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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
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, people are now actively reshaping their communal ancestral rites into a more inclusive form, introducing demonstratively into the ritual domain the politically troubled memories of the dead, which were excluded from the public sphere under the state's militant anticommunist policies.
The research for this article is part of a more extensive research on the commemoration of the Korean War, supported by the Academy of Korean Studies research grant (AKS-2007-R20) and by the British Academy research development award (BARDA-48932).
[1] Yun, Taik-Lim (2003), Inlyuhakja_i gwagŏyŏhaeng: han ppalgaengi ma_l_i yŏksarŭl ch'atasŏ [An anthropologist's journey to the past: in search of history in a “red” village], Seoul: Yŏksabipyŏngsa, pp. 148-52.
[2] In this article the idea of “global cold war” is used deliberately, in distinction to that of the ‘cold war’. The term “cold war” refers to the prevailing condition of the world in the second half of the 20th century, divided as it was into two separate paths of political modernity and economic development. In a narrower sense it means the contest of power and will between the two dominant states, the United States and the Soviet Union, which (according to George Orwell, who coined the term in 1945) set out to rule the world between them under an undeclared state of war, being unable to conquer one another. In a wide definition, however, the global cold war also entails the unequal relations of power among the political communities, which pursued or were driven to pursue a specific path of progress within the binary structure of the global order. The cold war's former dimension of a contest of power has been an explicit and central element in cold war historiography; the more recent aspect of a relation of domination is a relatively marginal and implicit element. This duplicity of bipolar political history relates closely to the definitional problem inherent in the reference of the cold war, which contracts the violent experience of political bipolarity endured in many non-Western regions. Following Westad, I use the term “global cold war” as a reference that incorporates both of these two analytical dimensions. See Westad, Odd Arne (2005), The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] Despite South Korea's appearance of being a highly industrialized and urbanized modern society, as observers note, political relations actually have strong elements of a traditional agrarian society, where public life and political association rely heavily on existing solidary relations based on a common place of origin or lineage identity, including close interpersonal ties traced to common educational backgrounds. Traditional social identities continue to matter in Korean public culture, and this applies to the process of democratization. See Kim, Kwang-Ok (2000), “Jŏnt'ongjŏk ‘gwankye'ŭi hyŏndaejŏk silch’ŏn” [The contemporary practice of ‘traditional' relations], in Hankuk Munhwa Inlyuhak [Journal of Korean cultural anthropology], 33 (2), pp. 7-48.
[4] Park, Myong-Lim (1999), “Minjujuŭi, isŏng, gŭrigo yŏksayŏngu: Jeju 4.3gwa hankuk hy_ndaesa” [Democracy, rationality and historical research: the Jeju 4.3 incident and modern Korean history], in Jeju 4.3 je 50junyŏn Ginyŏmsaŏp Ch'ujin Bŏmkukminwiwŏnhoe [The National Committee for the 50th Anniversary of the Jeju 4.3 Incident] (eds), Jeju 4.3 Yŏnku [Jeju 4.3 studies] Seoul: Yŏksabipyŏngsa, pp. 425-60.
[5] Giddens, Anthony (1998), The Third Way: Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 90-93.
[6] Giddens, Anthony (1994), Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 13.
[7] Ibid., p. 14.
[8] Bobbio, Norberto (trans. Allan Cameron) (1996), Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 14.
[9] Cumings, Bruce (1991), Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century, Durham NC: Duke University Press, p. 51.
[10] Kim, Seong-Nae (1989), “Lamentations of the Dead: Historical Imagery of Violence,” Journal of Ritual Studies 3 (2), pp. 251-85.
[11] Kwon, Heonik (2004), “The Wealth of Han,” in M. Demeuldre (ed.), Sentiments douxamers dans les musiques du monde, Paris: L'Harmattan, pp. 47-55.
[12] Kim, Kwang-Ok (1994), “Rituals of Resistance: The Manipulation of Shamanism in Contemporary Korea,” in C. F. Keys, L. Kendall, and H. Hardacre (eds), Asian Visions of Authority: Religion of the Modern States of East and Southeast Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 195-221.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Cited from Bettelheim, Bruno (1985), Freud and Man's Soul: An Important Re-interpretation of Freudian Theory, London: Fontana Bettelheim, p. 61.
[15] Hyun, Gil-Eon (1990), Uridŭlŭi jobunim [Our grandfather], Seoul: Koryŏwŏn.
[16] See the activity of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea, available here, and also here.
[17] Interview with Mr. Kim Du-Yon in Jeju City, South Korea, January 2007.
[18] Kim Seong-Nae, “Lamentations of the Dead”; see also Janelli, Roger L. and Dawnhee Yim Janelli (1982), Ancestor Worship and Korean Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 151-67.
[19] The South Korean administration has recently begun to nominate some of these “leftist” anti-colonial activists and intellectuals as national heroes. The rewriting of Korea's history of independence movements or nationalist movements in a more inclusive form that recognizes the heritage of radical as well as moderate nationalist movements, which is quite active today among historians in South Korea, has had a positive influence on the development of local initiatives for political reconciliation, including those in Hagui.
[20] A full text of this poem in Korean is available online here.
[21] See Mazower, Mark (ed.) (2000), After the War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation, and State in Greece, 1943-1960, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press; Tai, Hue-Tam Ho (ed.) (2002), The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, Berkeley: University of California Press.
[22] Kwon, Heonik, (2006), After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 154-64.)
[23] See the Japan Focus article available here.
[24] Stern, Steve (2002), Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit, New York: Routledge, p. 140.
[25] Butler, Judith (2000), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 5.
[26] Giddens, The Third Way, pp. 70-71.
[27] Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, p. 5.
[28] Ibid., pp. 53-9, 252.
[29] Gaddis, John Lewis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
[30] LaFeber, Walter, “An End to Which Cold War?” in M. J. Hogan (ed.) The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 13-4.
[31] Ibid., 13.
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