[KS] spies and thrillers

[Frank Hoffmann]

(cont.)

Allow me to give you two examples.

Example (A):
Professor Keith Howard's presentations and 
publications on music from/in North Korea: While 
he is in every case very aware of the political 
circumstances and while he includes this in his 
analysis, he still focuses on music. We learn 
something about music, on particular connections 
and developments within the political context, 
but also beyond a political context. In every 
talk I heard by him I always understood that 
there were actual people out there doing this, 
and that neither the music nor the people could 
be completely "explained" purely in terms of 
political or economic contexts. We can learn much 
more about a culture by looking at one cultural 
or artistic work (and after that another and 
another) than by reading or writing 20 more books 
on how the prison camp system or the spy network 
is organized or how exactly the ranking within 
the party has shifted.

A somewhat different example (B):
In October last year the Museum of East Asian Art 
and the Free University of Berlin held a 
symposium on Koguryô murals that went hand in 
hand with an exhibition on the same topic.
Professor Rocco Mazz of Bologna University is the 
scholar leading UNESCO's project for the 
protection and possible partial restoration of 
Koguryô tombs in both NE China and northern 
Korea. This talk on mural paintings was so 
fascinating because his research was purely based 
on "hard sciences" like chemistry and physics. He 
was thereby able to "discharge" a whole area of 
art historical scholarship that is mostly based 
on iconographic analysis à la Gombrich and texts, 
and texts about texts. My point here is not if 
Professor Mazz is right or wrong in his final 
statements, but the fact that he is looking at 
one specific area (the dating of Koguryô murals) 
using latest technology and testing methods, a 
rigid approach that does not start with all the 
pre-conceptions and nationalist agendas art 
historians, historians, and Korean studies 
country specialist have to deal with -- with 
underlaying questions about national identity 
(Korean vs. Chinese). In this case, in this 
example, a scholar, was able to give some very 
important input exactly because there was no 
embedding process of his particular work into the 
shared cultural assumptions about Koguryô culture 
and dating and its relationship to China.

I doubt that more summaries of the political and 
economic situation in North Korea, another set of 
books that all cover very similar and overlapping 
areas starting from the P'yôngyang subway system 
to Kim Il Sung / Kim Il Jong cult do help anyone 
to better understand North Korea. What I have 
seen is that a single talk about one work of art 
or music does this job much better, even if just 
a technical analysis. All the political analysis 
and the institutions that created them did not 
help West Germany (or its big brother) to even 
remotely forecast the fall of the Berlin Wall in 
1989, nor did it help the regime in East German 
(or its big brother) to stay in power. But the 
ongoing exchange of culture, information, and 
education between the two states -- the case by 
case exchanges of goods and knowledge (that had 
never really been interrupted) sure helped to 
avoid any sort of violence when the Wall fell. 
These allowed for a basic understanding that was 
most certainly not due to books on political 
analysis of systems.

Frank






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Frank Hoffmann
http://koreaweb.ws