Kinh Nghiệm Hướng dẫn Which of the following best explains the effect of the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula as a culture region? Mới Nhất
HỌ VÀ TÊN NỮ đang tìm kiếm từ khóa Which of the following best explains the effect of the DMZ on the Korean Peninsula as a culture region? được Update vào lúc : 2022-08-24 06:34:04 . Với phương châm chia sẻ Bí quyết về trong nội dung bài viết một cách Chi Tiết Mới Nhất. Nếu sau khi đọc tài liệu vẫn ko hiểu thì hoàn toàn có thể lại Comment ở cuối bài để Mình lý giải và hướng dẫn lại nha.Unknown Speaker 0:00
Nội dung chính- Which of the following describes a typical spatial relationship between federal and unitary states?Which of the following statements is helpful in explaining why Iran and the United Arab Emirates?Which of the following best explains the governance of the shaded areas shown on the map?What led to ethnic separatism in Belgium?
I am thrilled. I am thrilled to welcome you all here this afternoon, our distinguished speaker, Professor Elaina, Kim, and all of you in the audience. Before I introduce Professor Kim, I want to briefly introduce the Center for Korean studies and share the inspiration for the culture, society and environmental series that began last quarter. ckgs was created in 1993 to promote and coordinate the Korean Studies program UCLA and to engage with the public. The critical and ongoing issues related to Korea by organizing Lecture Series symposia, film screenings, cultural events, so please visit our website to learn more about our various programs and events. Now briefly to talk about the series, those of us the Center began this series with a sense of urgency about the rising environmental issues in the world in general. And in the Korean Peninsula in particular, South Korea's rapid industrialization and growth led to best deforestation, habitat loss, declining water quality and significant air and soil pollution across the peninsula, which also gave rise to a long and vibrant history of environmental activism. We also wanted to have a series of interdisciplinary and trans regional conversation among a broad community of scholars in different fields, humanities, social science and science, as well as environmental activists and artists, in the hope that we learn from one another, and begin to think of the ways that we human beings learn to coexist in this planet with many non human communities and beings. Professor Yuliana Kim is the second speaker in our series. The first speaker was Dr. Dave Feldman, who gave a talk on green imperialism in Asia. So Dr. Kim is our second speaker in the series and first speaker in this quarter. And I cannot think of someone who's better suited to help us think through this process than Dr. Kim. And today's topic cannot be more timely, especially as we again witness the untold human sufferings and further ecological damages with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and even the unimaginable possibility of the use of nuclear weapons. Professor Ileana Kim is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor of anthropology in Asian American Studies the University of California Irvine. Her first book adopted territory, transnational Korean adoptees and the politics of belonging, published in 2010. Won the James B Palais prize in Korean Studies from the Association of Asian Studies and the social science book or word from the Association of Asian American Studies, and immediately became a classic on the issues dealing with changing notions of kinship, family, globalization and nationalism, among other issues. Her second book making peace with nature ecological encounters along the DMZ from which today's talk will be partly based on I understand, will be published in June, from to university again. And I have no doubt this book, again will become one of those books that redefined the field of not only environmental studies, but also the field of Korean Studies. Professor Kim is such a delight and honor to have you with us today. Please, the platform is all yours now.
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Oh, I'm so sorry. I forgot to announce that. We are hoping to have obviously plenty of time for q&a session after Professor Kim's presentation is over. And that, that those of you with any questions, comments, please, you can go ahead and start putting those questions in the q&a box. Thank you
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Okay, thank you so much, Professor Lee. And I'll just start by sharing my screen. Um, it's really a pleasure to be here. And, you know, I have to say that I've given a few of these zoom lectures. And I still never get used to. Teaching over Zoom is one thing, giving these talks is quite a quite a different experience. But I'm really happy to be sharing my work with everyone here. And thank you so much for those who came. Thank you to Nami to Cal Luke to the Center for Korean Studies, and any and everyone else who helped to make this sự kiện possible. I wanted to echo what Professor Lee said regarding the situation in Ukraine. i It is a bit unnerving to be talking about war and militarization on the Korean peninsula as we're witnessing another war raging in Ukraine. And, you know, I just wanted to say that my heart goes out to everyone there, to those whose loved ones may be affected by the invasion. And to be completely honest, I'm finding it a little bit overwhelming and even maybe a bit irrelevant to be talking about my research under the circumstances. But I also found that it's unnerving because of the resonances across so many wars between Korea, the Korean War, what's going on in Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, you know, wars that always separate families, foment political division and lead to stage sanctions killing. So you know, we've heard a bit recently about the so called New Cold War. But I think in all of this, we should also be reminded that the old Cold War hasn't ended either. So this talk is, is based on my forthcoming book, which is part of a growing interest in anthropology, and other fields, in ecologies of war. And I just wanted to mention this collection that came out recently, that I co edited with a colleague, Bridget Quarshie that you can find on the Society for cultural anthropology website. It's a collection of short essays, that links together what we view as kind of essential entanglements of warring ecologies, encompassing scales that extend above and below the sights of conflict. So, I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to sort of assume some general knowledge about Korea. In my talk, I have a couple of slides that I'll just move through very quickly. But of course, if you have questions about the peninsula, about the war, about the division, please feel không lấy phí to ask during the q&a. So just you know, I just pulled some of these slides from previous talks. But again, I won't go go into them in any detail. This is the area of the demand size, demilitarized zone, the location, right across the, what's known as the waist of the peninsula. And most of my research and fieldwork took place in this middle zone, just south of the DMZ proper, known as a civilian control zone. But this talk actually will be focused primarily on sort of discursive analysis, less less fieldwork with ecological scientists, which is, you know, which constituted the majority of my fieldwork. And
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what, what oriented my questions around the DMZ when I started this project in 2011, was the fact that there was an increasing awareness of the biodiversity located in that region, the DMZ area, which includes the civilian control zone, and the DMZ proper. So the most recent statistics show more than 6000 species in that area, which constitutes 20% of the total species in Korea, and that there are 102 endangered species within those 6000s. And those constitute more than a third of all endangered species in South Korea. So this is just a kind of promotional map that shows some of these endangered crease creatures, the most charismatic of them and this is just a set of Images from international truyền thông that illustrate for me what I call the DMZ ecological exceptionalism, a notion that the DMCs biodiversity is both remarkable, and also somehow purifying of the violence that produced the DMZ in the first place. So this is very much a kind of discourse that indulges in the paradoxical wedding of war and nature of militarization, and, and biodiversity. So, as you can imagine, I find that juxtaposition to be rather simplistic and simplifying, because it tends to both purify and reify, the DMCs nature as if it were untouched and even redemptive of human violence. So in my talk, I'm going to be discussing partially how that came to be, and also what some of the implications of that are. So the broader argument in my book has to do with a critique of what I call demilitarized ecologies. And this has to do with the ecological except exceptionalism that tends to accompany many other sites alongside the DMC that have been identified as spaces of war in nature or the ironic juxtaposition of the two. So environmental historians have talked about the DMZ and these other places as exemplary of militarized landscapes where processes of militarization have not just been destructive, but also protective of landscapes and ecologies. But I draw upon an environmental historian Edmund Russell, who notes that colleagues in his own field have quote, delighted in the ironic, counterintuitive notion that military bases have served as nature preserves, he argues, we have rarely asked whether the similarity should be predictable rather than surprising, but we should start doing so more often. So in this map, I show it shows just Russian and US military bases around the world. And we can already see and others have written critically of what's known as the US US Empire of bases that expanded radically in the post world war two period, but actually, particularly in the in the post 1950 period. militaries are highly effective territorial lysing space limiting civilian activities and constraining capitalist development. conservation biologists Michael Lawrence and his co authors note in their survey of Warren biodiversity, that military activities were quote found to have overwhelming negative effects on ecosystem structure and function and quote, but that military activity was beneficial under specific conditions, such as when an exclusion zone was generated. So like the DMC indeed, the US Department of Defense has been particularly attuned to how to use exclusion zones and environmental exception to evade responsibility for remediating military pollution, and other times to expand territorial control in the name of national security and military readiness. There have been studies of US military and other national state militaries around the world using ecological protection as a form of greenwashing, when it comes to these military sites, and the Department of Defense has worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to address different kinds of entanglements between military spaces and ecological preservation. So the larger argument really is that we need to pay much more critical attention to these kinds of spaces rather than just assuming that they're curious, paradoxical or ironic, and particularly because in
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a process very similar to that which scholars have documented in critical studies of national parks, nature is often symbolically and materially deployed in the sites of toxicity and military pollution to D politicize them of the power asymmetries that created their boundaries in the first instance. The DMZ is slightly different than some of these other sites in the sense that it's still under a state of war. But what we see with South Korea is an increasing attempt to use nature to symbolically demilitarize the DMZ and to pacify it as it were. So placed within this broader planetary scene. The DMZ now appears as one example of other demilitarized landscapes whether they're decommissioned bases, or sites of active military activity, taking into account the seemingly inexorable expansion of militarization and security. Ice spaces around the world, including more than 1000 bases controlled and maintained by the United States alone forces one to acknowledge the proliferation of seemingly ironic spaces like the DMZ where war and protected nature converge. In fact, the DMZ holds a particularly significant place in the history of Cold War US military expansion. Until 1950. Most nations around the world particularly those in Europe, were resistant to allowing the use of their territory by US armed forces. According to a RAND study, after the Korean War, the fear of communism impelled weakened Asian and European nations not only to align with the United States, but also to allow Washington to indefinitely position US troops and their families in large military operating bases. Similarly, historian Bruce Cummings asserts that the Korean War, not World War Two occasion the enormous foreign military base structure and domestic domestic military industrial complex to service it. This complex Cummings emphasizes has come to define the sinews of American global power ever since the year 1950. Not only marks the beginning of the Korean War and the attendant expansion of US bases, but it's also the year that geological scientists point two as the beginning of the great acceleration. This is the point which industrial production and mass consumption began their exponential rise eventually leading to the planetary scale changes associated with the climate crisis, and what is widely referred to as the Anthropocene. Linking of these two histories of militarization and industrialization can serve as a reminder that the hot wars of the Cold War were fought for political and economic interests, which were did the necessity of containing the communist threat with the goal of securing markets to extend the reach of US led global capitalism. So ultimately, what I want to argue is that in many discussions of the Anthropocene, the focus has been predominantly on industrialization. But I think that thinking about industrialization with militarization together is really crucial.
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demilitarized ecologies are not ironic but instead are sites where the building and projection of state power come up over people spaces and nature comes up against the privatization and securitization of space under capital. Is it any wonder then that non human life forms should find provisional refuge within these two world ordering spatial regimes of capitalism and US Empire? In light of the increasingly coordinated relationship between conservation and militarization, in a range of post colonial nation states, demilitarized ecologies which can serve as a mirror image to that a fortress conservation should be seen as more than the unintended byproducts of war and Empire. They instead call for greater scrutiny of the violent impure and unpredictable entanglements of war and ecologies. So I'm going to now turn more specifically to the DMZ. And what I do in my book is I link this kind of broader planetary condition to the DMC in which, you know, get given that picture that I just drew for you. Perhaps the most paradoxical aspect of the DMZ is not that pristine nature coexists with manmade violence, but rather that the the narrow political logics of modern military power were for so long unproblematically equated with peace. This dominant view of the DMZ normalizes a militarized a US centric world order that indiscriminately produces politically and socially exceptional spaces, which are then further normalized, when the ecologies they contain are celebrated as accidental byproducts of war or postwar. equating those ecologies with peace is another step into discursive logic that naturalizes the foundational status of war and Empire, and to quote Shigematsu and Camacho obfuscates an alternative genealogy of Arrested D colonialization and demilitarization given these Imperial periodization of Cold War epistemologies that dare to represent the most militarized and war in mesh spaces as peaceful. How can we think of the DMZ psychology as related to peace, what peace and who's peace? So this is a sculpture Sony sawn mountain in children, Korea, very close to the border, kind of right smack dab in the middle of the peninsula. And when I first saw this sculpture, I was really kind of turned off by it's very cheesy aesthetics. But the more that I did my research, and the more that I heard the kind of you Buddhists call for thinking about the DMCs nature as equated to peace, the more I realized that I had to take the These sorts of articulations more seriously. And one thing I have a, I have a longer discussion in my book about how to think about peace, theoretically, which interestingly, in anthropology has really not had very much discussion in a sort of very focused manner, in part because of this maybe allergic reaction to images like this, or associations one might have between peace and these kinds of sentimental
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aspects. And what I write about is how, on the one hand, I share in other anthropologists skepticism, or ambivalence about talking about peace, or trying to theorize it, you know, the same time, we can ignore the fact that it exists within the discourses and imaginaries of the people that we study. So how can we think about peace, both ethnographically and theoretically in ways that are productive, and I draw upon some of the work by STS scholar Science and Technology Studies, scholars, who actually have very little difficulty thinking about peace in their own theorizations, which often entail kind of broader cosmological inclusiveness that not only thinks about peace among humans, but also peace, that can include nonhumans. So the, you know, the sort of theoretical thrust of my book, that ethnographically looks the practices of ecologists working with non human species in the DMZ area, is to ask, Can we imagine and theorize peace beyond the human through a kind of specific analysis of the work that they do? So this is a way of extending our imaginaries beyond the kind of geopolitical parameters that are often invoked or reinforced? Whenever we think about the Korean division and the attempts to move beyond the division as so many discourses ask us to do. So. You know, because I was finishing my book, right around 2022. When these kinds of, you know, the summits between Wenjian and Kim Jong Un were happening, you know, during the Trump era, it was it was a it was an odd time to be thinking about how peace beyond the human might work, Ben, of course, now we're back into a period of stalemate and non non cooperation and non communication. But that period during that during those moments, you had people like citta Chan, who is an ecologist, professor of ecology UVA University, making statements such as this, in which, which echoed the statements of others who care about the biodiversity in the DMZ, and we're worried that inter Korean thawing would, on the one hand, be maybe reflective of a long held desire among so many Koreans for peace on the peninsula, and yet could invoke dread for those who cared about the biodiversity. And the way that I frame this in the book is as the kind of double bind of the Create Korean DMCs by diversity, because, on the one hand, you know, those who desire peace, who may also think of the DMZ nature as symbolically representing that peace don't often understand that piece, least in the registers that it has taken most recently, and I'm drawing upon Geoparks really important work here that we're in which she argues that, you know, inter Korean reunification has actually happened through capital, right. So during especially during the Sunshine Policy era, that was when you had the most activity happening within and across the DMZ, as the two states attempted to actualize the peace and prosperity discourse through joint ventures, like the Kaesong Industrial Complex, like the diamond mountain, gang sawn tours, and it was precisely those kinds of cross border developments that led a lot of the colleges to try to figure out how can the DMCs nature be protected and how can the space itself be sort of turned into something like a World Heritage Park or a biodiversity
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reserve. And in part this is because the ways in which the DMZ has figured in South Korea over the decades, particularly since the end of the Cold War is or since the fall of the Soviet Union has been through these kinds of plans. And so when jayen Actually, you know, I'm sure that the upcoming presidential or the nominee, the, the two presidential candidates for the upcoming election have also been talking about the plans for the DNC, because it has just been such a consistent pattern across every presidential chiến dịch and every presidential term, to bring particularly to the UN a plan to do something with the DMZ that has to do with peace. And whether or not that includes ecological protection has been sort of increasingly part of the picture. But of course, peace can't happen just from one side. So North Korea has continuously rejected any attempt on the part of the South to establish a peace park, or a World Heritage Site or anything that might invoke peace through nature conservation, because for them, as we all know, a peace treaty is the prerequisite for any, any other kind of engagement. So, but as I was doing my research, I was just surrounded by images like this, and, you know, the leveraging of the DMCA nature, to not only promote imaginaries of peace, but also to capture the DMCA nature in the name of capital. So a lot of the touristic expansion and development, since the early 2000s has been around the DMZ nature, and trying to expand the experiences of tourists from the sort of typical security tours that bring you to, you know, look the military demarcation line, go to punk John, you know, go to the observatories, you know, sort of taste and not taste, you know, sort of smell the, the, this the scary, you know, sort of proximity to the DPRK or the, you know, the tunnels that the North Koreans had dug to try to infiltrate the South. All of these are sort of part of the typical security tours. But by the late 1990s, but particularly in the early 2000s, there was a radical expansion of tourism that really focused on the DMZ as the peace in life zone or the PLC, and this was part of a rural rural development project that was introduced through during normally hands presidency, in part because the interactions and negotiations with the North had really started to stall. So this is what you see, over and over and over again, is attempts to bring North Korea to the table. And once those kinds of you know, once the promise of inter Korean dialogue starts to wane or actually come to a close, then you have these presidential administrations really focusing on the border area, and developing tourism to help enhance the economic the economies of the towns and villages, just south of the DMZ. So I have to apologize, my cat is just really trying to get my attention. So it's been rubbing against my legs and, and scratching my legs and stuff. So if I seem a little distracted, that's part of the reason and it's crying too. So you might be able to hear that.
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Okay, so and just as some examples of the touristic expansion, you had Kpop concerts related to the DMC taking place in places like Toronto or in Jay County. You had this DMC the wild a documentary series featuring even whole was, I don't know if he's still very popular, very popular then you have things like this. Walk a thons, walk your DMC trail running competitions, marathons. Some of you may be familiar with the DMC film festival that's been going on for least almost 10 years now. art festivals, just a whole host of new activities that are attempts to capitalize on the place recognition, or the name recognition of the DMC as a place. And of course, these aren't taking place within the DMC but alongside just south of the border. But increasingly, particularly since under one Jane's administration, there were more activities and spaces being developed within the DMZ proper, and I can talk about that during the q&a. Again, lots of books focused on the DMZ. And all of these, again, focusing on the DMZ as the land of peace in life. So just a kind of really ubiquitous set of keywords associated with the DMZ. Here you have a conference Kintex in 2014, where you had various government ministries highlighting that point, Popkin has announcement about the International Peace Park in the DMZ. And this assertion, like the the DMZ is now life. And more recently, particularly since the post 2022 summits, the Moon Jae In administration promoting DMZ Peace tourism. And it's notable that, you know, once peace became more palpable in geopolitical terms, and talking about 2022, the life part of peace in life started to sort of fade from view. And the ecological values became sort of demoted. So but then once the geopolitical prospects start to dim, then suddenly the life part the nature part comes back. So one of the things that happened under MinJae, and was the opening of these DMZ Peace trails within inside the DMZ fence. And the idea was that people could sort of, you know, breathe and and experience, the nature of the DMZ. And again, expanding away from security, tourism. But those trails or those tours were actually heavily criticized by environmental groups, who accused the administration of not doing the proper environmental impact assessment. And just kind of jumping into this, in part because the administration really needed to show that they were making progress on the peace front. But without North Korea's cooperation, all you have left with is the DMZ and trying to again promote the DMZ on those terms. But when I was doing my research, what I really noticed was this kind of turn away from in, in the words of one of these government brochures, leaving behind a gloomy history, and this real attempt to try to re signify and rebrand the DMC not as sort of dark militarized, scary representation of the war and the ongoing division, but to frame it in much more sort of Kpop friendly terms, as you know, sort of productive and cheerful and maybe even cute. So, this is an image of one of the tourist brochures that appeared both in Korean and in English. And the brochure is called a special journey of connecting souls DMC and this appeared on the back of the brochure which and the bi me sensor business identity.
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And you'll see that the bottom you have these three characters, cartoonish characters, who represent the A family of butterflies that and in the description, it talks about the Father who is named DD for Dream, the daughter in the middle Nini for middle and the mother ZZ for zone So, instead of demilitarized zone, you have dream middle zone. And again this kind of active re signification of the DMC the DMC started the business identity story tells us that the butterfly family arrived from Planet Nabi. For those of you who don't know Nabil is the Korean word for butterfly. And these illustrations depict them as puffy white bipedal figures with pastel colored wings and blue, green and pink strapped to their backs. As it states in the Korean version, the DMZ the space in the middle of the peninsula overflowing with vital life force. This is the land from which the butterfly butterfly family starts its beautiful journey, dreaming of world peace. The business identity story strongly suggests that the souls being connected in this special journey are those of South Koreans and English speaking foreigners mediated by the fantastical butterfly family, but not those of Koreans on either side of the division. And in the longer version of this discussion, what I point out is how the DMZ nature a certain point in the 1980s really provided this kind of reorientation for progressive South Koreans during the military dictatorships to think about the DMZ in a different way, that the nature could actually provide an opening during a period of truly, you know, political and social impasse. And what has happened since then is a shift from away from the hope for some kind of national restitution towards one that is almost post nationalism, post nationalist. And here, what we have is the butterfly family, representing the South Korean states, first of all appropriation of the DMCs, imaginary around peace, but also the complete erasure of the north, and the reduction of the DMZ to a pure symbol. So what I argue is that this is a Stealth form of nationalism, disguised as cosmopolitanism, which uses soft power to assert South Korea's position as the rightful steward of the DMZ and its nature. The Korean language brochure brands the DMCs are okay DMZ or Dan Mingo. DMZ. And states in its preparatory notes, the DMC business identity embodies the intention of peace in life. The title of this guide book, a special journey, connecting souls expresses the hope that the DMC will overcome the symbol of division, and connect the hearts of all people who wish for peace. So again, almost like, you know, if the DMC supposed to transcend war in Division. In this sense, it transcends Korea altogether. So when I was doing my research, I was noting all of these discourses of peace and life and finding them mildly irritating and, and cheesy, etc. But when I spoke with and also problematic, obviously, because they're mostly emanating from the state, which has its own political agendas, but as I was doing my research, I also couldn't ignore the fact that the state's branding of the DMZ as a piece of life zone, what seemed also to be echoed by the discourses of progressive NGOs. So this is an image from eco horizon, and their piece life camp for youth, the DMC and I started to ask, you know, these NGO activists, environmentalists, you know, is your peace in life the same as the peace in life of, you know, the peace and live zone? And of course, they would all say, no, no, no, no, not all the same. You know, ours has much to do with,
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you know, sang song, or like the sort of very left wing politics that can be traced back to the democratization movement, and particularly under the regimes of, of email inbox and Pumpkinhead. They were particularly anti state, right. So to be aligned all with the peace and life of the state was very much not what they were going for. But again, the repetition of these terms is hard to ignore. So I went to the DMZ Peace like Valley, just an NGO located in India county very far on the eastern mountainous side of the DMZ area, and their slogan is DMC, peace life. So of course, I had to ask him ask the director, Mr. Hong about his relationship, this relationship among the DMZ peace in life and he made explicit the ways that Kim law or peace was a proxy for unification. And he said, our mission is to build a space of peace in life in a space of division and conflict, and that peace and life are foundational to unit reunification. And this is just a quote that I pulled from their promotional video, which, as you can see, makes all these associations among nature, peace, life, and unification. And what I write about in my chapter is how, for me, you know, trying to sort out what was happening in this particular space, what I learned was, particularly in India County, which is, you know, particularly in areas near this within or near the civilian control zone, this is a area of the country that is depopulating, because you have young people who leave for the cities, and leaving behind or left behind are bachelors who end up going on marriage tours across Asia to find wives. And so it's an ageing population. It's increasingly multicultural, it's heavily militarized. The the majority of people living in India county are soldiers. And so in this particular space, what you have is a kind of emergent set of relations and social formations that provide a very different image of what peace and unification could look like. When I talked to the director of peace life Valley, he discussed how in the particular town in which they're located Sahami on that, it used to have 30,000 residents before the war. But then after the war, because of the strict anti communism of the South Korean government, many people just left. And in that particular village, there's only one original household. So within the context of South Korea, where, you know, hometown, identity is very important. In a place like Soho, Mian, along the border, there's almost no sort of natives. And there's no hometown culture, right? There's no traditions that have been passed down through generations. So what he describes is the heavily securitized culture of the area, again, where the local economy is dominated by services for the majority population, which are soldiers, and that the associations with the DMZ there have everything to do with just being anti north, right being focused on national security. And his role he viewed it was to try to shift the mindset in the local community to be more as he put it, future oriented. So away from the kind of anti communist anti North discourses and ideologies towards something that could use nature to imagine a different kind of community, one based on peace in life. So what I discuss in this chapter is how my own experience was quite telling. Because as I was one of their events for peace in life, this piece of Life Festival, I saw these
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you know, there's a kind of there were these vendors selling food. And they were primarily marriage migrants. There were women from China, there were women from the Philippines and from Vietnam. And so when I talked to to two women who had come from the Philippines, or very young, they had gone there to get married to South Korean men. I suddenly realized that, you know, whatever unification meant in a place like Seoul, Hong Yan, or just along the border, where you know, so Hong Yan is not unique in having an increasing number of the residents being part of multicultural families, that whatever unification would mean in a place like this would have to be inclusive of people and identities that go well beyond the kind of ethno nationalist myth of the nation. So in conclusion, I'm just going to read from the conclusion of this particular chapter. And to sort of ask us ask ourselves, how to use the example of the DMZ to think more broadly about what human conflict how human conflict and the mean To use a shorthand, the Anthropocene might be thought of together. So what I discussed earlier the double bind of the DMCs ecology and its potential to provide some opening beyond division. This double bind is embedded in two competing frameworks of peace, an internationalist liberal peace among nations and a more peaceful relationship between humans and the earth. The peace imaginaries inspired by the DMZ opened a hopeful set of conceptual possibilities, reorienting politics away from the knotty problems of geopolitics and war toward the universal desire for harmony among all things. Yet, as this example of Soham, Yan suggests, peace within Korea is not just about right wing and left wing politics, but rather about a diverse human population in which multiple differences not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, family, origin and region present ongoing struggles over justice and equality. Thus, the dynamics raised by the DMCs double bind can be generalized. What is the relationship between human human Amity and more than human peace? Must one come before the other. philosopher Michel Serra begins his book the natural contract with an image of Goya's fight to the death with clubs which is pictured here. He does this to draw attention away from the to embattled protagonists, and toward the little ground, the marsh into which the struggle is sinking as he writes, buried up to their knees yet still attacking, they're stuck in a battle that neither will win. And that in their blind futility renders them both equal, equally doomed. Sarah has asked that we shift our gaze away from the human figures to focus on the ground on on in which in which their agonistic drama unfolds. To quote Sarah quicksand is swirling the dualists the rivers threatening the fighter, earth, waters and climate the mute world the voiceless things once placed as a decor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers. They burst in on our culture which had never formed anything but a local vague and cosmetic idea of them nature, but was once local this river that swamp is now global planet Earth, and quote from this view, local human conflicts are not only trivial compared to larger universal species levels struggle with Planet Earth, they are likely hastening our collective demise. Following Cirrus Logic we must imagine any future peace treaty as one involving more than just the state signatories, the former enemy nations, as he wrote in an essay revisiting the natural contract, quote, in the past, we signed temporary peace treaties between belligerents. Today, we must sign a temporary peace. I'm sorry, today we will sign a contract of symbiosis between the global Earth and the totality of actors. This refocusing on our habitat could not be any more necessary than it is now. And yet the dynamics of making peace with nature that I outlined here allegorized in the DMZ nature, in the name of its universal symbolism, while sacrificing its actual ecologies in the name of peace and profit, continue to intensify. Part of the reason that this is possible is because of the common cosmopolitan epistemologies among South Korean intellectuals, environmentalists and state actors, inspired by the notion of the DMZ as untouched and the scientific data of its biodiversity. Appearing as an unexpected, unexpected counter narrative to the story of ongoing Cold War emnity.
Unknown Speaker 48:37
And national division, the DMZ his nature became attached towards opposite, offering a surprising peace dividend that allowed its significance to jump scales, from national to global, from a divided Korea to Korean people to universal humanity. And these narratives nature serves as the vehicle by which humans can imagine a solution to human political problems. Moreover, through this very process of instrumentalizing nature, anthropocentric political forms, whether state or anti state become naturalized. The story I have told so far is one in which the men fighting and Goya's painting are not just allegories of Korean separated by the DMC, but also South Koreans fighting among each other. It is a drama whose protagonist symbolically scale from the local to the global and the dynamics in the drama replicate all scales. We South Koreans, all Koreans all humans are reproducing lines of difference and division, sinking together instead of cooperating to find a way to live peaceably with each other and the earth. The DMC as an allegory for our planetary condition does not therefore offer an optimistic view. The two Koreas remain war, and the fragile biodiversity of the DMZ region is facing increasing threats in the name of peace as development, rather than what Arturo Escobar calls peace with justice. Humans in Korea are thinking fast. And while the prospects of a peace treaty among humans can receive Just as quickly as they appear, life as it is lives on in the meantime of division, the question remains, then how can we make peace with nature not by using nature as a vehicle to solve human problems, symbolically or materially, but rather by attuning to specific landscapes and relations among humans and nonhumans. And I'll end there. Thank you very much.
Unknown Speaker 50:31
Thank you so much for such rich talk. Dr. Kim, and you've given us so much food for thought. I am not sure where to begin. I have lots of questions, but I already see two questions in the q&a box. So I would go ahead and be those questions and anybody with questions and comments, please go ahead and, and put those questions in the q&a box. Or I think you can also raise your hand if I'm not mistaken. So let me I don't know if you can read these questions, Elena, but let me go ahead if this is actually from Chunghwa joy, so good to see you jungle. As you mentioned, the Korean unification This course will soon face serious challenges, especially with the rise of marriage migration, according to statistics, 10% of newly married couples in Korea, are biracial marriages, how do you see this peace and unification imaginary will change or adjust as this trend continues? Along with the issues of population decline?
Unknown Speaker 51:50
Yeah, thank you so much for that question. You know, from what I read, this was a while ago now, I think etame Young, the presidential candidate actually addressed this, he mentioned it in one of his speeches, saying that, you know, the nation will is multicultural, and that future inter Korean dialogue will have to acknowledge that. So that I thought was, I mean, no matter what you think of him as a candidate, you know, that was quite interesting. And I imagine that, you know, that that will definitely continue to be an evolving conversation and a set of policy related discourses. But one thing I did want to mention just in relation to that, I think is that is important. You know, the border area in particular has always been a site of marginalization, because of racialization. Right, if we recall the, the ways in which people you know, right after the war, the Keiji chon or the, you know, Camp towns and biracial children born to Korean women, who some of whom were sent for adoption. And so that, you know, I think it's interesting to think about the history of these marriage migrants geographically in locations close to the border, along with that previous generation or ongoing generations of mixed race, Koreans. And, and also, just to cite, you know, my colleague, CG Gage, who wrote about the sort of myth of racial purity, that, again, I think, is very often reinforced in any inter Korean attempts to address the unification issue. And, and so yeah, I would be I think the those regions are going to be really interesting to pay attention to. Okay,
Unknown Speaker 54:07
thank you. This. Another question is actually from one of our students who's taking a class with me this quarter. In towards an anthropology of landlines, rogue infrastructure, and military waste in the Korean DMZ. You mentioned the propaganda loudspeakers along the DMZ on both sides that broadcast loudly across the region. Since the DMZ is physically an ecological haven for nature. Did you notice or do you know how do you know of how the noise pollution alter the animal's behavior, specifically songbirds who have been observed to adjust to urban soundscape and avoid being excluded from noisy cities according to Dustin rain card in his article
Unknown Speaker 55:00
Thank you for the question. You know, it didn't come up among the researchers that I was working with, you know, the, the loudspeakers the time that I was doing my research, were I mean, it wasn't kind of continuous. It used to be, like, very continuous back in the day, but they were less frequent. I think more important are some of the lights that are used to project across the border. There's, there's one area on the eastern side that just like a, you know, huge, like very large lights. And, but, but yeah, you know, people often ask about the effects of various militarized technologies on the different creatures there, particularly when it comes to land mines. But But yeah, it didn't. It hasn't been either. It hasn't been studied, or it hasn't been. It hasn't just been observed. So.
Unknown Speaker 56:14
I think a while we're waiting for more questions to be typed in the question in the q&a box. I will go ahead and raise one question. I think it is absolutely critical to suggest as you do this, the the both sort of trajectories of industrialization and militarization as part of the narrative of the rise of Anthropocene discourse, right? Because I think as you rightly suggested, the whole discourse of Anthropocene seems to be only focusing on industrialization or the impact of capitalism, in terms of, again, the social, political, economic disparities and environmental injustice stemming from such disparities. So I think it's so essential, that that this militarization, and its impact is is studied together as as your study does. So I'm very grateful that your work is touching on this issue. At the same time, obviously, even as I completely share with you, this discomfort about what you describe as a cosmopolitan sort of liberal discourse about environmental the land scape of the DMG as a sort of a pure nature, and as a possible sort of
Unknown Speaker 57:59
alternative. I'm not sure if that is the quite right word. But
Unknown Speaker 58:06
as it's sort of dmg seems to stand in for eventual sort of piece that is now going to be materialized. I guess let's put it that way. And use you I think, in other words of your work, you suggest that there there is sort of an alternative way that we giảm giá with this issue. And I think one sort of way might be thinking about what may be described as sort of this interspecies ethics in. So I wonder if you can possibly talk about more of that? Because you do sort of discuss that issue. If you don't mind?
Unknown Speaker 58:52
Of course, yeah, I'm happy to and actually, because what I presented today is sort of like my, the ground clearing chapter in the book, and the rest is much more. So the key term that I develop comes from one of my main interlocutors who is a sort of citizen ecologist in Paju. And so he very early on in my fieldwork described because I asked him, I said, you know, like, there's so much peace in life discourse, you know, floating around, and, you know, so what do you what do you think about peace, the DMZ and unification like, how do you think of that? And he basically was like, you know, that's just discourse, right? What I care about is what he called biological peace. So I kind of take that, and he you know, the term was sank down. Kanwar, so, you know, but I take that to kind of develop it into a framework of thinking about, again, sort of peace beyond the human peace beyond beyond beyond geopolitics. And what could that look like? And it does very much have to do With interspecies ethics, but really also not looking to the DMCs nature as this site of pure kind of, you know, almost like escapist fantasy, right? Because that doesn't do actually live in creatures any, any justice, right? To sort of just use them symbolically. But to you know, and so the people that I, that I focus on are those who are like very much embedded in these spaces that are very polluted, very impure, right, but who deeply care about the actually existing biodiversity? And this isn't just the rare species, right. But to think about, what can we do to understand, you know, protecting these habitats is kind of beyond the power of these individuals, right, that has to happen the state or international level. But for them, it's really like, how can we understand through scientific study? What actually exists, and from that knowledge, some of it just has to do with convincing others that they're valuable, right, once we know how can we turn a blind eye? And, and then also not to necessarily assume that? You know, I mean, I know I talked about the double bind, right, but you know, coming up with other solutions for creating what we might consider like a commons, right, so one example is the, his name is Kingston Hall in Paju, who, you know, imagine so there's an area, there's a village. I don't wonder, but anyway, so the DMC ends the Han River estuary. And in that space, it's actually neutral waters, right. So according to the armistice agreement, both North and South Korea should be able to use the estuary neither one has, but they're actually two villages, that one on the south southern sites on the South oguni, which is just one kilometer across the estuary from a village in the north. And both used to be habitats, wintering habitats for cranes, endangered cranes through me. And so his vision can some host vision is to establish a Ramsar wetland conservation area in both sites, use you know, kind of hoping, you know, starting with oakum neon in the south, and hoping that those cranes will travel to get pool in the north. And that, you know, so it'd be like, you know, a very different image than, you know, cranes are always used symbolically to say, Oh, they, they just naturally fly over and connect us. Right? But this would actually be, you know, saying like, how can we create a habitat that will allow them to connect us, and by you know, and they don't just connect naturally, right? It requires cooperation. So that's the sort of thing that I think, is, it may seem like a subtle difference, but I think it makes every difference, right to actively think about how to
Unknown Speaker 1:03:17
how to privilege the existence and kind of needs of these non human creatures in a way that then acknowledges that we need them to write not just to have hope, but because, you know, habitats for other creatures means that we have healthier habitats for humans. And, you know, I could go on and on, but the point is that, that, you know, there are openings for for imagining different kinds of futures, even as they may be as remote as geopolitical unification between North and South.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:59
Thank you so much. So we have set of questions here. Kimberly, you have you encountered any projects besides your own organization, scholarly works artists projects, for example, that have sensitively attended to desires for peace, and are intertwined political implications?
Unknown Speaker 1:04:21
Yeah, there are lots I mean, you know, since the 80s, there have been tons of South Korean artists thinking with the DMZ is nature. And actually I have the fun thing about doing a talk from home is that you can show these so Oh, but maybe can't see this. Um, there you go. Yeah, stay right there for a sec. Okay. So this is a huge book. That is by Yvonne, who was an artist from the 80s and early 90s. And he you know, it's very And so he had a group called front DMC, and tons of, you know, Artists Engaging with that question. And then more recently is this front which some of you may recognize this was the winner of the 2015 or 16. Venice Architecture Biennale lay? So, Min Sokcho was an architect organized this exhibition, which was supposed to be a joint north south exhibition, but it was impossible in the end. But, yes, definitely many artists thinking, thinking in similar terms, again, you know, trying to move outside of the geopolitical frame.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:56
Thank you. This question is from Todd Henry, your view of nature seems to have much to do with critical Indigenous Studies advocacy for land sovereignty, given the competing claims on the DMZ not to mention capitalism's hold over so much of the word, how are we to access such alternative concepts and living with the land that can have practical ramifications? I'm sorry, to sound pessimistic, but I'm truly interested in really enchanting territory away from totalizing forces.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:32
Yeah, that's a really important question and really hard to answer in a satisfactory way, I'm afraid. But yeah, lots of competing claims on the DMZ. And certainly, you know, lots of existing land claims to places that are, you know, the moment off limits. And so, you know, people have, you know, policymakers have also discussed the fact that, you know, if there's a peace treaty, if there's some kind of agreement between the two Koreas. You know, under the North Korean system, all of that land would be owned by the state. Whereas under the South Korean system, many people who have land claims titles would probably seek some kind of reclamation or restitution. So it would just open up a huge number of cans of worms. And this is one reason why there's a strong push to amongst some international groups to say we need to figure this out now. Right in preparation for that possibility. And but yeah, it would be it would be very complicated, very complicated.
Unknown Speaker 1:07:55
Next question is from Jeju, Kim, one of our graduate students in Anthropology Department. Thank you for your wonderful talk. Dr. Kim, can you speak a little more about how you are connecting ecological exceptionalism and greenwashing with the human tea population of the border bordered areas? And are you connecting ecological exceptionalism and American exceptionalism? If so, how? I'm trying to think about how residents are understanding or resisting or accepting this exceptionalism?
Unknown Speaker 1:08:29
Yeah, that's a great question. In a way. I mean, I can't really answer it. ethnographically Because I didn't do enough research in the actually can. Is it possible to put the question back up? Oh, my God, okay, if you can, it's okay. I think I got it. Oh, yeah. Okay. Um, yes. There you go. Can you see it? Or should I repeat? Oh, yeah, no, I got it. Okay. Got it. Yeah. Uh, so, um, yeah, I didn't do enough, like I would have loved to have done like more research in, in that village I described. But more generally, I think that like the discourses and the symbolism around the DMCs kind of ecological exceptional have everything to do with you know, the exceptional elevation of the territory under the division system and under US Empire. So for instance, many of you may know that the way that the DMC is controlled, the north, north northern two kilometers, right, is controlled by the DPRK army. The southern two kilometers is controlled by the UN military commission Armistice Commission, which is essentially the US Army. So, you know, for a lot of South Koreans that means that like their territory is actually not under their own control. And so yeah, that particular exceptionalism exceptionalism. Whence throughout, like the DMZ is history, including its ecology, like the very first ecological study that took place in the 1960s was a collaboration between the Smithsonian and the first generation of South Korean natural scientists. And those scientists just they couldn't go, they couldn't like negotiate their own entry into the DMZ area, because they had to go to the US military, and even the Smithsonian. person in charge in Korea, you know, he had to go to the US military to ask for her permission, you know, so just like all of the layers, but but more so than that there's a way to understand the exceptionalism through a kind of, you know, Giorgio Agamben, sort of state of exception, where it it, you know, it becomes like this sort of site of the state of exception. And, and, you know, I guess in a previous iteration of my thinking, you know, one thing that came to mind is, well, what would happen to our, our understanding of the state of exception if we were to include non human nature, right, because for a Gambon, it's always about being outside of human political formations like the polis, you know, and that's the, that's the worst possible outcome. But if what is outside of the polis is that nature is a pure nature is that some other space like what happens to the nonhuman, in in the state of exception? So I think there's some you know, it's not, you know, it, it provides some other ways of thinking about exceptionalism. And I'm just reading the question, again, how residents understand, resist accept this exceptionalism? Again, yeah, it's hard for me to say, apart from what I learned from that NGO, which I think shared with a lot of the progressive environmentalists and activists like a very healthy resistance, and refusal of US Empire and South Korean state kind of adherence to American exceptionalism. So but I think all of that played out much more concretely in the site that I talked about in my landlines, article and chapter where, you know, being able to trace out the precise ways in which the exceptionalism of US power was embedded in these landscapes was, yeah, it was much more powerfully articulated there.
Unknown Speaker 1:12:56
Next question is from Jennifer Chung, I was struck by your insight, the talk of life seems to recede in relation to talk a peace with the state led prospects for reunification. What do you think, accounts for this dynamic? What does the emphasis and I've seen to signify in terms of political possibilities in the discursive production of the DMDs dmgs nature? Also, do you see any connection between state produced and social organization produced discourses of peace and life the DMZ, and the struggles and discourses of contemporary environmental justice movements? Both in Korea and globally?
Unknown Speaker 1:13:39
Wow, yeah. Yeah, that pattern of peace, talk of peace and life, kind of in this inverse relationship, when it comes to state lead prospects for reunification was really interesting. And I think it has to do with the fact that, you know, the primary goal is state led unification. And nature's nature, the life part is very much secondary. So it'll come up as the kind of last gasp for keeping South Korean Unification politics alive. You know, it's kind of like, you know, a proxy almost for maintaining some forward momentum with unification across the states. So like, I mean, between inter Korean, and so. So yeah, that's definitely what I've noticed is, you know, for instance, when Jason's unification minister, post 2022, like nothing was happening, his hands were tied, couldn't do anything, right. So he was fired, and the next person they brought in, what did he do? He was like, I'm going to, I have a budget of like, whatever $40 million to expand DMC, or peace tourism, right? And it's just constantly but peace tourism, meaning like more nature stuff, more eco friendly stuff. And so it's it's very much a kind of last gasp when the real peace negotiation starts to stall. And but you know, maybe maybe there is something more optimistic there in the sense that, you know, you can't keep going back to the same if that is the dynamic you whenever you go back to nature or life, you can't go back to the same one, right? People are going to start asking questions about like, well, you know, are we making any progress there? Or not? And maybe, hopefully it'll, you know, lead to some actual policy changes in terms of protection. And to be honest, there has been some so the UNESCO man and Biosphere Reserve approved two large areas within the border area recently, and so those are spaces of potential conservation. Many scholars have critiqued those biosphere reserves for other reasons, because they don't really, you know, they're hard to enforce, you know, they lead to more development rather than less, etc. But, okay. And then lastly, Do I see any connection between the social organization produce discourses?
Unknown Speaker 1:16:51
Not really, to be honest, I don't. And I mean, not nothing that that goes beyond the sort of simplistic framings of the DMZ. But maybe, maybe it'll maybe it'll evolve. You never know, I don't want to try to be, you know, predict anything. But possibly, maybe it will come to fruition. But generally speaking, I think anyone who's familiar with South Korea, like there's a very high environment Tality among South Koreans. A lot of it having kind of come up through like the well being of the 2000s and all that kind of eco friendly stuff. But it seems more and more like even though the state is so much driven by the very kind of manicured idea of what nature is. You know, I think there's and which is why actually people are really drawn to the wildness of the DMZ. Because even so much of their natural parks in South Korea are really manicured, either managed very well, right. But there's also like a kind of standardization of how they are kind of organized. So I don't know. So I think I think all of those different processes will hopefully have some unintended or unanticipated effects.
Unknown Speaker 1:18:32
I think we do have time for just perhaps one or two more questions. So if anyone has any questions, please don't be shy. Meanwhile, may I also pose another question, which is about the previous article that the student mentioned, we were discussing this article in the class, and we were very struck by this notion of the landmines has having agency. And since we have this rare privilege of having you here, as a speaker, would you mind sort of elaborating on that notion, and for those in the audience who may not have read the article, perhaps you might sort of discuss a bit more about the article itself?
Unknown Speaker 1:19:19
Yeah, yeah, I know, I'd be happy to I mean, it's a it's a gruesome topic. But so the article is situated in a village in the central part of the DMZ in, you know, it's one of these areas where the, there's the DMZ and then the Civic civilian control zone, which is separated from civilian areas by what's known as the civilian control line. But that line has moved incrementally northward, least four times, since it was first established in the late 1950s. So every time it's moved northward, that means areas that used to be very heavily militarized are now supposedly, you know they've been decommissioned another civilian. And this has to do with the fact that these villages had to exist in very kind of constraining circumstances, heavily monitored, surveilled and having to go through checkpoints every time they went in and out. So they would petition to be removed from the civilian control zone. But that didn't change the fact that they there were just tons of minefields everywhere. So these minefields that used to be in a controlled area, within these checkpoints are now just in civilian areas. And most of these villages are agricultural. So they're, you know, these are mostly rice farmers who are very proud of the produce the, you know, the rice that they produce. And but the article talks about the history of these one particular village, but the villages in general that were established during a period of really stringent anti communism, and a desire on the part of the park Chung Hee administration to repopulate the area's and to re establish rice growing in the historic rice bowl of Korea. So these are people who were only allowed to return if they had gone through, like an ideological process of cleansing and proving themselves to be anti communist, because it was so close to the border. But in clearing the land, they were promised land ownership once they had kind of cleared the land and made it productive again. But that also meant clearing it from landmines, and just dozens of people died within the first few years. So, you know, these are people who still live in areas where they're, you know, 1000s, of unconfirmed minefields. So the article discusses this history, but also the ways in which local people kind of live among these landlines, and in ways that might, might surprise us if we're used to just thinking about them as victims. So my what would be eye opening moment for me was hearing a group of people just like joking about landmines. And, you know, and there family members who had been killed by them. But also the pride that one man in particular, who was the mayor the time, took in his ability to clear minefields. And so another piece of context here is that they weren't allowed after certain point, they weren't allowed to clear the minefields without permission from the local South Korean military battalion, because the mines themselves were considered to be military property, and you weren't allowed to destroy military property. If you did, you'd be sanctioned. But these are villagers who are saying, you know, okay, found a mine or someone died, we can't go there, that's land that you can't use, right? So they would, and I also discussed how, in the very early years, they were very unsuccessful with growing rice. So they were starving, and the state didn't give them any, any welfare or support. So they would end up selling mines and military waste that they found. So that was actually like one of the main economic activities the time. But the theory that I developed around mines and you know, kind of call it rogue infrastructure. So the mines themselves are not, they actually disrupt normal infrastructure, but in the way that they organized space, and in the ways that they help to circulate value through, you know, selling, selling military waste, etc. Kind of make some sort of infrastructure like, and, and the agency part comes from trying to understand how the minds are not just
Unknown Speaker 1:24:11
agents on their own, right, they need a human actor to set them off. But the human in a lot of the understandings we have of minds as anti humanitarian, the assumption is the victim is purely a victim. Right? But when we start to understand that there's an interaction between the mind and the human, then it's you know, drawing upon feminist Science and Technology Studies, scholar Karen borrowed, I talked about 30 an intra action, like the agency doesn't exist until it's like, you know, existing in relation between to suppose it like independent actors. And through that idea, then we can start to return some of the agency to the victim. In this case, the mayor who really took pride in his ability to clear minds, right? to outwit them, to figure them out to like, and make money from it, and also make his community safe. You know, so the fact that he was, you know, sanctioned by the military, for doing this mine clearance really pissed him off. He was, you know, he was like, I'm actually doing the work for you, and making the landscape habitable. Why are you? Why would you criminalize me? You know? Anyway, so that that's, that's essentially the idea. But I do think that like thinking about agency in a in a more complicated way helps us to understand or make sense of what what, for me was a very confusing and surprising set of
Unknown Speaker 1:25:48
effects. Thank you. So there are two more questions, perhaps. I'll just read them together. And you can sort of answer in whichever way you like to clear Chung or Chun, thank you so much for your talk, very interested in hearing about the trajectory of your scholarship specifically, if and how this project emerges out of and in relation to your your scholarship and Korean international adoption. Another question is I was wondering if you encounter the invocation of any religious elements in the narrative from local NGO, or state narratives around peace and nature the DMZ? There's yet another question. So I'm going to just stop here. So will you would answer these two questions, and we'll go on to the
Unknown Speaker 1:26:39
next question. Sure. Okay. Yeah, the two, the two projects are pretty disparate, transnational adoption, and the DMC but I think just as a as an anthropologist, I've, I've always been an actually, the, the real crux was I was teaching a course. In my previous institution, a seminar called nature. And in that course, I looked anthropologists who studied the nature culture binary. So whether it was medical anthropologists, environmental anthropologists, or anthropologist studying kinship, like I was, and it was actually from teaching that course, that I got more interested in what anthropologists were calling nature cultures, right? The kind of inability to really separate out categorically, what we think of as nature and what we think of as culture. So you know, reading like Brunella tours idea about the kinds of purifications and translations that have, he would argue, characterized, modern thinking, modernist thinking, and so yeah, that's actually my sort of intellectual trajectory, but topically, you can see how they're very disconnected from each other. And, you know, I think that moment in my life, I and I will just, you know, full disclosure, like, before I started this project, I knew zero, about nature, like, I could not tell you, you know, anything about with any specificity, beyond like, basic categories, like a tree, a bird, you know, whatever, like, you know, so. So, you know, it didn't, it wasn't emerging out of some kind of pre existing passion or interest in the natural world, but I certainly developed it. And that's one of the most amazing things about being a scholar, you can be curious about something and dive in, relatively ignorantly. And thankfully, I met I met people who were, you know, very generous with their knowledge and information. So I was able to learn from them. And then regarding the question of religious elements in the narratives, actually very little, but I really wasn't looking for it. So but yeah, I mean, certainly with with discourses of peace, one would wonder whether there would be any kind of religious connection but certainly not from state discourses, and not from NGO discourses. I mean, the environmentalist discourses there, there were, um, there always have been, like religious figures involved in unification efforts. And from what I understand, but I didn't have any interaction with them. There's some Catholic unification movement, folks who have a have an interest in The environmental Oh, but I'm completely forgetting. Now there was someone who I interacted with who Peter Jong, who started a an organization school called the border peace school. So he's like a peacemaker. Who's is also a he. He's a Quaker, I think. And yeah, so he has been there. And we had interesting conversations because he had built the school in Chitwan, and was interested in how I was thinking about peace. And I was interested in how he how he was thinking about peace, but he didn't have any ecology within his framework. But he became increasingly interested in it. So that picture I showed you of the sculpture soy song, the mountain there was when I was with him, we were you know, cuz he would hike up. So he's on every day, and was increasingly starting to think about the landscapes and the and the ecology there. Um, should we go to the next questions?
Unknown Speaker 1:31:12
I think this would have to be the last question. Thank you so much for your presentation today. Dr. Kim. I was impressed by efforts all levels to rebrand the DMZ as a tourism center and as an environmental sanctuary. But it also got me wondering, what has been the response of the DPRK to the rebranding of the DMZ by locals or western South Korean NGOs, as bilateral prospects of such Kumgang sun and Kaesong Industrial Complex have stalled have the DPRK plans for the DMZ as well.
Unknown Speaker 1:31:47
You know, the DIA, the DMZ on the North Korean side, as far as anyone that I know, knows, is just that, right, and they have their own version of the civilian control zone. But as people may be aware, there's no freedom of movement in North Korea. So it's not like there's a ton of you know, it's mostly military, if some agricultural they have done GIS studies of land use change in the DMZ area, and what you see on the south is just like urbanization, you know, just like for deforestation, etc, and on the north, it's pretty much stayed relatively the same. And the DMZ on the North Korean side, is not considered to be an ecological space. It's a space of war, and national security. And from everything I've learned about earlier attempts to create some kind, like indigene brought up the idea of a peace park to congenial in 1990 whenever it was 9899 I know I'm sorry. 2000 2000. Yeah. And he was encouraged by sorry, I'm tired. I'm forgetting people's names. The South African not Yes. Mental, pick you to bring up the idea of a peace park. And during that summit in 2000. And, and, yeah, and, you know, it was it was raised, and it was raised a few more times. But, you know, again, North Korea has always said, there's a peace treaty, a peace treaty must come before a peace park. But, you know, some of the ecologists I worked with would kind of cynically, maybe or sarcastically be like, well, you know, if there's unification, what we should do is just let South Korea develop itself to death, and keep North Korea as like this underdeveloped haven for biodiversity. So, obviously, that's not a not the best solution. But
Unknown Speaker 1:34:05
all right. Well, thank you so much, once again, for your wonderful, wonderful talk. And as I said before, it has given us so much food for thought. So thank you for accepting our invitation. We hope to see you sometime very soon. Again. I hope so. Yes, regulations on your book. We will be all reading it. Published, I'd appreciate that signing it. Our graduate students again. Looking forward to reading Thank you. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker 1:34:33
Thank you so much. Thanks, everyone, for being here. And thank
Unknown Speaker 1:34:36
you everyone for attending the talk and for your wonderful questions. And I believe the talk was recorded and if it is okay with Professor Kim, it will be upon the current set of a Korean Studies website. Thank you again.
Unknown Speaker 1:34:55
Thank you. Bye bye
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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