Belonging in a House Divided: The Violence of the North Korean Resettlement Process

Belonging in a House Divided chronicles the everyday lives of resettled North Korean refugees in South Korea and their experiences of violence, postwar citizenship, and ethnic boundary making. Through extensive ethnographic research, Joowon Park documents the emergence of cultural differences and tensions between Koreans from the North and South, as well as new transnational kinship practices that connect family members across the Korean Demilitarized Zone. As a South Korean citizen raised outside the peninsula and later drafted into the military, Park weaves in autoethnographic accounts of his own experience in the army to provide an empathetic and vivid analysis of the multiple overlapping layers of violence that shape the embodied experiences of belonging. He asks readers to consider why North Korean resettlement in South Korea is a difficult process, despite a shared goal of reunification and the absence of a language barrier. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in anthropology, migration, and the politics of humanitarianism.

ISBN-13: 9780520384248

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of California Press

Publication Date: 11-22-2022

Pages: 224

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Joowon Park is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Skidmore College.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction: A House Divided

1. Enduring Legacies of Division and War
2. The Chinese Dimension of the North Korean Migration
3. The Body and the Violence of Phenotypical Normalization
4. Remittances and Transborder Kinship
5. Constructing North Korean Deservingness
Conclusion: A Continuum of Violence in a House Divided

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index Show More