Culture and Everyday Life in North Korea

In a rich mix of presentations on a society and culture that is little understood, a diverse group of scholars discussed “Culture and Everyday Life in North Korea” at an April 25 event convened by Columbia’s Center for Korean Research and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Panels spanned topics as diverse as feminism in North Korea, the “religious” aspects of North Korean political ideology, and North Korean science fiction.

Many of the panelists grounded their discussions on ordinary aspects of everyday life in the country, in an effort to elevate the productive value of their studies beyond the need to categorize findings about North Korea under what they called “fetishized” labels like “Stalinist” or “Hermit Kingdom.”

“The sameness of common everyday life [in North Korea] is often overshadowed by the exoticized, hegemonic discourse about North Korea,” said Cheehyung Harrison Kim of Duke University, who is writing a book on the postwar life of North Korean industrial workers in the 1950s and ’60s.

Charles Armstrong, Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Studies in the Social Sciences at Columbia, raised a concept that may contribute to the fetishization of North Korea as he discussed his current efforts to unravel the concept of “political religion.”

Armstrong said that these words are often used to describe the sacralization of state symbols and rituals in North Korea. However, his ongoing project is to situate the concept of “political religion” in general history. He said he aimed to examine how it can be understood when applied to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes broadly, where political ideologies can resemble religion.

Other topics discussed included “socialist feminism” in North Korea, in which Suzy Kim of Rutgers University compared representations of female heroines in parallel North Korean and Chinese twentieth-century cultural productions, and science fiction in North Korea as a derivative of Soviet Bloc science fiction, presented by Dafna Zur of Stanford University.

Much of the discussion about culture, however, seemed to come back to the ways in which elements of culture could be understood as political tools in North Korea since the Korean War. All told, the forum offered four hours of a rare conversation with scholars that attempted to tease out North Korean culture and everyday life from our rigid political understanding of the country.

Other panelists included Ruth Barraclough of Australian National University and Andre Schmid of the University of Toronto.

— Doyeun Kim MIA ’14