceptualized by V. Turner. After the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement and the publication of A Critical Biography of Jeon Tae-Il, the number of suicides as a form of protest abruptly increased after 1986, showing the existence of a communication device of “public circumstance” that accepts and publicly uses the death of martyrs. A value of righteousness was then endowed onto this communication device, thereby reproducing solidarity between the dead and the alive. By traversing this kind of analysis into the process of counter-socialization, she carefully elaborates how the “social anti-structure” that counteracts the dominant political order is formed – in other word, the emerging process of the “society against the state” – to use the phrase in my title.

Interaction between Bereaved Families and Society: Formation of Families against the State

Set against this historical background, the core idea of Part 2 involves the pattern through which bereaved families of martyrs and society interact with one another. The birth of an institutionalized body called the “Association of Bereaved Families of National Democratic Fighters” on August 12, 1986, headed by Lee So-Sun, demonstrated the significance of “bereaved families” as a sub-group within Korea's political society. As families mourn, it is possible to find clear patterns of “consciousness-raising of han” centering on the “world of martyrs”. Put simply, for Korean activists the struggle for democracy could be understood as a process of “socializing the legacy of the dead” that took place socially on a broader scale – on the field of solidarity between the living and the dead. This process presupposes the “legacy of the dead” as a real entity, and then converts its succession into a social activity aiming for something. During this process, the “Association of Bereaved Families of National Democratic Fighters” has bonded together as a pseudo-kinship group. It is within such a context that the concept of “dynamics of han” is able to explain how a unique form of solidarity emerges centered around the martyrs’ families, or how the mechanisms behind “families against the state” – to use my own expression – are formed.

If I, as a researcher of bereaved families and trauma, were to make links to my own field of interest, then “han” can be understood as a typical form of trauma, buried in the form of bitterness inside the minds of Koreans. This book is notable in the sense that it newly contextualizes the “dynamics of han” as a form of dynamics of trauma or resistant traumatism that cuts across the history of the Korean people's movement. Such analysis has the non-depleting explanatory and expansive abilities to elucidate the dynamics of modern transitional justice experienced by an authoritarian state transitioning to a democratic one. Against this backdrop, I proposed looking at “bereaved families” as a group of people who cannot be reduced to the dichotomy of “expanded family vs. nuclear family” based on the experience of modernization in the West, but as a form of existence of families placed deep within the Korean political culture. In short, the dynamics of actions taken by bereaved families, linked to political democratization, can be understood as a form of a “counter intimate sphere” or “intimate public sphere”, which has the political potential to restructure the existing social order.Footnote ²

After “Dynamics of Han”

First and foremost, this book is quite meaningful in the sense that, using the keyword of “dynamics of han”, it focuses on the socio-political dynamics that penetrate the Korean pro-democracy movement and thereby does not bind “martyrs” to a particular historical event, but rather looks into the mechanisms of social formation that reproduce the vicissitudes of Korea's division and contemporary history. In other words, the title of the book, The Birth of Martyrs, accurately points to the transformations in Korean civil society and the dynamics of counter-solidarities being created “after” Jeon Tae-Il and “after” the Gwangju Democratization Movement.

This point makes me look forward to the author's next work. However as a researcher of Durkheim, I must comment on one point. The dynamics of han, while transforming the social anti-structure formed from the solidarity between the dead and the alive, i.e., religious ethos or traditional values and going through a certain ritualistic process to create sacredness (作聖), could have been emphasized even further by relying on theoretical resources from Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) rather than Suicide (1897), which comprises one step in the author's reconstruction. This is because when a state, for a long time, acts not as the guardian of social contract but as the perpetrator of violence – “forced division of labor” according to Durkheim – then the explanation on how society maintains and transforms itself can act as a clue to understanding Korea's unique form of a defiant civil society. In this regard, Durkheim's insight that pre-contractual solidarity, in other words, a community based on beliefs and emotions, can bond society is, in fact, precisely in line with, and not in contradiction to, the main arguments of this book.

Also, I cannot help but be in awe of the author's insight in terms of how she proposes, all the while resonating with Durkheim, that the dynamics of emotion in the course of bitterness transitioning to han be viewed as a form of “historical consciousness” that cuts across the history of the Korean people's movement. (According to the author, bitterness is individual grief whereas han is collective grief.) It is possible to see, at this juncture, the deep contemplation and the hopeful visions of the author who adheres to the concept of “dynamics of han” in order to be able to read the social dynamics of democratization in Korea, which cannot be fully captured by the concept of “trauma”, fraught with psychopathological implications. Such insight opens profound imagination for research on historical trauma, on the social emotional system, and even for collective work seeking a horizon of shared empathy in East Asia, all of which are newly emerging in today's Korean intellectual community. This is why the strenuous efforts of the author and the translator, who completed the Korean translation twenty years after the writing of the book, have not been in vain.