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.