Defining herself as an “ethnologist of North Korea who has yet to conduct ethnographic fieldwork there” (p. 3), Sonia Ryang explains her innovative goal, which applies “the conventional criteria of ethnography to make a break with overly politicized positions” (p. 4). However, “to examine the connection between individuals and the Leader” (p. 4), she recognizes the “political domain as the target of this study” (p. 4). Aiming to explain North Korea's culture from a distance “to (re)anthropo-ize the faceless Koreans” (p. 8), Ryang uses literary sources of the 1970s and 1980s and discusses the difficulty of defining a particular text as “key to a society's cultural logic” (p. 12). The introduction enthusiastically describes her non-literary intentions and hybrid ethnographic-ethnologic strategy (p. 3), to obtain “a certain glimpse of North Korean society” through a literary “textual and archival . . . body of [field] data” based on her own “interpretive manner,...

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