An apt reproduction of The Kim Family after the Korean War (1990) by the South Korean minjung artist Lim Ok-sang graces this book's cover, opening Heonik Kwon's soulful account of how families maintained their ties to envision reconciliation from a civil war that continues to haunt the Korean peninsula. True to his disciplinary home as a cultural anthropologist, Kwon presents a political theory that upends lay views of kinship as premodern, traditional, and apolitical (and therefore “natural”). He argues that kinship, during and after the Korean War, became a powerful form of political intervention that countered the vicious Manichean politics of Cold War polarization with an intimate sociality across generations that forged a community with the dead to create “a bond of commemoration” (p. 65) and reclaim the “rights of the soul” (p. 184). Here, kinship as it is understood in anthropological terms is not limited to biological kin, but...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
