Peace under the Orange Tree: Civil War and the Amity of Kinship
Heonik Kwon
In 1952, Pablo Picasso completed another major work dedicated to the theme of war and
peace. Installed in the curved vaulting of the village chapel at Vallauris in southern France,
his War and Peace follows his oil-on-plywood Massacre in Korea (1951) and, of course, his
larger and far better-known Guernica (1937). Massacre in Korea shows a group of helpless
women and children on the left side of the composition. This group is confronted by a horde
of heavily armed robot-looking soldiers on the right side of the composition. In the space
between these two parts, a mass grave appears in the distance. His 1952 work consists of two
murals, one of which is titled War and the other Peace, which face each other in the vaulting.
Peace depicts a tightrope walker “as a symbol of the fragile nature of peace” as well as
“mothers and playing children, around the central figure of Pegasus, pulling a plough at the
bidding of a child, which is supposed to personify the fertile world of peace.” The mural also
shows a family, under an orange tree, “calmly and happily enjoying themselves in the
sunshine.”1 The communal effervescence and conviviality in Peace appear to be in dialog
with the lethal terror of Massacre—as if the lives lost in Massacre were summoned in Peace.
For the purpose of today’s talk, I would like you to focus on the family under the orange tree.
The family consists of a woman breastfeeding an infant and a man tending the hearth and
preparing a meal. Another man seems to be immersed in writing, and the woman is reading a
book while breastfeeding. I ask how the peaceful domestic life portrayed in the Peace mural
could relate to the political concept of peace, that is, a peace that confronts the force of war.
Because the artworks were produced during the Korean War (1950–1953), one of the first
1 See http://www.vallauris-golfe-juan.fr/Picasso.html?lang=en
major military and political crises of the early Cold War, I will discuss the amity of kinship as
a political question in the same historical context, particularly in relation to the current South
Korean public’s interest in the history of civilian massacres during the conflict. The issue at
stake here has relevance not merely for understanding modern war experience but also for
thinking of the place of kinship in modern politics more generally. I will briefly touch upon
the latter issue at the end of this paper.
***
At the end of 1989, when the world was riveted by the powerful drama of the fall of the
Berlin Wall, the island of Jeju, at Korea’s southern maritime border with Japan, was
undergoing its own end drama of the Cold War. In Jeju, this drama took the form of breaking
down the wall of silence that had enveloped the islanders’ everyday lives for the previous
four decades. Notable in this respect was the appearance of the book Now We Speak Out, in
which twenty islanders testified to their experiences of the extreme violence in the period
from 1948 to 1953.
The April 3 Incident refers to the communist-led uprising on April 3, 1948 against the
United States military authority that then governed the southern half of postcolonial Korea,
which took the form of armed assaults against several police outposts. The “incident,”
however, also concerns the numerous atrocities and civilian killings that devastated the island
communities following the uprising, caused by the brutal counterinsurgency military
campaigns and in part by the counteractions of communist partisans.2 The United States
Military Government of Korea first led the counterinsurgency campaigns before the latter
handed over its power to the nascent postcolonial state of South Korea in August 1948. The
insurrection was specifically in protest to the United States Military Government’s policy of 2 Hun Joon Kim, The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty Years of Truth Seeking in South Korea
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
establishing a separate state in the southern half of Korea under its occupation. Soon after
their initial assaults against the police, the partisans were entrenched in the relatively
inaccessible mountainous areas at the center of the island, from where they spread their
influence to the hillside villages. In contrast, the counterinsurgency forces took control of the
communities in the lowlands and along the coast. The standoff between the mountain-based
partisan groups and the counterinsurgency troops that controlled the coastal areas continued
until the end of the Korean War in July 1953. It resulted in the loss of numerous lives and
great hardship especially for the villagers in the highlands who were punished by the forces
both above in the mountains and below in the coastal region.
In Now We Speak Out, the lead testimony is given by a simbang, the local word for a
specialist in shamanism, which is a strong tradition in Jeju:
Nearly every family keeps some grievous spirits of the tragic dead from the time of
the incident. If you listened to their stories, you would know that nearly all these
dead were innocent people. They were neither on that side nor on this side: these
people, caught between the two sides, were simply trying to escape a brutal fate.
Some escaped to the mountains to preserve their lives and never came back; others
met death while staying quietly at home. Each time I performed a kut [shamanic rite],
I heard these stories. In rituals for families who had people working for the police or
the government, you would hear more stories about people killed by the mountain
[partisan] side; in other homes, stories were mostly about the victims of the
government side. Many dead had no origin in this or that side. I heard from [the spirit
of] a man how his death had been caused by his relative by law. His relative had had
a grudge against him because of an old marriage dispute between the two families.3
3 Ijesa malhaemsuda (Now we speak out), (Seoul: Hanwool, 1989), pp. 21-22.
The appearance of these testimonies is regarded by the island’s intellectuals as the single
most important public event in recent decades and as an event that marked the end of the
island’s long-held silence about its experience of state terror. In Jeju, efforts to speak about
this forbidden subject in modern historical experience were made earlier and more forcefully
than in other parts of South Korea. Such efforts were a pioneering and exemplary local
initiative that encouraged many other similar public efforts to promote historical
accountability, which emerged elsewhere in Korea in subsequent years and continue today.
Hence, it is not an exaggeration to say that the public appearance of these stories marked a
decisive change in the socio-political order of South Korea in general as well as in the public
knowledge of the country’s past. Now We Speak Out introduces twenty important testimonies
to the violence that occurred on April 3, 1948, which was experienced in different localities
and by a variety of survivors, including secondary-school students in towns, village farmers,
prisoners, and member of the mountain partisan group. These testimonies provide rare
insights into the hitherto publicly unknown historical reality, and they comprise a view of the
era from diverse standpoints. The story told by the local village shaman is the opening
testimony in the collection, serving as the general introduction to the stories that follow.
The preeminence of shamanism in the act of historical testimony, as manifested in the
organization of Now We Speak Out, draws upon the islanders’ everyday lives during the Cold
War. The anthropologist Kim Seong-Nae conducted fieldwork in a seashore village on
northern Jeju at the end of the 1980s. Her research initially focused on gender issues in the
Jeju islanders’ religious lives, especially the significance of shamanism in the daily lives of
the island’s women. Shamanism is a form of religion that exists in parallel with the rituals of
ancestor worship, which also have an important place in the routines of the islanders’ family
and communal lives. Subsequently, however, after hearing some fragmented remarks about
the violence that took place between 1948 and 1953, Kim changed her research focus to
narratives of historical violence as they are told in shamanic rituals. Such remarks were rarely
encountered outside the context of the rituals held at that time, which led Kim to conclude
that in Jeju, shamanism is a distinct, powerful institution of historical memory.
Since the April 3 Incident, shamanism has continued to play a pivotal role in the
commemoration of the victims. During the month of April, visitors to the island often
accidentally encounter ritual occasions that are referred to as “the lamentations of the dead.”
Presided over by local specialists in shamanic rituals, these rituals are invitations to the spirits
of the tragic dead, offering them food and money before enacting the clearing of obstacles
from their pathways to the netherworld.4 A key element in this long and complex ritual
occurs when the invited spirits of the dead publicly express their grievous feelings and
unfulfilled wishes through the ritual specialist’s speeches and songs.
In the family-based performance, the lamentations of the dead typically begin with a
tearful narration of the moments of death, the horrors of violence, and expressions of
indignation against the unjust killing. Later, the ritual performance moves to a stage in which
the spirits, exhausted by lamentation and somewhat calm, engage with the surroundings and
the participants. They express gratitude to their family for caring about their grievous feelings,
which 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, it is understood to mean that they have become relatively free from the bonds of
sorrow, which the locals express as the successful “disentanglement of grievous feelings.”
On a wider scale, in a ritual that involves participants beyond the family circle, the
lamentations may include the spirits’ confused remarks about how they should relate to the
4 Seong-Nae Kim, "The Work of Memory: Ritual Laments of the Dead and Korea's Cheju Massacre," in Janice Boddy and Michael Lambek (eds.), A Companion to the Anthropology
of Religion (Oxford: Wiley, 2013), pp.223-238.
strangers gathered for the occasion. These lamentations later include expressions 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 make gestures of support for the organization. Thus, the spirit narration of the victims of
a massacre may explicitly invoke concepts such as human rights if the ceremony is sponsored
by a civil rights activist group or other modern issues such as gender equality if the occasion
is supported by a network of feminist activists. Hence, the lamentations of the dead closely
engage with the diverse aspirations of the living.
The lamentations of the dead constitute an important aesthetic form in Korea’s culture
of political protest, which should be considered in light of the nation’s particular historical
background. Most notable is its experience of the early Cold War in the form of a vicious
civil war and prolific political violence. Equally important in this background is the postwar
experience of anticommunism as part of the enduring Cold War politics, which has prevented
society from coming to terms with the truth of its war experience. The proliferation of the
spirit narration of violence, war, and death in the present relates to the repression of the
history of mass death in 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. Hyun Gil-Eon’s short story, “Our Grandfather,” for
instance, narrates a village drama that is 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. The
villager had taken part in accusing the son of being a communist sympathizer during the
April 3 Incident, thereby causing his summary execution at the hands of counterinsurgency
forces. The grandfather demands that he publicly apologize for his wrongful accusation. The
villager refuses and instead enlists other villagers to help lynch the accuser. The return of the
dead in this magical drama highlights the villagers’ complicity with the dominant ideology of
anticommunism and the related rule of silence about past grievances. The story’s climax
occurs when the son’s spirit realizes the futility of his actions and remains silent, at which
moment the family’s grandfather passes away.
Just as the silence of the dead was a prime motif in Jeju’s resistance literature under
the anticommunist political regime, their publicly staged lamentations became 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 which the living are no longer obliged to
remain deaf to what the dead have to say about history and historical justice. What has
continued 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.
The rituals displaying the lamenting spirits of the dead were an important part of civic
activism in Jeju, which was focused on the moral rehabilitation of the casualties from the
April 3 Incident as innocent civilian victims, departing from the classification in the previous
era as communist insurgents or sympathizers. Such rehabilitative initiatives spread to other
parts of the country, which in 2000 resulted in a special parliamentary inquiry into the April
Third Incident. This inquiry was followed by the legislation passed in May 2005 on the
investigation of all incidents of civilian massacres during the Korean War. These initiatives
led to the forensic excavation of suspected sites of mass burial throughout the country. The
2005 legislation includes an investigation of the rounding up and summary execution of
alleged communist sympathizers in the early days of the Korean War—estimated two
hundred thousand civilians. These dark chapters in modern Korean history were relegated to
non-history under the previous military-ruled authoritarian regimes, which defined
anticommunism as one of the state’s primary guidelines. Since the 1990s, in contrast, these
hidden histories of mass death have become one of the most heated, contested issues in public
debate. The province of Jeju is central to this debate. It initiated an institutional base for
sustaining a program to document the victims of the April 3 atrocities and province-wide
memorial events. It continues to excavate suspected mass burial sites, and it plans to preserve
these sites as historical monuments. The provincial authority also hopes to develop activities
to promote the province’s public image as “an island of peace and human rights.”
These laudable achievements of Jeju islanders were made possible by their sustained
community-based grassroots mobilization, which was networked through active non-
governmental organizations and civil rights groups, including the victims’ families. For those
active in the family association, the beginning of the 1990s was a time of sea change. Before
1990, the association was officially called the Anticommunist Association of Families of the
Jeju April Third Incident Victims. The association consisted mainly of families related to a
particular category of victims—local civil servants and paramilitary personnel killed by the
communist militia. This category of victims, in current estimations, amounts to about twenty
percent of the total civilian casualties. The rest were the victims of the actions of government
troops, police forces, or the paramilitary groups. Since 1990, the association gradually has
been taken over by the families of the majority, relegating the family representatives from the
anticommunist association era to minority status within the association. This was “a quiet
revolution” according to the association’s former president, Kim Du-Yon, and the result of a
long, sometimes heated negotiation between different groups of family representatives.5
During the transition from a nominally anticommunist organization to one that intends to “go
beyond the blood-drenched division of left and right,” the association faced several crises.
5 Interview with Mr. Kim Du-Yon in Jeju City, South Korea, January 2007.
Some family representatives with anticommunist family backgrounds left the association, and
some new representatives with opposite backgrounds refused to sit with the former. Conflicts
persist not only within the provincial-level association but also at the village level.
Nevertheless, the association is resolute in its objective to account for all atrocities
from all sides, communist or anticommunist, which has been conducive to preventing the
conflicts from reaching an implosive level. Equally important was the fact that many family
representatives had casualties on both sides of the conflict within their immediate circle of
relatives. This was particularly the case in the villages in the mountain region, which suffered
from both the pacification activity of the government troops and the retributive actions by the
communist partisan groups. The democratization of the family association was a liberating
experience for the families that were in the majority, including those who were members
before the change. Under the old scheme, some victims of the state’s anticommunist
terrorism were registered as victims of the terror perpetrated by communist insurgents. This
was partly a survival strategy of the victims’ families, and it was caused by the prevailing
notion that the violent “red hunt” campaign would not have happened had there been no “red
menace.” Since the 1990s, the quiet revolution meant that these families have been free to
grieve publically relatives who were killed between 1948 and 1953 in a way that does not
falsify the history of their mass death. It also meant that the democratic revolution was much
more than reshaping the relationship between the state and civil society and that it involved a
multitude of small yet significant actions that took place in the familial, inter-familial, and
communal spheres.
This development has affected the material culture of commemoration in Jeju. Most
prominent is the large memorial complex at the center of the island, Jeju Peace Park.
Completed in 2010, the Peace Park is intended to represent the history of the political
violence the islanders underwent between 1948 and 1953 on a province-wide scale. The site
consists of a state-of-the-art museum complex, beautifully conceived memorial sculptures, a
large chamber containing the names of victims, and graves of the missing. The park attracts a
great number of visitors from mainland Korea and overseas, Each April a province-wide
commemorative event is held in the presence of notable guests, media, and families of the
victims. Although the park is regarded as a public memorial dedicated to the victims of the
April 3 Incident, the Jeju islanders join the annual commemorative gathering in April as an
extension of the ancestral death-day rites held at home and in their home villages (see below).
New memorials were erected also in villages. Particularly remarkable is the local
ancestral shrine in the village of Hagui, in the northern district of Jeju Island, which was
completed at the beginning of 2003. The Hagui memorial consists of a white vertical stone
that is located in a central space on both sides of which are two horizontal stones made of
black granite. On the white stone at the center is the following inscription in Chinese
characters: “Shrine of Spirit Consolation.” The two black stones on the left commemorate the
patriotic ancestors in the colonial era (“stone for virtuous ancestors”), the patriotic fighters
from the village during the Korean War and later from the military expedition to the Vietnam
War (“stone for patriotic spirits”). The two black stones on the right side (“stones for spirit
consolation”) commemorate the hundreds of villagers who fell victim to the protracted
anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns waged in Jeju before and during the Korean
War.
The completion of this monument has a complex historical background. In the 1920s,
the village was divided into two separate administrative units, which are now understood as
having been a divide-and-rule strategy of the Japanese colonial administration at the time.
The division was distorted during the chaos following the April 3 incident. Hagui elders
recall that the imposed administrative division of the village caused a perilous, painful
situation at the height of the counterinsurgency military campaigns. The zero-sum logic of
these campaigns set the people in one part of the village, which was labeled a “red” hamlet,
against those in the other part of the village, who then tried to dissociate themselves from the
former. After these campaigns ended, South Koreans considered Hagui and the entire island
of Jeju subversive and “red.” A document published in 1986 about anticommunist public
education argues, “The characteristics of local communities [in Jeju] are such that once
someone in the community’s leadership position was affected by communism, due to the
tight webs of kinship and residential ties in the island communities, it was inevitable that
members of the entire lineage and the entire village were to become members of the
communist party.”6 According to this logic of guilt by association, Hagui villagers seeking
employment outside the village experienced discrimination because of their place of origin,
which then aggravated the existing grievances between the two administratively separate
residential clusters. People on one side felt that it was unjust that they were blamed for what
they believed the other side of the village was responsible for, and the latter found it hard to
accept that they had to endure accusations and discrimination even within a close community.
Against this background, some Hagui villagers petitioned the local court, proposing to divide
the village into two new units and name them differently. Their intention was to bury the
stigmatizing name of Hagui and to eradicate all signs of affinity between the two units. This
occurred immediately after the end of the Korean War in July 1953. The village of Hagui was
eventually officially separated into Dong-gui and Gui-il, two names that no one liked, but
which were, nevertheless, necessary.
The above historical trajectory resulted in a host of problems and conflicts in the
villagers’ daily lives. Not only did a several suffer the effects of the extra-judicial system of
associative guilt, which prevented individuals with an allegedly politically impure family
genealogy from taking employment in the public sector or from enjoying social mobility in 6 Bangong anbo jǒnsǒ (Encyclopaedia of anticommunism), (Seoul: Hankuk bangong
gyoyukyk yǒnguwǒn [Korean institute of anticomunist education], 1981), p. 283.
general. Some also had to endure sharing the village’s communal space with those who they
believed were to blame for their predicament. This last point relates to the persisting wounds
of violent postcolonial history within the community, which are the legacy of the villagers’
complex, violent experience with the counterinsurgency actions, including their being forced
to accuse close neighbors of supporting the insurgents. These hidden histories are
occasionally pried open and become explosive issues in the community. For instance, young
lovers ask why their families and the village elders oppose their relationship so ferociously
without telling them any intelligible reason for such opposition.
The details of these intimate histories of state violence and their contemporary traces
remain a taboo subject in Hagui. The most frequently recalled and excitedly recited episodes
are instead related to festive occasions. Before the villagers began to discuss the idea of a
communal shrine, the two units of Hagui participated together in inter-village sporting events
and feasts that were organized periodically by the district authority. Although they had met
on many such events, on one occasion, the two football teams of Dong-gui and Gui-il both
managed to reach the semi-finals, and both teams hoped to win the final match. During the
competition, the residents of Dong-gui cheered against the team representing Gui-il,
supporting the team’s opponent from another village instead, and the same happened with the
residents of Gui-il in a match involving the team from Dong-gui. This experience was
scandalous according to the Hagui elders I spoke to, and they contrasted the explosively
divisive situation of the village with an opposite initiative that was taking place in the wider
world. At the time of the inter-village feast, the idea of joint national representation in
international sporting events was under discussion between South Korea and North Korea.
The village was going against the stream of history according to the elders, and they said that
the village’s shameful collective behavior on the district football ground was the momentum
for thinking about a communal project that would help to reunite the community of Hagui.
In 1990, the village assembly in Dong-gui and its counterpart in Gui-il agreed to
revive their original common name and to dissolve the nominal separation in the past four
decades after the Korean War. They established an informal committee to be responsible for
the rapprochement and reintegration of the two villages. In 2000, this committee proposed to
the village assemblies the idea of erecting a new ancestral shrine based on donations from the
villagers and from those living elsewhere. 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 overseas (many Hagui natives live in Japan). The black memorial stones on
the left are inscribed with many names of patriotic village ancestors, including one hundred
names of those who lived in colonial times, dozens of patriotic soldiers who died in the
Korean War and the Vietnam War, and a dozen villagers killed by communist partisans
during the April 3 incident. The two stones on the right (from the audience’s perspective)
commemorate three hundred and three villagers who were victims of the anticommunist
political terror during the April 3 incident. The following poetic message is dedicated to the
victims:
When we were still enjoying the happiness of being freed from the colonial misery,
When we were yet unaware of the pain to be brought by the Korean War,
Did come to us the dark clouds of history, whose origin we still don’t know after a ll those
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 the
others?
What about those who couldn’t 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 the unnatural life of wandering souls, without a place to
anchor.
Only today,
Being older than our fathers and aged more 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.
It is because we hope someday the bleeding wounds may start to heal and we may see some
sign of new life on them…
Looking back,
We see that we are all victims.
Looking back,
We see that we all are to forgive us all.
In this spirit,
We are all together 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 hold hands together.7
***
A central myth in modern politics is that the milieu of human kinship is in the private sphere
of life and has no place in the advancement of political society. In this myth, kinship was
central to the moral order of premodern society and that the horizons of modern society and
politics emerge when kinship relations retreat from the public world to the private sphere.
The historical experience of the modernity of the Cold War in the outposts of global conflict
does not sit comfortably with this understanding of kinship.
In his foundational sociological text, Community and Society, the German social
philosopher at the end of the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Tönnies, makes an interesting
observation on the conceptual distinction between community and society in terms of moral
judgment. Addressing family and kinship relations, which he defines as an ideal type of
community, Tönnies observes that it is impossible to conceive of a “bad community.” He
argues that although one may speak of a society as a good or bad society (i.e., just or unjust
society, or democratic or undemocratic society), this moral judgment cannot apply to
community:8
7 The full text of this poem in Korean is available online at
http://www.Jeju43.org/outlook/outlook-1_27.asp?area=bukJeju 8 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society, trans. By Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 1957), p. 34.
All intimate, private, and exclusive living together, so we discover, is understood as
life in Gemeinschaft (community). Gesellschaft (society) is public life—it is the
world itself. In Gemeinschaft with one’s family, one lives from birth on, bound to it
in weal and woe. One goes into Gesellschaft as one goes into a strange country. A
young man is warned against bad Gesellschaft, but the expression bad Gemeinschaft
violates the meaning of the word.
Tönnies’s point about the freedom of community from moral judgment speaks of the
particular constitution of what he calls the “strange country” of modern society, in which
members are to associate with each other, supposedly free from the dispositions of their
familiar, rooted communal identities. Being strangers to each other, these newcomers (the
parvenue) to the “strange country,” called individuals, invent new rules of mutual
engagement and association. How they establish and agree upon these rules and what these
rules may look like will speak greatly of whether the strange, new country is to be deemed a
good society or not. Once they start engaging in building this strange country of society,
however, they are all equal to each other and no longer to be judged according to their place
of origin.
This early achievement in social theory has an interesting insight to offer to thinking
about the subjectivity of modern war experience. South Korea at the time of the civil war and
afterwards was a political society on the frontier of the global Cold War that took
anticommunism as one of its constitutional principles; the construction of national identity
involved not only the creation of pure ideological selfhood on the frontier of anticommunism
but also the containment of society from what the political authority defined as impure
traditional communal ties. The construction of an ideologically cohesive and unitary society
progressed, partly but crucially, through measures of control over traditional relations
including the punishment of what the state regarded as politically impure and subversive
communal ties. In this milieu, the complexity of kinship ties was pitted against the clarity of
friends versus enemies, and the communal ties were judged good or bad depending on
whether or not they were contained within the projected space of political interiority and
ideological purity. In order to come to terms with these historical legacies, therefore, it is
necessary to confront the way in which the making of a modern political society resulted in
moral classification and judgment of traditional communities and communal relations. In this
respect, Tönnies’s insight into the conceptual contradiction of “bad gemeinschaft” offers a
meaningful starting point for understanding how the constitution of modern political society,
in the era of the Cold War, involved a self-contradicting process of social construction in
relation to traditional communities.
If the idea of bad gemeinschaft has no place in modern life, yet nevertheless can exist
as a formative element in the constitution of a modern political order, a progressive
development away from this order must involve efforts to correct the disparity between the
supposedly defunct conception of bad gemeinschaft in modern society and the actuality of its
proliferation in modern politics. Political democratization, in this developmental context, is
not merely about a struggle in representation, more accountable governance and the
protection of individual liberty. It is also about the community’s recovery of its freedom from
moral judgment and its destructive consequences.
The experience of the Cold War as a violent civil conflict resulted in a political crisis
of the moral community of kinship. It resulted in a situation that Hegel characterized as the
collision between “the law of kinship,” which obliges the living to remember their dead
relatives, and “the law of the state,” which forbids citizens from commemorating those who
died as enemies of the state.9 The political crisis concerned 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 is traceless in public memory.10
The epic heroine Antigone met her death by choosing family law instead of the
state’s rule. Survival, for many families in postwar South Korea, meant following the state’s
rule thereby sacrificing their right to grieve 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 be divided into two hostile states,
the new state of South Korea found its legitimacy partly in its containment of communism. Its
militant anticommunist policies included containing impure traditional ties, which
engendered the concept of unlawful, non-normative kinship. In this context, sharing blood
relations with an individual who was believed to harbor sympathy for the opposite side in the
bipolarized world meant being an enemy of the political community in extension of the
individual. In this political history, being on the left or right of the ideological spectrum was
not only about opposing ideas but also about determining the bodily existence of individuals
and collectives. Similarly, after the Cold War, this society has had to deal with corporeal
identity. If someone has become an outlawed person by sharing blood ties with the state’s
object of containment, that person’s claim to the lawful status of a citizen involves
legitimizing this relation. This is how kinship emerges as the locus of the decomposing
bipolar political world in the world’s outposts, and as a powerful force in the making of a
tolerant and democratic society.
9 Steve Stern, Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Routledge 2002), 135-45.
10 Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
A recent province-wide commemoration of the victims of the April 3 violence
opened with the following invocation to the souls of the dead:
Please come in, samchon,
Jokae, I have come.
Samchon!
Jokae!
Today, all the samchon in the world of the dead and all the jokae in this world are
gathered together.
In local Jeju language, samchon (roughly translated to uncles and aunts) and jokae (nieces
and nephews) refer to broad contiguous relations that incorporate ties of residence as well as
those of kinship. In the context of the commemoration rite, the invited spirits of the dead (the
victims of violence between 1948 and 1953 in Jeju) stand as aunts and uncles of the living
participants in the ceremony (nominally all the people of Jeju).
On the same occasion, thousands of islanders from nearly all the highland and coastal
villages gathered at the Peace Park located in the island’s central highlands. The reason they
came to the memorial of the April 3 incident in the beautifully landscaped Peace Park that
day was both individual and collective. Each participant had ties of kinship with some of the
names inscribed in the Peace Park’s gigantic Chamber of Names of the Victims of the April
Third Massacres. Many were related to the Graves of Missing Persons, which consist of row
upon row of empty graves of those who went missing in the counterinsurgency war on the
island in 1948 and 1949 or during the early months of the subsequent Korean War. In the
Chamber of Names and the Graves of Missing Persons, the victims’ names are organized
according to their village of origin. On this occasion, the islanders who travelled to the Peace
Park also assembled according to their village of origin. They took part in the official
memorial events, which involved messages and speeches of condolence by politicians,
government officials, and family representatives. When the speeches were finished, the
people dispersed to visit separately the Chamber of Names or the Graves of the Missing. At
this time, the atmosphere changed noticeably. The event continued to be a public
commemoration for the officials and the outside visitors each of whom proceeded to pick a
flower from a bundle of chrysanthemums prepared by the provincial government and lay it on
a stone tablet in front of the Chamber of Names. For the families of the victims, however, the
moment constituted the beginning of their rite of ancestral remembrance. They opened the
bundle of fruit and drinks they had brought with them, and they presented these offerings at a
specific village location beneath their relatives’ names inside the chamber or in front of
specific graves of missing persons. Some families brought a full set of ceremonial utensils,
the heavy copperware that people use at home exclusively for ritual meals offered to their
ancestors. After these food offerings, the families gathered elsewhere in the park according to
their village origins and shared the food they had brought with them with neighbors and other
visitors. The ambience then changed again from the solemn atmosphere of the earlier formal
commemorative event and from the chaotic dispersal of family groups to all corners of the
park. I cherished the conviviality of these moments. There was an explosion of conversation
about the unstable prices of spring onions and tangerines, about novice members of the
village from the mainland and from overseas, about Chinese tourists, and about long-awaited
visits to relatives in Japan. In one corner, several elders and youths were engaged in a
conversation about recent clashes between China and Japan over an obscure island southwest
of Jeju, which is called Senkaku in Japanese and Daiaoyu in Chinese. The island is one of the
sites under territorial dispute in the region. In another corner, an elderly woman, whose
youngest son recently married a woman from South Vietnam, was boasting to her friends
about her new daughter-in-law. She said that she was surprised to hear from her daughter-in-
law in the morning that the young woman knew why her mother-in-law was going to the
Peace Park that day and that her family in Vietnam also had lost relatives in the war and
many had not been buried.
The voice of kinship is heard in the shiny copperware utensils for ancestors that the
villagers brought to the public memorial events. It is heard in the care these mourners give to
unwrapping these objects while participating in the public space as an extension of their
domestic space and in the fleeting moments when these caring and dignified acts are
performed in public—moments in which the morality of kinship, free from the political
legacy of the civil war, declares its sovereignty. For the living, this freedom means the
recovery of the right to grieve and commemorate the dead without the fear of negative
political consequences. For the dead and the missing, it means recovering the right to exist in
the world of kinship without endangering this world by being part of it. After the massacres
in Korea, the political life of kinship involved a long struggle to reclaim the inalienable rights
of the memory of the dead to an intimate existence among the living. In these assertions of
conviviality between the living and the dead, moreover, we witness how people harness the
power of the amity of kinship in building the ideal of peace.
In her comments on Picasso’s War and Peace, art historian Kirsten Keen explains the
image of the domestic life under the orange tree as depicting “an apolitical golden age in
which figures symbolizing maternity and culture are warmed by an olive-branched sun.”11
Keen is critical of Picasso’s Massacre in Korea, which she believes is principally a political
artwork that expresses the painter’s political identity as a communist and critic of American
11 Kirsten Hoving Keen, “Picasso’s Communist Interlude: The Murals of ‘War’ and ‘Peace’,”
The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 122, No. 928 (1980), p. 467.
power. She argues that, in contrast, in War and Peace Picasso parted with his ideologically
charged selfhood, his “communist interlude” as she calls it, recovering his true vocational self
as an artist. I question this conclusion. My question is not necessarily about the freedom of art
from politics. Instead, it concerns the alleged freedom of War and Peace from politics.
Viewed on its own, the image of domestic conviviality in Peace may appear idyllic, innocent,
and obliviously apolitical. However, I doubt whether it can be interpreted in only this way
considering the larger composition of which the image is part. The peaceful domestic life
portrayed in the Peace mural may be meant to be perspectival: Suppose that this imagery is
seen not by any spectators but by those who, having experienced the destruction of war, are
trying to gather the fragmented pieces of their lives. Then the seemingly apolitical scenery of
ordinary life near the hearth may have different significance: it may invoke memories of a
long lost past life or the aspiration for the return of this life in the future. I ask if the image of
domestic conviviality, seen from the specific perspective in which the sorrows of war are
integral, could relate to the political concept of peace, that is, a peace that confronts the force
of war. I also ask whether we can see in the intimacy between the living and the dead among
the Jeju islanders, as shown in their act of bringing food and drink to the public space of the
Peace Park, a living art of “peace under the orange tree” that people in this island create as
part of their everyday life and on the basis of their specific cultural and religious tradition.