Description

The political foundation of North Korea, like those of Vietnam and China, is based on moral legitimacy deriving from the historical experience of armed resistance against colonial domination. However, North Korea is distinct from other Asian revolutionary postcolonial states in that its revolutionary heritage, in postcolonial history, has been increasingly reduced to a handful of historical actors and, ultimately, radically personified. This lecture will reflect on North Korea’s distinct political history with reference to two relevant ideas in historical sociology: Clifford Geertz’s “paradigm of the exemplary centre” and Weberian notions of political power and authority with which Geertz’s symbolic approach to power engages. It will ask what lessons we can learn from Weber’s treatise on the nature and historicity of charismatic authority in trying to come to terms with North Korea’s established stateliness and its contemporary political process.

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Heonik Kwon is reader in anthropology at the London School of Economics and has conducted fieldwork in Russian Siberia, central Vietnam and, most recently, in Korea. He is the author of Ghosts of War in Vietnam, which received the inaugural George Kahin prize in 2009 from the Association for Asian Studies, and After the Massacre, winner of the first Clifford Geertz prize in 2007 from the American Anthropological Association. His new book, The Other Cold War, was published in 2010 by Columbia University Press. Currently, Heonik Kwon directs an international collaborative research project on the contemporary histories of the Korean War supported by the Academy of Korean Studies.