UC Berkeley

This is a project that seeks to broaden the spatial, conceptual, and ethnographic terrain on which north Korea can be encountered. In order to imagine and undertake anthropological fieldwork that approaches north Korea in this way, a seemingly inaccessible place, a seemingly insurmountable task, I had to look obliquely, from multiple vantage points, to infinitely approach, but not subsume the elusive “object” that is north Korea.

I take on the problematic of seeing in this dis-located fieldsite, what it entails, the risks, limits, and possibilities. I mobilize a method of “peripheral vision” to trouble the assumption that the “real” north Korea is “totalitarian” or that the “real” north Korea is “the most dangerous place on earth,” that the “real” is something to be uncovered or exposed by a certain vigilant, scrutinous “hyper focused” observation. In contrast to this limited view of vision, my work explores what happens when seeing is expanded in all of its embodied, relational, philosophical, ontological, and sensory capacities. Photography and experimental modes of writing are central to this endeavor, which I mobilize from a negative space of becoming, rather than through the logic of representation.

The research proceeds in multiple contexts within north Korea proper, as well as in places and times both distant and intimate. As a visitor to north Korea, there was an immediate and intimate connection in our Koreanness, but also a vast and unbridgeable distance within the same sentiment. As an instructor at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, there was life in a closed, closely monitored campus, but the people who were “minding” me, my students, the administrative staff, the Foreign Affairs officials, blurred these lines of enclosure and division. These kinds of relations and encounters are not things that can be readily observed, nor are they experiences hidden from view. These are scenes that only come into view peripherally, unfolding in the margins, in the spaces between and within rules and prohibitions, lingering in whispered questions on a soccer field, handwritten notes passed through the hands of others, half formed responses to ambiguous questions, and drunken exchanges in late night Pyongyang, seen and unseen.

In Yangjiri, a south Korean village bordering the DMZ, the north can be encountered through echoes. When attuning to the sound of the loudspeaker broadcasts that echo across the border, north Korea appears through loss, longing, curiosity, anxiety, evoking an ambivalent and paradoxical image, unlike the ritual of seeing through binoculars, from observatory platforms, on dioramas and maps, which too precisely aims to locate the other side. In Kazakhstan, north Korea emerges through the memory of the Soviet Korean diaspora that lived the time of Korea as an Asian frontier of socialism, a time before the division. In the Sino-Korean borderland, from which I could peer across the river from one socialism to another, there was a postsocialist nostalgia to heed to, the space of an intimate gap, where the sultry resin of socialism and its afterlives are made visible from a broken bridge, a rupture.

From these various peripheries, no matter how distant and fragmented the seeing, my hope is that north Korea feels nonetheless intimate and viscerally presenced. It is in this sense that I say, north Korea so far.