Heonik Kwon
Biographic Data
| ID | 3581006 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Heonik Kwon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Heonik |
| FAMILY NAME | Kwon |
| SIGNATURE | KWON H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 269 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Secrets and truths
How do anthropologists study epics? This forum intervention considers how large-scale events such as the Cold War can become subjects of ethnographic enquiry. Usually considered the domain of International Relations, History, and Politics, we argue that Cold War legacies are manifested in kinship relations, consumption practices, and embodied silences. Anthropologists can contribute to a much-needed scalar understanding of the Cold War across tem…
Earth Spirit of Central Vietnam
The idea that the earth is a spirited entity is found nearly universally across Southeast Asia. Vietnam is no exception. In the country’s central region, a shrine dedicated to the earth being is part of the premises of the communal ancestral house, facing the house of worship in the exterior. When people make offerings to this shrine as part of their ancestral rite, they interact with not only the powerful Earth God but also the myriad non-ancest…
Empty old graves of the Korean War Hill Fight
The Hill Fight of the Korean War constitutes an important chapter of the formative military conflict of the mid-twentieth century where the South Korean and other UN forces confronted the Chinese and North Korean forces. Currently, it has become a vital site of contested memory, especially in relation to the growing contest of power between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Describing South Korea's recent initiative of missing…
Sharing the Sacra: The Politics and Pragmatics of Intercommunal Relations around Holy Places
“Shared” sites, where members of distinct, or factionally opposed, religious communities interact—or fail to interact—is the focus of this volume. Chapters based on fieldwork from such diverse sites as India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, and Vietnam demonstrate how sharing and tolerance are both more complex and multifaceted than they are often recognized to be. By including both historical processes (the development of Chin…
Part Seven. Ethical Life: Encounters with History, Religion, and the Political
"Seeking Good Luck" in North Korea
Sinjŏm or spirit fortune-telling is now an intimate part of everyday life among many North Koreans. Extremely popular at the grassroots level, the rise of this traditional religious culture since the late 1990s, if properly understood, can provide an interesting looking glass into North Korea's society and politics in transition. This report is one small step to that end
Ghosts
The term “ghosts” is a valuable metaphor in historical scholarship, addressing the perceived vitality of past events in lived reality. Notable examples include the ghosts of the Cold War or the specter of Marx. These expressions belong to the specific genre of literary and historical studies referred to today as “hauntology.” In anthropology, the term has been an important descriptive category in the study of religion and morality. Here, ghosts s…
No Place for Neutrality: A Korean War Story
How do we imagine and actualize the space of neutrality in the radically bipolarizing environment of modern politics such as those that prevailed in the early Cold War? We can pursue this question in the context of the Non-Aligned Movement, or the politics of the Third World more broadly, the early initiative of which took shape at the Bandung Conference of 1955 and in the precarious time in Asia immediately after the Korean War. Alternatively, w…
Eingegangene Bücher
After the Korean War: An Intimate History
After the Korean War: An Intimate History
Following his prizewinning studies of the Vietnam War, renowned anthropologist Heonik Kwon presents this ground-breaking study of the Korean War's enduring legacies seen through the realm of intimate human experience. Kwon boldly reclaims kinship as a vital category in historical and political enquiry and probes the grey zone between the modern and the traditional (and between the civil and the social) in the lived reality of Korea's civil war an…
Anthropology and world peace
The pursuit of world peace has long been part of the telos of modern anthropology, although this may not be particularly obvious in the discipline's teaching on its history today. Taking Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a key text, this article reviews how anthropology rose to prominence (post-World War II) as a vital body of knowledge in the making of a durable international peace
After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai
Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life…
Ancestors
In anthropology, the term “ancestors” denotes those forebears from the past who are remembered and whose legacies the living consider as being constitutive of their identity. Several of the subdisciplines of anthropology, such as paleoanthropology and evolutionary biology, take the discovery of the realities of distant, prehistoric human ancestry as their core ethos
American Power in Korean Shamanism
The Korean War was a formative event in the making not only of Korea's contemporary political geography, but also of its religious landscape. This is the case with shamanism as well as other more institutionalized religions. Focusing on the originally northern-Korean Hwanghae shamanism tradition now based in Incheon, this paper examines how rituals of this tradition engage today with legacies of the 1950–1953 war. In Incheon, an important episode…
Return to animism
Tim Ingold’s extraordinary intellectual journey is far from over and continues along increasingly creative pathways. I have known him for over 25 years since I first discovered his work while compl
Les voisins invisibles: Fantômes cosmopolites dans un village vietnamien
Les fantômes de la guerre abondent dans les villages vietnamiens d'aujourd'hui. Les longues guerres que le pays a connues de 1945 à 1975 ont pris une dimension internationale et, de la même façon, les ruines qu'elles ont laissées parmi les vivants ont elles-mêmes un caractère transnational. Cet article explore l'art de vivre, au Vietnam, avec des identités historiquement spectrales et néanmoins culturellement bien réelles
The invisible neighbours: Cosmopolitan ghosts in a vietnamese village
I The residents of Cam Re, a seaside community south of Danang in central Vietnam, can tell many vivid stories about the village’s ghosts. Cam Re’s enterprising Taoist priest calls these ghosts his “invisible neighbours”. Although some of the stories about these invisible neighbours might come across as unsettling or even creepy, most typically sound much like any other mundane neighbourly gossip that the people in this small semi-fishing and sem…
North Korea now
What are the possibilities for rapprochement between North Korea and the US? In this guest editorial the author considers some of the issues at play
Revolution in the Afterlife
The idea of an afterlife is formative of modern social scientific enquiry into the normative fabrics of human sociality. The idea also indicates how societies come to terms with their destructive past. Focusing on the legacies of the Vietnam War, this essay explores how the historical experience of generalized loss and displacement can radically change the traditional conception of an afterlife
Anthropology through Levinas: Knowing the Uniqueness ofEgoand the Mystery of Otherness
An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a "culture." Hence, social science comes to terms with the "internal" nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch's and Evans-Pritchard's conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein's philosophy. For Wittgenstein, "the limits of my langu…
Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field
Spirits in the work of Durkheim, Hertz and Mauss: Reflections on post-war Vietnam
Scholars of the early French sociological school shared strong common intellectual interests, but they pursued these interests in both convergent and divergent perspectives. Focusing on the ideas of soul and spirit, this essay examines how Mauss and Hertz approached these ideas differently from Durkheim, leading to their distinct understandings of human solidarity and social inequality. It argues that the powerful legacies of these three formativ…
Legacies of the Korean War: Transforming ancestral rituals in South Korea
The radical bipolarization between the left and the right during the global Cold War was manifested in places such as postcolonial Korea in terms of civil strife and war, in which achieving national unity became equivalent to excising one or the other side from the body politic. In this context, the political history of right and left is not to be considered separately from the history of the human lives and social institutions torn apart by it. …
The Korean War and Sino-North Korean Friendship
The relationship between China and North Korea is a subject that attracts much discussion and speculation in today's policy circles and media. The history of Sino-North Korean friendship is typically traced to the time of the Korean War (1950-1953), although in North Korea it tends to go further back, to the colonial period. The texture of this international friendship has been changing recently. Some Chinese leaders state that China's friendship…
Ghosts of War in Vietnam: The Afterlife of the War
Heonik Kwon's "Ghosts of War in Vietnam: The Afterlife of the War" explores the enduring impact of the Vietnam War on Vietnamese society through the lens of popular beliefs and practices surrounding the wandering souls of the war dead. Kwon argues that these "ghosts of war" are not merely remnants of the past but active agents in shaping postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination. He examines the intimate ritual ties that many Vietna…
Anthropology through Levinas: Knowing the Uniqueness ofEgoand the Mystery of Otherness
An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a "culture." Hence, social science comes to terms with the "internal" nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch's and Evans-Pritchard's conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein's philosophy. For Wittgenstein, "the limits of my langu…
The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money
Offering money to gods, ancestors, and ghosts is an increasingly important part of everyday life in Vietnam. When it concerns the traces of a violent war, this custom is believed to help the spirits of the dead become liberated from their grievous histories. This article discusses the role of money in death commemoration, focusing on how money-offering takes on different meanings between gods and ancestors, on the one hand, and displaced, grievou…
The Saddle and the Sledge: Hunting as Comparative Narrative in Siberia and Beyond
Cet article explore la technologie de chasse dans l'economie des Orochon en Siberie orientale, dans laquelle la meme espece animale, le renne, est a la fois domestiquee et chassee comme proie. Je discute les moyens symboliques par lesquels les Orochon s'efforcent de bannir la violence predatoire de leur chasse en particulier, et plus generalement la mort de leur vie sociale. Je contraste cette chasse 'non-predatoire' a la conception de rapacite p…
Spirits in the work of Durkheim, Hertz and Mauss: Reflections on post-war Vietnam
Scholars of the early French sociological school shared strong common intellectual interests, but they pursued these interests in both convergent and divergent perspectives. Focusing on the ideas of soul and spirit, this essay examines how Mauss and Hertz approached these ideas differently from Durkheim, leading to their distinct understandings of human solidarity and social inequality. It argues that the powerful legacies of these three formativ…
The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism
Rethinking Traumas of War
L'esprit dans l'œuvre de Durkheim, Mauss et Hertz
Cet article compare la théorie maussienne du don comme moteur des solidarités humaines avec la conception durkheimienne centrée sur la transmission des ancêtres et celle de Hertz qui, au contraire, met l'emphase sur l'aspect créatif des interventions ponctuelles. L'attention est portée sur la manière dont chacun de ces membres fondateurs de l'École française de sociologie comprenait le rapport à l'« esprit », illustrée à travers l'exemple de la c…
Play the Bear: Myth and Ritual in East Siberia
Anthropology and world peace
The pursuit of world peace has long been part of the telos of modern anthropology, although this may not be particularly obvious in the discipline's teaching on its history today. Taking Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a key text, this article reviews how anthropology rose to prominence (post-World War II) as a vital body of knowledge in the making of a durable international peace
Return to animism
Tim Ingold’s extraordinary intellectual journey is far from over and continues along increasingly creative pathways. I have known him for over 25 years since I first discovered his work while compl
Les voisins invisibles: Fantômes cosmopolites dans un village vietnamien
Les fantômes de la guerre abondent dans les villages vietnamiens d'aujourd'hui. Les longues guerres que le pays a connues de 1945 à 1975 ont pris une dimension internationale et, de la même façon, les ruines qu'elles ont laissées parmi les vivants ont elles-mêmes un caractère transnational. Cet article explore l'art de vivre, au Vietnam, avec des identités historiquement spectrales et néanmoins culturellement bien réelles
Legacies of the Korean War: Transforming ancestral rituals in South Korea
The radical bipolarization between the left and the right during the global Cold War was manifested in places such as postcolonial Korea in terms of civil strife and war, in which achieving national unity became equivalent to excising one or the other side from the body politic. In this context, the political history of right and left is not to be considered separately from the history of the human lives and social institutions torn apart by it. …
The Saddle and the Sledge: Hunting as Comparative Narrative in Siberia and Beyond
Cet article explore la technologie de chasse dans l'economie des Orochon en Siberie orientale, dans laquelle la meme espece animale, le renne, est a la fois domestiquee et chassee comme proie. Je discute les moyens symboliques par lesquels les Orochon s'efforcent de bannir la violence predatoire de leur chasse en particulier, et plus generalement la mort de leur vie sociale. Je contraste cette chasse 'non-predatoire' a la conception de rapacite p…
Play the Bear: Myth and Ritual in East Siberia
After the MassacreCommemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai
Though a generation has passed since the massacre of civilians at My Lai, the legacy of this tragedy continues to reverberate throughout Vietnam and the rest of the world. This engrossing study considers how Vietnamese villagers in My Lai and Ha My—a village where South Korean troops committed an equally appalling, though less well-known, massacre of unarmed civilians—assimilate the catastrophe of these mass deaths into their everyday ritual life…
The dollarization of Vietnamese ghost money
Offering money to gods, ancestors, and ghosts is an increasingly important part of everyday life in Vietnam. When it concerns the traces of a violent war, this custom is believed to help the spirits of the dead become liberated from their grievous histories. This article discusses the role of money in death commemoration, focusing on how money-offering takes on different meanings between gods and ancestors, on the one hand, and displaced, grievou…
Anatomy of US and South Korean Massacres in the Vietnamese Year of the Monkey, 1968
What happened in My Lai in March 1968 is remembered in the outside world as one of the most tragic episodes of the Vietnam War. However this was not an isolated event and should be considered in relation to other similar incidents of mass civilian killings. This essay investigates the Vietnam War's history of village massacres, including those by US forces and South Korean forces, and how these catastrophic events are remembered in the affected c…
The Ghosts of War and the Spirit of Cosmopolitanism
Ghosts of War in Vietnam: The Afterlife of the War
Heonik Kwon's "Ghosts of War in Vietnam: The Afterlife of the War" explores the enduring impact of the Vietnam War on Vietnamese society through the lens of popular beliefs and practices surrounding the wandering souls of the war dead. Kwon argues that these "ghosts of war" are not merely remnants of the past but active agents in shaping postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination. He examines the intimate ritual ties that many Vietna…
The Ghosts of the American War in Vietnam
The spiritual remains of the unknown war dead take on a vital presence in popular Vietnamese religious culture and their everyday ritual life. They are also a powerful means of historical narration and reflection in contemporary Vietnam. This article introduces some of their vigorous actions and claims for social justice, and explores how we can make sense of their existence in the terms of sociology of religion
The Korean War Mass Graves
On a gentle hillside on Jeju, a communal graveyard has a unique name and history. Surrounded by the reed fields that abound on this beautiful island near the southern maritime border of Korea, the gravesite consists of a large stone-walled compound, where one hundred and thirty-two modest, well-tended grave mounds lie in neat lines, and a tall stone-made memorial stands in the middle of the compound. Visitors can easily recognize that it is no or…
Excavating the History of Collaboration
This article is a contribution to a symposium on collaboration in East Asia during the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath, which addresses some of the most fraught issues in historiography, historical remembrance, and contemporary politics. It also reflects on occupation states in Europe and postwar East Asia, while casting important light on contemporary issues of collaboration globally. How are we to assess occupation regimes that emerged in ea…
Healing the Wounds of War: New Ancestral Shrines in Korea
Since the decades of authoritarian anticommunist rule ended in the late 1980s, and the geopolitical order of the cold war collapsed in the wider world shortly thereafter, there have been several important changes in the political life of South Koreans. One notable change is found in the domain of ritual life or, more specifically, in the activity of death commemoration and ancestor worship. In increasing numbers of communities across South Korea,…
The Other Cold War
In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history. Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough …
Korean War Traumas
This is the first of two paired articles which view the U.S.-Korean War through the lens not of great power conflict, or even of civil war, but from the perspective of its impact on Korean society in countryside and city, and the continuing traumas that remain unresolved sixty years late. The second article is
L'esprit dans l'œuvre de Durkheim, Mauss et Hertz
Cet article compare la théorie maussienne du don comme moteur des solidarités humaines avec la conception durkheimienne centrée sur la transmission des ancêtres et celle de Hertz qui, au contraire, met l'emphase sur l'aspect créatif des interventions ponctuelles. L'attention est portée sur la manière dont chacun de ces membres fondateurs de l'École française de sociologie comprenait le rapport à l'« esprit », illustrée à travers l'exemple de la c…
North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics
This timely, pathbreaking study of North Korea’s political history and culture sheds invaluable light on the country’s unique leadership continuity and succession. Leading scholars Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung begin by tracing Kim Il Sung’s rise to power during the Cold War. They show how his successor, his eldest son, Kim Jong Il, sponsored the production of revolutionary art to unleash a public political culture that would consolidate Kim’s c…
Rethinking Traumas of War
North Korea's Partisan Family State
The decade after the Korean War (1950-1953) was a formative era for North Korea. Many of the striking features of the country's political and social system visible today took root during the postwar era, from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s.The era was, above all, a time of proud achievements for North Korea. Socialist politics are often referred to as substantive economic democracy based on the principle of egalitarian access to and distribution…
Legacies of the Korean War: Transforming ancestral rituals in South Korea
The radical bipolarization between the left and the right during the global Cold War was manifested in places such as postcolonial Korea in terms of civil strife and war, in which achieving national unity became equivalent to excising one or the other side from the body politic. In this context, the political history of right and left is not to be considered separately from the history of the human lives and social institutions torn apart by it. …
The Korean War and Sino-North Korean Friendship
The relationship between China and North Korea is a subject that attracts much discussion and speculation in today's policy circles and media. The history of Sino-North Korean friendship is typically traced to the time of the Korean War (1950-1953), although in North Korea it tends to go further back, to the colonial period. The texture of this international friendship has been changing recently. Some Chinese leaders state that China's friendship…
Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field
Spirits in the work of Durkheim, Hertz and Mauss: Reflections on post-war Vietnam
Scholars of the early French sociological school shared strong common intellectual interests, but they pursued these interests in both convergent and divergent perspectives. Focusing on the ideas of soul and spirit, this essay examines how Mauss and Hertz approached these ideas differently from Durkheim, leading to their distinct understandings of human solidarity and social inequality. It argues that the powerful legacies of these three formativ…
Anthropology through Levinas: Knowing the Uniqueness ofEgoand the Mystery of Otherness
An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a "culture." Hence, social science comes to terms with the "internal" nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch's and Evans-Pritchard's conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein's philosophy. For Wittgenstein, "the limits of my langu…
Revolution in the Afterlife
The idea of an afterlife is formative of modern social scientific enquiry into the normative fabrics of human sociality. The idea also indicates how societies come to terms with their destructive past. Focusing on the legacies of the Vietnam War, this essay explores how the historical experience of generalized loss and displacement can radically change the traditional conception of an afterlife
Ancestors
In anthropology, the term “ancestors” denotes those forebears from the past who are remembered and whose legacies the living consider as being constitutive of their identity. Several of the subdisciplines of anthropology, such as paleoanthropology and evolutionary biology, take the discovery of the realities of distant, prehistoric human ancestry as their core ethos
American Power in Korean Shamanism
The Korean War was a formative event in the making not only of Korea's contemporary political geography, but also of its religious landscape. This is the case with shamanism as well as other more institutionalized religions. Focusing on the originally northern-Korean Hwanghae shamanism tradition now based in Incheon, this paper examines how rituals of this tradition engage today with legacies of the 1950–1953 war. In Incheon, an important episode…
History (30 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies (21 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Korean Peninsula Historical and Political Studies (11 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Art (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works)