The Ethnography of North Korean Texts

Suk-Young Kim’s Illusive Utopia and Sonia Ryang’s Reading North Korea are fascinating works for consideration together. Both Kim and Ryang proclaim their works to be “ethnographic” explorations of North Korean society through a particular genre of propaganda: fiction for Ryang and film, theater, and public performance for Kim. Both offer a wealth of North Korean narratives—and in Kim’s case, visuals as well—which should be of enormous interest to a broad range of readers. Both are bold in their assertions that texts can be appreciated ethnographically to stand in for social life; and both employ this tactic in order to access a social world for which traditional ethnographic field research is not yet feasible. While we appreciate these attempts at social analysis or “culture from a distance,” in the words of Ryang (pp. 8–13), we do call attention to the limits of social portraiture via propaganda genres and to the way in which these two authors analyze these genres. Most broadly perhaps, and perhaps ironically for two sociocultural anthropologists (i.e., the authors of this review), we query the dangers of an exclusive focus on cultural texts as transparent reflections of North Korean society or social life. Considerable ethnographic research with North Korean refugees (Kim’s work includes some interview research with refugees) suggests that North Korean propaganda does not necessarily always work so well, particularly in recent years.¹ This then demands that we consider other (i.e., noncultural) features of North Korean social and political organization that have explanatory power. Also at issue for both works is the question of the present: while Ryang focuses on a foundational North Korean political shift in the 1970s and 1980s and Kim motions to perhaps some changes into the present, both works imply a quite consistent cultural paradigm that governs a largely unchanging North Korean social architecture; considerable literature, however, belies this portrait.² Again, this said, we do think that these textual analyses make important contributions to the study of North Korea. We begin with Ryang and proceed to Kim.

Sonia Ryang’s Reading North Korea: An Ethnological Inquiry is grounded in a fascinating and very personal premise: namely, that Ryang herself (hailing from an ethnic Korean family in Japan) could have been repatriated to North Korea. Most fundamentally she is interested in what it is to render extreme Others “deeming . . . of respect” (p. 9). Ryang seeks to humanize, or in her words to “anthropo-ize” (p. 9). Implicit in Reading North Korea is that to humanize North Korea for a US, and perhaps world audience is to necessarily explain the relationship between individual North Koreans and Kim Il Sung (Kim Ilsŏng)—often depicted in the Western world as North Korea’s “strangest and most anti-democratic element” (p. 200) and centerpiece of an “illogical dictatorship, totalitarian madness” (p. 210). There is no question that Western media bristles with the signs and symbols of excessive political devotion; indeed, Kim Il Sung is part and parcel of the rogue state that North Korea represents in the Western imagination. To reiterate our opening paragraph, however, we query whether an exclusive focus on culture through a propaganda genre characterized by the relationship between the protagonist, who is often an ‘ideal’ person in North Korea, and Kim Il Sung, can instead function to make North Korea seem strange; it is, indeed, no small rhetorical feat to humanize North Korea. We worry that the North Korea in Ryang’s representation emerges as a society where “there are no social relations that are devoid of political concerns” (p. 204).

Ryang turns to literary fiction as a critical genre of propaganda and component of the North Korean state apparatus. Literature, Ryang asserts across her analysis of fifteen works, offers a productive...