Legacies of the Korean War: Transforming ancestral rituals in South Korea

Introduction

According to the sociologist Anthony Giddens, the Cold War confrontation was not merely about different visions of ideal economic and political relations but also about separate ways of imagining the place of kinship in modern society, which he identifies as the “rightist” idealization of the traditional, patriarchal familial order versus the “leftist” view of the family as a microcosm of an undemocratic political order. In this light, Giddens argues that in the post-Cold War world, societies require a new model of family relations that goes beyond the old bifurcated view of family. The new model has to synthesize the imperative of moral solidarity with the freedom of individual choice, according to him, as a unity based on contractual commitment among individual members. Calling the model “new kinship” and “democratic family,” Giddens (1998) proposes that the new kinship will respect the norms of “equality, mutual respect, autonomy, decision-making through communication and freedom from violence” (pp. 90–93).

Giddens (1998: 89) writes about family relations at length in a work devoted to the political history of bipolar ideologies because he believes that families are a basic institution of civil society and that a strong civil society is central to successful social development beyond the legacy of left and right oppositions. Giddens’ “third way” agenda is based on the notion that new sociological thinking is necessary after the end of the Cold War. According to Giddens, political development after the Cold War depends on how societies creatively inherit positive elements from both the right and left ideological legacies. Its main constituents will be “states without enemies” (as opposed to the old states organized along the frontline of bipolar enmity), “cosmopolitan nations” (as opposed to the old nations pursuing nationalism), a “mixed economy” (between capitalism and socialism), and “active civil societies.” At the core of this creative process of grafting, Giddens (1994) argues, are the “post-traditional” conditions of individual and collective life, an understanding that requires transcending the traditional sociological reasoning that sets individual freedom and communal solidarity as contrary values (p. 13). The “post-traditional” society, according to Giddens, is expressed most prominently in the social life of what he calls the “democratic family.”

This is a stimulating discussion that has considerable relevance for the subject to be discussed in this essay. One issue stands out as having particular significance, and this is the recognition that it is meaningful to consider a large, apparently global political form such as the Cold War and its changing ramifications through a look at the intimate, small-scale milieu of human lives such as family relations. Violent bipolar politics, such as Korea’s civil war crisis, penetrated deeply into the fabric of communal life and also brought communal relations into a powerful tool for the creation of an ideologically pure, cohesive political society. This means, logically, that the understanding of how global bipolar politics actually shaped human lives remains critically incomplete without grasping how communities experienced the extreme ideological bifurcation in the twentieth century and how today they strive to attend to the ruins and wounds left by this turbulent history.

However, the problem is that Giddens’ idea about the post-Cold War social order, although suggestive in some ways, is based on a parochial understanding of the global conflict, exclusively addressing the specific historical context of Western Europe. In his accounts, the correlative positions of “left and right” appear mainly as debating different visions of modernity and schemes of social ordering. According to the Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio (1996), “left and right” are like two sides of a coin, in which “[the] existence of one presupposes the existence of the other, the only way to invalidate the adversary is to invalidate oneself” (p. 14). This privileged experience of left and right oppositions as both being integral parts of the body politics, however, does not extend to the broader historical realities of the global Cold War, in which taking the position of one side meant denying the opposite side a raison-d’être or physically annihilating its existence from the political arena.

In the situation of an ideologically charged armed conflict or systemic state violence, “left or right” might not be merely about antithetical political distinction but rather a question that has direct relevance for the preservation of human life and the protection of basic civil and human rights. Against this historical background of the Cold War experienced as a “balance of terror” rather than as a balance of power, family, or kinship, relations may therefore take on a relevance in the general social transition from the bipolar order that is different than how Giddens discusses the issue.

Jeju Island

In April 2004, many places on Jeju Island on Korea’s southern maritime border were bustling with people in preparation for their annual commemoration of the April 3 incident—a communist-led uprising triggered on 3 April 1948, to protest against both the measures taken by the United States’ occupying forces to root out radical nationalist forces from postcolonial Korea and the policies of the US administration to establish an independent anticommunist state in the southern half of the Korean peninsula. The commemoration also refers to the numerous atrocities of civilian killings that devastated the island following the uprising, caused by brutal counterinsurgency military campaigns and the counteractions by communist partisans. The violent period was, in many ways, a prelude to the Korean War (1950–1953).

The April 3 incident has only recently become a publicly acknowledged historical reality among the islanders, in contrast to the past decades during which the subject remained strictly taboo in public discourse (Gwon, 2006). The situation changed at the beginning of the 1990s, and nowadays, the islanders are free to hold death-anniversary rites for their relatives who were killed or who disappeared in the chaos of 1948. Every April, the whole island briefly turns into one gigantic ritual community consisting of thousands of separate but simultaneous family- or community-based death commemoration events.

During the month of April, it is now a familiar experience for visitors to the island to find themselves inadvertently party to a ritual occasion that the anthropologist Kim Seong-nae (1989) calls “the lamentations of the dead.” Presided over by local ritual specialists, these occasions invite the spirits of the tragic dead, offer food and money to them, and later enact the clearing of obstacles from their path to the netherworld. A key element in this long and complex ritual procedure is the occasion when the ritual specialists’ speeches and songs relate the grievous feelings and unfulfilled wishes of the invited spirits of the dead.

In a family-based performance, the lamentations of the dead typically begin with tearful narration of the moments of death, the horrors of violence, and the expression of indignation against the unjust killing. Later, the ritual performance moves on to the stage where the spirits, exhausted with lamentation and somewhat calmed down, engage with the surroundings and the participants. They express gratitude to their family for caring about their grievous feelings, and this is often accompanied by magical speculations about the family’s health matters or financial prospects. When the spirits of the dead start to express concerns about their living family, this is understood to mean that they have become free from the grid of sorrows, which the Koreans express as a successful “disentanglement of grievous feelings” (Kwon, 2004).

In a ritual on a wider scale that involves participants beyond the family circle, the lamentations may include the spirits’ confused remarks about how they should relate to the strangers gathered for the occasion, which later typically develop into remarks of appreciation and gratitude. The spirits thank the participants for their demonstration of sympathy for the suffering of the dead, who have no blood ties to them and to whom, therefore, the participants have no ritual obligations. Moreover, if the occasion is sponsored by an organization that has a particular moral or political objective, some of the invited spirits may proceed to make gestures of support for that organization. Thus, the spirit narration from the victims of a massacre may explicitly invoke concepts such as human rights if the ceremony is sponsored by a civil-rights activist group, and other modern idioms such as gender equality if the occasion is supported by a network of feminist activists. In this way, the lamentations of the dead closely engage with the diverse aspirations of the living.

Several astute observers of Korea’s modern history have noted that South Korea’s recent democratic transition, and the forceful popular political mobilization since the late 1980s that enabled this transition, is not to be considered separate from the esthetical power of ritualized lamentations (Kim, 1994). During the 1990s, South Korea’s civil-rights activist groups actively disseminated the voices of the victims of state violence as a way of mobilizing public awareness and support for their cause, and they employed forms of popular shamanic mortuary processions to materialize the dead victims’ messages. The lamentations of the dead have been, according to Kim Kwang-Ok (1994), a principal esthetical instrument in Korea’s “rituals of resistance.” The voices of the dead are considered both as evidence of political violence and as an appeal for collective actions for justice. Political activism in South Korea has been so intimately tied to the ritual esthetics of lamenting spirits of the dead that even an academic forum might include the esthetical form. The annual assembly of Korean anthropologists chose the cultural legacy of the Korean War as the conference’s main theme in 1999, and that conference included a grand shamanic spirit consolation rite dedicated to all the spirits of the tragic dead from the war era.

The lamentations of the dead constitute an important aesthetic form in Korea’s culture of political protest, and this aspect should be weighed against the nation’s particular historical background, most notably, its experience of the Cold War in the form of violent civil war and the related political history of anticommunism. The proliferation of spirit narrations of violent wartime death in the present time relates to the repression of the history of mass death in the past decades. The rich literary tradition of Jeju testifies to this intimate relationship between the grievance-expressing spirits of the dead and the inability of the living to account for their memories.

One such literary expression, for instance, is Hyun Gil-eon’s (1990) short story Our Grandfather, which deals with a village drama caused by a domestic crisis when a family’s dying grandfather is briefly possessed by the spirit of his dead son. The possessed grandfather suddenly recovers his physical strength and visits an old friend (of the son) in the village. During the April 3 incident, the villager had taken part in accusing the son of expressing communist sympathies; these accusations had resulted in his summary execution at the hands of counterinsurgency forces. The grandfather demands that the friend publicly apologize for his wrongful accusation. The villager refuses to do so and instead, gathered other people in the village to help in his plot to lynch the accuser. The return of the dead in this magical drama highlights the villagers’ complicity in the unjust death of the son and the long imposition of silence about past grievances. The story’s climax comes when the son’s ghost realizes the futility of his actions and turns silent, at which moment the family’s grandfather passes away.

Just as the silence of the dead was a prime motif in Jeju’s literature of resistance under the anticommunist political regimes, their publicly staged lamentations are now a principal element in the island’s cultural activity after the democratic transition. Between the past and the present, a radical change has taken place in that the living are no longer obliged to turn a deaf ear to what the dead have to say about history and historical justice. What has not changed over time, however, is that the understanding of political reality at the grassroots level is expressed through the communicability of historical experience between the living and the dead.

Since the end of the 1980s, the rituals displaying the lamenting spirits of the dead have become public events in Jeju, and in the 1990s, these rituals were used as part of the forceful nationwide civil activism. In Jeju, activism focused on morally rehabilitating the casualties of the April 3 incident as innocent civilian victims, replacing their previous classification as communist insurgents. The rehabilitative initiatives have since spread to other parts of the country, and in 2000, they resulted in legislation of a special parliamentary inquiry into the April 3 incident. This step was followed in May 2005 by legislation for an investigation of incidents of civilian massacres in general during the Korean War. This legislation included an investigation of the roundup and summary execution of alleged communist sympathizers in the early days of the Korean War, which involved an estimated 200,000–300,000 civilians.

In subsequent years, these initiatives led to forensic excavations on a national scale to uncover suspected sites of mass burial; in 2008, a memorial park (Jeju Peace Park, see later in the article) was also completed in Jeju. These dark chapters in modern Korean history were relegated to nonhistory during the previous authoritarian regimes under military rule, which made anticommunism one of the state’s primary guidelines. By contrast, since the early 1990s, the previously hidden histories of mass death have become one of the most heated and contested issues of public debate. In fact, their emergence into public discourse is regarded by observers as a key feature of Korea’s political democratization. Jeju Province provided an excellent example of this development when it initiated an institutional basis for sustained documentation of the victims of the April 3 atrocities. Throughout the province, there are memorial events, and the island continues to excavate suspected mass burial sites, with plans to preserve these sites as historical monuments. The provincial authority also hopes to develop these activities so as to promote the province’s public image as “an island of peace and human rights.”

The achievements of the Jeju islanders were made possible by their sustained community-based grassroots mobilization, activated through networks of nongovernmental organizations and civil-rights associations, including the association of the victims’ families. For those active in the family association, the early 1990s was a time of sea change. Before 1990, the association was officially called the Anti-Communist Association of Families of the Jeju April 3 Incident Victims and, as such, it was dominated by families related to a particular category of victims—local civil servants and paramilitary personnel killed by the communist militia. By current estimation, this category of victims amounts to 10%–20% of the total civilian casualties. The rest—the victims of government troops, police forces, or paramilitary groups—were previously classified as communist subversives or “red elements.” Since 1990, the association has gradually been taken over by the families of the majority, relegating the relatives of victims killed by insurgents to minority status within the association. This was “a quiet revolution,” according to a senior member of the association, the result of a long, heated negotiation between different groups of family representatives.

During the transition from a nominally anticommunist organization, the association faced several crises: some family representatives with anticommunist backgrounds left the association, and some new representatives with different backgrounds refused to sit with the former representatives. Conflicts continue to exist, not only within the provincial association but also at the village level. Nevertheless, the association’s resolute determination to account for all atrocities from all sides, communist or anticommunist, has been conducive to preventing the conflicts from reaching an explosive level. Equally important was the fact that many family representatives (particularly from the villages in the mountain region, which suffered both from the pacification activity of the government troops and from the retributive actions from communist partisans) suffered casualties on both sides of the conflict within their immediate circle of relatives. The democratization of the family association was a liberating experience for the families on the majority side, including those who were members before the change. Under the old scheme, some of the victims of the state’s anticommunist terror were registered as victims of the terror perpetrated by communist insurgents. This listing was in part a survival strategy by the victims’ families and in part caused by the prevailing notion that the “red hunt” would not have happened had there been no “red menace.” The “quiet revolution” of the 1990s meant that these families are now free to publicly grieve for their dead relatives of 1948 without falsifying the history of the mass death.

New ancestral stones

This development has affected the islanders’ ritual commemorative activities. Many communities have recently begun to introduce previously outlawed “red” ancestral identities into their communal ancestral rituals, thereby placing their memorabilia in demonstrative coexistence with the tablets of other “ordinary” ancestors, including the memorabilia of patriotic “anticommunist” ancestors. This process has resulted in the rise of diverse, highly inventive new communal ancestral shrines across communities in Jeju and elsewhere in South Korea since the end of the 1990s, erected with the specific purpose of community repair.

In February 2008, The New York Times reported a story from a village in the southwestern region of Korea, under the heading “A Korean village torn apart from within mends itself” (Choe, 2008). The residents of this village have recently taken a decisive initiative to come to terms with the wounds of the Korean War, partly through a community-wide project to erect a village ancestral memorial.

This village, named Kurim (“the forest of pigeons”) after an ancient legend, is famous in the area for the conservation of traditional houses and for the production of traditional earthenware. Maintaining a typical traditional village structure comprising a few lineage-based kindred groups, Kurim’s elderly residents hold bitter memories of the war. Situated at the mouth of a rugged mountain area, the village was vulnerable, even before the Korean War broke out, to the reciprocal violence from the communist partisans, who had taken shelter in the mountains, and from the counterinsurgency actions by the national police. This precarious situation resulted in incidents of vengeful violence within the village, between some individuals and households who suffered from the communist partisans and those who lost relatives to the counterinsurgency actions. When the village was swept into the changing hands of military occupation during the initial phase of the Korean War, the violence magnified in intensity and its brutality was radicalized, as it began to involve the armed power of the occupying forces.

The Kurim villagers speak proudly of their long-held tradition of daedong’gye (a type of village assembly), which in the past worked as an informal local governing body. Consisting of representatives of the community’s six major lineage groups, the village assembly recently prepared a book about the settlement’s past and present based on the local people’s vernacular knowledge of its history. The book includes the history of the village assembly over the last four centuries, the village’s folkloric tradition, and the turmoil it underwent during the colonial era and then during the war. The last depicts a community left helplessly exposed to the war’s violence. It includes several incidents of mass killing perpetrated both by the northern and southern forces, which also instigated vengeful violence among the locals. The publication of this book is part of broader efforts among the residents of this village, spearheaded by the multilineage village assembly, to come to terms with the destruction of war. The book’s prologue says,

Bringing this book into light, the people of Kurim are preparing other works in the hope of going beyond the wounds of modern history, which our nation as a whole had to undergo with great pains. Our objective is to console the souls of those who fell victim to the violence of war and to bring some comfort to the descendants of these tragic victims who had to conceal their sorrows during the past decades. We plan to erect a memorial stone that we hope will provide a means with which we forgive and reconcile with each other. It will be to our great satisfaction if this book can contribute to bringing about the spirit conducive to communal reconciliation and peace. (Kurimjipyŏnchanuiwŏnhoi, 2006: 7)

In addition to the village history book project, the Kurim village assembly is also discussing the idea of erecting a memorial stone for the village’s wartime victims. Many new ancestral shrines and memorials also arose recently on Jeju Island. Most notable among them is the large memorial site built at the center of the island, Jeju Peace Park. It was completed in 2010 and is intended to represent the history of the political violence the islanders underwent between 1948 and 1953 on a province-wide scale. The place consists of, among others, a state of the art museum complex; beautifully conceived memorial sculptures; and, above all, a large chamber that contains thousands of names of victims inscribed on stone tablets and arranged according to their village origins. The park attracts a large number of visitors from mainland Korea and overseas and, in April each year, holds a province-wide commemorative event in the presence of notable guests, the media, and the families of victims. Although the place is regarded as a public memorial complex dedicated to the victims of the April 3 incident, this is not necessarily the case for the islanders. At the annual commemorative gathering in April, when the place is packed with visitors and commemorators, a number of islanders bring their household utensils that are kept in their home exclusively for their ancestral death-day rites. For these families, whether the ceremony is held at home or in the public sphere, it is above all a rite for the living memory of their family ancestors. Consequently, for the bereaved families (unlike how it appears to outside visitors), the Jeju Peace Park is a shrine for ancestral memories rather than simply being a public monument.

Also remarkable is the local ancestral shrine in the village of Hagui, in the northern district of Jeju Island, which was completed in the beginning of 2003. The residents of this village are proud of their 1000-year-long history of settlement as well as several prominent historical relics existing in the environs of the village, particularly those relating to a historic resistance by their ancestors in the fifteenth century against the Mongol invasion. Close to the village are several well-preserved historic sites that, for the locals, speak of Hagui’s distinguished role as “a frontier defender of the island of Jeju against foreign invaders arriving from the northern sea” (Aewŏlŭp, 1997: 167). In contrast to these numerous monumental sites for an old war, there is a relative lack of memorials for the Korean War in Hagui, unlike some other places on the island. Elsewhere in Jeju, village spaces are usually dotted with small, widely scattered memorial stones dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers of the Korean War from the village. The Jeju youth provided a crucial labor force to the South Korean Marine Corps during the Korean War, which played a formative role in the war’s key battle in the Inchon landing. However, there is very little trace of this history in Hagui, which the villagers explain by saying that there were few adult men left in Hagui who could join the Korean War by the time it broke out—so many of them had already fallen during the earlier April 3 crisis. However, Hagui does have a prominent war memorial that other Jeju villages do not. This neogothic memorial, called the Memorial for Patriotic Spirits, is located at the center of a well-landscaped park cemetery, which, tucked away from the village houses, contains the graves of 131 fallen soldiers and combat police from the time of the April 3 crisis. The graves include a number of fighters from “civil organizations”—referring to the paramilitary anticommunist youth groups, which were active in the April 3 counterinsurgency war.

The new ancestral shrine in Hagui arose out of the village’s particular material landscape of war commemoration, that is, the presence of a prominent memorial dedicated to the combatants of the April 3 counterinsurgency campaign, and the absence of memorials for the villagers’ sacrifice to the Korean War. These two elements were closely interconnected, as mentioned earlier, as the village had been hit so hard by the government’s counterinsurgency anticommunist violence waged on the island that it had few men to send to the country’s general armed struggle against communism by the time the Korean War broke out.

The communal ancestral shrine in Hagui consists of a white vertical stone located at the center, on each side of which lie two horizontal stones made of black granite. The white stone is inscribed, in Chinese characters, “Shrine of spirit consolation.” The two black stones on the left commemorate the patriotic ancestors from the colonial era; the patriotic fighters from the village during the Korean War; and, later, from the military expedition to the Vietnam War. The two black stones on the right side commemorate the hundreds of villagers who fell victim to the protracted anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns waged in Jeju before and during the Korean War.

A complex history underlies the completion of this ancestral shrine. As the villagers now understand, the division of the village into two separate administrative units in the 1920s was a divide-and-rule strategy of the Japanese colonial administration, and this division was further exacerbated during the chaos following the April 3 uprising. Hagui elders recall that the village’s enforced administrative division developed into a perilous, painful situation at the height of the military campaigns of the counterinsurgency. The logic of these campaigns set people in one part of the village, labeled then as a “red” hamlet, against those in the other, who then tried to dissociate themselves from the former. After these campaigns, Hagui was considered a politically impure, subversive place in Jeju (just as the whole island of Jeju was known as a “red” island to mainland South Koreans). Villagers seeking employment outside Hagui experienced discrimination because of their place of origin, and this attitude aggravated the existing grievances between the two administratively separate residential clusters. People of one side felt it was unjust that they were blamed for what they believed the other side of the village was responsible, and the latter found it hard to accept that they should endure accusations and discrimination even within a close community. Just after the end of the Korean War in 1953, a group of Hagui villagers petitioned the local court to give new, separate names to the two village units. Their intention was partly to bury the stigmatizing name of Hagui and partly to eradicate signs of affinity between the two units. Since that time, official documents divide the village of Hagui into Dong-gui and Gui-il, two invented names that no one liked but which were, nevertheless, necessary.

The historical trajectory resulted in a host of problems and conflicts in the villagers’ everyday lives. Not only did a number of them suffer from the extrajudicial system of collective responsibility, which prevented individuals with an allegedly politically impure family and genealogical background from taking employment in the public sector and from enjoying social mobility in general, but some of them also had to endure sharing the village’s communal space with someone who was, in their view, to blame for their predicament. The community still reacts to the enduring wounds of April 3; these feelings are caused by the villagers’ complex experience with the government’s counterinsurgency actions and the retributive violence perpetrated by the insurgents. These included, as the story of Our Grandfather illustrates, coercion to accuse neighbors of supporting the enemy side. These hidden histories are occasionally pried open to become an explosive issue in the community, as when, for instance, two young lovers protest against their families’ and the village elders’ fierce opposition to their relationship, without giving them any intelligible reason for this opposition.

The details of these intimate histories of the April 3 violence and their contemporary traces remain a taboo subject in Hagui. The most frequently recalled and excitedly recited episodes are, instead, relegated to festive occasions. Some time before the villagers began to discuss the idea of a communal shrine, the two units of Hagui joined in a periodic intervillage sporting event and feast, organized by the district authority. Although this event had taken place on many previous occasions, at this particular occasion, the football teams of Dong-gui and Gui-il both managed to reach the semifinal, each hoping to win the championship. During the competition, the residents of Dong-gui cheered against the team representing Gui-il, supporting the team’s opponent from another village instead; the residents of Gui-il responded in the same way during the match involving the team from Dong-gui. This experience was scandalous, according to the Hagui elders I spoke to; they contrasted the divisive situation of the village with an opposite initiative taking place in the wider world. (At the time of the intervillage feast, the idea of joint national representation in international sporting events was under discussion between South and North Korea.) The village’s shameful collective representation on the district football ground provided the momentum for the elders to consider a communal project that would help to reunite the community of Hagui.

In 1990, the village assemblies of Dong-gui and Gui-il each agreed to revive the original common name and to shake off their four-decade-long separation. They established an informal committee responsible for the rapprochement and reintegration of the two villages. In 2000, this Committee for Village Development proposed to the village assemblies the idea of erecting a new ancestral shrine, funded by contributions from the villagers and from former residents. The idea attracted broad support from the villagers, including those who had only recently settled there. It also received strong endorsement from the village elders’ associations; among the most enthusiastic supporters was the elder who had joined the partisan group as a boy and whose older brother had been killed by the insurgents. The donations to the project came from many elderly widows who had lost their husbands to the counterinsurgency during the April 3 chaos, as well as from a successful businessman settled in Seoul, the eldest son of a villager killed by the insurgents. When the shrine was completed in 2003, the Hagui villagers held a grand opening ceremony in the presence of many visitors from elsewhere in the country and from overseas (many people from Hagui live in Japan). The black memorial stones on the left (from the spectator’s perspective) are inscribed with the names of patriotic village ancestors, including 100 names from colonial times, dozens of patriotic soldiers from the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and a dozen villagers killed by communist partisans during the April 3 chaos. The 100 patriotic ancestors from the colonial era include a few whose dedication to the cause of national liberation was combined with a commitment to socialist or communist ideals. The merit of these so-called left-wing nationalists was not recognized before the 1990s. The 12 villagers killed by the insurgents belonged to the village’s civil-defense groups hastily organized by the counterinsurgency forces, most of whom were forcibly recruited and had not been equipped with firearms. Whether to place the names of these 12 individuals on the side of patriotic ancestors or on that of tragic mass death was one of the most complex and most contested questions during the 3-year preparation of the shrine. The two stones on the right, which commemorate 303 village victims of the anticommunist and the communist insurgents’ political terror during the April 3 incident, dedicate the following poetic message to the victims:

When we were still enjoying the happiness of being freed from colonial misery,

When we were yet unaware of the pains to be brought by the Korean War,

The dark clouds of history came to us, whose origin we still do not know after all these years.

Then, many lives, so many lives, were broken and their bodies were discarded to the mountains, the fields, and the sea.

Who can identify in this mass of broken lives a death that was not tragic?

Who can say in this mass of displaced souls some souls have more grievances than others?

What about those who could not even cry for the dead?

Who will console their hearts that suffered all those years only for one reason: that they belonged to the bodies who survived the destruction? …

For the past fifty years,

The dead and the living alike led an unnatural life as wandering souls, without a place to anchor.

Only today,

Being older than our fathers and more aged than our mothers,

We are gathered together in this very place.

Let the heavens deal with the question of fate.

Let history deal with its own portion of culpability.

Our intention is not to dig again into the troubled grave of pain.

It is only to fulfill the obligation of the living to offer a shovel of fine soil to the grave.

Our hope is that some day the bleeding wounds may start to heal and we may see some sign of new life …

Looking back, we see that we are all victims.

Looking back, we see that all of us must forgive each other.

In this spirit, we are all together in erecting this stone.

For the dead, may this stone help them finally close their eyes.

For us the living, may this stone help us finally to hold hands together.

Conclusion

The democratization of kinship relations is at the heart of political development beyond the polarities of left and right. The reason for this situation is not merely that family and kinship are elementary constituents of civil society as Giddens describes it but primarily that kinship has actually been a locus of radical, violent political conflicts in the past century. By extension, this means that social actions taking place in this intimate sphere of life are important for shaping and envisioning the horizon beyond the politics of the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War as the dominant geopolitical paradigm of the past century has enabled people to publicly recount their personal experience of bipolar conflict without fearing the consequences of doing so, and it has encouraged many scholars of Cold War history to turn their attention from diplomatic history to social history. These two interconnected developments constitute the emerging field of social and cultural histories of the Cold War. When examining societies that experienced the Cold War in the form of vicious civil war, recent research shows how the violently divisive historical experience continues to influence interpersonal relations and communal lives (Kwon, 2006; Mazower, 2000; Park, 2010). The reconciliation of ideologically bifurcated genealogical backgrounds or ancestral heritages (“red” communists vs anticommunist patriots or, in other contexts, revolutionary patriots vs anticommunist “counterrevolutionaries”) is a critical issue for individuals and for the political community. In these societies, kinship identity, broadly defined as inclusive of place-based ties, is a significant site of memory of past political conflicts; it can also be a locus of creative moral practices. The experience of the Cold War as a violent civil conflict resulted in a political crisis in the moral community of kinship. The consequent situation is one that Hegel characterizes as the collision between “the law of kinship,” which obliges the living to remember their dead kin, and “the law of the state,” which forbids citizens from commemorating those who died as enemies of the state (Stern, 2002: 140). The political crisis was basically a representational crisis in social memory, in which a large number of family-ancestral identities were relegated to the status that I have elsewhere called “political ghosts,” whose historical existence is felt in intimate social life but can nevertheless not be traced in public memory (Kwon, 2008).

Hegel explored the philosophical foundation of the modern state in part by posing ethical questions involved in the remembrance of the war dead, drawing upon the legend of Antigone from the Theban plays of Sophocles. Antigone was torn between the obligation to bury her brothers, killed in war, according to “the divine law” of kinship on one hand and, on the other, the reality of “the human law” of the state, which prohibited her from giving burial to enemies of the city-state. After burying her brother who had died as a hero of the city, she chose to do the same for another brother who had died as an enemy of the city. Since the latter act violated the edict of the city’s ruler, Antigone was condemned to death as punishment. Invoking this epic tragedy from ancient Greece, Hegel reasoned that the ethical foundation of the modern state is grounded in a dialectical resolution of the clashes between the law of the state and the law of kinship. Judith Butler (2000: 5) believes that the question pivots on the fate of human relatedness suspended between life and death and forced into the tortuous condition of having to choose between the norms of kinship and subjection to the state.

Antigone met her death because she chose family law over the state’s edict; many families in postwar South Korea survived by following the state’s imperative to sacrifice their right to grieve properly and seek consolation for the death of their kinsmen. The state’s repression of the right to grieve was conditioned by the wider politics of the Cold War. Emerging from colonial occupation only to find itself as one half of two hostile states, the new state of South Korea found its legitimacy partly in the performance of anticommunist containment. Its militant anticommunist policies included forging a pure ideological breed and denying impure traditional ties. In this context, sharing blood relations with an individual believed to harbor sympathy for the opposite side of the bipolar world meant being an enemy of the political community. Left or right was not only merely about bodies of ideas in dispute but also about determining the bodily existence of individuals and collectives. Equally, the process “beyond left and right” in this society must inevitably deal with corporeal identity. If someone has become an outlawed person by sharing blood ties with the state’s object of containment and exclusion, that person’s claim to the lawful status of citizen requires legitimization of that relationship. Thus, kinship emerges as a locus of the decomposing bipolar world in the world’s outposts and as a powerful force in the making of a tolerant, democratic society.

Giddens (1998) writes,

If there is a crisis of liberal democracy today, it is not, as half a century ago, because it is threatened by hostile rivals, but on the contrary because it has no rivals. With the passing of the bipolar era, most states have no clear-cut enemies. States facing dangers rather than enemies have to look for sources of legitimacy different from those in the past. (pp. 70–71)

He then proceeds to chart what he considers to be the new sources of state legitimacy; he highlights the political responsibility to foster an active civil society—that is, to further democratize democracy. In this light, Giddens paints the democratic family as the backbone of an active civil society after the Cold War. As a new social form, the democratic family is meant to structurally reconcile individual choice and social solidarity, and achieve a dialectical resolution between individual freedom and collective unity.

In Giddens’ scheme, the social form of kinship has no direct association with the oppositions of left and right. Its role for societal development beyond the Cold War is mediated by the state’s changing identity and the related reconfiguration of its relationship to civil society. The end of the Cold War, for Giddens, primarily affects the state, in the sense of losing the legitimacy of prioritizing external threats. The displacement of the state from the dualist geopolitical structure forces it to build alternative legitimacy in an active, constructive engagement with civil society. The challenge is to forge a constructive internal relationship with society in place of hostile external relationships with other states. The idea of the “democratic family” enters this picture as a constitutive element of civil society—that is, as an important site of post-Cold War state politics.

The composition of “new kinship” presented by Giddens, however, allows little space for kinship practices that arise from the background of a violent modern history such as Jeju’s. His account of right and left unfolds as if this political antithesis had principally been an issue of academic paradigms or parliamentary organizations, without mass human suffering and displacement. Giddens (1994) discusses social and political developments beyond left and right on the assumption that the end of the Cold War is coeval with the advance of globalization and that these two changes constitute what he sees as “the emergence of a post-traditional social order” (5). If the end of the Cold War is at the same time an age of globalization, as Giddens claims, and the vision of a third way speaks of the morality and politics of this age, it is puzzling why this vision, claiming to speak for the global age, draws narrowly on the particular history of the Cold War manifested as a contest and balance of power, ignoring the war’s radically diverse ramifications across different places. Moreover, Giddens blames Hegel for advancing a teleological concept of history, which he believes to have been sublimated in Cold War modernity (Giddens, 1994: 53–59, 252). From his history of left and right, it transpires that Hegelian historicism is one of the notable philosophic ills that nations and communities should be alert to in pursuing a progression away from the age of extremes toward a relationally cosmopolitan and structurally democratic political and social order. This essay argues to the contrary—that Hegelian political ethical questions are crucial for historical progression away from the age of violent bipolar politics.

The world did not experience the global Cold War identically, nor does it retain an identical memory of it. It is true that the period of the Cold War was a “long peace”—the idiom with which the historian John Lewis Gaddis (1987) characterizes the international environment in the second half of the twentieth century, partly in contrast to the war-torn era of the first half. Gaddis believes that the bipolar structure of the world order, despite the many anomalies and negative effects it generated, was a factor in containing an overt armed confrontation among industrial powers. As Walter LaFeber (1992: 13–14) notes, however, this view of the Cold War deals only with a half-truth of bipolar history. The view represents the dominant Western (as well as the Soviet) experience of the Cold War as an imaginary war, referring to the politics of competitive preparation for war in the hope of avoiding actual fighting, whereas identifying the second half of the twentieth century as an exceptionally long period of international peace would be hardly intelligible to much of the rest of the world. As LaFeber (1992: 13) points out, the Cold War era resulted in 40 million human casualties of war in different parts of the world. A crucial question for comparative history and for grasping the meaning of the global Cold War lies in finding a way to reconcile this exceptionally violent historical reality with the predominant Western perception of an exceptionally long peace. Seen in a wider context, therefore, we cannot think of the history of right and left without confronting the history of mass death. Right and left were both aspects of anticolonial nationalism, signaling different routes toward the ideal of national liberation and self-determination. In the ensuing bipolar era, this dichotomy was transformed into the ideology of civil strife and war, in which achieving national unity became equivalent to excluding one or the other side from the body politic. In this context, the political history of right and left should not be considered separately from the history of the human lives and social institutions torn by it nor should the “new kinship” after the Cold War be divorced from the memory of the dead ruins of this history. Family relations are important vectors in understanding the decomposition of the bipolar world not merely because these relations are an elementary constituent of civil society, as Giddens believes, but above all because during the Cold War they were actually a vital site of political control and ideological oppression. Seen against this historical background, it is misleading to define the state in the post-Cold War world merely as an entity without external enemies. Rather, we must think of the state, as Hegel did, as an entity that finds it necessary, after the state had condemned a significant part of society to an unlawful status, to deal with internal hostilities and with reconciliation with society. What has happened in Jeju since the early 1990s can be placed along this hopeful trajectory of reconciliation, and the recognition of the right to remember and console the dead has been a central element in this important social progress beyond left and right.