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Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement, by Nancy Abelmann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 306 pp. (ISBN 0-520-08590-6 cloth; ISBN 0-520-20418-2 paper).

Reviewed by Changzoo Song
University of Hawaii at Manoa

This book is about the discursive politics of the minjung (the non-elite mass as subject of history) as practiced by the farmers of Koch'ang and their supporters, including students and organizers. Koch'ang is a remote rural county in North Chôlla Province, but Carter Eckert's eloquent book, Offspring of Empire: The Koch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origin of Korean Capitalism, 1876-1945 (University of Washington Press, 1991) has made it known to many Koreanists as the hometown of early capitalists Kim Yôn-su and Kim Sông-su, the founders of the Kyôngbang and Samyang companies. Though Abelmann and Eckert deal with very different issues in their books, Eckert's accounts of the Koch'ang Kim family and their entrepreneurial activities during the colonial period help us to understand the movement of the Koch'ang tenant farmers that Abelmann investigates.

The Samyang group reclaimed land in Koch'ang in the late 1930s, and many villagers of the region worked on the newly created rice fields as tenant farmers. While these fields could later have been allocated to the tenant farmers as a result of the Land Reform Act of 1949, they remained exempt from distribution because of the company's claim that the land was not ready for rice cultivation at that time. The farmers, nevertheless, believe that it was not distributed because of the political influence of Kim Sông-su, the brother of Samyang's chairman Kim Yôn-su. Motivated by the minjung spirit and the highly politicized atmosphere of 1987, the tenant farmers occupied the headquarters of Samyang in Seoul and demanded the company cede the land to them. Abelmann, who stayed several months in villages with the farmers and participated in their protest in Seoul, writes about their lives, their labor, protests, and discourses of resistance.

This book is composed of nine chapters in which discussion moves back and forth between the villages of Koch'ang and Samyang's headquarters in Seoul, and between past and present. Following introductory remarks in the first chapter, Abelmann explores the discourse of the minjung in Chapter 2, and maintains that the essence of the movement lies in its reinterpretation of the past against the hegemonic views of governmental and corporate elites. Chapter 3 describes the farmers' daily activities during their one-month protest in Seoul, including the preparation of food, encounters with the media and the people of Seoul, and their confrontation with the police. Chapters 4 and 5 show how these farmers construct their own version of "history" and the "present," and provide an excellent comparison between the conflicting historical views of the farmers and the Samyang elite. The farmers accuse the Kim family of having collaborated with both the colonial government and the authoritarian regimes of the post-Liberation era. Chapter 6 deals with the discussions between the farmers and organizers, and presents the decision-making process behind the protests. Chapter 7 depicts the class structure of the villages, which functioned as a variable in terms of ideology and participation in the protest. Chapter 8 analyzes rural mobilization and the state's ideological programs in the post-Liberation period, and concludes that "regardless of the vicissitudes and variety of their urban images today, farmers emerge not as passive objects but as subjects who have been simultaneously structured by and resisted ideological, political, and economic realities" (p.225). In the last chapter, Abelmann revisits the farmers and other minjung activists several years after the protest, and she presents changes within the minjung movement during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Based on thorough research and observation, Abelmann's discussion shows keen analysis and erudition. Moving back and forth from past to present, from periphery to center, and from interpretations based on political and economic structures to those based on Korean culture, she draws a compelling map of the consciousness of the farmers and their supporters. The real importance of Abelmann's work, however, lies in its focus on farmers, who have been neglected in the minjung literature despite their significance in the movement's discourse. Thus far the great majority of discussions about the minjung and South Korean democratization have focused on organizers, students, industrial workers and the middle class, while farmers have been relegated to the margins. Abelmann brings farmers back to the center stage of minjung discourse and the movement, especially in Chapters 4 and 5, where she most effectively explores the farmers' discourse and the challenge it issues to the hegemonic practices of the corporate elite.

While I enjoyed this book, a few minor points of criticism come to mind. First of all, Abelmann's conclusion on the use of the past in the politics of the minjung could be expanded. Although she is certainly correct that "dissent is always an engagement with the past" and that the past "echoes in the epics of dissent" (p.248), as is clear in the minjung's self-empowering attempts to revive the memory of the Tonghak Peasant Revolution and to stress its anti-elite character (Chapter 2), in post-Liberation Korean politics, the "past" has nevertheless been used by not only dissenters but other social groups such as capitalists and the state, to either gain power or deprive others of it. For example, as described in Chapter 4, the Samyang elite, in their conflict with the tenant farmers, stress their role as "national" capitalists who not only competed with Japanese capital but also contributed to the enrichment of the nation. Similarly, in their arguments about the rightful ownership of the disputed land, both the farmers and Samyang cite nationalist credentials as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy: the farmers criticize Samyang for its anti-national character in its collaboration with the Japanese colonial authorities (p.86), while Samyang tries to depict itself as a nationalist corporation (pp.78-9). Understandably, in minjung discourse the authoritarian government of South Korea becomes an evil institution much more for its anti-national character (such as its dependence on the US) than for its undemocratic qualities. Such arguments reflect the position of nationalism as the supreme moral value in Korean culture, and Abelmann could have explained more fully why nationalist causes became the ultimate determinant for both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces.

Readers may also feel that some changes in the farmers' outlook after their culminating experiences of protest are given short shrift. In particular, gender relations could have been analyzed in greater detail, especially because the author relates the story of a peasant woman in the first chapter as a paradigmatic exemplar for her account (pp. 16-18). Her later descriptions of the dominant role played by women at the protest site in Seoul ("the life of protest was in all ways sustained by women; they were the cooks as well as fearless protesters," p.64) merely tantalize, however, since she does not elaborate further, even in the final chapter where she reflects upon changes in the villagers' world view and lives after the protest. Yet village women might well have had their consciousness raised in regard to their own relationships with men as a result of their political struggles, especially since the protesters met with and defied patriarchal attitudes and rhetoric on the part of the landlords (p.123). Certainly, gender relationships are not the author's main focus in the study, but discussion here would have connected this experience with broader societal trends. If no changes occurred in the villagers' notion of gender relationships after their protest experience, one can affirm the crucial vulnerability of the 1980s minjung movements in general: although pursuing dogmatic nationalism and procedural democracy, they rarely challenged the authoritarian and oppressive cultural foundations of the society, such as the Confucian patriarchy.

Aside from these few minor criticisms, this book, with its first-hand observation and thorough scholarship, offers an excellent account of the discursive politics of the minjung movement through the late 1980s and early 1990s. Anyone seriously interested in modern Korean society, politics, culture and history will find this book highly informative and helpful.


Citation:
Song, Changzoo 1998
Review of Nancy Abelmann, Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social Movement (1996)
Korean Studies Review 1998, no. 7
Electronic file: http://koreanstudies.com/ks/ksr/ksr98-07.htm

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