Summary of SEAA READS, session four, 2/2023

Making Peace with Nature, Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ. 2022 Duke University Press.

Seven anthropologists of all ages got together online on Zoom to compare notes on Eleana Kim's latest book about the land, people, and locale along the long, narrow Demilitarized Zone between the north and the south of the Korean peninsula. This time the host who convened the virtual salon was Yookyeong Im, who got the conversation started and guided the topics from one area to another from time to time. Everyone knows that readers bring different experience to the text and so it was during the book club meeting. A variety of connections to the text and the larger landscape of anthropology came up. What is more, while solitary scholarly traditions of reading and authoring and presenting produce a lot of valuable thinking, it is only in conversation with others that whole new thoughts can be sparked and then kindled into a brighter light. As a small illustration, the book's title --like others sometimes manage to do-- has a double meaning (or maybe more than two angles of view). "MAKING PEACE with nature" has the figurative meaning of "learning to live with nature," although with some tension or ambivalence. But in the flow of book club conversation, the other meaning of "Making peace WITH NATURE" also came to mind: using the subject of the natural environment conserved in the "no man's land" of the  DMZ as an instrumental form to establish peaceful relationships on both sides of the borderland.

Across our many time zones the conversation included the following, during the 1st hour among the readers and then in the final half hour together with the author, too.

--Ethnography of space: how each zone of the DMZ is defined and thereby shapes human experience and use and risk there.

--Anthropology of time: how seasons affect landmine risk (dislodged by flooding, immobilized mechanism in winter), pond reservoir use, bird migrations. Also how time scales overlap: human lifetime, migration cycles, landmine functional duration, and the "deep time" of larger processes of the Earth and climate change.

--Genesis of the book's themes: book 1 (international adoptions) and book 2 (DMZ lives both human and non) and book 3 in process (ginseng) all thread together the consequences of nature and culture mashed together by war and ongoing generational effects.

--Configuring the ethnography's chapters (birds, ponds, landmines): as a trained visual anthropologist EJK saw each chapter as self-contained movie that centered on a protagonist in order to tie many threads and themes into a coherent picture. Also cinematic is the author's writing voice - "holding lightly" the subject, rather than crushing it under the weight of theory or burying it under too much information. From cover to cover the book flows with the ethnographer present from time to time, but not the star of the show. Theory threads together several layers of context and orientation to the complexities unfolding, but never does the "tail wag the dog." As well, EJK followed the writing advice she offers to her own students undertaking a period of fieldwork: first write about things that come up (surprising, exciting, inspiring) since many other dimensions you can fill in from notes later, relying on context and other records taken. As a newcomer to the DMZ up close, all three topics captured her attention: bird lives, ancient farming practices of retention ponds (dumbeong), and the many implications and characteristics of landmine fields.

--There is considerable interest in putting the book into Korean to reach scholars and interested readers throughout the peninsula and across the diaspora. But identifying a dedicated translator with an ear for the original and sharing a cinematic imagination will be a challenge. After all, while many Korean speakers/readers know fragments of the "Making Peace" or the "with Nature" story, very few will have connected these many sites, times, and dimensions into a single tapestry. Therefore, the book will be a fresh view to people who are local or a long way away.

--The abiding [normalized] presence of the war came up: acts of aggression, deaths from landmines shifted by rain or freeze-thaw cycles, lively propaganda and reactionism. All these go on since the Korea War just on the south side of the DMZ. There is no real way to estimate the shadows cast from the War on the north side of the DMZ. In this connection to the place of the war in today's "late Cold War" society [not POST Cold War], EJK published an op-ed, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/opinion/sunday/south-korea-trump-war.html 

In conclusion, the book club was valuable to all readers, and maybe of interest to the author, as well. For this 4th episode, being able to talk to the author made the book come alive in new ways; not just through the eyes of each reader, but also through its maker. As Dr. Kim described the process of writing anthropology, there is the part in the field and at the writing desk, but there is also a chance to revisit the field experience in hindsight. She called those final paragraphs of each chapter a coda, using the analogy of music in which something of the main theme is returned to at the end. And now, through the miracle of online meetings, this conversation is a kind of coda to the coda; a chance to reflect on the book as readers have reacted to it, too.

In early April the SEAA's 2022 Francis L. K. Hsu Book Award title will be featured, The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan, written by Chikako Ozawa-De Silva, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, published by the University of California Press.