The 2nd World Humanities Forum, Busan, Korea

Proceedings
Proceedings
The 2nd World Humanities Forum

1(Thu) - 3(Sat) November 2012 / BEXCO, Busan, Republic of Korea
whf@unesco.or.kr
http://www.worldhumanitiesforum.org
Contacts
Proceedings

Proceedings
Keynote Lecture
The Human Sciences and the Healing of Civilizations
/ Yersu Kim (Kyung Hee University)
Catharsis by Confronting the Past: Lessons of Germanys Double Burden of Dictatorship
24
/ Konrad H. Jarausch (University of North Carolina)
Regeneration by Complete Humanism
40
* La rgnrscence par lhumanisme intgral 53

/ Michel Maffesoli (Paris Descartes University Sorbonne)
SESSION 1
Plenary Session 1. Sufferings and Conflicts
69
1. Memories, Representations and Working through Genocides
71
/ Daniel Feierstein (National University of Tres de Febrero)
2. Nepal Searching for Democratic Soul
88
/ Narayan Wagle (Author/Journalist)
3. C
linical Healing or Pathological Reflection: the Imagination that Links Auschwitz with
Fukushima
103
/ Kyung Sik Suh (Tokyo Keizai University)
4. Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian Epic in Modern War
114
/ Wai Chee Dimock (Yale University)
SESSION 2
Plenary Session 2. Nature and Civilization, Science and Technology
1. New Forms of Harmony between Human and Nature
135
137
/ Hwe Ik Zhang (Seoul National University)
2. Becoming the Alien: Avatar and District 9
156
/ Andrew M. Gordon (University of Florida)
3. T
he Work of Art in the Age of Digital Technology: What Kind of a Future Will Human Beings
Create?
175
/ Peter L. Rudnytsky (University of Florida )
4. Illness and Art
192
/ Desmond Egan (Irish Poet)
SESSION 3
Parallel Session 1. Perspectives, Approaches, and Practices
Parallel 1-1. Healing Humanities: Criticism and Defense
201
203
1. H
umanities and Healing from Perspectives in and around Environmental Ethics
205
/ Johan Hattingh (Stellenbosch University)
2. N
otes Toward a Typology of Consolation: Healing and Cultural Difference
222
/ Yasunari Takada (The University of Tokyo)
3. F
eminism and the Humanities as Means for Healing: Focused on the Issue of Female North
Korean Defectors
235
/ Heisook Kim (Ewha Womans University)
4. H
umanities and the Crisis of Politics: from Kallipolis to Blade Runners L.A.
252
/ Luca Maria Scarantino (IULM University)
Parallel 1-2. Who Should Be Listened To?
253
1. Therapeutic Function of the Humanities: Black Studies and the African American
Experience
255
/ Tunde Adeleke (Iowa State University)
2. S
olidarity of the Subaltern Confronting the Globalization of Suffering: A Transmodern
Critique of Zygmunt Baumans Liquid Modernity
274
/ Yong-gyu Kim (Pusan National University)
3. D
ivorce Disputes, Property Right, and Legal Pluralism in a North China Village
286
/ Zhao Xudong (Renmin University)
4. D
ifficult Dialogues: Perpetrators, Victims, Power, and the Legacies of Mass Violence
/ Henry C. Theriault (Worcester State University)
Parallel 1-3. Healing Practices in the Humanities
319
1. H
ealing Words: Philosophy in the Treatment of Mental Illness
321
/ Peter B. Raabe (University of the Fraser Valley)
2. Instances of Philosophical Counseling and Byzantine Philosophy

/ Shlomit C. Schuster (Center Sophon)
3. H
ealing Practices in the Humanities
355
/ Kayama Rika (Rikkyo University)
4. Healing Practices in the Humanities: A Search in Progress

/ Jeanette Fourie (Lyndi Fourie Foundation)
367
340
302

Proceedings
Contents
SESSION 4
Parallel Session 2. Call for Papers Session
385
Parallel 2-1. The Humanities, Narratives, Memory, and Healing
387
1. The Humanities and Medicine: Narratives of Illness and Suffering
389
/ John Clammer (United Nations University)
2. U
nderstanding of the Motherland and Narrative Representation of Healing Shown in
the Novels of Korean-Japanese writer Yang-Ji Lee
409
/ Jung-Hwa Yun (Ewha Womans University)
3. N
o One Has Ever Died of the Humanities: Healing and Transcendence in the
Contemporary World
426
/ Elizabeth S. Gunn (Morgan State University)
4. The Role of Memory for Healing in Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster Place
437
/ Myung-joo Kim (Chungnam National University)
Parallel 2-2. Language, Gender, and Senses
447
1. Healing Thought: Therapeutic Philosophy and the Critique of Metaphysics
449
/ Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University )
2. The Practicing of Feminism as Healing Humanities
464
/ Ra-Keum Huh (Ewha Womans University)
3. E
motions and Humanities Healing: The Greek Philosophers and the Stoics
Understanding of Emotions
478
/ Wooryong Park (Sogang University)
4. The Healing Function of Talchum
494
/ Hyun Shik Ju (Sogang University)
Parallel 2-3. Diseases, Pathology, and Social Healing
511
1. S
ociety as a Patient: Metapathology, Healing and Challenges of Self and Social
Transformations
513
/ Ananta Kumar Giri (Madras Institute of Development Studies)
2. P
rincess Bari, Answering the Conundrum of Sufferings of the World
521
/ Kang Ha Yu (Kangwon National University)
3. D
isplacement as Disease: Exploring the Links between Traditional Healing and WellBeing in the Context of a Relocation Crisis
535
/ Ronel P. Dela Cruz (St. Paul University Quezon City)
4. T
reatment of Hwabyung in Traditional Medicine with Four Elements of Non-Violent
Communication
548
/ Young-Wan Kim (Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine)
SESSION 5
Parallel Session 3. Organizers Session
Parallel 3-1. UNESCO: Narratives of Change
557
559
1. Narratives as Healing: Perspectives from Environmental History
561
/ Gregory Quenet (University of Versailles-Quentin-en-Yvelines)
2. Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans: A Historicized Account
563
/ Ranjan Chakrabarti (Vidyasagar University)
Parallel 3-2. MEST/NRF: Healing Humanities in Korea
579
1. The Humanities Policy and Their Social Contributions in Korea
581
/ Kidong Song (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology)
2. Humanities Therapy: Theory and Practice
595
/ Young E. Rhee (Kangwon National University)
3. T
he Division Trauma of Koreans and Orality Healing
611
/ Jong Kun Kim (Konkuk University)
4. Deficiency, Expression and Mind Healing: Focusing on Selective Mutism

/ Sunmi Hong (Wonkwang University)
Parallel 3-3. Busan City: 20C Busan, its Scars and Healing
1. P
osie Dedicated to the Forefront of Korean History
645
647
/ Yol-Kyu Kim (Sogang University)
2. The Scars and Healing of the Korean War Refugees
665
/ Chulwook Cha (Pusan National University)
3. Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National History: The Scars of Wounds and the
Current History
677
/ Man-joon Park (Dongeui University)
4. Envisioning a Modern Busan at a Corner of Sanbok Road

/ Dong Jin Kang (Kyungsung University)
699
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The 2nd
World Humanities Forum
Proceedings
Keynote Lecture
/ Yersu Kim (Kyung Hee University)
Catharsis by Confronting the Past:

Lessons of Germanys Double Burden of Dictatorship
/ Konrad H. Jarausch (University of North Carolina)

* La rgnrscence par lhumanisme intgral
/ Michel Maffesoli (Paris Descartes University Sorbonne)
Yersu Kim
Kyung Hee University
A miracle at Centum City?

I would like to thank the organizing committee of this very important forum on World Humanities
for placing enough confidence in me to give one of the keynote talks on a topic that is crucial for
understanding the nature and the role of the humanities in todays world. I can only say that I will do my
very best to be worthy of that confidence, but I am not confident that that would be enough.
Please allow me to engage in some personal reminiscences. Exactly 60 years ago, I left Korea for the
unknown world of the United States, probably from the very place I am speaking at this moment. Centum
City was at that time the place of Suyoung Airport at the westernmost corner of Busan, the temporary
capital of the Republic of Korea, fighting for its very survival in the vortex of an international war that
involved the United States, the Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, and sixteen nations of the
United Nations, and of course two Koreas. The airport was the hub of much military air traffic, and a
small corner was allotted to civilian use that connected the Korean peninsula to the outside world.
After 48 hours of flight, stopovers, and being quite airsick, I landed in San Francisco. Although in a daze,
I could dimly see that I was in a world totally different from the one I left two days ago, where I did not
know how to operate a flush toilet, and my culinary and linguistic ability was only just enough to order
tomato soup for all three meals.
Buildings were taller than I had imagined. The streets were wide and clean, and full of tall trees and
automobiles. The brightly colored houses were painted in yellow, pink and blue as only the houses in fairy
tale books could be. People were clean and smiling and said Hi or Hello even to a bewildered boy
from a far-off land. Everything seemed and looked better than what I had expected from what I had read,
Keynote Lecture

Proceedings
heard and experienced from the American soldiers, stationed in Korea. It dimly occurred to me at the time
that this new world, this new civilization would never be mine, too far away, too different from the one I
was used to. But I was determined that I would do my best to learn as much as I could and bring it back
home to make Korea a better place to live.
Busan had been at that time the temporary capital of South Korea during much of the fratricidal war at
the front line of the ideological confrontation between the so-called the Free World and the Soviet bloc.
Busan, a port city of about a half million at that time the war broke out, was bursting at the seams with an
influx of more than two million refugees from all parts of Korea. There were also soldiers of both Korean
and foreign nationalities who were passing through Busan as one of the central points of deployment. The
city swarmed with soldiers who had been wounded on the fronts and being sent to the hospitals or simply
discharged without adequate provisions or care.
The city simply was not capable of dealing with the situation. There was not enough food, the signs
of malnourishment were obvious to everyone, and some even died of hunger. To say that housing was
inadequate would be an understatement, and shanties and mud-huts sprang up in the many parts of the
city, with attendant problems of sanitation, safety and fire protection. There was a serious shortage of
water, making long lines of people with big buckets waiting for long hours for drinking water a part of
the street scene. Begging in the street, burglary, and pick-pocketing were daily occurrences and seemed
somehow to be natural parts of the daily life in this city. With the police forces overburdened, everyone
was on his own, left to fend off as best he could whatever harm that might occur to him in this miserable
city.
There was of course easy money to be made in the hustle and bustle and the confusion of war. There were
smugglers of much needed goods from such places as Japan, Hong Kong and Macau. Merchants dealing
in illicitly obtained military goods made fortunes. While some serious-minded entrepreneurs began laying
the foundations for their post-war business empires by beginning to meet the needs of the military and
civilians, the easy money was accompanied by corruption in high and low places and decadent life styles.
Prostitutes were a common sight in the streets, and cabarets, tearooms, and secret dance halls dotted the
streets at nights. Some youths were deeply drenched in nihilism born of the miseries of daily life and
hopelessness about the future. Sartre and Camus were much talked about, if little read.
Even in the midst of misery and suffering, schools and universities were opening their temporary
campuses. My school was putting up temporary classrooms in military tents on vegetable field at the
outskirt of Busan. When the wind blew, we would be covered with dust from the field underneath our
benches, which contained infectious remnants of human manure that had been used as fertilizers for
10
again, and even having to resort to dim candles during frequent power outages could not dampen our
sprit. Young males were conscripted to serve in the army and many lost their lives. But even more began
to experience, in an indirect way, the West, in the military system that was based on the organization
and management of the US armed forces. Many young military officers were sent to the US for training,
thereby giving them first-hand experience of a culture and civilization so totally different from their own.
When the cruelly destructive war came to an end with an inconclusive truce in 1953, Korea was one of the
poorest countries in the world, if not the poorest. According to World Bank statistics, even as late as 1962
the per capita GNI was $100, less than that of the many LDCs today, and certainly less than that of many
Asian neighbors such as the Philippines and Malaysia. During the period from 1953 to 1960, as the rubble
of the war was being cleared, more than 70 percent of the government income was from foreign aid,
predominantly from the US through such diverse channels and institutions as ECA, UNKRA, ICA, and
PL480. There are acronyms which may ring a bell with some older members in the audience who have
lived through the times when Korea was poor and destitute.
Today, a half century later, Busan stands transformed. Koreas second largest metropolis after Seoul and
worlds fifth busiest seaport by cargo tonnage, Busan is a modern city of 3,600,000. It was the host to the
2002 Asian Games, the 2005 APEC Meeting, the 2010 G-20 Summit, and the 2011 Nuclear Summit. The
Busan International Film Festival, held every year on these very premises, has become the largest and
most talked about international film festival in Asia. Earlier this year, the population of Korea reached the
50 million mark and our media celebrated the event with Koreas symbolic entry into the 20-50 Club, a
notional club whose seven members each have a population of more than 50 million and per capita GNI
of more than US $20,000. It was emphasized in the media that Korea is the only member of the Club
which has won independent after the end of World War II.
A Craving for Healing
A miracle at Centum City? A transformation of great magnitude has certainly taken place. A world has
been created that was unimaginable in the minds of the youngster who left Suyoung some sixty years ago.
Have Koreans not been healed from the misery and suffering from poverty and indignity? Has such a
miracle at Centum City brought happiness and fulfillment to the people of Korea?
Let us take a little detour to answer this seemingly simple question.
A few weeks ago, a presidential hopeful, who had just been nominated the official candidate of the
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Keynote Lecture
vegetables. But that did not matter. We were all happy that we were fortunate enough to go to school

Proceedings
opposition party, promised he would be a healing president. A committee has been formed by the party
with a focus on developing policies to redress the anxiety of the people regarding housing, education,
security and old age and youth employment, and was to be called the healing policies committee. The
candidate of the governing party, for her part, came up with the headquarters for the happiness of 50
million which would perform similar functions as the healing committee of the opposition party. The
third candidate, a political neophyte, who gained national prominence by conducting youth concerts and
mentoring the youth, has recently declared his candidacy for the office of president, vowing to become the
healing president for Korea. There is an enormously popular television show called Healing Camp,
which consists of well-known public personalities who publicly confess to past mistakes and unhappy
moments in their lives and by the end of the show magically declare themselves healed.
Korea is today awash with healing since perhaps the middle of last decade. There are healing walks,
healing food, healing tourism, healing lectures, healing dances, healing equestrian clubs, and healing
forest resorts and the list seems endless. The marketing industry seems to have found a new blue ocean
where neglected products and activities make new appearances with healing label and naturally at
substantially enhanced price. Bookstores have special counters selling books dealing with various aspects
of healings. Books by Buddhist monks top the bestseller list and the demand comes from a wide range of
social groups, spanning people in their 20s to those in their 50s and beyond.
Healing is a restorative concept with many nuances. When we speak of healing in physiological
sense, we refer to damage or disease suffered by an organism, and, in these terms, healing as a whole
means resumption of the natural functioning of the biological system as a whole. Medical treatments
would be more appropriate word for this process with well-defined procedures performed by trained
and experienced experts. When we speak of healing in a psychological or spiritual sense, we refer to
damage or suffering in the mind and soul. And through some non-physical process of healing, the
resumption of normal and fulfilling existence becomes possible.1 It is thus natural that many people seek
healing in religion. More people throng to Christian retreats and temple stays a few days of quiet and
contemplation in secluded places of prayer and contemplation. Some people retreat to a more primitive
mode of living close to nature and away from the conveniences of modern civilization. People thereby
wish to be free from the stresses of daily life and to restore themselves through quiet and contemplation to
an original state of purity for renewed energy and readiness for life.
To judge from these trends toward healing in all sectors and aspects of Korean life, the answers to the
1 cf. Healing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing, accessed on September 22, 2012.
12
not brought happiness and fulfillment. This perception is corroborated by some interesting international
statistics. Despite membership in the 20-50 Club, Korea ranks a distant 102nd place with the Satisfaction
with Life Index released in 2006,2 an index of subjective well-being pioneered by an analytic psychologist
at the University of Leicester correlating factors of health, wealth, and access to basic education. Denmark
ranks the highest, Bhutan ranks at 8th place, the US at 23rd and East Timor at 69th, China at 82nd, and
Japan in 90th place. Korea does slightly better in the Human Development Index,3 a composite statistic
of life expectancy, education and income indices, published by UNDP. According to 2011 Human
Development report, Korea ranks 28th with Norway in first place, France in 6th place and the US in 23rd
place.
In a comprehensive and enlightening paper given as the keynote address at the 11th International
Conference on Philosophical Practice and Fourth International Conference on Humanistic Therapy,
recently held in Chunchon, Korea, Sung-Jin Kim, a Korean philosopher who has been active in
introducing philosophical practice in Korea, declares Korea is becoming a therapy country.4 Presumably,
he has made his judgment based on diagnosis that people are showing more and more neurotic symptoms
while they are trying to adjust themselves to all the dramatic changes of life style to the rapidly changing
social environment.5
Idea of philosophical practice or philosophical counseling began to be known to the public at large with
the publication of the Koreans translation of Lou Marinoffs Plato not Prozac6 in 2000. Since then the idea
spread quickly among Korean philosophers. The Korean Society of Philosophical Practice was founded
in 2009, and has grown to the point of hosting the 11th international conference earlier this year. The idea
of philosophical practice was further expanded into one of humanities therapy by scholars at Kangwon
National University. With the support of the National Research Foundation of Korea, its Humanities
Institute has been conducting researches on humanities therapy through conferences, colloquia and
researches into healing methods for mental and emotional problems. According to Sung-Jin Kim, the
demand of philosophical counseling and therapy in Korea is so high and the number of people who need
2 cf. Satisfaction with Life Index, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index, accessed on September 22,

2012.
3 cf. Human Development Index, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Deveopment_Index, accessed on September 22,
2012.
4 Sung-Jin Kim, Philosophical Practice in Korea: A Short History, A New Approach, Proceedings of the 11th International
Conference on Philosophical Practice and the 4th International Conference on Humanistic Therapy, Vol. I, Humanities
Institute: Kangwon National University, p. 173.
5 Ibid., p. 176.
6 Lou Marinoff, Plato Not Prozac, New York: Harper Collins, 1999.
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Keynote Lecture
questions we have asked a few moments ago seem to be a clear No. The miracle at Centum City has

Proceedings
philosophical help is growing so rapidly that no hesitation is allowed for us philosophers in Korea. 7
A Revival of the Humanities?
We must also consider the surprising surge in the demand for the humanities we are witnessing today. To
what extent this phenomenon is connected with the all-encompassing call for healing is difficult to gauge.
Prima facie, it is a surprising and unexpected phenomenon. As late as 2002, there was a public decision to
establish a committee to study policies dealing with what was considered to be the crisis of the humanities
and the proposed policies that would have the effect of promoting and putting life into humanistic studies.
I myself chaired the committee for five years with an increasing sense of frustration, and I must say the
results were far from satisfaction. Representative of the crisis atmosphere in university humanities circles
was a declaration in 2006 by a group of professors in humanities departments that the foundations for
very survival of the humanities were under threat due to the blind belief in the logic of the market and
efficiency. The association of deans of humanities colleges followed up the declaration by warning that the
crisis of the humanities could lay waste the dignity of human beings and the authenticity of human life.
The response came, surprisingly, from the market itself. To call this a response to the agonized cries of
the academics is perhaps misleading, since the demand for restructuring of universities of the neo-liberal
provenance had come primarily from the market itself in the name of demand and efficiency. Market then
began to notice how Steve Jobs, the icon of the business world, said he would give all the technologies
of Apple in return for a single meal with Socrates. Over the last four to five years, humanities programs
for CEOs have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain and some programs have become so competitive
as to institute screening procedures to sift out those who are serious about the humanities and those who
are not. Costs are sometimes prohibitively high, but they are sometimes subsidized by the companies
themselves as legitimate extracurricular activities of their CEOs. The CEOs go through weeks of rigorous
evening studying Socrates to Confucius, Machiavelli to Sun Zi, Hermann Hesse to Han Young Man,
Marx to Beopjeong. Not only businessmen participate, there are people from the financial world and
government bureaucracy, judges, lawyers, university presidents, medical doctors, journalists, church
leaders, and artists.
Some business groups have internal programs and seminars with emphasis on the humanities. One
group recently organized a CEO strategy meeting with the title Understanding of the Humanities and
Leadership. This is how the chairman of the group saw the rationale for the meeting. In this difficult time,
7 Kim, op. cit., p. 172.
14
lies on the understanding human being through the study of the humanities. Understanding what clients
want and creating a creative and challenging work force both of these tasks boil down to the problem of
human beings.8
Is this what seems to be a see change in the attitude of Korean society toward the humanities for real?
There is certainly an element of adroit commercialism in this humanities phenomenon. But it seems to
have spoken to a deep need in the minds of Korean people. In 2010, Michael Sandels What is Justice? in
Korean translation sold over a million copies and his lectures filled the halls seating thousands. Earlier this
year, the lectures by Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher of Marxist provenance, met with a reception
of similar enthusiasm. The audience consisted not only of students but of young people in their 20s and
30s coming directly from work. Paradoxically, Zizek, the Marxist, was sponsored by a medium to low
end clothing brand. There are also lecture courses on various aspects of the humanities such as art, music,
classics and philosophy organized by different foundations and local governments and most of them
are overflowing with applicants. There are also humanities and philosophy courses for prison inmates,
homeless. Some who are engaged in the humanities and philosophy, traditionally disciplines which prided
themselves in being secluded in the isolated splendor of the ivory tower now visit homes of single moms,
conduct care programs for the North Korean refugees and international families.
Telescoped Development and Borrowed Cultural Synthesis
Are these phenomena somehow related, and if so, how? I believe one has to go back to the early days of
Koreas entry into Western civilization in seeking an answer to this question. Korean economic, political
and social development has been so unprecedented in the contemporary world that it requires a deep a
careful understanding. In such an understanding lies at least part of the answer regarding the role which
the humanities and philosophy play or fail to play in todays world.
Exactly 136 years have passed since Korea opened its door to the West. The Treaty of Gangwha with
Japan signed under duress in 1876 was the beginning of an end to Koreas traditional civilizational
allegiance to the Sino-centric world. Six years later, in 1882, Korea signed Treaty of Amity and Commerce
with the US. With the signing of the treaty, Korea opened its door directly to the ascendant West for the
first time in its history. Then in rapid succession, Korea signed treaties with Great Britain and Germany in
1883 and Russia in 1884 and France in 1886.
8 cf. Chosun Ilbo, October 17, 2012, B6.
15
Keynote Lecture
what is important is how you can differentiate yourselves from other groups. The basis of differentiation

Proceedings
Defeated in a confrontation of civilizations and suddenly confronted with the vitality of Western
civilization during the latter half of the 19th century, we blamed our own political and cultural tradition for
all the stagnancy, ineffectiveness and injustice in our society. To be sure, there were such men as Ki-Rak
Kwak and Sun-Hak Yoon, who attempted to mediate between civilizations with such doctrines as dongdoseogi, which, while recognizing importance of Western technology, seogi, such as canons, steam ship,
railways and the telegraph, believed the Eastern way, dongdo, originating in Confucian ethical norms, was
superior to the Western way. They held that the Eastern way and Western technology could be separated
from the original habitat and could be combined to meet the challenges of the West. But it was a classic
case of too little, too late. We associated ignoble demise of Joseon Kingdom with a Confucian tradition
rendered defunct by formalism, factionalism and a regressive world view. Then came to colonial distortion
of the Korean cultural tradition as the record of mere subservience to China and therefore of no intrinsic
value. The cultural synthesis that has been at the basis of political stability and cultural achievements was
in deep disarray. Deprived of national dignity and history and the future, the de facto devaluation of our
own tradition was deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the Korean people.
We Koreans thus became a cultural tabula rasa and highly receptive to the political, social and cultural
ideas and institutions that Americans brought with them after the defeat of Japan in the Second World War.
The dissemination of these ideas and institutions and practices was all the more rapid and fundamental
because they were part of the culture of a welcome liberator and later a powerful ally in the struggle for
survival in the Korean War. There was a ready-made cultural synthesis which promised a way forward
to survival and flourishing. Intellectual and political leaders had neither the time nor need to choose
with discrimination among the goods offered by the new culture. The course of economic and social
development necessitated borrowing many Western experiences and technologies. American culture,
identified with Western culture in the popular mind, seemed inevitable part of experience, with all its fads,
fetishes, disorders and aberrations. To be sure, the Confucian norms and attitudes continue to govern to
this day the daily behavior of Koreans at a deeper level. But as explicit cultural ideals, these norms were
as good as dead. In a virtual cultural tabula rasa, the conception of American economy and politics found
ready and enthusiastic acceptance in the mind of Koreans.
Such an acceptance brought about, through a painful and tortuous process of trial and error and of
simple hard work, a measure of realization of the visionary expectations of power and affluence. Korea
has become a postindustrial society, unimaginable half a century ago. In this sense, the transformation
at Centum City is truly a miracle. The transformation brought about is a fair replica of the industrial
civilization that the West, particularly America, had succeeded in creating during the last century and
half by systematizing countless technological inventions and improvements. It guaranteed for man a
material existence at the level never before enjoyed. The phenomenal increase in productivity attained
16
wants, but also promises of the creation of accumulated material wealth that would enable man to develop
his potentialities to the full.
In this process of telescoped development based on a borrowed cultural synthesis, there was no need and
no place for humanistic thinking about the ideas and values underlying what was considered a defunct
civilization. In moments of perplexity and need, we needed only to turn to the ready-made cultural
synthesis for inspiration and instruction. Given Koreas defeat this civilizational confrontation in the latter
half of the 19th century, reducing many centuries of humanistic achievements to a mere pile of useless
papers, who can be surprised at the fact that the classical disciplines of the humanities even in their
imported form became wholesale useless disciplines, of interest only to those few who made it their
profession. There were of course some who made valiant efforts to revive the study of Korean history and
philosophy, but colonialism saw to it that these efforts go nowhere.
Fortunately for us Koreans, we were perhaps the last riders of the civilizational train that brought
affluence, democracy and justice to a significant minority of people in the world. In 1945, Koreans
adopted a civilization as embodied the American conception of economy, politics and culture. By that
time, however, the inner dynamics and validity of this civilization were in disarray. The material and
institutional side of the civilization was, to be sure, still basking in the splendor of high noon, but perhaps
only of Indian summer. The intellectual and moral ideas and values of this civilization were undergoing,
unnoticed except by a very few, a process disintegration and transformation. As early as 1888, the decade
in which the treaty between Korea and the US was signed, and doors opened to the entrance of West into
Korea, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in the preface to his Will to Power thus:
What I relate is the history of next two centuries, I describe what is coming, what can no longer
come differently; the advent of nihilism. The future speaks even in hundred signs [...] For some
time now our whole European culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured
tension that is growing from decade to decade; restlessly, violently, headlong like a river that wants
to reach an end, that no longer reflect, and that is afraid to reflect.9
9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (ed. by Walter Kaufmann), 1967, p. 3, as quoted in Yersu Kim, Interaction of
Aesthetic and Intellectual Traditions in Academy of Korean Studies and Woodrow Wilson Center, Reflections on a Century of United States-Korean Relations, New York and London: University Press of America, 1983, p. 110.
17
Keynote Lecture
by institutionalizing the fruits of science and technology promise not only the satisfaction of mans basic

Proceedings
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy

Healing, as I said a moment ago, is a restorative concept. Here two questions pose themselves. If healing
is a restorative concept, what is the nature of the disease, damage and consequent suffering? What do we
need to do to get back to the original state of normalcy and purity to which we would wish to be restored?
To get a grip on these questions, I propose that we take another detour and go to Boethiuss The
Consolation of Philosophy.10 It is a fifth century Roman protreptic or exhortation with a specifically
religious message, written in the prosimetric form, a combination of prose and verse. Following the
Renaissance and the Reformation the work was translated into many languages of Western Europe,
including various translations into English, and remained a recommended reading for every educated
person until well into the 20th century.
Born into one of the aristocratic families which dominated Roman life in the final decades of the fifth
century, Boethius became the leading figure in the Roman establishment with power and prestige. He
was then suddenly accused to treason, imprisoned, and was finally put to death. The circumstances of
his trial and the death are not clear but it is probably during his imprisonment that Boethius wrote The
Consolation.
Boethius is complaining bitterly about his unjust fall from power and grace. The figure of Philosophy
appears and chases a way the muses of poetry who had been consoling him. Philosophy offers him a
physicians help.11 In order to diagnose his ailment, Philosophy poses several questions to Boethius:
whether the world is guided by the reason; to what end it proceeds; and what the essential nature of man
is.12 Though she finds Boethiuss answers less than satisfactory, Philosophy sees in them the hope for
cure. Philosophy declares that she now knows the further cause of your sickness, and it is a very serious
one. You have forgotten your identity. So I have now fully elicited the cause of your illness, the means
of recovering your health. [] Your true conviction of the government of the world provides us with the
nourishment to restore you to health.13
After a round of give and take with the prisoner, Philosophy comes to the conclusion that the defective

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (Translated and with an Introduction by P. G. Walsh), New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Ibid., p. 8.

Ibid., p. 13.

Ibid., pp. 16-17.
18
means of happiness. This lies with God. Philosophy here makes an important point that defective goods
sought piecemeal by humans must be gathered in unity. Philosophy makes the point that the things
sought by most men were not true or perfect goods that the true good emerges when those aims are
gathered into a single shape, so that sufficiency is identical with power, renown and pleasure. And indeed
unless all are one and same they, have no claim to be counted among things worth seeking.14
Step by step, Philosophy moves from the prisoners personal concerns and makes clear to him that
consolation does not lie in prisoners attainment of mundane satisfaction. It lies rather in aspiring to
and attaining knowledge of God, the Good. That knowledge will bring with it the realization that God
orders all things justly. So God is the highest good which governs all things peacefully, and orders them
sweetly.15 A central feature of the freedom given to human beings is that they are able to choose their
way. Humans cannot fully comprehend this process, but they are thus given the freedom to free himself
from the shackles of earthly serfdom and rise to the contemplation of God.
Civilizational malaise and cultural synthesis
Does this early medieval language of exhortation to God have anything to teach us? In particular, what
is the relevance of Boethiuss protreptic for the question we posed a few moments ago, namely what is
the nature of sickness and suffering which philosophy and the humanities are called upon to heal? And
how does he help us in conceptualizing the original state of purity and integrity toward which the healing
should be directed?
Once stripped of the early Christian language of the Roman era, it becomes clear that Boethiuss focusing
on the discrepancy between values and ideas that are dominant in the society and the individual in need
of healing. This can be seen in such questions as the relations between reason and governance, the final
purpose of the world, and essential nature of man. This discrepancy results in the loss of identity for
the individual. Philosophys final prescription and Boethiuss acceptance of it consist in seeing God
as the embodiment of the One and the Good. The ideas are not just randomly selected ideas, but the
essential part of the world in which a person lives and must live. And such a world order with ideas and
values in coherent unity is represented as God. In secular language Boethius seems to be saying that it is
civilizational analysis which gives consolation and healing to a person because he is suffering from what
is essentially a civilizational malaise.

Ibid., p. 62.

Ibid., p. 67.
19
Keynote Lecture
goods sought by human beings piecemeal are merely stages in the search for true good, which is the true

Proceedings
Culture and civilization of each time and place strive to forge optimal synthesis of ideas, values, and
practices that would enable it to deal with the task of survival and flourishing. At some point in time and
place, a synthesis thus achieved would be perceived by those inside as well as outside it to have achieved
an optimal point, a reflective equilibrium in the process of interaction and interchange of ideas, values, and
practices on the one hand, and recalcitrant but changeable reality on the other. A cultural synthesis thus
achieved would be the basis of civilization.
Such synthesis must constantly adapt its ideas, values, and practices to the ever changing or changed
circumstance in order to function as the guide to survival and flourishing for humanity. Radical changes
in the natural environment in which a particular civilization as situated may necessitate it. Some have
been exterminated by imperialistic imposition. A civilization may lose a sense of direction at a certain
stage of its development and may be confronted by another budding civilization that is more powerful and
conceptually richer. The resulting transfer of allegiance, partial or total, may come through imperialism but
it need not always be so, since the old civilizations may itself come to recognize its own inadequacies.16
In times of great transition and transformation, when the essential pillars of a civilization are in jeopardy,
there would be serious grappling with historical and cultural alternatives before each culture, adopting and
further developing some and discarding others. Danielle Eliseef, a French Sinologist, tells us about the
Confucian wave17 that gripped Europe in the last quarter of the 16th century. When Histoire du Grande
Royaume de la Chine by Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza was published in 1585, it became an immediate
sensation and was translated into several European languages. Michel de Montaigne is said to have
expressed his interest in a world much more ample and diverse than Europe and surpassing in some
aspects the ancient civilizations of the Greeks and Romans. Matteo Ricci introduced Confucius to Europe.
Chinese civilization continued to fascinate the Europeans in times of formation and evolution of a cultural
synthesis in its early stage. One can only surmise what the result of the interaction between civilizations
could have been had it continued its course unimpeded by other courses of events. What this Confucian
wave shows clearly is the crucial importance of the humanities in the formation and evolution of cultural
synthesis, which becomes the basis of civilization.

cf. Yersu Kim, The Idea of Cultural Identity and Problems of Cultural Relativism, Occasional Paper 40, Washington
DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center, 1990.

cf. Danielle Eliseef, Les Valeurs Confuceenes: Un Ferment de lEurope, A Paper presented at a UNESCO conference
on Dialogue Among Civilizations in Paris, 2003, unpublished.
20
The nature of the damage, disease and suffering seems now clear enough. What we are suffering from and
what is crying out for healing is civilizational. It is civilizational in the sense that many of the values, ideas
and institutions that constitute the pillars of the cultural synthesis of the West that has served humanity
so well in its task of survival and flourishing seem now to be increasingly irrelevant and sometimes
counterproductive. Take, for example, conception regarding mans relationship to nature. The Faustian
will to shape the nature for the benefit of human being has been very strong in the cultural synthesis
of the West. We are now in an ecological dead end and we do not know much about when and where
the tipping point may be reached. Times we live in are times of great uncertainties. We speak of risk
societies and tired societies. These terms indicate the sense that we have entered an age of uncertainty
and simply do now know what will come next as a result of many actions and ways of life that we thought
we were conducting in a rational way. We witness in Korea as well as in other societies of the world
many senseless and brutal killings and we agonize over them because we do now know why they have
occurred and what in our interpersonal relations has gone wrong to make crimes of such inhumanity and
heinousness happen. We seem to have lost our way and seem to be living in a lost society.
I suspect at the bottom of the present surge in demand for the humanities lies a fumbling search for some
kind of new cultural synthesis. The long, drawn out process of the demise of the cultural synthesis of the
West which had been at the basis of the miracle at Centum City is manifesting in particularly painful ways
in Korea. Koreas place in the sun has been secured on a borrowed identity, a borrowed cultural synthesis.
Koreas development during the last half century has been telescoped one, achieving relative affluence
within a span of time two or three times shorter than that required by other societies. In this sense, what
happened at Centum City is truly a miracle, and not simply a mirage. Just a few days ago, as I was writing
these lines, a review of a book, written by a British journalist, caught my attention. The book is entitled
Korea: The Impossible Country.18 Why an impossible country? Firstly, according to the author in the
interview, Korea has created economic and political miracles. Secondly, because Koreans are setting for
themselves the standards of achievement that are almost impossible to achieve.
Be that as it may, many of the developments that are taking place in Korea, in economy, politics, and
humanities are happening elsewhere too. But somehow they seem to appear writ large in Korea. Our
sense of loss of direction and waywardness in Korea is only that much greater because we have only a
distant memory of the agony of identity building and creation. Joseon dynasty, Koreas last, was a locus
18 Joongang Sunday, September 30 October 1, 2012, p. 12.
21
Keynote Lecture
Plea for Ecumenism in the Humanities: Human Sciences

Proceedings
of political stability and cultural achievement because we have actively and creatively participated in the
creation of a cultural synthesis that was the basis of an ecumenical Confucian world order for 500 years.
Then the world turned topsy-turvy for Korea with a civilizational defeat by the Westernized Japan and
then by the United States.
The surge for the humanities may certainly have this element of being writ large. It is of course
explainable partly by commercialism and the newly affluents taste for what looks like luxury. Hopeful
sign is it is business enterprises which seem to be most serious about the humanities. It had been partly
from the pressure of the market against useless learning that had led to the kind of restructuring
of knowledge that occasioned the crisis of the humanities. Now the business leaders see that time of
economic developments based on borrowed models of management and technology is over. They see that
they have to be creative in order to stay ahead and even just to survive. The problem boils down to the
problem of human beings. Ergo, the humanities, the sciences of human beings par excellence.
Today, sadly for us, there is no cultural model that can effectively replace the old. Signs of civilizational
transformation are everywhere, and there seems to be a definite direction toward which certain economic
and political trends are moving. But it is far from clear whether such shifts are merely signs of an
extension of the refurbished cultural synthesis of the West or a truly transformational moment in the
evolution of civilizations. Science and technology are creating an unheard of opportunities even as they
threaten the very foundation of human life. The economic turmoil that began in 2007 and the tragic
disasters at the nuclear power plants in Fukushima last year attest to human beings terrifying helplessness
to deal adequately with the consequences of what we have ourselves wrought. Today, computers are
getting faster such that some point to the specific year, 2045, barely 33 years from now, as the year when
the computers will have become capable of whatever it is our brains are capable of. Given exponentiation
of the growth of computers, human mind will be quickly eclipsed by artificial intelligence and what lies
beyond that threshold will be unfathomable for the human mind.19
If there is a healing mission for the humanities of today, it is the first and foremost in the creation of a
cultural synthesis that would be adequate to deal with these problems. That would involve search and
reflection on knowledge and wisdom that would give meaning to the relationship between nature and
human beings, on how a just society can be envisaged in which freedom and equality play appropriate
roles, how the relationship between the individuals and community in which he has existential roots
should be conceptualized, how to conceive what ultimately constitute the meaning of life, and many more

Cf. Lev Grossman, Singularity, Time, 177-7, February 2011, pp. 25-31.
22
These are times of challenge and opportunity for the humanities. It is clear that the humanities cannot
exhaust itself as it is conceived in the modern bifurcation of knowledge into science and the humanities
and its relegation to lesser part of knowledge. The humanities that would be adequate to the tasks of
forging a cultural synthesis would need to be a more inclusive ecumenical activity, encompassing all the
disciplines that contribute to understanding human beings and their lives, past, present and future. It would
include not only ideographic classical humanistic studies but also the less nomothetic part of the social
sciences and even some sciences such as genetics, artificial intelligence, and nano technology. It would
be a call for the kind of knowledge sought after in movements such as consilience and convergence. The
label for such an ecumenical science of human beings could be the human sciences, les sciences de
lhomme, in the tradition of Fernand Braudel. It would be a single adventure of mind, not even just the
obverse sides of a single cloth, but the entire cloth itself, in all the complexity of its threads.20
Is this task almost impossible to achieve? Therein, I submit, lies the challenge for all of us who are
engaged in the human sciences not only in Korea, but everywhere.

Fernand Braudel, Histoire et Sociologie, In Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur lHistoire, Paris: Flammarion, 1969, pp.
85-86, as quoted in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Uncertainties of Knowledge, Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
p. 62.
23
Keynote Lecture
questions that animate the current intellectual debate.

Proceedings
Catharsis by Confronting the Past:

Lessons of Germanys Double Burden of Dictatorship
Konrad H. Jarausch
University of North Carolina
One of the most vexing legacies of a defeated dictatorship is the question of what to do with its violations
of human rights. During the peaceful revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe, cautious voices warned
against confronting Communist crimes so as to build a common future. They argued that citizens could
only reconcile with each other by letting bygones be bygones. Nonetheless, the victorious dissidents
opened the prison gates to free political victims who were calling for justice. Once the spell of secrecy
was broken, the public also clamored for information about who was responsible for its prior suffering.
Moreover, the newly enfranchised media published scandalous revelations about the corruption of those
who abused their power for personal gain. So as to legitimize the transition to democratic rule some
post-Communist governments sought to expose the misdeeds of their predecessors.1 These conflicting
approaches raise the fundamental question: Should a post-dictatorial country ignore prior crimes in order
to move forward, or should it openly confront repression and atrocities in order to heal the pain?
Especially in pacted-transitions like the democratization of Spain after the death of Generalissimo
Franco, the impulse of forgetting has proven quite powerful. As compensation for giving up power
peacefully, dictatorial elites have insisted not just on exemption from legal or economic punishment but
on keeping their reputation unsullied, even if they knew full well that they had committed crimes. Former
perpetrators and many collaborators argued that little would be gained by dwelling on their transgressions,
because that would only continue internal conflicts. Rather than reopening old wounds, it would be much
better just to forgive and forget in order to move on to a brighter future. For the sake of living in peace
with ones neighbors it seemed sensible not to delve into their misdeeds under the dictatorship. Such
1 A. James McAdams, ed., Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (Notre Dame, 1997). Cf. also
Helga Welsh, When Discourse Trumps Policy: Transitional Justice in Unified Germany, German Politics 15 (2007), pp.
137-152.
24
of generosity among the victors.2 Hence some East European and Latin American countries decided to
forego transitional justice by maintaining a benevolent silence about prior crimes.3
In contrast, regime critics have argued quite insistently that lasting social peace could only be restored
by openly confronting the past, because then the ghosts could no longer haunt the living. In opposing
impunity, victims of the military dictatorship in Argentina have stressed the need to find out what hap
pened to the family members who simply disappeared, to discover the graves of murdered dissidents
or to identify the children who were taken from their parents so as to be able to mourn.4 Most critical
intellectuals emphasized the necessity of bringing perpetrators to justice in order to restore faith in the rule
of law. They argued that untold victims of repression and violence needed both personal consolation and
financial compensation for their destroyed lives. In the long run, so they reasoned, a stable democracy
required open discussion rather than sweeping previous atrocities under the rug. These claims rest both on
the Christian teaching that forgiveness requires a prior confession of guilt and on the psychiatric theory
that the soul can only achieve peace, if it honestly engages its own failings.5
For this debate, the German case is particularly instructive, since the Federal Republic has borne a
double burden of dealing with two ideologically opposed dictatorships: After 1945, it had to confront the
responsibility for unleashing the Second World War and perpetrating the mass murder of the Jews and
Slavs in the Holocaust. After 1989, it had to deal with the effects of Communist repression that imprisoned
GDR citizens behind the Wall. The effort to cope with the fascist past first coined the untranslatable
term of Vergangenheitsbewltigung, i.e. mastering the past, and later on the equally complex concept
of Aufarbeitung, i.e. working through history. While the international community has made sure that
the Germans would not escape their responsibility for the Nazi crimes, internal pressure has kept the
Communist violations of human rights in the public eye. Moreover, the success in creating a stable postwar democracy and the progress in reunifying a divided country have raised the question of what other
countries might be able to learn from the German effort to come to terms with its terrible past.6
2 Laura Desfor Edles, Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy After Franco (Cambridge, 1998).
3 Monika Nalepa, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge, 2010).
4 Carlos H. Acunia, Transitional Justice in Argentina and Chile: A Never-Ending Story? in John Elster, ed., Retribution
and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 206-238.
5 Alexander Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York., 1975) and Joachim
Gauck, Winter im Sommer, Frhling im Herbst. Erinnerungen (Munich, 2009).
6 These remarks draw on Konrad H. Jarausch, Memory Wars: German Debates about the Legacy of Dictatorship, in John
A. Williams, ed., Berlin Since the Walls End: Shaping Society and Memory in the German Metropolis since 1989 (Cambridge, 2008), 90-109; and Double Burden: The Politics of the Past and German Identity, in Jrn Leonhard and Lothar
Funk, eds., Ten Years of German Unification: Transfer, Transformation, Incorporation? (Birmingham, 2002).
25
Keynote Lecture
arguments tended to find favor with groups who had something to hide while also appealing to a sense

Proceedings
In order to explore whether to forget or to confront history, the following remarks will briefly examine
the German struggle over coping with its dictatorial histories. These reflections will trace the evolution of
memory culture rather than legal and administrative measures, since a public understanding of the past
forms the basis for most judicial sentences and political decisions.7 First I shall focus on the laborious
process of coming to terms with Nazi crimes which took decades to complete, since the establishment of a
self-critical view had to overcome much public resistance. Then I shall take a look at the post-unification
discussions about the Communist dictatorship in East Germany which are still in progress since they
are more recent, engendering strong emotions in the new federal states. Thereafter I shall address the
competition between the efforts to deal with the Nazi and Communist legacies in order to point out how
the different memory regimes have influenced one another. And finally I shall conclude with some general
comments on the relationship between truth, justice and reconciliation.

1) Confronting Nazi Crimes

Learning to deal openly with the horrible crimes committed by the Third Reich was a long and contested
process, because the establishment of a critical approach to the past had to overcome strong public
resistance. In order to prevent another World War, the victorious allies instituted a program of reorientation
during the Potsdam Conference that sought to transform the defeated countrys entire political culture by
demilitarization, denazification and decartelization. When they returned from emigration, concentration
camps and inner exile, the German opponents of the Nazi regime also insisted on a fresh start by repudi
ating the dangerous traditions of militarism, nationalism and authoritarianism which had brought about the
catastrophe. But the majority of the population remembered the prewar years as a good time and refused
to address its own complicity in the brutality of the war, the persecution of the Jews and the exploitation of
the slave laborers. While official pronouncements admitted German guilt, private memories instead dwelt
on their own suffering during and after the collapse.8
The military defeat of Hitlers regime permitted the victorious Allies to combat Nazi propaganda myths
by revealing the full extent of the atrocities perpetrated in the German name. The demobilization of the
military machine, the dissolution of the Nazi Party, and the deconcentration of the war industries sought to
discredit militarism, displace party members and dismantle the economic basis of aggression. Compulsory
visits to nearby concentration camps and films of the skeletal survivors also demonstrated of inhumanity
of Nazi policies to shocked German civilians. But it took the much publicized Nuremberg Trial of the
7 Timothy Garton Ash, Trials, Purges, and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe, in JanWerner Mller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge, 2002).
8 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, 1997).
26
order to make public the full extent of war crimes. Moreover crimes against humanity had to be added
as a new category so as to punish the genocide of Jews and Slavs. In order to sustain their indictments,
the prosecutors amassed an enormous amount of evidence in official documents and personal testimony
which proved the murderousness of the NS-dictatorship beyond any doubt.9
Most of the Germans responded to the presumed accusation of collective guilt with incredulity and
resentment, instead blaming the top Nazis for their misfortune. Excuses such as I was just following
superior orders, we did not know anything about the crimes or the other countries also did bad
things were popular, because they diminished personal responsibility. Though designed to establish the
degree of individual guilt, the denazification process gradually turned into a white-washing when most of
its judgments classified perpetrators as mere fellow-travelers. While the Protestant Church admitted some
failing in its Stuttgart declaration, conservative bishops and the Catholic hierarchy pleaded for the release
of generals convicted of war crimes. Moreover, many collaborators who had been interned or lost their
job were eventually reintegrated into government service through a general amnesty. Though Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer courageously offered restitution to the Jewish community, the bulk of the electorate
wanted the politics of the past to stop any further legal prosecution and debate.10
The renewed confrontation with the Nazi crimes in the FRG during the early 1960s came as somewhat
of a surprise, because it went counter to public sentiment. Since the formulaic anti-Fascism of the
GDR served to justify the dictatorship of the SED, many West Germans dismissed charges that old
Nazis still held power as Eastern propaganda. But a series of highly publicized court cases such as the
Einsatzgruppen trial in Ulm, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt drew
public attention once again to the criminal past. Based on incriminating documentary evidence and
touching survivor testimonies, a minority of progressive jurists like Fritz Bauer decided to prosecute
perpetrators before the statute of limitations would make legal action impossible. The establishment of
a central clearing office in Ludwigsburg helped to assemble material for further court cases. Moreover,
famous writers such as Heinrich Bll in his short stories, Gnter Grass in the Tin Drum, Peter Weiss
in his staging of the Auschwitz trial and Ralf Hochhut in the play The Deputy also issued searing
9 Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of the German Archives after the Second
World War (Cambridge, 2012).

Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen (Munich, 2005). See also Philipp Gassert
and Alan E. Steinweis, eds., Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict,
1955-1975 (New York, 2006).
27
Keynote Lecture
Nazi leaders and the subsidiary cases against the SS, the captains of industry and the medical profession in

Proceedings
indictments.11
The overwhelming response to the US TV series on the Holocaust, aired in the Federal Republic in
January 1979, reinforced this critical turn. Liberal media like Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel had already
prepared the ground with their honest reporting, while an entire rebellious generation which had grown
up since the Third Reich kept asking Daddy, what did you do during the war? The American TV
series, directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, was so effective because it did not treat the murder of the Jews
didactically, but used the form of a soap opera to dramatize the gruesome fate of the putative Weiss family
of a Berlin doctor, hunted by a bureaucratic SS killer named Dorf. Seen by 10-15 million viewers, about
a quarter of the West German TV audience, the miniseries, portrayed by gifted actors like Meryl Streep
showed the entire trajectory of increasing discrimination, killing by bullets, extermination in Auschwitz
and painful survival. This dramatization evoked such an emotional response that the Bundestag was
forced to extend the statute of limitation and the term Holocaust entered into the German debate.12
Local efforts to uncover traces of persecution and the transformation the concentration camps into public
memorials supported the growing Holocaust sensibility by making the effects of Anti-Semitism visible.
The methodological shift from an abstract history of society to a more tangible everyday history
inspired historians and amateurs to research the effects of persecution where they lived, revealing a
universe of forgotten Nazi detention facilities. Arresting the decay of former concentration camps, this
increasing public interest transformed sites of suffering like Buchenwald or Dachau into impressive public
memorials. Ironically East and West Germany began to compete by offering different versions of a critical
approach, with the GDR extolling the Communist resistance and the FRG stressing the racist nature of
genocide.13 Grass-roots initiatives like Stolpersteine or plaques to murdered Jews on their former houses
made the process of discrimination and the loss of Jewish culture visible. As a result, educated young Ger
mans identified with the racial victims and developed a diffuse sense of philosemitism.
Yet among the older generation and the political right signs of discomfort continued to emerge which
demonstrated an unwillingness to be self-critical. During the post-war decades an unofficial subculture
of veteran reunions and rightist publications (Landserheftchen) maintained a more positive recollection
of Wehrmacht exploits during the war. Fortunately the various neo-Nazi parties, initially forbidden but

Annette Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Ttern im geteilten Deutschland: Vergangenheitsbewltigung 1949-1969, oder
eine deutsch-deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im kalten Krieg (Paderborn, 2002).

Peter Reichel Erfundene Erinnerung - Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Munich, 2004).

Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp 1933-2001 (New York, 2001);
and David A. Hackett, The Buchenwald Report (Boulder, CO, 1995).
28
politicians like Helmut Kohl also made occasional missteps such as meeting with President Reagan
in the Bitburg military cemetery which contained Waffen-SS graves. When traditionalist scholars such
as Ernst Nolte sought to relativize German crimes by pointing to the prior Stalinist mass murders as
inspiration, they set off a fierce quarrel among the historians (Historikerstreit).14 While liberal intellectuals
ultimately prevailed in maintaining the critical consensus of public discourse, they were unable to stop the
development of a xenophobic skin-head subculture among disenchanted youths.
The post-unification tendency towards claiming victimization also revealed a desire to revise the critical
memory regarding the Third Reich. In his Frankfurt Peace Price speech the writer Martin Walser ques
tioned whether Auschwitz ought to be used any longer as moral club for beating the Germans, pro
voking censure from Ignatz Bubis, the head of the Jewish community. The novelist W. G. Sebald and the
journalist Jrg Friedrich also called attention to the suffering of German civilians during the fire-storm
of Allied bombing, which had previously been somewhat neglected. Similarly Gnter Grass pointed to the
plight of over 12 million fleeing from the Red Army in 1945 and expelled from their homes in the East
in order to blunt the call of the Union of Refugees for a separate memorial to flight and expulsion.15
Pointing to German suffering during the War needed not to diminish responsibility for Nazi crimes, if its
causes were clearly kept in mind. Chancellor Kohl suggested a compromise with the revised inscription of
the Berlin war memorial Neue Wache which now pays tribute to all Victims of War and Tyranny.
The erection of the new Holocaust Memorial close to the Brandenburg Gate, nonetheless, showed that
self-criticism was here to stay. Though institutions like the Topography of Terror or the Jewish Museum
already addressed the topic, the redoubtable journalist Lea Rosh and the historian Eberhard Jckel
organized a citizens initiative which convinced Helmut Kohl that a symbolic expression of German guilt
was needed in the new capital. In spite of much criticism directed against the necessity of further contrition
as well as against its artistic form, Kohl chose the concept proposed by the architects Peter Eisenman and
Richard Serra, which resembled a Jewish cemetery with 2,711 tomb-like columns of polished concrete.
After an underground place of information was added so as to help visitors decode the sites meaning,
the Bundestag voted the funds, and construction was completed in 2004. The memorials massive size and
location close to the Bundestag created a permanent presence in the center of government, suggesting that

Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988).

Thomas A. Kovach and Martin Walser, eds., The Burden of the Past: Martin Walser on Modern German Identity (Rochester, NY, 2008); Jrg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (New York, 2006); Gnter Grass,
Crabwalk (Orlando, FL, 2002).
29
Keynote Lecture
resurrected in a tamer guise, never received enough votes to get into the federal parliament. But moderate

Proceedings
national identity could be reconciled with a sense of guilt.16

2) Coping with Communist Repression
The effort to deal with the Communist dictatorship was both similar to and different from the
confrontation with the Nazi crimes. On the one hand, the regimes resembled each other as one-party
dictatorships, supported by a well-oiled propaganda machine and a powerful secret service, which
violated human rights. On the other, the GDR was a Soviet satellite, covered only one third of Germany,
lasted three times as long and killed many fewer victims. In fact, its Communist ideology of egalitarian
internationalism was diametrically opposed to the Fascist dreams of racist imperialism.17 This perplexing
mixture of resemblance and antagonism was bound to complicate the process of dealing with the second
German dictatorship which tried to avoid the earlier mistake of reluctant engagement by insisting on a
more thorough reckoning from the beginning. Although emotions continue to run high in the East due to
conflicting memories of the GDR, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2009 has created an
incipient consensus by establishing the notion of a peaceful revolution in the public mind.
The quest for free speech as a fundamental human right was already part and parcel of the democratic
awakening of 1989, seeking to tear the veil of secrecy from the SED regime. The most popular citizens
initiative of the fall was the New Forum which proclaimed the need for an open discussion of the
problems confronting the GDR, thereby trying to restore an independent public sphere in which citizens
could articulate their wishes. After ousting the dictator Erich Honecker, his successor Egon Krenz was
forced to initiate a policy of public dialogue that gradually escaped his control. At the same time, the
media threw off its prior censorship, with state television suddenly presenting unvarnished news and
newspapers scandalizing the corrupt life-style of the Socialist Unity Party in its suburban ghetto Wandlitz.
The partys privileges such as a separate grocery store, an indoor swimming pool or a hunting preserve
seemed rather modest by Western standards. Propelled by freed victims of the regime, critical reckoning
with the GDR past therefore originated already during the overthrow of the SED.18
The records of repression became an important bone of contention during the post-dictatorial transition.
When the secret service began to shred and burn its documents, alert dissidents occupied its regional

Jan-Holger Kirsch, Nationaler Mythos oder historische Trauer? Der Streit um ein zentrales Holocaust-Mahnmal fr
die Berliner Republik (Cologne, 2003). Cf. www.holocaust-denkmal-berlin.de.

Gnter Heydemann and Eckart Jesse, eds., Diktaturvergleich. Theorie und Praxis (Berlin, 1998).

Konrad H. Jarausch, Die Unverhoffte Einheit 1989/90 (Frankfurt, 1995); and Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis
of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton,1997).
30
the opposition stormed its Berlin headquarters in mid-January. Though the foreign espionage branch HVA
succeeded in destroying its files and the Modrow government authorized the purging of personnel records,
the dissidents captured kilometers of files, documenting the prior repression in great detail. A curious
alliance of the Eastern communist perpetrators and the West German government, afraid of disclosing
their respective secrets, wanted to seal or destroy this evidence. But the civic movement engaged in a dra
matic hunger strike in order to preserve the written record of injustice. In the end, the dissidents succeeded
and the Bundestag established a special office for Stasi files (BStU) that offered access to victims and
scholars, thereby laying an archival basis for a critical memory.19
The political confrontation with the SED-regime culminated in a commission of inquiry which sought to
discredit the Communist dictatorship. Meeting from 1992 to 1998, this parliamentary Enquetekommission
was dedicated to Examining the History and Consequences of the SED-Dictatorship. In a series of
widely-publicized hearings, politicians, eye-witnesses and academic experts discussed the structures
of the SED-regime in order to destroy apologetic myths and enlighten the public about the repressive
character of the GDR. Since they revealed secrets such as the shady economic dealings of Alexander
Schalck-Golodkowski, the televised discussions reached a considerable audience. While conservative
anti-Communists and regime victims painted a dark picture of the East German state, post-Communist
partisans sought to defend its record as socially innovative, whereas moderate commentators tried to
make sense of the many contradictions between humane goals and inhumane policies. Eventually, the
Bundestag created a foundation to carry on with public education and historical research.20
Legal efforts to punish perpetrators and compensate victims turned out to be just as difficult after
Communism as after Nazism, because they were constrained by the rule of law. Court cases were based
on GDR laws as long as they did not conflict with FRG provisions, while foreign spies were excluded
altogether, since Markus Wolf claimed that they were no different than the sleuths of the West. As a result,
thousands of investigations led to hundreds of cases, but yielded only a few dozen convictions. It was
easier to condemn border guards for shooting escapees at the Wall than to punish Stasi-chief Erich Mielke
or the head of the security committee Krenz for their political responsibility. Organized in pressure groups,
the victims clamored for rehabilitation and compensation through laws to undo the injustice. While
about 200,000 people received some payment for prior suffering, it proved more difficult to handle the

Joachim Gauck, Die Stasi-Akten. Das unheimliche Erbe der DDR (Reinbeck,1991).

Andrew Beattie, Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany (New York, 2008). Cf. www.
stiftung-aufarbeitung.de.
31
Keynote Lecture
offices in December 1989 and when it leaked out that the Stasi was trying to survive by changing its name,

Proceedings
more than one million claims for restitution of lost property.21 As a result the high hopes for justice were
often dashed by the cold reality of legal procedure, leaving both perpetrators and victims dissatisfied.
Resentment against blanket condemnation and Western lack of understanding triggered a nostalgic reflex,
called Ostalgie, which made the GDR seem more attractive in retrospect than it had been in reality.
Not surprisingly, former regime members in the party, the military or the security organs became rather
defensive, feeling victimized by Western media, and voted for the post-Communist PDS. Intellectuals,
who often had lost their jobs due to their ideological taint, clustered around the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
in a separate scholarly subculture, debating the reasons why Communism had failed. The majority of
East Germans regretted the loss of their objects of daily life, which they had precipitated by switching to
Western goods. Therefore, a series of Ostshops started to revive familiar Eastern brands, offering the new
citizens a sense of regional continuity across the rupture. Curiously enough, many Easterners failed to
distinguish between criticism of the regime and their own lives, gradually replacing their recollections of
shortage and repression with an illusion of a warm solidarity in the GDR.22
Artistic efforts to come to terms with the Communist past have presented more complex renditions of
life under the SED dictatorship, seeking to balance the old security with the new freedom. A spate of
autobiographical texts like Jana Hensels Zonenkinder described the transition from a regulated but
protected GDR childhood to the excitement and insecurity of Western life-styles. Some authors like the
film-directors of Sonnenallee or Goodbye Lenin took recourse to irony while contrasting the claims and
realities of the East and the West with each other, using a light touch in order to explore the ambivalences
of the two systems.23 Other writers like Uwe Tellkamp of Der Turm or directors like Henkel von Donners
marck of The Lives of Others employed a more dramatic voice so as to portray the suffering of victims
in the GDR, suggesting that the SED-dictatorship was not just a friendly summer camp. Intellectuals like
Christa Wolf have offered a whole spectrum of recollections, ranging from a defense of socialist ideals to
an indictment of repressive practices sometimes even within the same text. 24
Less than one generation after the collapse of Communism, the academic controversy between harsh
condemnation and sympathetic understanding of the GDR remains unresolved. Internal and external
opponents interpret the SED regime as a brutal dictatorship, implanted by the Red Army, which violated

A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge, 2001).

Daphne Berdahl, (N)Ostalgia for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things, Ethnos (1999), pp. 192211.

Jill E. Twark, Humor, Satire and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s (Berlin, 2007).

Klaus Scherpe,
After the GDR? Restoring Literatures Standing, in Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects (New York, 2013).
32
developed by German migrs like Hannah Arendt, in order to equate the anti-democratic nature of
Fascism with Communism. In contrast post-Communist intellectuals tend to defend the Enlightenment
derived idealism of Socialism as a progressive quest for an egalitarian utopia. But they need to explain
when and why this noble experiment failed in the end. Instead, more moderate scholars, supported by
Anglo-American academics, emphasize the tensions between the unquestioned dictatorial features of SED
control and the relatively normal daily lives of East Germans as constitutive. The concept which I have
suggested in order to reconcile this contradiction is the notion of a welfare dictatorship.25
This disagreement is also visible in the cleavages of the memory landscape of museums and exhibitions
that deal with the GDR. On the one hand, condemnations of the Unrechtsstaat have motivated the
transformation of former prisons like in Hohenschnhausen or the Lindenstrasse in Potsdam into
memorials of brutal repression in which victims talk about their terrible suffering. On the other hand, the
experience of everyday life in the East has inspired apolitical presentations like the GDR-museum at the
Spree or nostalgic impulses like the Trabi tours in Berlin. In order to meet the interests of world-wide
tourists, the Berlin Senate has developed a decentralized Wall concept which preserves a few remnants
of the divisive barrier and dramatizes their effect in a special memorial at the Bernauer Strasse. Most
controversial remains the future of the crossing point at Checkpoint Charlie, since its commercialism
clashes with plans for the construction of an international Cold War Museum to explain the world-wide
context. The ultimate shape which the memorialization of the GDR will take is therefore still unclear.26
3) Reconciling Competing Memories
The development of critical approaches to the past has been complicated by the ideological competition
between anti-Fascism and anti-Communism as the foundation for a functioning democracy. Even if
Fascism fortunately disappeared with the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, other authoritarian regimes and
military dictatorships of the Right have taken its place around the globe. Similarly, Communism has been
overthrown from below in Eastern Europe and Russia, but developmental dictatorships of the Left are
still in power from Cuba to North Korea, and with some economic modification in China and Vietnam.
Developed as a form of resistance during the 1930s, anti-Fascism remains the ideological basis for leftist
ideology, abhorring all forms of exploitation and repression. At the same time, the Cold War reflex of antiCommunism is still a powerful motive force for conservatives who fear social leveling and various kinds

Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999).

Martin Sabrow, ed., Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung? Dokumentation einer Debatte (Bonn, 2007); and Klaus-Dietmar
Henke, ed., Die Mauer. Errichtung, berwindung, Erinnerung (Munich, 2012).
33
Keynote Lecture
human rights in order to retain power. They have revived the theory of totalitarianism, originally

Proceedings
of experiments.27 Since both ideologies clash in the Federal Republic, the German case has important
implications for the world wide debate about developing a critical memory.
The territorial division of memory regimes has hampered the global spread of the principle of historical
self-criticism. Western and Central Europe primarily remember the brutality of the Nazi occupation,
therefore attributing, like the Dutch, the responsibility for all suffering to the Germans. The myth of the
rsistance in France allowed the restoration of democratic government by ignoring the evidence of mass
collaboration, punished in a wave of puration after liberation. Only gradually were critical scholars
like Robert Paxton from the US or Henry Rousso in France able to dismantle the Vichy syndrome by
pointing out that most Frenchmen had cooperated with the German occupiers, and the Laval government
had even turned over tens of thousands of hapless Jews to be annihilated in Auschwitz.28 This growing
Holocaust sensibility has made the racist violation of human rights a central international concern. Hence,
acknowledgement of the Holocaust has emerged as a new standard of civilized conduct, symbolically
reaffirmed by the Stockholm declaration that it must be forever seared in our collective memory. 29
In Eastern Europe, memory debates are instead dominated by the recollection of suffering from Soviet
atrocities, sometimes even downplaying the cooperation of local auxiliaries in Nazi murder. This fixation
on the misdeeds of the Communists is understandable, since their wounds are more recent and the
discrepancy is greater between the liberationist rhetoric of anti-Fascism and the Red Army practice of
rape, pillage and repression. The effort to legitimize national independence also involves pointing to
Russian crimes, inspiring accusations of mass starvation during the Holodomor in the Ukraine and of the
vicious repression of Hungarian wishes for independence in 1956, dramatized in the House of Terror in
Budapest. In contrast to the courageous democratic activists around Memorial, the majority of patriotic
Russians and Belarusians remain in deep denial about Stalinist crimes, preferring to celebrate their victory
in the Great Fatherlands War over the Fascist aggressors. Recent research has nonetheless pointed out
that in the Eastern bloodlands Soviet murder rivaled the beastliness of Nazi killing.30
In many ways the German case is unique, because there the debates about the Holocaust and the Stalinist
crimes overlap, engendering an exceptionally critical memory culture. Compared to the nationalist

Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1999).

Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order. 1940-1944 (New York, 1972); and Henry Rousso, The Vichy
Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA, 1991).

Stockholm declaration https://www.holocausttaskforce.org/about-the-itf/stockholm-declaration.html

Claus Leggewie, Der Kampf um die europische Erinnerung. Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich, 2011). Cf.
Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New
York, 2007).
34
resisted the Fascists, international and domestic pressure has forced Germany to confront its ugly past
as chief perpetrator of the Holocaust.31 The latest instance of this mechanism was the debate about the
compensation of Slave Laborers, which led to the establishment of a business and government foundation,
paying out billions of Euros to survivors. At the same time the fall of the Wall has also compelled
Germans to deal with the legacy of Communist crimes, since tens of thousands of SED-victims demanded
legal punishment as well as material aid. The internal effort to integrate the new citizens during unification
therefore sparked heated discussions about Stalinist repression. As a result, the Germans were forced to
address the relationship between these two sets of memories.
One way of resolving the competition between Fascist and Communist memories consisted of looking
more closely at the repressive practices of both dictatorships on the ground. Surprisingly enough, both
the Nazis and the SED used the same places such as the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Sach
senhausen or established prisons in Bautzen, Brandenburg or Halle to incarcerate their opponents. As
a result, two groups of victims now compete for erecting memorials on the same sites, seeking to high
light their particular suffering so as to establish the priority of their ideological message. Ironically the
patterns of persecution by prosecutors and informants, the harsh treatment of inmates, and the disinterest
of outsiders were rather similar under both regimes. Moreover, some Communists imprisoned under the
Nazis subsequently turned into guards while some NS-jailers found themselves imprisoned afterwards.32
Rather than quarreling about the primacy of anti-Fascism and anti-Communism, this resemblance
suggests that it would be more constructive to pay attention to their actual relationship.
Another method of dealing with the paradox would be to emphasize that both the Nazi and SED
dictatorships were antidemocratic regimes, proposing alternatives to Western forms of modernity. The
revival of totalitarianism theory after the fall of the Wall highlighted the structural similarities of the oneparty dictatorships in terms of the political science criteria of Carl Friedrich. Critics, however, quickly
pointed out that such an approach risked equating two hostile regimes which had fought each other in the
Second World War and committed different kinds of crimes such as racist ethnic extermination versus
class-based killing by starvation and labor. As a result, scholars have turned to comparing both dictator
ships systematically in a Diktaturvergleich so as to establish where they resembled each other or where

Richard J. B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War (New York,
1993); Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York, 1994).

Gabriele Schnell, Das Lindenhotel. Berichte aus dem Potsdamer Geheimdienstgefngnis (Berlin, 2012), rev. ed. Cf. Heike Roth, ffentliche Anhrung zum Konzept und zur Trgerschaft der Gedenksttte Lindenstrae am 7. Juni 2012 in
Potsdam (Potsdam, 2012).
35
Keynote Lecture
tendency to downplay the Nanking massacre in Japan and the Italian penchant for claiming that everyone

Proceedings
they were rather different. Recent research has also paid more attention to their mutual learning, with the
Nazi mass murder copying Soviet crimes and Soviet repression imitating Nazi techniques.33 Instead of ig
noring each other, both memory initiatives would benefit from confronting their mutual entanglement.
The sterile moralizing about the priority of the Holocaust or of the Communist crimes might be overcome
by a new effort at comparative genocide studies. The Polish Jewish survivor Raphael Lemkin coined this
concept as description of the resemblance between both ideological mass killings during World War Two.
In its 1948 convention, the United Nations therefore forbade the deliberate and systematic destruction,
in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. By being ideologically neutral, the
term genocide makes it possible to compare various cases of mass murder from the Ottoman persecution
of the Armenians all the way down to Pol Pots crimes in Cambodia to the orgy of killing in Rwanda.
Although beset with definitional and empirical difficulties, statistical comparisons have established that
the magnitude and form of mass murder committed by the Fascists and Communists were generally on
the same scale. Therefore, a similarly critical effort is needed in order to investigate the causes, courses
and consequences of all cases so as to be able to prevent their recurrence.34
The debate about repression, ethnic cleansing and genocide has begun to establish the critical approach
to past crimes as global standard of civilization. The internationalization of the Holocaust has played a
crucial role in raising awareness of the connection between the admission of crimes and democratic rule
as the continuing denial of Iran indicates. It took a mixture of academic research and journalistic exposure
to overcome denials of the reality of mass murder of Jews and Slavs, so that the Holocaust could become
the historical basis for a shared European identity. In the case of the Communist crimes, intellectual
resistance to admitting guilt has been stronger yet, but even there the reality of massive transgressions
cannot be disputed any longer. The symbolic meeting between Russian and Polish leaders at Katyn,
the site of the Red Armys mass killing of the Polish officers, was an important step towards improving
relations between both neighbors.35 Such encouraging examples need to be extended to other military or
leftist dictatorships so as to break the cycle of hatred and revenge at home and abroad.
In this process scholars have a crucial role to play because they can establish the actual facts and provide
conciliatory interpretations. While selling thousands of copies, most kiss-and-tell memoirs of politicians

Colin Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London,
2002).

Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, 2007).

Norman Naimark, Stalins Genocides (Princeton, 2010); and Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and
Nation (Princeton, 2003).
36
announced with great fanfare, tend to scandalize the past through shocking disclosures rather than to
provide judicious judgments. Due to their critical methods and self-reflexive detachment, contemporary
historians can help establish what actually happened in order to dispel partisan myths. Moreover, their
transnational discussions are also able to support internal critics and transcend the narrowness of chauvi
nistic interpretations so as to enhance mutual understanding.36 The international school-book conferences
supported by the Georg Eckert Institut in Braunschweig are such an endeavor that has brought scholars
together from various countries so as to narrow their interpretative differences.37 This effort has already
helped to diminish hostile stereotypes between Germany and France as well as Poland.
4) Aufarbeitung as Catharsis
These remarks have proposed the thesis that confrontation with the horrors of the past is necessary so as
to reach closure through a process which Aristotle called catharsis. In a simple sense this elusive term
suggests a purgation of the blood from evil humors. Closer to the issue is the connotation of purification,
referring to the release fear and pity in Greek tragedy. More suggestive yet is another meaning of
intellectual clarification in the audience via its vicarious participation. Psychotherapists like Sigmund
Freud have picked up the concept in order to suggest a way of dealing with shocking experiences through
a controlled release of emotions. A recent psychological summary claims: Catharsis refers to the reexperiencing (partially or fully) of significant traumatic events, that have not been adequately emotionally
processed and are repressed, causing emotional, physical, or relationship problems in the persons life.38
In dealing with crimes of repression or mass murder, historians can play a similar therapeutic role of
containing destructive feelings through intellectually clarifying their cause.
The examples of Hitlers Holocaust and of Stalins crimes suggest that the attempt to come to terms with
the past involves several successive steps. As in individual therapy, survivor experiences of repression or
genocide indicate that coping with trauma must begin with breaking the wall of silence. The incredulity of
the public has to be overcome, since it creates a barrier among bystanders who do not want to be troubled
by facing their complicity in the horrors. Moreover, the reluctance of most perpetrators to confess to

Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., Verletztes Gedchtnis: Erinnerungskultur und Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt
(Frankfurt, 2002), pp. 9-73.

Ursula A. J. Becher, 25 Jahre Georg Eckert Institut fr Internationale Schulbuchforschung in Braunschweig (Hannover,
2000).

Donald Keesey, On Some Recent Interpretations of Catharsis, The Classical World, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Dec., 1978 - Jan.,
1979), pp. 193-205; and Esta Powell, Catharsis in Psychology and Beyond: A Historic Overview http://primal;-page.
com/cathar.htm
37
Keynote Lecture
are ultimately self-serving, often covering up more than they reveal. Similarly journalistic exposes,

Proceedings
crimes which they have committed has to be surmounted, since they correctly fear that their justifications
will not be believed. Confronted with such indifference, victims often have a compulsive need to share
their stories in order to establish that the atrocities which trouble their dreams have actually happened,
even if that seems implausible in retrospect.39 Testifying is therefore their effort to convince the public
of the reality of the crimes so as to gain a measure of sympathy for their suffering that might lead to
punishment and compensation, even if the wrongs can never be fully righted.
The creation of a critical memory therefore involves the sharing of eyewitness stories, the collating of
different testimonies and the verification of competing claims. While an unburdening from horrors allows
individuals to cope with survivors guilt, remembering is a social process as Maurice Halbwachs has
indicated. The Spielberg interviews demonstrate how actual dimensions of suffering emerge by listening
to different experiences and comparing various accounts. As I have argued in Shattered Past, such
exchanges allow groups like the Displaced Persons or German expellees to shape collective recollections
which standardize narratives of persecution as a basis for claiming recognition and restitution. The airing
of conflicting versions sponsored by different interests in a public debate is a necessary part of the process
of creating a memory culture, because it forces society to decide which rendition will be adopted by the
media and in the schools.40 Instead of being dictated from above by government fiat, this civil society
discussion is essential for developing a pluralistic memory that supports democracy.
In order to foster mutual understanding, such a public memory must be based on strenuous efforts to
discredit propaganda by uncovering the truth of disputed incidents. In the Balkan Wars, NATO claimed
that Milosevic was the aggressor, while Russia portrayed the Serbs as the victims of a Western plot. Only
through investigative journalism and several court cases did the full tragedy of the Srebrenica massacre
become public knowledge: The Dutch had an interest in downplaying the cowardice of their bluehelmeted peace keepers who refused to protect the imprisoned men and boys. The Serbian government
and its offshoot in the Republika Srbska wanted to hide the mass killing of about 8,000 males. And the
Bosnians sought to inflate what was undoubtedly the largest slaughter on the European continent after
World War Two. The persecution of perpetrators like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic was only
credible when the Hague Tribunal also indicted Croatian general Ante Gotovina for similar mass murder.41
In such cases, scholars have the responsibility of scrutinizing the truthfulness of the various claims.

Steven Spielberg, The Last Days: Steven Spielberg and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (New York,
1999).

Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003).

Isabelle Delpla, Xavier Bougarel, Jean-Louis Fournel, eds., Investigating Srebrenica: Institutions, Facts, Responsibilities
(New York, 2012).
38
constructive future. Inspired by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Commission has proven helpful in overcoming the deep-seated hatred, left behind by the
white-supremacist apartheid regime. As in Latin America, its aim was not punishment but rather individual
consolation and collective enlightenment about the crimes committed by the prior regime. While critics
objected that the injustices cried out for legal redress, the full disclosure of the previous crimes did help
create public awareness on which internal concord and external peace could be based.42 Even other
Eastern European countries have therefore started to open their Communist files. In the shadow of the
Holocaust, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers rightly insisted: That which has happened is a warning.
To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains
possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented. 43

Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York, 2001).

Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York, 1948).
39
Keynote Lecture
The final challenge in confronting an evil past is the fostering of forgiveness as a basis for a more

Proceedings
Michel Maffesoli
Paris Descartes University Sorbonne
The word caritas, a royal road of truth for Saint Augustine, has been weakened significantly in modern
times. However, the word has found a new kind of vigor on the occasion of numerous charity events; it is
a vigor of a social bond with love. The entire theme of care is summarized here.
Of course, love in this context cannot be reduced to a private sense. Moreover, it doesnt refer to the
feeling shared by two persons for each other. Love, in its full meaning, is an appropriate term to describe
a general atmosphere in which a way of being together develops and blossoms. This is a basis for another
form of social relation. This is not actually a new way but it has been hidden or at least marginalized
throughout modern times and we need to see why. And Saint Augustines link between truth and caritas
is timely, if we agree with each other, from a phenomenological perspective which acknowledges that the
nature of truth is to be something which is discovered and unveiled.
Truth is not given once and for all and there is also the case of a priori truth. However, considering the
Greek etymology (aletheia), it refers to something that avoids oblivion and something that is unveiled.
In this context, it is about unveiling the secret permanence of emotions in the societal game. It is about
acknowledging that only life (in its complete meaning) has its rights. Citing Heideggers joyful expression,
it is also about showing dialectical maturity in order to completely address the elements of life. It is truly
what differentiates abstract and unilateral thinking (seeing only one aspect of what is real) from concrete
thinking which allows us to decipher its multiple aspects. We should thus find words that know how to
make things happen. The words that reveal their intimate truth while unveiling these things. It is the way
(the only way actually) to find possible healing for societies in crisis!
Nevertheless, in order to fully understand the role of emotions, to decipher the logic belonging to ordo
40
speakers of an ancient memory, in other words, the tradition, in contrast to what is conventionally defined
as correctness (unilateral, univocal). This considers the fact that being an echo is more difficult and
thus rarer than having an opinion and giving value to a point of view. Being an echo means endurance
in thinking. (M. Heidegger). Being an echo of the fact that life isnt divided and that truth of life itself
cannot be divided.
This means that there arent on one hand emotions, which take care of and heal us and on the other hand,
politics, in other words, power, knowledge, and the predictable. In contrast, feelings constitute part of
public and private lives. Even if this sounds surprising, nothing and no one can avoid the strong love
(caritas, care) understood likewise. The role played by the emotional in administrative actions, in labor
games, in professional requests and in reactions to diverse news items, all of this would encourage more
lucidity in terms of ingredients used in the preparation and maintenance of social relations.
In short, we cannot understand this idea if we dont take into consideration its Eros. The same is true for
what concerns the mental atmosphere characterizing todays era. We can even say that we are slaves to
a mania and madness that we inherit. A people is always subordinate to passions and emotions coming
from afar and it is useless to believe that we have overcome these feelings. Ideological prejudices, racial
reactions, diverse conventions and customs, specific language practices, cultural idioms, etc. The list is
long for the ways of being and thinking that are far from being rational but rather passionate and such
ways have been accumulated during a long period of human history. This is the period of CULTURAL
TRADITION.
Whatever was said and done during ancient times of which we have lost the memory, it continues to
work on the social body in its completeness. We had believed that we had overcome this sedimentation of
collective passions and emotions and here it returns strongly and undeniably. Maybe in an analytical vision
of societal power (this groundwater zone nourishing the entire social life), should it be acknowledged
that there isnt a difference between energy and love (what savants call energy and what mystics call
universal love)?
That is why, beyond our prudent language use and below our disciplinary confinements (psychology,
sociology, philosophy, theology), it is appropriate to decipher a passionate basis from which arises any
way of living together. That is because social consensus (cum sensualis) is essentially a shared feeling.
This is what the social contract, in its rationalism, had forgotten. This is what the emotional pacts, in all
the areas, are rediscovering. This is what allows us to understand that societal healing is possible.
41
Keynote Lecture
amoris (Max Scheler), it is necessary to admit that those who play the role of saying what is are only the

Proceedings
To remember, lets remind ourselves that it is only since the Renaissance period that an individual me
has been affirmed. Philosophers and historians effectively showed the paradigm shift going on with the
invention of what I think, making self a centripetal force: everything goes back to this individual person
thinking and acting by him or herself and for him or herself. The world is absorbed by the me. This is the
root of epistemological egotism, source of diverse egoisms (moral, economic, social, political, national)
that have characterized modernity.
Panofsky has analyzed how this aspect me was centrifugal in Europe in the Middle Ages; me is
thrown toward the world that surrounds it and even absorbed by it. In its strong meaning, there is
altruism in current trends. Without giving moral connotation to this term, it is the other, in other words,
social, geographical, ideological, religious consideration of the other, that determines what me is. This
consideration of the other, is almost a mold, a forming form informing us of what each person is all about
and the social world in its completeness.
This is what altruism is, in its epistemological meaning. Emergence of subjectivity starts from objective
concepts: from a place, a tribe, and a religion. We are thus from one body: individual and social. In other
words, this is importance that we give to meanings and sensitivity. Realism was that of Saint Thomas
Aquinas: Because the meaning is also a form of reason like any cognitive power. Sense like a form
of reason, isnt this point focused on the connection of body and spirit? Isnt it also focused on what I
call the entirety of being whose perceptible reason is a good methodological leverage for a pertinent
approach of this entirety?
What is certain is that this cognitive power of the perceptible is at the very heart of a postmodern
paradigm thus discovering the pre-modern institutions and practices. The entirety of a medieval person, a
person from a traditional society finds an echo in the holism of diverse tribes (sexual, musical, sportive,
and religious) constituting the mosaic of postmodern societies. Separation is no longer a question but
what is regarded as important is connection or interaction among all the elements that the modern way of
thinking has slowly dichotomized.
Nature is connected to culture, the body is spiritualized, materialism becomes mystic and archaisms are
technologized, work becomes prospective and creative, progressivity is combined with tradition, social
ethics are beautified and so on. These oxymorons thus translate, in fact, the important role played by libido
in social structure. In the image of organic solidarity that belongs to traditional societies, the spirit of
postmodern times provides diverse emotions with a place of the front view in the arrangement of all that
is social.
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linking reason and sense. Without an exception, modernity is certainly based on domination of nature, the
individual body, and bodys environment. However, in this functionalist and production-oriented future of
civilization, free thinkers constitute an exception.
We can see in what aspect the pioneers of the 17th century were all lovers of eroticism and forbidden
books at the same time. We can see how they showed (almost) public contempt for morals and religion
and at the same time, fascination for forbidden philosophy. Among all the radical authors, lets think
about Beverland(1650-1716), protagonist of the Radical Lights, specialist of the history of Greece and
ancient Rome and the one who developed a philosophy of life from the liberation of libido and the
glorification of passion. All of this constitutes a fundamental and universal characteristic of humanity. In
this sense, he is a good analyst of a pantheist concept and a general theory of the erotic. In other words,
this is a theory of an eroticism that isnt reduced to the functionality of reproduction but that
irrigates life in its totality.
The same is true for Saint vremond despising war, politics and religion and trying to distinguish
himself from others similar to him through a subtle mix of philosophical spirit and love, through irreverent
writing and a taste for refined pleasures. A typical free thinker, Saint vremond made great efforts to
found and justify a close link between passionate and intellectual freedom. Therefore, nothing is separate
from concrete reality but on the contrary, everything is deeply rooted in it. Such thinkers conserve the old
ideal of an authentic humanism knowing how to savor the always renewed beauty of what is given to see
and what is given to live on. Leaving things intact, leaving them as they are, we are characterized by a
pleasure in which the body and spirit find the part that belongs to them, all the time, again and again.
What truly brings back societal emotions is the fact that behind the narrow reason exists an instinctual
force: the power of life. It is about all these non-rational causes, whether they be spiritual, social, ethnic,
or educational, that achieve their goals by means of psychic operations other than reasoning.
They constitute the basis of beliefs and prejudices whose importance is known in political, social and
economic life. Always remember the expression used here: non-rational causes but not irrational
causes. In fact, even if these causes dont depend on instrumental reason, in other words, they are oriented
toward a precise (and faraway) goal, these causes still have an internal reason, expressing what is lived by
the group which carries them. In this context, we can talk about a ratio-vitalisme (Ortega y Gasset).
As indicated, what is special for ratio-vitalisme is that it leaves something as it is and doesnt give
it an external, moral order explaining what it must be or what we want it to be. This is exactly how
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Keynote Lecture
We can remind ourselves that there were certain ancestors with such an understanding of the world,

Proceedings
Heidegger characterized the power of desire: Thanks to it, something has the fundamental power of
being. Such power is fundamentally possible []. There is a chain of reasons between power of being,
leaving as it is, and making it be which is expressed at best in the structure of postmodern communities
(tribes) beyond and below philosophical definition. The essence of these communities is certainly desire,
sharing a taste, process of attraction, and everything that can be summarized with the expression selective
affinities (Goethe). This may be a basis for healing induced by a complete humanism.
What bewilders rational thinking is the fact that the relation to the other lies in the action to leave as it
is rather than the fact of taking action: toward the natural world or the social world. However, this is
such rudeness that characterizes the mental atmosphere of the era, in many aspects and in multiple ways.
Losing interest in politics, getting tired of diverse forms of political participation (plus, lets not forget
about the hedonistic atmosphere contaminating most social phenomena), all these things emphasize the
saturation of finalized energy and underlines the regeneration of energy with a passionate connotation.
In short, energy isnt accumulated but it is consumed. However, it is to clearly mention that the libido
implying this passionate energy should not be reduced to a purely genital sexuality. As all the works by
Jung show, it is about psychic energy that we will rediscover in the foundation of culture in general. This
is in all the aspects of this culture: art, daily life, economy, politics, etc. This is this libido in its general
meaning that is the basis of symbolic nature, another way of referring to living together. This is what I
say here ordo amoris. This is characterized by a true humanism.
This psychic energy (objective psyche, more specifically) is composed of all these habits, these diverse
taboo atavisms and other secret areas which contain hidden pleasures and the desire of being together. A
being is rooted in the feeling and to be in love no longer means to be closed in ones individual self which
is significantly rickety and it doesnt mean to be closed in a duo (that of a couple) which is entirely
economic. Rather, it is comparable to a state of diffraction in perpetual movement. What is formed is thus
this affectio societatis, the mystic basis of the entire political reality, and we begin to measure its effects
again.
In this context, to be in love, once its sweet connotation used in romance novels or Harlequin books is
removed, constitutes a kind of synthesis that spreads everywhere with an energy secretly forming societal
friendliness. This is the underlying core of sociality where excess, games, dreams and imagination dont
fail to play an important role, while favoring acceptance, which is paradoxically lucid and unconscious, of
human conditions.
We can apply to such a state of being in love the meditation by Heidegger regarding the word be: The
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modus infinitivus, that is, the world of the unlimited, of the undetermined []. In fact, there is the
unlimited in emotions. Thus comes its spreading aspect that was celebrated in abundance by thinkers,
poets, and, of course, those in love. It can, in essence, only be multiplied and spread. This is the emitter
of a spiritual combat. This is what transforms everyone and everything. This is also what has the power
to intoxicate the one whom we know is contagious. Then, what does the force of contagion of emotions
mean? All that was divided desperately longs for a reunion. This is the nature of love! Distinction meant
the supreme achievement of modernity. Fusion seems to be the vector of postmodernity.
This is what makes shared passion an internal feeling of Res Publica (republic) and this public thing is
common to all. Such a concept cannot be understood simply through small reasoning if this isnt enriched
by all the potentialities of the perceptible. For Greek wisdom, Eros is a mix of pleasure and wisdom.
It is this mixed structure that is the beating heart of a communitys ideal. In contrast to any form of
unilateralism, such a structure encourages us to hold the two ends of the chain: thought and desire. This is
the thread of popular wisdom. This is also what we find in the social networks on the Internet.
To make an ode to perceptible reason or in other words, to know how to connect right reason and
common sense, this is what can allow us to overcome the fundamental error of modernity: that of
separation. We pay for this error at a high price. That is because if analytical reason (the very one that
separates) enabled scientific advances that we know, if it generates technological development that softens
social life, the well-being that will result from was made at the expense of better being. Ecological
damage, the decrease of collective sense and the foolishness of the public are the most evident illustrations
of this.
As provocative as it may seem, it is the superiority of exacerbated consciousness and subjectivism that
is reached by it. Such subjectivism is exactly what found its peak in the incommunicability of these
same kinds of consciousness, with each of them confined to its small individual fortress. Surrounded by
political, ideological and religious certainty, consciousness can only start a combat against another kind
of consciousness equipped with identical weapons. The reason that reasoning resonates with the sound
of war is that it is greedy. The rationalist systems as well as causes and effects of battles are fatal in their
essence; they induce death.
In its strict meaning, it is about paranoia (a system of thinking that is well constructed, tilted and
unilateral), denying all reality where we are: tradition, place, people, and culture. With all things being
against I think, we must consider the previous and surrounding altruism.
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Keynote Lecture
infinitive, what should be heard from this? This name is an abbreviation of a more complete expression:

Proceedings
In fact, there is paranoia in progressism which is a big modern myth (which is not acknowledged as
such). Progressism forgets the progressivity of things, in other words, to be involved in the natural and
societal world and to be rooted in the sensitivity of those who are alive. Such progressivity will reappear
in postmodern ecosophy.
In its holistic perspective integrating the entire condition of humans, this postmodern ecosophy will
bring back all the aspects (rational, sensitive, instinctive and emotional) of human nature. In addition, it
has its habitus, in other words (Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas) its adjustment to a territory shared with
others, or (Spengler), its situation of being rooted and thus growing under specific biological conditions.
Here is truly what we can call the revolution induced by the return of senses and of sensitivity as well as
that of body and tempers to a societal reality that is enlarged and enriched by all of its potentialities.
Sensitive ecosophy (we understood well that it gives all its importance to emotions again) will be from
now on an alternative to modern normapathy. Modern normapathy, whether it is from religious, moral or
political obedience (in any case, the logic is identical: must be), tries to rid itself of any risk (ideology of
zero risk), to reassure excessively, to antisepticize daily existence up to the point of making it incapable
of resisting any intrusion of antibody or to the diverse adversities that actually constitute worldly
conditions. However, it is well known that fear of abuses, excesses, and even that of disorder is in itself
what leads to the most tiring immobilism. The holistic concept allows the possible healing of the social
body!
The rise of emotions simply reminds us of the dialogue existing between chaos and cosmos and
between order and disorder. Homo sapiens only exist in relation to Homo demens. Vitalism is structurally
ambivalent. That is a law of land can exist because there are the antinomic and the anomic. It is an
internal, ambiguous, plural, polytheistic law whose ambivalence is no other than the movement or
dynamics of nature as a whole. Inside their diverse impulses, body and spirit are united in a mixture
without end. After all, the devil of the flesh is a good illustration of this deeply rooted spirit. Isnt this
what popular wisdom used to call affectus carnalis, or carnal emotions, a firm human impulse to adjust
to and enjoy this world?
This is thus what starts in the societal structure where love plays an important role. It is the end of long
domination of the heart by the cognitive. Lets also not forget that this was an intuition of A. Comte. This
was regarded as the object of ecstatic phantasmagorias, in a somewhat contemptuous manner. In the
same vein, the Religion of Humanity expressed in itself the firmly anchored conviction that spirit isnt
destined to reign but to serve In fact, the real command requires a force above all and reason was only
the light; its impetus should come from elsewhere.
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of saying human dynamics. We could provide it with several names: dynamics (dunamis: force), energy,
emotion, libido, etc. Anyway, it is an initial impulse which is at the origin of vital leap either individually
or collectively and it ensures its principal command. It is by forgetting this fundamental element that we
reach abstractization of social life correlated to uprooting of the human plant!
In fact, if we want to understand a number of current phenomena (e.g. hysteria, sports gatherings, political
effervescence, religious fanaticism, and other ways of expressing emotions), we may have to remember
the sharp formula of Auguste Comte: ...spirit is always the minister of the heart. In addition, before we
reduce their works to dried schematism, Durkheim and his followers had a much more open concept of
the role of emotions in collective consciousness. This is how they didnt hesitate to regard sociology as
science of suggested desires. It is a curious and beautiful anticipating formula in that it underlines not
only the role of collective consciousness but also that of unconsciousness common to all in which anyone
participates and that he or she shares with others, in an almost magical way.
The attempt of interpretation, deciphering and decoding the signs belonging to a culture, can only pay
attention to the expression of feelings. These feelings are symbolic and in the strong meaning of the
term, they mean a process of acknowledging the other, in other words, a process of being born to oneself
from altruism. It is thus a more intense light that is given by the connection of reason and sense. A
swift light isnt reduced to brightness offered by small reason, or by rationalism that is its epistemological
expression. The light producing this illumination whose diverse institutions (religious, moral, and social
ones) are always objects to be wary of. It is still such illumination that we need to learn to consider if we
want to understand the social mysticism beyond scholars opinions (This combined opinion is quite
moralizing). The contemporary tribes of such mysticism provide us with numerous examples. Also, as it
is true, if we dont take this term in a bad sense, that a number of those who are enlightened are growing
in all areas of public life.
Deep ecology, religious revival, charismatic movements, political extremism, gay fanaticism, esoteric
recurrence, medias mimicry, obsession with sports, and theoretical militancy confuse science and labor
engagement. Under these circumstances, we can find, for the best and for the worst, a large number of
examples of this illumination characterizing the Spirit of time! Moreover, we can at least say that these
illuminated persons receive views and reactions through a logical conformity of which they are not
conscious. In this regard, it is enough to surf several lists of diffusion such as a university association
or such a sexual tribe in order to measure the scope of mimicry.
The laws of imitation, which were applied in the case that we have just quoted, lie in the power of
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Keynote Lecture
Thanks to its theoretical quirks, this enlightening remark emphasizes the role of impetus as another way

Proceedings
contagion of emotions. It is a priori and without any reflexive basis that we react and think in such ways,
that we will announce bitter critiques and apply inquisitorial processes. However, this is also thanks
to such a feeling of belonging that we will participate in such things as charitable activities, vibrate in
response to such collective emotions and engage in concrete forms of solidarity or daily generosity.
The feeling of belonging and relation of belonging! Such intrusion of emotions transforms mechanical
solidarity into a real, organic solidarity and it is characterized by its initiatory structure. We dont judge;
we follow our masters. We dont exert our critical spirit; we try to deepen the order of things. We never
define the ideological tools of the State in a critical way, using the jargon from the 1960s. On the other
hand, we create analogies and we use metaphors. In other words, in a poetic way, we trace the real
that is complex, unstable and located inside existential dynamism. In an impulsive way, we are probably
enraged collectively. Most often, we try to adjust to the world as it is and we do so in order to win the
best part for ourselves and for the tribe we join. The harmony with the world and with others is truly the
common denominator for all the past experiences.
All of this brings back the underlying part of social being and unconscious excitement that it always
generates. Thus comes the need to elaborate on a thought of the organic in accordance with vitalism
which is generated from all the pores of the social body, in opposition to the dominating knowledge (that
of functionalist mechanics). This is what is at the heart of social healing. Such a thought is no longer
blessed tap water (holy water) but it is a thought that knows how to use aristocratic freedom offshore.
As Proust said, We become moral when we are unhappy! However, what we can empirically observe
is a revival of generalized hedonism. It always irritates the sad people preferring to criticize catastrophist
analyses. Nevertheless, such hedonism is there (popular expression appetitus), such vital appetence for
which certain good people show maintenance and renewed vigor. Cult of body and pleasure to consume,
to enjoy the goodness of this world and to be attached to the present are often described as signs of deep
alienation or exploitation of body and spirit. Cant we rather acknowledge here the fact that we enjoy
life?
We enjoy a life that is strengthened, increased and doubled, expressing everyday popular wisdom that
has always been friendly to love. Such love is like energy coming from the very nature of humanity, from
those who are alive. It is a love that is not castrated by constant Judaeo- Christian (Semitic) moralism. It is
a love that is an afterglow of the old pagan foundations and we could be quite right to call it Eros.
In fact, there are permanent comings and goings in social dynamism (what Bergson calls vital
momentum) between Love and Eros, between ordo amoris and social eroticism. Sense of belonging
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together what is scattered. Wouldnt it be the nostalgia of what Durkheim used to call social divinity? It
means to be together like God. It is transcendence that is generated!
It is the final destination of the analysis of a social structure where emotions occupy the principal place.
This means that beyond a rationalism with devastating effects (destroying the planet and the consensus),
we know how to integrate intuition into mystic experience. Intuition (intueri or to see the inside), which
is the condition of possibility of any scientific discovery, is thus the methodological leverage allowing
us to understand the close union uniting reason and sense. Ratio-vitalism reaches its peak in festive
effervescence throughout time, our time in particular.
An undeniable appetite for this world, this is what can lead to healing! Its roots are found in
epicureanism and stoicism which, each in its own way, attest to the worldly radicality of enjoyment
finding its own interactivity existing between reason and senses.
Such senses are from the Middle Ages in amor discretus where discretion is synonymous with right
judgment, in other words, the right judgment of oneself and the other and thus, sense of belonging that we
can form between one and the other. Therefore, it is about a love controlled by the right judgment. This is
the basis for the formation of social relations, that among tribes, that of states and nations in a complex
and organic structure where understanding and sensibility occupy their own place.
We recall that how and in what aspect caritas, care, love and desire are intimately intertwined and are
at the very foundation of Aristotles hexis and Thomas Aquinas habitus. These notions bring back our
permanent measures pushing us to act in one way or another. We thus see well how libidinal energy is at
the very origin of multiple impetuses that move individuals and thus, favor their diverse reunions. It is by
keeping this in mind that we could have an understanding (not concretely anymore) of postmodern tribes
action for which emotional attraction and impulse never fail to play the most important role.
It is exactly what Spinoza called loving intelligence in his pantheistic naturalism. Such loving
intelligence means to link together (intellegere) all of the scattered elements of the complex real,
starting from emotions. In fact, intelligence finds its essence only when it gathers together what is
scattered. Intelligence is thus specific; it is about growing (cum crescere) with the very thing that it
describes. In short, intelligence is rooted in everyday life and it thus contributes to common passions.
Such rooting isnt an easy matter as long as our mind tends to become separate from this humus which,
however, constitutes a human. This can be radically defined like this: a return to the roots of a complex
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Keynote Lecture
expresses this impulse which is found only in humans whose very nature is to aspire fusion, to bring

Proceedings
and ambivalent human, a return which allows us to update the contemporary understanding of the soul
of the world of the neo-Platonists. It could be called an unconscious soul, an emotional soul, a soul of
nature, the way it is described doesnt matter. It is enough to note that such an intuitive view allows us to
underline the importance of the release of oneself into the other. The term empathy, frequently used these
days, merely expresses such interaction between one and the other. In other words, it means to put oneself
in the place of the other. This could be because we share the same feelings or, this could also be done to
perceive the consequences of such reversibility.
What is enabled by empathy is the situation in which Eros, combining all the impulses of life, pushes me
to be detached from myself. In the Banquet, Plato shows that Love acknowledges its state of destitution;
the other is needed. In short, perfection isnt in Me but in Us.
It is this mystical experience (We have seen some of its roots) that we will rediscover in the postmodern
New Age: to free oneself, to be liberated from self, paradoxically encouraging oneself to be linked to
the other. Some have been able to emphasize the relationship between heart (cor-cordis) and rope (chorda,
gut). Related to the Old French corder, (to tie up), the modern French word saccorder (to agree with
each other) means to come from the heart that we share. Thus love means tying each other together. It
is the Gordian knot constituting postmodern tribes, that of interrelation. In contrast to epistemological
individualism, it is the prevalence of ordo amoris where dependence on the other (the Other) is essential.
To express in another way, we can recall the position (if it is reasonable) of the philosopher Alain,
emphasizing that in contrast to contractualism, society is based on friendship or diverse feelings. We can
also see that in this context, society is an extension of family. Such metaphysical familialism is exactly
the cause and effect of this movement of magnetization largely dominating social relations whose basis is
impulsive, emotional, and affectionate, all things whose erotic element cannot be more evident.
Thus facing tedious and somewhat brief social theories diagnosing general prostration on the rise: gloom,
decadence, ennui, decline and other catastrophist characteristics, it is right to remember that we are
observing multiple existential experiences rooted in the (re)birth of passion, desire and diverse emotions of
the same water, revitalizing what is always and over again old and very young: the eternal togetherness.
Here, it is the logic of philia that constitutes the backbone of society, sometimes secretly and sometimes
in a paroxysmal way; what is beyond and below the tragic feeling of existence makes such logic
acceptable, anyway more desirable than its entire disappearance. It is exactly the question asked by
Cicero: qui potest esse vita vitalis, quae non in amici mutua benevolentia conquiescat (how can we have
a livable life, if it wasnt able to find ease in the mutual benevolence of friendship.)
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structural relationism. Specific wisdom: ecosophy based on the permanent interaction of reason and
sense. Put into a perspective that we continue to see in terms such as mutuality, cooperation, solidarity, all
things refer to a lasting relation and even symbiosis between entities that are different and supplementary
at the same time. Here, what is in question is natural health of all sociality. Deep sociality, while being
hidden (we could say secret or discreet) still constitutes the culture of all being together over a long
period of time. In this simple meaning, it is the humus soil, the good soil where togetherness can grow
and develop. It is, in a way, dynamic rooting. It is also a natural characteristic which is closer to what
Heidegger said about physis: emergence, blooming, movement of birth.
Thus, the nature of things that like to hide themselves. Note the Heraclitean remark emphasizing
the constant dialogue existing between the depth and appearance of what is. It is about withdrawal,
concealment and shadow necessary for the whole of ones life. It is what Heidegger specifies in the
critique of meta physics denying the simple physics. In other words, such physics denies this world in
accordance with a hypothetical heavenly world which is to come later on. Thus physis refers to the act
of rising up and flourishing, all to be revealed within oneself. The rhythm of life can only be expressed
from this fixed point, a basic source allowing and justifying the flow of what is. It is exactly what we can
observe in a number of contemporary practices, in particular youthful ones: to stay inside oneself while
blooming on the outside. An oxymoron such as mystical celebration of body effectively regenerates the
role and function of display (body), starting from inwardness (spirit, soul).
Such dynamics are expressed in a specific kind of living together: that of mysticism where each one, in
his or her entirety, is only an element of a big group that surpasses each one and gives a meaning to each
one. It is the mystical body of Catholic theology, the subtle body of oriental traditions, the collective
spirit of Freemason-type symbolic logic; all things beyond the anatomical body and serving as a basis for
a relation of belonging (ecosophy) between Me, altruism of the world and the others. In some sense, it is
expanded and generalized eroticism.
As for the expression sensitive ecosophy, it is about becoming attentive to this irrefutable vitalism
which is expressed in so many ways. It is vitality that, beyond utilitarianism, emphasizes the unconscious
importance of a culture of instinct no longer accepting to be reduced to a rationalistic civilization. Lets
meditate again on Heidegger: Action is everywhere and display of a world is nowhere. (ein Welten
der Welt). However, what is happening is that such display, such search of a beautiful life and of a
better-being (more than just well-being) appears in a spontaneous sociality surpassing the limits of a
reasoning sociality.
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Keynote Lecture
Such mutualism of benevolence is exactly what constitutes the economy of all human changes, its

Proceedings
Such spontaneity of life and of the vitalist system, which is developed little by little, is expressed in the
concern to transform existence into a daily work of art. We can also measure its effects in the increased
role given to imagination in all the areas of social life. It is not to forget exacerbation of feelings promoting
all of these kinds of enthusiasm: political, social, charitable, religious, musical, sports, etc. where passions
or more simply moods take the place of reasoning and even that of intellectual capability to understand
the social real.
There is lyricism in the current trend and it is romantic sensibility which is heated up by collective
excitement and it offers a global and holistic vision of these human things that we had tended to strangely
separate. Maybe it is to see there what M. M. Bakounine called regeneration through love. Meanwhile,
Fourier celebrated erotosophy expressing the powerful return of imagination and phantasmagoria in the
development and strengthening of the social relation. It is the return of common passions.
By understanding this term in its original meaning, this is what Comte called the sympathetic culture
belonging to entire humanity and ensuring its moral regeneration. This is an acknowledgement of the
predominance of feelings able to maintain dissolution of what is social dominated by simple reason.
Ecosophy restores feelings to the most important position in the structure of social life. Thinking about
the memory of long, long ago of humanity, certain thinkers had shown the probable return to this ordo
amoris, as early as the 19th century. It is this and this alone that can allow the beginning of regeneration
of social life.
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Michel Maffesoli
UNIVERSIT PARIS DESCARTES SORBONNE
Le mot caritas voie royale pour Saint Augustin de la vrit, sest bien affaibli tout au longs des temps
modernes. Sinon quil trouve dans les nombreuses manifestations caritatives une vigueur renouvele.
Celle dun lien social o lamour a sa place. Toute la thmatique du CARE est l rsum !
Il ne sagit pas, bien entendu, dun amour que lon peut rduire la sphre prive. Non plus dun amour
dsignant le sentiment prouv par deux personnes lune pour lautre. Lamour en question, en son sens
plnier, est un terme commode pour dsigner une ambiance gnrale dans laquelle slabore et spanouit
une manire dtre-ensemble. Le fondement dune autre forme du lien social. Manire pas forcment
nouvelle, mais qui fut occulte, ou tout le moins marginalise, il faudra voir pourquoi, tout au long de la
modernit. Et la liaison augustinienne entre vrit et caritas est opportune, si on saccorde, dans loptique
phnomnologique reconnatre que le propre de la vrit est dtre ce qui se dcouvre et se dvoile .
Vrit non pas donne une fois pour toute, pas plus que vrit a priori, mais bien, au plus prs de son
tymologie gecque ( aletheia ) : ce qui chappe loubli, ce qui est dvoil.
En la matire dvoilement de la secrte permanence de laffect dans le jeu socital. La reconnaissance
que la vie, en son sens plnier, seule a ses droits. Et que ds lors il convient, pour reprendre une heureuse
expression de Heidegger, de faire preuve dune maturit dialectique afin daborder ces choses de la vie
en leur entiret. Cest bien cela qui diffrencie la pense abstraite, unilatrale, ne voyant quun seul ct
du Rel , de la pense concrte sachant en reprer laspect pluriel. Il faut donc trouver ces mots sachant
faire advenir les choses. Mots qui en dvoilant ces dernires rvlent leur intime vrit. Cest l , et l
seulement, que repose la possible gurison (Healing) pour des socits en crise!
Mais, pour apprcier le rle de laffect, pour reprer la logique propre lordo amoris (Max Scheler)
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Keynote Lecture
La rgnrscence par lhumanisme intgral

Proceedings
il est ncessaire, lencontre de ce quil est convenu de nommer le correctness (unilatrale,

univoque), dadmettre que ceux qui ont pour fonction de dire ce qui est ne soient que les hauts parleurs
dune antique mmoire , cest dire de la TRADITION. tant entendu qutre un cho est plus
difficile et de ce fait plus rare quavoir un avis et faire valoir un point de vue. tre un cho, telle est
lendurance de la pense (M.Heidegger). tre un cho du fait que la vie ne se divise pas; et que la
vrit de la vie, elle-mme est indivisible.
Ce qui veut dire quil ny a pas, dun ct laffect, qui soigne et gurit, et de lautre le politique cest-dire le pouvoir, le savoir, le prvoir. Mais quau contraire les sentiments sont partie prenante de
la vie publique et prive. Mme si cela peut paratre tonnant, rien ni personne nest indemne de la
ptulance dun amour ( caritas , care ) ainsi compris. Le rle que joue lmotionnel dans laction
administrative, dans le jeu syndical, dans les revendications professionnelles, dans les ractions aux
faits divers, tout cela devrait inciter plus de lucidit quant aux ingrdients entrant dans llaboration et
dans la perdurance du lien social.
En bref, on ne peut pas comprendre le pass si lon ne tient pas compte de son ros . Il en est de
mme pour ce qui concerne latmosphre mentale caractrisant lpoque prsente. On peut mme
dire que lon est tributaire des manies et des folies dont on hrite. Un peuple est toujours soumis aux
passions et motions venant de fort loin, et quil est vain de croire dpasses. Prjugs idologiques,
ractions raciales, us et coutumes divers, pratiques langagires spcifiques, idiotismes culturels,
longue est la liste des manires dtre et de pense qui sont rien moins que rationnelles, mais devant
tout un passionnel, sdiment sur la longue dure des histoires humaines. Celle de la TRADITION
CULTURELLE.
Ce qui a t dit et fait dans les temps anciens et dont on a perdu la mmoire, a continue travailler
le corps social en son entier. On avait cru dpasser cette sdimentation des passions et motions
collectives, et voil quelle refait un indniable retour en force. Peut-tre dans une vision analytique de
la puissance socitale (cette nappe phratique sustentant toute vie sociale) faudrait-il reconnatre
quil ny a pas de diffrence entre nergie et amour : ce que les savants appellent nergie et les
mystiques amour universel .
Voil pourquoi, au-del de nos prudences langagires et en-de de nos enfermements disciplinaires
(psychologie, sociologie, philosophie, thologie...), il convient de reprer le substrat passionnel partir
duquel slve tout vivre-ensemble. Le consensus ( cum sensualis ) social tant, essentiellement,
un sentiment partag. Ce que le Contrat social , en son rationalisme, avait oubli. Ce que les pactes
motionnels, en tous les domaines, sont en train de redcouvrir. Ce qui permet de comprendre quune
54
Rappelons, pour mmoire, que cest partir de la Renaissance que se constitue laffirmation dun moi
individuel. Les philosophes, les historiens ont bien montr le changement de paradigme soprant
avec linvention de ce je pense , faisant de soi une force centripte : tout est ramen cet
individu pensant et agissant par lui-mme et pour lui-mme. Le monde est absorb par le moi . Ce
qui est la racine de lgotisme pistmologique, source des divers gosmes (moraux, conomiques,
sociaux, politiques, nationaux...) ayant caractris la modernit.
Panofsky a bien analys en quoi au Moyen ge europen ce moi est centrifuge, cest--dire quil
est projet vers le monde qui lentoure, voire absorb par lui. En son sens fort, il y a de laltruisme
dans lair du temps. Sans donner une connotation morale ce terme, cest lautre, cest--dire laltrit
sociale, gographique, idologique, religieuse qui dtermine ce quest le moi. Cette altrit est,
quasiment, un moule, une forme formante informant ce quest tout un chacun et le monde social en son
entier.
Cest cela laltruisme en son sens pistmologique. Lmergence de la subjectivit se fait partir
des intimations objectives : tre dun lieu, dune tribu, dune religion. Ainsi lon est dun corps :
individuel et social. Cest--dire limportance que lon peut accorder aux sens et au sensible. Ce
ralisme fut celui de saint Thomas dAquin : car le sens, aussi, est une forme de raison comme tout
pouvoir cognitif . Les sens comme forme de raison , nest-ce point rendre attentif la conjonction
du corps et de lesprit ? ce que jappelle lentiret de ltre, dont la raison sensible est un bon
levier mthodologique pour une approche pertinente de cette entiret?
Ce qui est certain, cest que ce pouvoir cognitif du sensible est au cur mme dun paradigme
postmoderne retrouvant, ainsi, les intuitions et les pratiques prmodernes. Lentiret de lhomme
mdival, celui des socits traditionnelles, trouve cho dans le holisme des diverses tribus
(sexuelles, musicales, sportives, religieuses) constituant la mosaque des socits postmodernes. La

sparation nest plus de mise, mais bien la conjonction, linteraction entre tous les lments que la
pense moderne avait, loisir, dichotomiss.
La nature sallie la culture, le corps se spiritualise, le matrialisme devient mystique, les archasmes
se technologisent, le travail devient prospectif en tant cratif, la progressivit intgre du traditionnel,
lthique sociale sesthtise et tout lavenant. Ces oxymores traduisant, de fait, limportance que
joue la libido dans la structuration sociale. limage de la solidarit organique propre aux socits
traditionnelles, lesprit du temps postmoderne redonne aux divers affects une place de premier plan
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Keynote Lecture
gurison socitale est possible.

Proceedings
dans lordonnancement du tout social.

On peut rappeler quil y eut quelques anctres une telle conception du monde alliant la raison et les
sens. Certes, la modernit se fonde sur la domination, sans distinction, de la nature, celle du corps
individuel et celle du corps environnant. Mais dans ce devenir fonctionnaliste et productiviste de la
civilisation les libertins font exception.
On peut montrer en quoi les dfricheurs du XVIIe sicle taient tout la fois amateurs drotisme et
de livres interdits . Comment ils affichaient un mpris (presque) ouvert pour la morale et pour la
religion et ce conjointement avec une fascination pour la philosophie interdite . Parmi tous les
auteurs radicaux pensons Beverland (1650-1716), protagoniste des Lumires radicales , spcialiste
de lhistoire de la Grce et de la Rome antiques, et qui dveloppe une philosophie de la vie partir de
la libration de la libido et de la glorification des passions. Tout cela constituant une caractristique
fondamentale et universelle de lhumanit. Il est, en ce sens, un bon analyste dune conception
panthiste et dune thorie gnrale de lrotique. Cest--dire dun rotisme ne se rduisant pas la
fonctionnalit de la reproduction, mais irriguant la vie en sa totalit.
Il en est de mme de Saint vremond mprisant la guerre, la politique et la religion et cherchant

se distinguer de ses semblables par un mlange subtil desprit philosophique et dhumour, par
une plume irrvrencieuse et un got pour les plaisirs raffins . Type mme du libre-penseur, Saint
vremond sest employ fonder et justifier une liaison troite entre la libert des passions et la
libert intellectuelle. Donc rien qui ne sabstrait par rapport la ralit concrte, mais au contraire,
sy enracine on ne peut plus. De tels penseurs conservent le vieil idal dun humanisme authentique
sachant apprcier la beaut, toujours renouvele, de ce qui se donne voir et de ce qui se donne vivre.
En laissant les choses en repos, en les laissant tre on participe, ainsi, dun plaisir dans lequel corps
et esprit trouvent, toujours et nouveau, la part qui leur revient.
Ce que fait bien ressortir lmotionnel socital cest que derrire la raison troite existe une force
instinctuelle : la puissance de la vie. Il sagit de toutes ces causes non rationnelles, quelles soient
spirituelles, sociales, ethniques, ducationnelles, qui arrivent leurs fins par des oprations psychiques
autres que le raisonnement.
Ce sont l les fondements des croyances, des prjugs dont on sait limportance dans la vie politique,
sociale ou conomique. Gardons en mmoire lexpression employe: causes non-rationnelles
et non irrationnelles. En effet, quoique ne dpendant pas dune raison instrumentale, cest- -dire
oriente vers un but prcis (et lointain), ces causes nen ont pas moins une raison interne, exprimant ce
56
(Ortega y Gasset).
La spcificit de ce dernier cest, ainsi quon la indiqu, quil laisse-tre ce qui est et nimpose pas,
de lextrieure une injonction morale prcisant ce qui doit-tre , ou ce que lon aimerait qui soit.
Cest bien ainsi que Heidegger caractrisait le pouvoir du dsir : cela grce quoi quelque chose a
proprement pouvoir dtre. Ce pouvoir est proprement le possible... Il y a une chane de raisons entre
le pouvoir-tre, le laisser-tre, le faire-tre qui, au-del ou en-de de la dfinition philosophique,
sexprime au mieux dans la constitution des communauts (tribus) postmodernes dont lessence est
bien le dsir, le partage dun got, le processus dattraction, toutes choses pouvant se rsumer dans
lexpression daffinits lectives (Goethe). L est, peut-tre le fondement de la gurison ( healing
) induit par un humanisme intgral.
Ce qui dconcerte lentendement rationaliste, cest que la relation lautre repose sur le laissertre plutt que sur le fait dagir : sur le monde naturel ou le monde social. Or cest bien une telle
dsinvolture qui est, bien des gards et de multiples manires, ce qui caractrise latmosphre
mentale de lpoque. La dsaffection vis--vis du politique, la lassitude concernant les diverses formes
dengagement, sans oublier le climat hdoniste contaminant la plupart des phnomnes sociaux, toutes
choses accentuant la saturation dune nergie finalise et soulignant la reviviscence dune nergie
connotation passionnelle.
En bref, lnergie ne saccumule pas, elle se dpense. Prcisons, cependant, que la libido sousentendant cette nergie prsentiste ne saurait se rduire une sexualit purement gnitale. Ainsi que le
montre bien toute luvre de Jung, il sagit dune nergie psychique que lon va retrouver au fondement
de la culture en gnral. Et ce dans tous les aspects de cette culture : art, vie quotidienne, conomie,
politique, etc. Cest cette libido en son sens gnral qui est le substrat de lordre symbolique, autre
manire de dire le vivre-ensemble. Ce que je nomme ici ordo amoris . Ordre dun vrai humanisme .
Cette nergie psychique (psych objective , prcisons- le) est constitue par toutes ces habitudes, ces
tabous divers atavismes et autre plis dans lesquels se nichaient le plaisir et le dsir dtre-ensemble.
Un tre enracin dans le sentiment, faisant de ltat amoureux non plus un repliement sur un soi
individuel bien rachitique, pas plus sur un duo (celui du couple) tout fait conomique, mais bien
comme un tat de diffraction en perptuel devenir. Et constituant, de ce fait, cette affectio societatis
, fondement mystique de toute ralit politique, dont on recommence mesurer les effets.
En ce sens tre amoureux , une fois vacue toute connotation doucereuse usage de la
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Keynote Lecture
qui est vcu par le groupe qui en est le porteur. On peut parler, ce propos, dun ratio-vitalisme

Proceedings
bibliothque rose ou des romans de la collection Arlequin, constitue une sorte de synthse
dissminatrice, parpillant ici et l une nergie constituant, secrtement, le liant socital. Ce qui est la
centralit souterraine dune socialit o lexcs, le ludique, lonirique, limaginaire ne manquent pas
de jouer un rle dimportance, ce serait-ce quen favorisant lacceptation, paradoxalement lucide et
inconsciente, de la condition humaine.
On peut appliquer un tel tre-amoureux la mditation que Heidegger fait propos du mot tre
: linfinitif, que faut-il entendre par l ? Cette appellation est labrviation de lexpression plus
complte : modus infinitivus, cest--dire le monde de lillimit, de lindtermin....
Il y a, en effet, de lillimit dans laffect. Do son aspect irradiant qui fut, en abondance, clbr par les
penseurs, les potes, sans oublier les amoureux. Il ne peut, par essence, qutre multipli, dmultipli.
Il est le projectile dun combat de lesprit. Cest en cela quil mtamorphose tout un chacun et toutes
choses. Cest aussi en cela quil a un pouvoir enivrant qui, on le sait, est contagieux. Que signifie donc
la force de contagion de laffect? Tout ce qui a t divis aspire, profondment, la runion. Cest
lordre de lamour! La distinction fut laboutissement suprme de la modernit. La fusion semble tre
les vecteurs de la postmodernit.
Cest bien cela qui fait de la passion partage le sentiment intrieur de la Res Publica (Rpublique), de
cette chose publique commune tous, ne pouvant pas tre saisie simplement par la petite raison si
celle-ci nest pas enrichie de toutes les potentialits du sensible. Pour la sagesse grecque, ros est
un mixte de plaisir et de sagesse. Cest cette duit qui est le cur battant de lidal communautaire.
loppos de toute unilatralit, elle incite tenir les deux bouts de la chane : la pense et le dsir.
Cest bien une telle concatnation qui est le fil rouge de la sagesse populaire. Cest cela mme que lon
retrouve dans les rseaux sociaux propres Internet.
Faire un loge de la raison sensible ou, ce qui revient au mme, savoir ajointer la droite raison
et le sens commun, voil ce qui peut permettre de dpasser lerreur-mre de la modernit : celle de
la sparation. Erreur que lon paye, de nos jours, au prix fort. Car si la raison analytique (celle
justement qui spare) permit les avances scientifiques que lon sait, si cela engendra le dveloppement
technologique qui adoucit la vie sociale, le bien-tre qui en rsulta se fit au dtriment dun mieuxtre. Les saccages cologiques, labaissement du sens collectif, labtissement des esprits en sont les
illustrations les plus videntes.
Aussi provocateur que cela puisse paratre, cest le primat dune conscience exacerbe, et le
subjectivisme auquel cela aboutit qui, justement, trouva son acm dans lincommunicabilit de ces
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certitudes, politiques, idologiques, religieuses, la conscience ne pouvait quengager le combat contre

une autre conscience munie darmes identiques. La raison raisonnante rsonne du bruit des guerres dont
elle est avide. Les systmes rationalistes, causes et effets de ces batailles, sont par essence mortifres :
ils portent la mort.
En son sens strict il sagit dune paranoa (systme de pense bien construit, surplombant, unilatral), dniant toute ralit ce dans quoi lon est immerg : tradition, lieu, ethnie, culture. Toutes
choses faisant qu lencontre du je pense , lon est pens par laltrit antcdente et environnante.
Il y a, en effet, de la paranoa dans le progressisme qui est la grande mythologie (ne se
reconnaissant pas comme telle) moderne. Progressisme oubliant la progressivit des choses, cest-dire limplication dans le monde naturel et socital et lenracinement dans le sensible du vivant.
Progressivit qui va ressurgir dans lcosophie postmoderne.
Cette dernire, dans une perspective holistique , cest- -dire intgrant lentiret du donn humain,
va mette en jeu, dans une logique de rversibilit, tous les aspects : rationnel, sensible, instinctuel,
motionnel, de lhumaine nature. Son habitus , galement, cest--dire (Aristote, saint Thomas
dAquin) son ajustement un territoire partag avec dautres, ou encore (Spengler) son enracinement et
donc sa croissance dans un biotope prcis. Voil bien ce que lon peut nommer la rvolution induite par
le retour des sens et du sensible, du corps et des humeurs, dans un Rel socital largi et enrichi de
toutes ses potentialits.
Lcosophie sensible, ce qui on la bien compris redonne toute son importance laffect, sera ds lors
une alternative ce que fut la normopathie moderne. Celle-ci, quelle soit dobdience religieuse,
morale ou politique (leur logique est identique : devoir-tre ), semploie vacuer tout risque :
idologie du risque zro , scuriser outrance, aseptiser lexistence quotidienne jusqu la rendre
incapable de rsister lintrusion des anticorps ou aux diverses adversits pourtant constitutives du
donn mondain. Or il est bien connu que la crainte des abus, des excs, voire du dsordre est cela mme
qui conduit limmobilisme le plus abrutissant. Conception HOLISTIQUE permettant la possible
gurison du corps social!
Lirruption des affects rappelle, tout simplement, la dialogie existant entre chaos et cosmos ,
entre ordre et dsordre. Homo sapiens nest tel quen rapport avec Homo demens. Le vitalisme est,
structurellement, ambivalent. Cest parce quil y a de lantinomique, de lanomique, que peut exister
un nomos de la terre . Une loi interne, ambigu, plurielle, polythiste, dont lambivalence nest pas
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Keynote Lecture
mmes consciences chacune enferme en son troite forteresse individuelle. Caparaonne dans ses

Proceedings
autre chose que le mouvement ou la dynamique de la nature en son entier. Lesprit et le corps en leurs
pulsions diverses unis en un mixte sans fin. Aprs tout le devil of the flesh est une bonne illustration
de cet esprit enracin. Nest-ce point ainsi que la sagesse populaire nommait affectus carnalis , affect
charnel, cette pulsion humaine consistant sajuster et jouir de ce monde-ci?
Ce qui est, donc, samorce dans lordonnancement socital o lamour joue un rle dimportance.
Cest la fin de la longue domination du cognitif sur le cur. Ce qui, ne loublions pas, tait une
intuition de A. Comte. Cela fut considr, dune manire quelque peu mprisante, comme lobjet
de fantasmagories dlirantes. Ainsi la Religion de lHumanit exprimait chez lui la conviction
fortement ancre que lesprit nest pas destin rgner, mais servir... En effet, le commandement
rel exige par-dessus tout de la force, et la raison na jamais que de la lumire ; il faut que limpulsion
lui vienne dailleurs .
Remarque clairante qui, cause ou grce ses manies thoriques, accentue le rle de limpulsion
autre manire de dire la dynamique humaine. De quelque nom quon veuille lappeler : dynamique
(dunamis : force), nergie, affect, libido, etc., il est une pulsion initiale qui, individuellement ou
collectivement, est lorigine de llan vital, et en assure le commandement principal. Cest en
oubliant cet lment fondamental que lon aboutit une abstractisation de la vie sociale, corrlative au
dracinement de la plante humaine!
En fait, si lon veut comprendre nombre de phnomnes actuels : hystries musicales, rassemblements
sportifs, effervescences politiques, fanatismes religieux et autres expressions de lmotionnel, il faut
peut-tre se souvenir de la formule aigu de ce mme Auguste Comte : ... lesprit est toujours le
ministre du cur . Et, avant quon ne rduise leurs uvres un schmatisme dessch, Durkheim
et les durkheimiens avaient une conception bien plus ouverte du rle des affects dans la conscience
collective. Cest ainsi quils nhsitaient pas considrer la sociologie comme tant la science des
dsirs suggrs . Curieuse et belle formule anticipatrice, en ce quelle souligne le rle pas simplement
de la conscience collective, mais bien de linconscient commun tous, et auquel tout un chacun, dune
manire quasiment magique, participe et communie.
La dmarche hermneutique, reprant et interprtant les signes propres une culture, ne peut qutre
attentive lexpression des sentiments. Ils sont symboliques ; et ce au sens fort du terme : processus
de reconnaissance de lautre, cest--dire natre soi partir de laltrit. Cest donc une lumire
plus intense qui est donne par la conjonction de la raison et des sens. Une lumire fulgurante ne
se rduisant pas la clart offerte par la petite raison, ou par le rationalisme qui en est lexpression
pistmologique. Lumire produisant cette illumination dont les diverses institutions (religieuses,
60
faut savoir prendre en compte si, au-del de lopinion savante, cette doxa bien moralisante, on veut
comprendre la mystique sociale dont les tribus contemporaines donnent maints exemples. Et ce,
tant il est vrai, si lon ne prend pas ce terme en mauvaise part, que le nombre dillumins crot dans
tous les domaines de la vie publique.
Deep ecology, revival religieux, mouvements charismatiques, extrmismes politiques, fanatisme gay
, recrudescences sotriques, mimtismes mdiatiques, obsessions sportives, militantismes thoriques
confondant science et engagement syndical, on peut trouver, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, une
foultitude dexemples de cette illumination caractristique de lEsprit du temps ! Et le moins que
lon puisse dire, cest que ces illumins sont penss et agis par des conformismes logiques dont ils
ne sont pas conscients. Il suffit, cet gard, de surfer sur quelques listes de diffusion de telle
association universitaire ou de telle tribu sexuelle pour mesurer lampleur du mimtisme.
Les lois de limitation luvre dans les cas que lon vient de citer, reposent sur la force de
contagion de laffect. Cest a priori et sans fondement rflexif que lon agit et pense de telle ou
telle manire, que lon va promulguer des apprciations lemporte-pice, et mettre en uvre des
processus inquisitoriaux. Mais cest, galement, en fonction dun tel sentiment dappartenance que
lon va participer telle action caritative, vibrer telle motion collective et sinvestir dans des formes
concrtes de solidarit ou de gnrosit quotidiennes.
Sentiment dappartenance, rapportdappartenance! Cette intrusion de laffect, faisant dune solidarit
mcanique une relle solidarit organique, participe de la structure initiatique. On ne juge pas : on
suit ses matres. On nexerce pas son esprit critique : mais on cherche approfondir lordre des
choses. On ne dfinit point, dune manire ergoteuse, les appareils idologiques dtat , selon le
patois des annes 60 : mais on tablit des analogies, on use de la mtaphore. Cest--dire que dune
manire potique, on suit la trace un Rel complexe, labile et tout en dynamisme existentiel.
Eventuellement, et dune manire impulsive, on sindigne collectivement. Le plus souvent on tente
de sajuster au monde tel quil est, et ce afin den tirer le meilleur pour soi et pour la tribu laquelle on
participe. La syntonie avec le monde et avec les autres est bien le dnominateur commun toutes les
expriences vcues.
Tout cela renvoie aux sous-sols de ltre-social et aux fermentations inconscientes quils ne manquent
pas de provoquer. Do la ncessit, lencontre du savoir dominant, celui des mcaniciens
fonctionnalistes, dlaborer une pense de lorganique tant en accord avec le vitalisme qui sourd par
tous les pores du corps social. Voil qui est au couer de la gurison socitale . Pense qui ne soit
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Keynote Lecture
morales, sociales) se sont toujours mfie. Il nen reste pas moins que cest une telle illumination quil

Proceedings
plus un robinet deau bnite, celle du moralisme, mais qui sache user de laristocratique libert propre
aux dmarches hauturires.
Ainsi que le rappelait Proust, on devient moral quand on est malheureux ! Or, ce que lon peut
empiriquement observer cest bien la reviviscence dun hdonisme gnralis. Ce qui ne manque pas
dirriter les esprits chagrins prfrant fulminer des analyses catastrophistes. Mais cet hdonisme est l,
expression populaire de lappetitus, cette apptence vitale dont certains bons esprits vont montrer la
perdurance et la vigueur renouvele. Le culte du corps, le plaisir de consommer, de jouir des biens de
ce monde et de sattacher au prsent sont souvent dcrites comme des manifestations dune profonde
alination ou dune exploitation des corps et des esprits. Ne peut-on pas, plutt, reconnatre l le fait
quon se rgale de la vie ?
Dune vie dcuple, dmultiplie, double, manifestant, au quotidien, une sagesse populaire qui sut, de
tout temps, tre accueillante lamour. lamour comme nergie venant du tuf de lhumain, du vivant.
Un amour non castr par le constant moralisme judo-chrtien (smitique). Amour rmanence dun
vieux fond(s) paen et que lon pourrait, aussi bien, nommer ros.
Il y a, en effet, un va-et-vient permanent dans lnergtique socitale (ce que Bergson nomme lan
vital ) entre Amour et ros, entre ordo amoris et lrotique sociale. Rapport dappartenance exprimant
cette pulsion, propre lanimal humain, qui aspire la fusion ; rassembler ce qui est pars. Peut-tre
est-ce l la nostalgie de ce que Durkheim nommait le divin social ? Ltre-ensemble comme dieu.
La transcendance qui simmanentise !
Cest bien cela que conduit lanalyse dun ordonnancement social o lmotionnel occupe la place
principale. Ce qui implique quau-del dun rationalisme aux effets dvastateurs (destructeurs de la
plante et du consensus) lon sache intgrer lintuition sur lexprience mystique. Lintuition ( intueri , voir lintrieur), condition de possibilit de toute dcouverte scientifique tant, de ce fait,
le levier mthodologique permettant de comprendre lunion troite unissant la raison et les sens.
Ratio-vitalisme atteignant son apoge dans les effervescences festives de tous les temps, du ntre en
particulier.
Indniable apptence pour ce monde-ci , voil ce qui peut amener la gurison ! Ce dont on
trouve des racines dans lpicurisme et le stocisme qui ,chacun sa manire lun de lautre, portent
tmoignage de la radicalit mondaine dune jouissance sachant trouver sa propre mesure dans
linteractivit existant entre la raison et les sens.
62
est synonyme de discernement, cest--dire de juste estimation de soi et de lautre et, donc, du
rapport dappartenance que lon peut tablir entre lun et lautre. Il sagit donc dun amour rgi par le
discernement. Cest sur cette base que pouvait se constituer le lien social, celui des tribus, des tats ,
des nations en une architectonique complexe, organique, o lentendement et la sensibilit occupaient
la place leur revenant.
On peut rappeler comment et en quoi la caritas , le care , amour et dsir intimement mls, est
au fondement mme de l hexis chez Aristote, ou de l habitus chez St. Thomas dAquin. Ces
notions renvoyant la disposition permanente de notre tre nous poussant agir en tel ou tel sens.
On voit bien, ainsi, comment lnergie libidinale est la source mme des multiples impulsions qui
meuvent les individus et, donc, favorisent leurs diverses agrgations. Cest en ayant cela lesprit que
lon pourrait avoir une comprhension, on ne peut plus concrte, de laction des tribus postmodernes o
lattraction affectuelle et limpulsion motionnelle ne manquent pas de jouer un rle de premier plan.
Cest bien ce que Spinoza, dans son naturalisme panthiste, nommait lintelligence amoureuse :
cette capacit, partir de laffect, de lier ensemble (intellegere) tous les lments pars dun Rel
complexe. En effet, lintelligence en son essence nest telle que lorsquelle sait rassembler ce qui est
pars. Elle est, alors, concrte : elle sait crotre (cum crescere) avec cela mme quelle dcrit. En bref,
elle est enracine dans la vie de tous les jours et participe, ainsi, aux passions communes.
Un tel enracinement nest pas chose aise tant lesprit tend sabstraire de cet humus qui, pourtant,
constitue lhumain. Cest cette radicalit ainsi dfinie : retour aux racines dun humain complexe et
ambivalent, qui permet de comprendre la ractualisation contemporaine de cette me du monde des
no-platoniciens. me inconsciente, me affective, me de la nature, peu importe les appellations. Il
suffit de noter quune telle vue intuitive permet de souligner limportance de la sortie de soi dans lautre.
Le terme empathie, frquemment utilis de nos jours, ne fait quexprimer cette interaction entre lun et
lautre : se mettre intuiti- vement la place de lautre parce que lon prouve des sentiments communs,
ou pour percevoir les consquences dune telle rversibilit.
Ce que fait bien ressortir lempathie cest que ros, en tant quensemble des pulsions de vie, me pousse
tre dcentr par rapport moi-mme. Dans Le Banquet, Platon montre que lAmour reconnat son
tat dindigence : lautre est ncessaire. En bref, la perfection nest pas dans le Moi, mais dans le Nous.
Cest cette exprience mystique, dont on a vu quelques racines, que lon va retrouver dans le New Age
postmoderne : to free oneself , se librer de soi incitant, paradoxalement, se lier lautre. Certains
ont pu souligner le rapport entre cur (cor-cordis) et corde (chorda, boyau). En ancien franais corder
63
Keynote Lecture
Sens de la mesure que lon retrouve, au Moyen ge dans cet amor discretus , o la discrtion

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, saccorder vient du cur que lon partage. Lamour consiste donc sencorder. Voil bien le nud
gordien consti- tutif des tribus postmodernes, celui de linterrelation. loppos de lindividualisme
pistmologique, cest la prvalence dun ordo amoris o la dpendance lautre (lAutre) est
primordiale.
Pour exprimer autrement, on peut rappeler la position, si raisonnable, du philosophe Alain, soulignant
qu lencontre du contractualisme , la socit est fonde sur lamiti ou les sentiments divers. Et
quelle est, en ce sens, une extension de la famille . Ce familialisme mtaphysique est bien la cause
et leffet de ce mouvement daimantation prsidant, pour une bonne part, aux relations sociales dont
le substrat, avou ou non, est le pulsionnel, lmotionnel, laffectuel, toutes choses dont la composante
rotique est on ne peut plus vidente.
Ainsi face aux languissantes, et quelque peu sommaires, thories sociales diagnostiquant une une
cachexie galopante : morosit, dcadence, ennui, dclin et autres qualificatifs catastrophistes, il convient
de rappeler que lon assiste de multiples expriences existentielles senracinant dans le (re)nouveau
de la passion, du dsir et divers affects de la mme eau, dynamisant ce qui est, toujours et nouveau,
ancien et fort jeune : lternel vivre-ensemble.
Il sagit l de la logique de la philia qui, parfois souterrainement parfois, au contraire, dune manire
paroxystique, constitue lossature du corps social ; ce qui au-del ou en-de du sentiment tragique de
lexistence rend celle-ci acceptable, en tout cas plus souhaitable que son entire disparition. Cest bien
la question pose par Cicron : qui potest esse vita vitalis, quae non in amici mutua benevolentia
conquiescat, ( comment peut-on avoir une vie vivable, si elle ne pouvait trouver lapaisement dans la
mutuelle bienveillance de lamiti ).
Un tel mutualisme de la bienveillance est cela mme qui constitue lconomie densemble des
changes humains, son relationnisme structurel. Sagesse spcifique : cosophie, reposant sur
linteraction permanente de la raison et du sensible. Mise en perspective que lon voit perdurer dans
des termes tels que mutualit, coopratif, solidarit, toutes choses traduisant une relation durable, voire
une symbiose entre des entits tout la fois diffrentes et complmentaires. Il sagit l de la sant
naturelle de toute socialit. Socialit profonde qui, tout en tant cache (on pourrait dire secrte,
discrte) nen constitue pas moins, sur la longue dure, la culture de tout tre-ensemble. En son sens
simple, le terreau, la bonne terre o celui-ci peut natre et se dvelopper. Un enracinement dynamique
en quelque sorte. Caractristique naturelle rapprocher de ce que Heidegger dit de la Phusis :
mergence, panouissement, mouvement dclosion.
64
existant entre la profondeur et lapparence de ce qui est. Le retrait, loccultation, lombre ncessaire
lentiret de la vie. Cela Heidegger va le prciser dans sa critique dune meta physique dniant la
simple physique. Cest--dire refusant ce monde en fonction dun hypothtique monde cleste, venir
ultrieurement. La Phusis dsigne le fait de se dresser en spanouissant, de se dployer en demeurant
en soi . Le rythme de la vie ne pouvant sexprimer qu partir dun point fixe, dune source fondatrice
permettant et lgitimant lcoulement de ce qui est. Cest bien ce que lon peut observer dans nombre
de pratiques contemporaines, en particulier juvniles : demeurer soi-mme tout en spanouissant vers
lextrieur. Un oxymore tel le corporisme mystique fait bien ressortir le rle et la fonction du
dploiement (le corps) partir dune intriorit (esprit, me) .
Dynamique qui va sexprimer dans un vivre-ensemble spcifique : celui de la mystique o tout
un chacun nest quun lment dun ensemble qui tout la fois le dpasse et lui donne sens. Cest le
corps mystique de la thologie catholique, le corps subtil des traditions orientales, lgrgore
de la symbolique franc-maonne, toute choses dpassant le corps anatomique, et fondant un rapport
dappartenance, cosophique , entre le Moi et laltrit du monde et des autres. En quelque sorte une
rotique largie et gnralise.
Au travers de lexpression cosophie sensible , il sagit de rendre attentif cet irrfragable vitalisme
dont les manifestations sont lgion. Vitalit qui au-del de lutilitarisme, souligne limportance du
prix des choses sans prix : le luxe comme luxation du fonctionnalisme moderne, comme expression
inconsciente dune culture de linstinct nacceptant plus dtre rduite une civilisation rationaliste.
Mditons, encore, Heidegger : Partout est laction, et nulle part le dploiement dun monde (ein
Welten der Welt). Or, il se trouve que cest ce dploiement , cette recherche de la belle vie , dun
plus-tre plus quun simple bien-tre qui se fait jour dans une socialit spontane outrepassant
les limites dune sociabilit raisonneuse.
Cette spontanit de la vie, et du systme vitaliste, qui peu peu se dveloppe, sexprime dans le
souci de faire de lexistence une uvre dart au quotidien. On peut, galement, en mesurer les effets
dans le rle accru accord limagination, et ce dans tous les domaines de la vie sociale. Sans oublier
lexacerbation des sentiments promouvant tous ces enthousiasmes:politiques, sociaux, caritatifs,
religieux, musicaux, sportifs etc., o les passions, ou tout simplement les humeurs prennent la place du
raisonnement, voire de lentendement dans la comprhension du Rel social.
Il y a du lyrisme dans lair du temps, une sensibilit romantique passablement chauffe par les
excitations collectives, et donnant une vision globale, holistique, de ces choses humaines que lon
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Keynote Lecture
Ainsi : ltre des choses aime se cacher . Remarque hraclitenne soulignant la dialogie constante

Proceedings
avait eu tendance singulirement sparer. Peut-tre faut-il voir l ce que M. Bakounine appelait la
rgnration par lamour . Fourier, de son ct, clbrait une rotosophie exprimant le retour en
force de la fantaisie et de la fantasmagorie dans llaboration et la confortation du lien social. Le retour
des passions communes.
En comprenant ce terme en son sens fort, il sagit l de ce que Comte appelait la culture
sympathique propre au genre humain et assurant sa rgnration morale . Il sagit l dune

reconnaissance de la prpondrance du sentiment pouvant prserver la dissolution dun social
domin par la simple raison. cosophie, redonnent aux sentiments une place de premier plan dans
larchitectonique de la vie sociale. Songeant la mmoire immmoriale de lhumanit, certains
penseurs avaient, ds le XIXe sicle, montr le retour probable de cet ordo amoris. Cest cela et cela
seul qui peut permettre la rgnrescence de la vie sociale.
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The 2nd
Proceedings
Session 1
Plenary Session 1
Sufferings and Conflicts
The 2nd
Proceedings
Plenary Session 1
Sufferings and Conflicts
1. Memories, Representations and Working through Genocides

/ Daniel Feierstein (National University of Tres de Febrero)
2. N
epal Searching for Democratic Soul
/ Narayan Wagle (Author/Journalist)
3. C
linical Healing or Pathological Reflection: the Imagination that
Links Auschwitz with Fukushima
/ Kyung Sik Suh (Tokyo Keizai University)
4. Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian Epic in Modern War

/ Wai Chee Dimock (Yale University)
Session 1
Memories, Representations and Working through Genocides
Daniel Feierstein
National University of Tres de Febrero
This paper analyzes the consequences of terror on the identities of genocide survivors. It starts from the
assumption that genocide in the modern world seeks to transform and reorganize the social fabric. Massive
state violence is thus seen as instrumental and serving a broader objective: the breakdown, destruction and
transformation of the identity of the survivors. This approach is rooted in Raphael Lemkins pioneering
definition of genocide, but also in a careful analysis of the socio-political outcomes of Nazism and
Stalinism, as well as those of the National Security doctrine, a counterinsurgency strategy developed by
the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s and later implemented throughout Latin America.
Although the focus of this paper is on the genocide carried out by Argentinas last military government
between 1976 and 1983, the example chosen can equally serve as an historical analogy for other cases
of modern genocide. Of particular importance for comparative genocide studies, the paper examines
how different legal definitions of social conflict war, genocide and crimes against humanity give
rise to different narratives and different types of collective memory. In particular, it considers the
impact these definitions have had or may have in the future on the collective workingthrough of the
traumatic experience in terms of memory, representation and identity. It shows how each narrative mode
of representation (war, genocide, crimes against humanity) defines and constructs the victims and the
perpetrators in different ways. It also shows how each of these modes leads to analogies with different
historical events, suggesting different causal explanations for what occurred and stimulating very different
modes of intergenerational transmission and ways of relating to the present and to others.
The purpose of terror is to destroy the self and the main outcome of trauma following systematic terror is
the destruction of identity together with a breakdown of self-confidence and, consequently, of confidence
in others. This has been the rationale of torture since the late Middle Ages, when it was first used by
the Inquisition as part of the embryonic technology of power that would only become fully developed
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in the twentieth century. Now, torturewhich is a recurrent feature of modern genocide - would be
unnecessary if the goal were simply to defeat or disarm the enemy. Torture sets out to achieve more than
the destruction of the will to fight. Torture aims to erase the victims identity by forcing them to say or do
things they should not say or do, such as denying their religious, national, political or sexual convictions,
providing information that will harm loved ones, or giving their affection or sexuality to a subject that
repels them.
The most typical psychological response to memories of a traumatic experience is to block them from
consciousness. The feeling remains but, because the memories cannot be processed in narrative form, they
cannot be modified. Instead, they produce dislocations of identity; for example, repressed feelings are
responsible for such diverse mental health problems such as phobias, hysteria, obsessions and repetition
compulsion. Thus, unprocessed feelings are played out in endless ways that are harmful or problematic
for the subjects and/or their social environment. However, what is repressed is only the subjective
experience of the event that took place, not the event itself.
At the social level, repetition compulsion is related to a transubjective phenomenon Kas (1989) calls
the denegative pact, that is, an unconscious agreement not to mention the traumatic event. The pact
shares the logic of repetition compulsion, but it also establishes a consensus that did not exist when the
trauma was repressed. It operates on individual subjectivity, destroying any vestige of self-confidence
that those involved in the pact may have had previously and preventing them from appropriating their
own history. The pact alienates individuals not only from their own experience but from any narrative
account of the traumatic event. They remain detached and unable to relate such stories to their own
experience.
But this pact is not only maintained in and through silence. Various discourses about the traumatic
past help to produce a collective distancing and alienation from the traumatic event by using narrative
procedures that deliberately exclude the first person and construct the narration as something that
happened to others. At the same time, trauma produces a desensitization which, like repression, operates
at the individual and subjective level, but also has cumulative social and historical effects. When
caused by events affecting large population groups, this accumulated desensitization is experienced as
meaninglessness and may be accompanied by cynicism or nihilism, satire or ridicule. In ideological
terms it is expressed as the impossibility of trying to understand the traumatic event. Here, a deliberate
and ideologically justified refusal to seek ones own identity will be called the ideology of nonsense. This
ideology is a more extreme form of repression because, far from challenging the denegative pact, it seeks
to voice it at a conscious level, giving it narrative solidity and restoring some sort of coherent identity by
denying the very existence of the self that was previously destroyed.
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of neuroscience, one of the most important discoveries of the last thirty years is that memories are not
stored in the brain as complete video recordings of events, but as a set of fragmented and disordered
experiences from which sense has to be made through a narrative or story. In the field of gross human
rights violations, it is impossible to decide which explanatory framework best fits a particular historical
event unless we consider the alternative narratives each one generates and its implications for working
through trauma and rebuilding personal identities. This is especially true in an applied discipline such as
law, where there may be fundamental disagreements about how events should be defined. 1
Concepts are not facts - even though social scientists, historians and lawyers often confuse the two.
Concepts are mental constructs interpretative frameworks used to make sense of the facts. Thus, in the
case of human rights violations in Argentina in the 1970s, it is impossible to decide whether or not these
occurred, for example, in the context of a war or genocide simply by appealing to the facts (for example,
the number of skirmishes and casualties; or the number of rapes, kidnappings and disappearances) because
a number of different concepts can potentially explain the same facts.
More than any other discipline, law plays a key role in the collective working through of trauma following
systematic mass violence. This is partly because courts are authorized to detain and punish wrongdoers
but also because judges sentencing decisions tend to become collectively sanctioned truths and stories.
The important point to remember is that different concepts organize facts in different ways, giving the
same facts different meanings. These meanings will inevitably be influenced by social attitudes towards
the events in question.
Reviewing the different legal concepts
The widespread and systematic human rights violations committed in Argentina between 1976 and
1983 can and have been described in numerous ways. Some descriptions have changed over time or
have acquired greater or lesser social acceptance at different moments during and after the dictatorship.
However, in legal terms these descriptions can be grouped under three separate categories, each with its
own discourse. These categories are: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. In Argentina, the
area of legal discourse is marked by an ongoing dispute over the meaning of two of these (genocide and
crimes against humanity) while the third (war) has been appropriated by the defence lawyers and political
supporters of those responsible for the crimes, both as a weapon to legitimize the defendants actions and

This does not mean that it is not possible to make a doctrinal analysis of the possible definitions, but this belongs to another level of discussion, involves not memory processes and representation but the construction of lawsuits.
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Session 1
The importance of narrative for nearly every area of our lives is now widely recognized. In the field

Proceedings
as a tool to secure their acquittal.

These categories are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. On the contrary, some sociologists and
historians work with two and even all three simultaneously.2 Nevertheless, the different chains of
reasoning associated with each concept lead not only to widely different understandings of Argentine
history, but to different symbolic outcomes for trials and sentences. Consequently, both factors impact
differently on the collective working through of trauma.
War
The discourse of war has taken many different forms in Argentina, some totally at odds with others,
politically and ideologically. Moreover, although this discourse shaped common-sense understandings
of the events at the time, it became quickly discredited after the dictatorship. Nowadays, it is kept alive
among sectors of Argentine society close to the perpetrators, by a minority of former members of armed
leftist organizations, and by small groups of academics.
All the different discourses of war agree that the 1976-1983 military repression originated in the political
climate and social mobilization of the late nineteen sixties. For the military and their civilian accomplices
and sympathizers, the very essence of Argentine identity was threatened by subversion from abroad
a subversion instigated by Communists, atheists and Freemasons, among others. On the other hand,
the armed leftist organizations saw war as a response from the ruling bloc to the radicalization of the
poorer classes and the emergence of militarized Peronist and/or Marxist revolutionary vanguards. In their
view, the military coup of 1976 was a counter-revolutionary backlash to the expansion of socialism in
Argentina, an expansion which began after the Peronist resistance movement (1955-1973) turned to the
Cuban Revolution for inspiration and started to preach insurrection.
The concept of dirty war,3 used by the perpetrators refers to the fact that fighting did not take place in
2 Such a combination is clearly present (even in the title) in Ines Izaguirre et al, Lucha de clases, guerra civil y genocidio en
la Argentina, 1973-1983. Antecedentes. Desarrollo. Complicidades, (Class struggle, civil war and genocide in Argentina,
1973-1983. Background. Development. Complicity), Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 2009. It clearly and explicitly juxtaposes the
concepts of civil war and genocide and expressly excludes the notion of crimes against humanity. Their work is based on
the previous works by Juan Carlos Marn, who started by viewing the events as war but quickly adopted the concept of
genocide.
3 Note that the concept of dirty war, created by the perpetrators and used exclusively by them in Argentina, now
dominates foreign literature on the topic. From the twenty-first century, the term dirty war has been adopted by several
Argentine academics who had deliberately ignored the term in the past without explaining in what sense the concept is
used, how it relates to the perpetrators vision of the period, or what political and moral weight it presupposes, deriving
as it does from French counterinsurgency doctrines. See its use, for example, in Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La
74
of civilian populations supporting guerrilla movements was thought to be more effective than directly
targeting the guerrillas themselves. In fact, as is widely known, this counterinsurgency doctrine was first
implemented by the French in Indochina and Algeria and later spread throughout Latin America by the
U.S. School of the Americas.
Using the concept of war in the case of Argentina presupposes that:
1) There were two social groups involved in the conflict, both with military capability and political power.
2) War was a logical consequence of the escalating violence in Argentina. Therefore, whatever the Armed
Forces set out to defend (the nation, the institutions, the status quo, oligarchic power), they were
fighting in a defensive way.
3) The terror unleashed on Argentine society after the coup of 1976 was an unintended consequence of the
Armed Forces decision to fight left-wing violence.
Genocide
The concept of genocide refers to a premeditated and organised attempt to spread terror throughout
society. Terror is not a by-product but a fundamental part of the genocide process. To argue that
Argentina suffered genocide means, among other things, that there was a plan to reorganize society
which sought to destroy social identity and social relations based on cooperation among autonomous
agents. This destruction was brought about by killing a significant part of the national group (significant
in number or in importance) and by using the terror thus caused to establish new forms of social
relations and identity.4
Using the concept of genocide in the case of Argentina presupposes that:
1) The victims can no longer be divided into guilty or innocent because terror is directed against the
whole of society, including the perpetrators and their families. The definition of the enemy as subversive
criminals is deliberately ambiguous and may include, as the Argentine perpetrators put it in one
infamous public statement the rebels accomplices, supporters, the indifferent and the timid.5 Terror
dictadura militar 1976/1983. Del golpe de Estado a la restauracin democrtica, (The military dictatorship 1976/1983.
From the coup to the restoration of democracy), Buenos Aires, Paids, 2003.
4 Daniel Feierstein, El genocidio como prctica social. Entre el nazismo experiencia argentina, (Genocide as a social
practice. Between Nazism and the Argentine experience), FCE, Buenos Aires, 2007. p. 83.
5 Statements by the then de facto Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Ibrico Saint Jean, to the International Herald
Tribune, May 26, 1977.
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Session 1
the open on conventional battlefields. Because the insurgents were irregulars, clandestine police repression

Proceedings
was not a side-effect of a crackdown on armed leftist groups nor did the military aim primary to defeat
these groups. The Argentine military used concentration camps to terrorize the Argentine national group
as a whole, not just to intern radical or militarized groups.
2) The military repression in Argentina was not a reaction to escalating violence but a project of social
reorganization patiently and persistently pursued even before armed leftist organizations existed in
Argentina and before the poorer sections of the Argentine population became radicalised. Although it
was implemented with the excuse of a fight against subversion, it was in fact part of a continent-wide
project - expressed in the National Security Doctrine - and so independent of whether local insurgent
organizations posed any real threat of revolution. The existence of a continent-wide reorganizing
project is obvious from the fact that it was implemented not only in countries like El Salvador, where
there was almost certainly a civil war, but in countries like Guatemala and Argentina, where insurgent
forces had no conventional military combat capability, and even in countries like Chile and Bolivia,
where there were almost no armed actions against the State.
3) The military repression was not a defensive reaction to left-wing violence, but rather an offensive
action. It took advantage of the violence perpetrated by left-wing organizations to legitimatize its
own use of terror but it was in no way dependent on these organizations. On the contrary it was, in
principle, more or less independent of the guerrilla forces in the region. It had its own project - one that
used concentration camps and terror to transform social relations based on reciprocity and cooperation
into relations based on individualism and mutual suspicion. It sought to use informants and betrayal to
destroy and/or transform patterns of social ties and with them, social and personal identity.
It is worth pointing out that this particular way of conceiving and narrating genocide is less common
outside Argentina. In most other cases genocide has been regarded as the result of racial or ethnic
confrontation. Thus, there is a clear difference between studies of repression in Guatemala, which tend to
stress the indigenous status of the victims, at the same time depoliticizing them, and studies of repression
in Argentina, where race and ethnicity played only a marginal role.
Crimes against humanity
Using the concept of crimes against humanity in the case of Argentina presupposes that:
1) The victims are seen as individual citizens persecuted by the State. The big difference between
crimes against humanity and genocide lies in the fact that that genocide sees the victims as members of
a national group whereas crimes against humanity treats them as politicized individuals who have
suffered violations of their individual rights (to life, physical integrity, safety, or welfare). The victims
76
voluntary identity they can adopt or discard at will - as opposed to an involuntary ethnic or national
identity that people are born into.6
2) The discourse of crimes against humanity includes the notion of a terrorist state but unlike the
discourses of war and genocide, it presents no consistent explanation about when or why the Argentine
State began to commit these crimes. For example, the 1984 report Nunca Ms (Never Again) drawn up
by CONADEP (the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) takes the view that state
terrorism was an excessive and disproportionate response to left-wing political violence. Other authors,
however, see state terrorism as an independent project, much more in line with the concept of genocide.
In summary, the concept of crimes against humanity as applied in Argentina allows for two types of
causal explanation of the repression (i.e. as a reaction to left-wing violence or as an independent project)
while sharing a roughly similar vision of the victims as politicized individuals.
It is instructive to examine other historical cases in which only one of these frameworks - war crimes,
genocide and crimes against humanity - is generally accepted. For example, Spain undeniably waged a
civil war between 1936 and 1939, with conventional battles fought by more or less professional armies.
This has tended to exclude the possibility of interpreting the murder and torture carried out by the Franco
regime during and after the Spanish Civil War as instances of genocide, even though the number of
atrocities far exceeded those committed in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 and genocide might prove to
be a much more revealing explanation.
According to a recent estimate, 150,000 people were murdered by right-wing Nationalists during the
Spanish Civil War and a further 20,000 were executed after the war had ended, with an additional 50,000
put to death by the Republicans.7 These killings are quite separate from the 200,000 soldiers killed in
combat. One cannot help but wonder to what extent the conventional picture of a two-sided military
conflict has made it impossible to obtain justice for atrocities committed far from the battlefront and for
Spanish society as a whole to work through these traumatic events.
The conventional view of the Spanish Civil War as war makes it difficult to appreciate that the systematic
6 For the legal characterization of this discourse, see the amicus curiae presented by the Nizkor organization in the case
heard in Spain against Adolfo Scilingo. The document can be found on the site www.radionizkor.org and was one of the
items referred to by the Court of Spain to change the initial charge of genocide for one of crimes against humanity.
7 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, London, 2012.
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of crimes against humanity are persecuted for their convictions, which are thought of as part of a

Proceedings
terror exercised by Francos forces affected the whole of Spanish society (not just the Republican
sectors). It also makes it more difficult to identify those responsible. Just to give one example: Spanish
society still shows an almost complete lack of interest in the children appropriated by their parents
murderers during and after the Spanish Civil War. In contrast, the efforts of the Grandmothers of
Plaza de Mayo to uncover similar cases in Argentina have been well publicised. This discrepancy is
surprising since the number of stolen children is calculated at around 500 in Argentina as opposed to
30,000 in Spain, where the Spanish Catholic Church was involved in a clandestine adoption network.
The link between memory and the present: we live in a remembered present
Having described the three main ways human rights violations in Argentina are generally interpreted, I
will now analyze their different implications for the present. As we will see, each interpretation impacts
differently on our ability to work through terror, facilitating or hindering our capacity to work through
and appropriate the past. I will consider five dimensions that can be affected by different interpretations of
events:
a) how the victims are described;
b) how meaning is assigned to events;
c) the types of analogies and comparisons allowed for by each interpretation;
d) the necessary actions for working through terror and/or preventing its reappearance;
e) generational transmission and mourning and the types of appropriation or alienation that each
interpretation tends to produce.
a) How the victims are described
The criminal legal system uses the term victim to describe people affected both directly and indirectly by
criminal actions. The concept of indirect victim will be useful when examining the effects of different
narrative approaches and how they construct people as victims. The concept of indirect victim allows
for a broader understanding of who is affected by terror and what relationship if any - exists between the
two types of victim.
1) Although the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 extended civilian protection during times of war,
the idea that the victims of armed conflict have a right to compensation was not seriously discussed
until the 1990s and the positions of various courts and scholars vary considerably. Moreover, we
have to distinguish between rights under international and national law, and between rights vis-vis a State or a non-State actor. Nevertheless, it is clear that the only victims in a war are those
78
think of war as a crime or see themselves and the enemy as victims, whether direct or indirect.
2) F
or those who claim that human rights violations committed in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 were
genocide, however, the indirect victim is the Argentine national group. Genocide does not target specific
political opponents or individual citizens, but the whole group; that is why the notion of destruction of
a group is specific to the concept of genocide. This focus on the group poses a different approach to
the relationship between victims and perpetrators. Even the perpetrators are, in a sense, victims, in that
torture and murder have left indelible marks on them as well as on the rest of society. They, too, suffer
a breakdown of social ties radically different from that which is produced by other conflicts, including
war.
3) The discourse of crimes against humanity does not set up a binary opposition between two more
or less evenly matched opponents, as in war, but between the state and the rights of the individual
citizen. This liberal approach sees the State as committing crimes against individuals whose rights
it is supposed to guarantee. Consequently, victims whether direct or indirect - are citizens whose
rights have been violated in some way by clandestine and illegal repression. The big difference with
genocide is that they are affected as individual citizens, rather than as members of a broader group.
It is worth pointing out here that there is clear connection between the discourse of crimes against
humanity and the concept of the responsibility to protect, a more recent discourse used to legitimize
neo-colonial military interventions. The most direct and emblematic of these has been the bombing of
the Libyan people during 2011 and the intervention to overthrow Gaddafis dictatorial regime, with the
intention of imposing a government more sympathetic to U.S. and European interests, particularly in the
management of Libyan oil and the control of a geopolitically vital territory.8
b) How meaning is assigned to events
The meaning of state-sponsored mass violence also varies depending on whether we describe
them as war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity. Except in rare cases of stalemate like
8 For a geopolitical discussion of genocide and crimes against humanity and their redefinition in neo-imperialist terms,
see Daniel Feierstein, Getting Things into Perspective, in Genocide Studies and Prevention. An International Journal,
University of Toronto Press, vol. 4, no. 2, 2009, pp. 155-160, The Good, the Bad and the Invisible. A Critical Look of the
MARO Report , in Genocide Studies and Prevention. An International Journal, University of Toronto Press, vol. 6, no.
1, 2011, pp. 39-44.
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Session 1
civilians harmed by lawful or unlawful conduct. The combatants in an armed conflict do not generally

Proceedings
the Korean War, the outcome of a war is usually defined in terms of victory and defeat. Thus,
whatever their ideological perspective, those who interpret events in Argentina in terms of a
civil war agree that the war resulted in a clear victory for the military regime. For the defeated,
the primary focus is mainly on analyzing battles in order to understand where they went wrong.
From the perspective of genocide, however, the meaning of the events far exceeds military strategy
and tactics. After genocide, it is more important to understand how the national group and the social
fabric have been transformed. In the case of Argentina, the defeat of the different guerrilla forces by the
Argentine military is seen as less important than the radical transformation of society as a whole. Thus, the
key issues implicit in the notion of destruction of a group as opposed to the more liberal destruction of
individuals are: 1) what Argentine society was like before it was transformed by terror; 2) how terror was
internalized; and 3) how it continued to operate in society after the dictatorship had ended.
From the perspective of crimes against humanity, meaning derives from the binary opposition of
individual vs. the State. In this view, when the State abuses freedom and individual rights (human rights),
individual autonomy is stifled and individuals are suffocated within a mass society where they are unable,
either partially or wholly, to exercise their individuality.
c) Types of analogies and comparisons allowed for by each interpretation
The third focus of our analysis is the relationship between memory and the present. What other historical
events does each narrative model typically bring to mind? Here we are particularly interested in how
representations of the past affect current behaviour, learning or orientation towards the present and future.
In Argentina, the term revolutionary war tends to evoke a range of historical events from the prototype of
the Russian revolution to revolutions closer to home, especially those in Cuba, Nicaragua or El Salvador.
But not all such events are linked to mass annihilation. Several revolutionary and counter-revolutionary
wars of the 1970s and 1980s were accompanied by state-sponsored genocide. This was especially true
of El Salvador but also - to a lesser degree - Nicaragua and perhaps Guatemala. However, no mass
annihilations were committed by either side during or after the Cuban revolution, which served as a model
for the Latin American guerrilla movements until the 1990s. Nevertheless, where war and genocide did
co-exist, an emphasis on one has tended to render the other invisible. In particular, genocide is apt to be
written off as wartime excesses. This has an unfortunate effect on memory processes since transforming
genocide into a by-product of revolutionary struggle somehow prevents us from examining it critically.
The term genocide tends to suggest the Holocaust, despite the numerous other extermination processes
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enlightening. First, the Nazis apparent obsession with race has little or nothing to do with destruction
processes in Latin America. Although this is clear in the case of Argentina, an overemphasis on racism as
a motive for annihilating Guatemalas indigenous population between 1960 and 1996 tends to obscure the
political intentions that guided the process. I use the word apparent advisedly because, as I have argued
elsewhere, Jewish identity was targeted for destruction by the Nazis more for political than for ethnic
reasons.9
However, the concept of partial destruction of the national group not only allows us to break with the
myth that genocide is driven by irrational hatred; it allows us to understand all the annihilations that
have taken place during the modern era. And by recognizing that State violence is intended to affect the
survivors as much as the direct victims, we are able to recognize more easily its effects in the present.
We are also able to demand various collective responsibilities and, in doing so, to change the processes
whereby we appropriate events or remain alienated from them.
One positive aspect of analogies with the Holocaust is that after World War II an international consensus
was forged that these crimes could not go unpunished. In Argentina, a popular catchphrase during the final
years of the military dictatorship clearly expressed the rejection of impunity: Even if you go to ground,
like the Nazis youll be found.
The term crimes against humanity does not clearly conjure up any one historical event. Among the
many human rights violations of the past, perhaps those committed by the Nazis are the most significant
in scope and scale. But the Third Reich is associated in most peoples minds with genocide rather than the
violation of individual rights. Instead, the most paradigmatic examples of crimes against humanity are
likely to occur in the future, as new and increasingly broader international regulations and institutional
bodies are created. Let us not forget that the International Tribunals and the International Criminal Court,
as well as around half the current International Human Rights Conventions were not created until after the
military dictatorship in Argentina had ended.
Now that the anticommunist crusade of the Cold War era has been discredited, the neo-imperialist tool10 to
9 See: Daniel Feierstein, El genocidio como prctica social. Entre el nazismo experiencia argentina, (Genocide as a social
practice. Between Nazism and the Argentine experience), FCE, Buenos Aires, 2007.
10 For a discussion of this issue, see Daniel Feierstein,
El peligro del redireccionamiento de los conceptos del derecho internacional: las Naciones Unidas, la Corte Penal Internacional y el nuevo papel de los ee.uu.
(The danger of reformulating the concepts of international law: the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the new role of the U.S.),
Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio (Journal of Genocide Studies), Buenos Aires, EDUNTREF, vol. 3, November
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that have taken place since 1945. But comparisons with the Holocaust can be misleading as well as

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legitimize international intervention is a human rights discourse preaching the responsibility to protect
civilians and even the war on terror. This new direction in international order and international criminal
law could be seen clearly in the USs direct military intervention in Libya in 2011 after the UN authorised
the use of all necessary measures to prevent attacks on civilians.
Interestingly, the concept chosen to justify these new policies is the vaguest and most ambiguous of
those discussed so far - crimes against humanity. In international criminal law, war and genocide are
considered much more restrictively and this makes it far more difficult for the international community
to intervene and protect on the basis of half-baked media reports alone. To prove the existence of a war
or genocide there must be clear objective evidence (territorial control or professionalized armies for war;
the intent to destroy a group for genocide). Yet it seems more and more that any act of state violence-and
even non-state violence, as far as the International Criminal Court and some others are concerned - can be
quickly classified as crimes against humanity.
Thus, the concept of crimes against humanity is being progressively devalued as totally different practices
are conflated. If the twentieth century was in Mark Levenes view the century of genocide, the twentyfirst century may soon become one where crimes against humanity are used to legitimize and morally
justify military intervention in cases where violence is not state-sponsored and/or not systematic, or where
it may not even exist at all. Paradoxically, such interventions to prevent human rights abuses end up
creating many more victims than they were intended to protect, while international peacekeeping forces
use international resolutions to punish the perpetrators for their own purposes.
d) Working through terror and preventing its reappearance
It is clear, then, that different meanings and emotions are attached to war crimes, genocide and crimes
against humanity, largely because of the different historical analogies that each category brings to mind.
Consequently, each category suggests the need for a different course of action in the present. In this sense
these different representations also play an eminently political role by mediating the link between memory
of the past and present action.
For those on the left who support the idea of a dirty war in Argentina, the task ahead is to continue the
struggle on the cultural level. Public opinion has turned against the perpetrators and in favour of putting
them on trial again; supporters of the dirty war hypothesis insist, fortunately with little success so far, on
2009, pp. 83-97.
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of the years before the dictatorship. Although such discourses are promoted by a minority of Argentineans,
they have a wide following in the case of the Spanish Civil War because of the strong dominance of the
discourse of war which excludes other visions of the conflict.
For those who think in terms of genocide in Argentina, the ways of working through are very different.
Because the whole national group was affected, terror needs to be worked through at a group level. The
social transformations that took place cannot be reversed by mere individual acts of will because they
are anchored in a shared collective unconscious. Any attempt at prevention must take into account the
tremendous force of what Freud calls repetition compulsion (the psychic need to repeat the unprocessed
trauma again and again) as well as denegative pacts (a social phenomenon that reveals to what lengths
individuals will go to repress trauma) and the various additional processes of desensitization. The rallying
cry of never again heard at so many remembrance ceremonies must be understood in this context as an
attempt to deny this compulsion to repeat the past. But trauma can only be worked through slowly and
patiently perhaps only when we have done a thorough job of discovering its complex and intricate scars
on the collective psyche.
For those who prefer the explanation of crimes against humanity, however, working through is fraught
with obstacles. It is no coincidence that supporters of this view tend to practise denial. They attempt to
turn the page on history through a wholesale condemnation of violence and the past in which subversive
activity and state repression are lumped together as one. They do not understand that justice is the
fundamental tool that would allow the past to be laid to rest.
e) Generational transmission and mourning and the types of appropriation or alienation
Abraham and Torok have developed an interesting notion to describe this level: the crypt. According to
the authors:
The unspeakable words and sentences, linked as they are to memories of great libidinal and
narcissistic value, cannot accept their exclusion. From their hideaway in the imaginary crypt-into
which fantasy had thrust them to hibernate lifeless, anesthetized, and designified- the unspeakable
words never cease their subversive action.11

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1. Edited and translated by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994, p. 132.
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the need to strip the alleged victims of their the aura of martyrdom and reformulate our understanding

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They add that.

Should a child have parents with secrets, parents whose speech is not exactly complementary
to their unstated repressions, he will receive from them a gap in the unconscious, an unknown,
unrecognized knowledge a nescience subjected to a form of repression before the fact. The
buried speech of the parent will be a dead gap without a burial place in the child. This unknown
phantom returns from the unconscious to haunt its host and may lead to phobias, madness, and
obsessions. Its effect can persist through several generations and determine the fate of an entire
family line.12
Thus, these experiences, repressed and unprocessed in one generation, are unconsciously transmitted
to the next generation. As the team at Chiles Centre for Mental Health and Human Rights (CINTRAS)
explains:
The contents of the crypt are unspeakable for the subject because, despite being present psychically
in the person who has lived them, they cannot talk about it. Because they are transmitted to the
next generation as a phantom and cannot be represented verbally, they become nameless, their
contents are unknown, but their existence can generate psychic disturbances. In the generation of
the grandchildren, they generate unthinkable thoughts, because this generation is not aware that a
secret hangs over an unresolved trauma. This can result in symptoms, bizarre feelings and emotions
that occur without any apparent correlation with the psychic life of the family.13
Hayde Faimberg describes this transgenerational transmission of trauma as alienating identification
or generational telescoping, as the older generations experiences overrun those of their children and
grandchildren.14 The image comes from 19th century accounts of train accidents in which wagons were
described as collapsing into each other like a folding telescope. Here we will examine how the different
legal concepts discussed so far can affect this phenomenon.
12 Ibid, p. 140.
13 cintras, Dao transgeneracional en descendientes de sobrevivientes de tortura (Transgenerational damage in the offspring of survivors of torture), in cintras, eatip, gtnm/rj y sersoc, Dao transgeneracional. Consecuencias de la represin poltica en el Cono Sur, Santiago de Chile, Unin Europea-Grfica lom, 2009, pp. 48-49.

For the concept of generational telescoping, see Hayde Faimberg, El telescopaje (encaje) de las generaciones - acerca
de la genealoga de ciertas identificaciones (The telescoping of generations - on the genealogy of certain identifications) in Ren Kas, Hayde Faimberg and others, Transmisin de la vida psquica entre generaciones (Transmission
of psychic life between generations), Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2006 (first edition, 1996).
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incoherent transgenerational legacy. In the case of war, the fallen are constructed as heroes and the mode
of mourning tends to be melancholic. In the case of crimes against humanity, the tendency towards an
abstract and blanket condemnation of all types of violence leads to detachment and so to denial.15
However, the idea of a militarized conflict between the guerrillas and Armed Forces has lost ground in
Argentina, at least since the end of the Cold War, while the idea of a repressive, centralized State has also
lost legitimacy. Even if we accept that there was a war in Argentina, the notions of war crimes and crimes
against humanity produce visions of the past that are difficult to appropriate for the younger generations
that have never participated in a war. Moreover, despite all the shortcomings of contemporary democracy
in Argentina, the overwhelming majority of the population votes in elections and so governments are
lawfully elected. If freedom of expression is still limited, this is not due to State censorship of the media
but, as in other democratic countries, to the power of media corporations and other economic groups.
Thus, the generation born after the dictatorship is dislocated from both types of discourse. For those who
did not live through the events the discourses of war crimes and crimes against humanity tend to sound
contrived since those who supposedly confronted each other in war no longer speak of continuing the
military conflict, while a return of the military dictatorship is no longer a real threat to democracy. This
younger generation tends to feel increasingly alienated by the discourse of war crimes and crimes against
humanity because these relegate past terror to history, a history that belongs to their parents and which
remains disconnected from their own experience in the present.
For the victims children, this lack of intergenerational legacy has complex and profound effects. Some
of these can be observed in activities as diverse as public protests organised by HIJOS, an acronym
in Spanish for Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence, consisting
of demonstrations outside perpetrators homes or at the restaurants and night clubs frequented by the
perpetrators. They also include works by Theatre for Identity, poems by writers like John Terranova,
films like Los rubios (The blond) by Albertina Carri and any film by Alejandro Agresti, all of whom
belong to the generation of those who were children at the time of the 1976 coup or were born during the
dictatorship.

For the analysis of patterns of bereavement in addition to the classic work of Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, Collected Works, op. cit, pp. 235-256, available on the third volume (Loss) of the trilogy of John Bowlby, Attachment and
loss, op. cit, which performs a brilliant analysis of the different types of grief and its relationship to the possible construction of detachment, and inability to handle the effects of the absence.
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In the discourses of war and crimes against humanity, generational imprinting leads to relatively

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Of course, confronting the effects of the three narrative models analyzed with the discursive logic
of another generation involves broadening and deepening our analysis of the different memory and
representation processes of how these are moulded and how they are linked to action.
The need felt by the younger generations to demonstrate in public meant a break with the silence and
closure imposed on - or, at least, accepted by - the older generations that lived through the terror. And
these demonstrations began precisely in the years when the perpetrators enjoyed complete impunity and
sought closure in the name of national reconciliation. Through their protests, the sons and daughters of
the disappeared signified their refusal to accept this distorted legacy of trauma. With their cry of rebellion,
they sought and continue to seek not only a link with their missing parents but with a missing generation
one that relinquished its parental roles and responsibilities as lawgivers, authorities, and dispensers of
justice.
These public protests appealed - and still appeal - to the State to exercise its responsibility. One of the
demonstrators chants translates roughly as: No justice? No closure? Then public exposure. The failure
of the generation that came through the terror to live up to its responsibilities has led to a revolt against
order and authority among some of the younger generation, exposing a breakdown of intergenerational
bonding in a society when justice is still denied. Although this plea for justice is directed at the State,
it appeals primarily to a whole generation, a generation delegitimized because it failed to exercise its
parental role by seeking justice.
These appeals can also be identified in much of the creative literary and artistic output of the second
generation, which questions or confronts the older generation. Some of these dissident voices are children
of the disappeared; others are simply members of a generation. Their work forms part of a wider focus
on the ways in which society was reorganised by destruction a focus essential for working through
trauma in both age groups. At the same time, the questions raised by the children could be an opportunity
to demolish their parents denial of the past and open the way to the transmission of a legacy. Together
they could give the past a different meaning and cope jointly with the crypt, seeking somehow to raise its
sealed lid.
Both generations need to understand how society and social behaviour have been reorganized by genocide,
even if they approach the question in different ways. And each needs an intergenerational dialogue. Only
by starkly facing pain, shame and guilt is it possible to construct a legacy capable of including the dreams,
successes, problems and concerns of a generation, dreaming of a better world, and how it was marked by
terror and by the consequences of terror. A terror that sought to destroy meaning as they had known it, to
turn their experience into nonsense, to block any possibility of rebellion, and to reorganize the ways of
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One of the key conclusions of this study is that a fundamental objective of reorganizing genocide is
desubjectification and desensitization, not only of the direct victims, but of the national group as a whole
together with its complex web of social relationships and practices. As for what to call the violence of the
1970s, those who seek definitions need to examine the emotional transference between their own traumas
and their descriptions of historical events. Otherwise, they risk becoming bogged down in abstract
definitions without ever coming to grips with the heart of the matter and how it affects us, our parents and
our children. Different concepts are likely to satisfy our needs in different ways. Being aware of this fact
and acting responsibly is the least we can ask of ourselves and others.
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conceptualizing the self and relationships with others, even with loved ones, even with their own children.

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Nepal Searching for Democratic Soul
Narayan Wagle
Author/Journalist
When I was born, Nepals first popularly elected leader was still in jail. He had made the king very
nervous, winning two thirds of seats of the parliament. The ambitious king couldnt reconcile the fact
that peoples huge and unprecedented mandate was not with him, but with his subject. The popular and
determined prime minister had outlined the countrys political, developmental and social charter along
with independent foreign policy. Just in one and a half years of the countrys first democratic exercise,
the king began his misadventure to derail the process of democracy and development by peoples
representative. Not for a short period as he promised, his misadventure lasted for decades. Nepal remained
under the dark cloud of totalitarian royal regime.
The king sacked the government, disbanded the parliament and seized every power of peoples system.
Who cared about the constitution at the time when most of the countries in Asia and elsewhere were
not democratically run? He mobilized the national army to arrest the prime minister, ministers and all
important political leaders and put them in jail. Whoever compromised with him was released, and those
who didnt remain in jail for years. The leader was happy writing literary short stories, novels and letters
to people close to him, rather than bowing down with the military backed kings coup. He inspired the
country with his ideology of centrist politics and ideas of pro-humane literature even from the heavily
guarded cell.
The four walls of the Kathmandu prison, guarded by the national army, now have been turned into a
museum after his name, BP Koirala.
The king, ruling from the royal palace, who made the life of Koirala, his followers and the Nepali citizens
in large miserable, has also been turned into a museum now. Koirala Museum is visited by people to
remember and reflect on how he and the peaceful political struggle suffered throughout history. And
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belongings and to get a sense of how they suppressed the peoples aspirations for so long from behind the
most attractive landmark of the capital.
That was the time of the early 1960s. That had been just 10 years of newly found freedom. When most of
the neighboring countries were becoming independent from the British, Nepal was being freed from 100
plus years of family rule. Not of the kings family, but their kin. In fact, it was a military rule. The Rana
family successfully maintained their grip on state affairs, making the monarchy a ceremonial head of state
and ran the country with the military. Nepal had remained independent and safeguarded her sovereignty
even during the fierce wars with the British in the south and with the Tibetans and Chinese in the north.
The monarchy didnt have any power and voice. People who asked for freedom and tried to rally against
the rule were crushed. Some of the brilliant minds who showed their courage to stand up were hung, and
several others were expelled from the country.
There was no university. Only one campus, opened basically for Rana and their cronies children. There
were a handful of schools. There was one Koirala family among the freedom loving people who were
expelled and compelled to go reside in neighboring Indian towns. The senior Koirala had lost all his family
property when he was punished by the rulers. He went into exile almost penniless with all his siblings
and raised them in an atmosphere when Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were championing for
independence against the British rule. His young son BP connected himself with the Indian uprising for
huge change and famously led a formation of the popular political party Nepali Congress and launched
the first known democratic movement against the Ranas from India.
The Ranas lost their best friend, the British in India. During the movement, the then king frustrated from
his limitations inside the palace surprisingly went to take refuge in the Indian embassy and was eventually
flown to New Delhi. The new leader in India Jawaharlal Nehru invited the Rana ruler from Kathmandu
to have a trilateral agreement between India, the king and the Ranas. The king came back to Kathmandu
with huge fanfare opening the country in a new democratic, free era. He formed an interim cabinet under
the same Rana prime minister and managed to bring BP Koirala and others as ministers. That led to the
ultimate fall of the Rana rule.
Nepal was no longer a forbidden country on the global map. Foreigners were allowed to visit the middle
age type of culture and society. Political parties were officially recognized. The country which welcomed
airplanes before cars was slightly changing. The Ranas didnt construct roads to connect to India but
imported some cars. The cars were carried by porters in flock along the ups and downs and rivers of
mountains. One flight a day from the closest town of India and the first foreign cars for Ranas symbolized
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people visit the royal museum at the centre of downtown Kathmandu to see the kings and queens

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the change in Kathmandu as it saw some signs of the progress the outside world made while the country
was asleep.
But the transition never ended. The king didnt fulfill his promises of holding election to Constituent
Assembly. He appointed one prime minister and another to prolong the uncertainty and to consolidate his
own power. Koirala ended up with an understanding of holding parliamentary election ten years down the
line with the new king, Mahendra, after much exhaustion from the political turmoil under the constitution
given by the king. He believed in the king to stabilize the parliamentary political system, participated in
the first general election and got a landslide victory. But the monarchs who were limited inside the palace
for so long werent happy at all losing again the power to political leaders. Thus, the king dismissed the
political system he himself declared.
Putting political leaders behind bars, the king imposed a party-less political system, himself becoming
the executive head of the country. Koiralas Nepali congress launched again a democratic movement
from India which failed to win the confidence of the Indian government, which was facing a border war
with China. India desperately wanted to keep Nepal under her influence in the new context of Chinese
ambition. As Nepal is a sandwich country between the two giants, the king played politics. He made his
own political opposition silent with Indian help and tried to cultivate good relationships with China too.
The cold war between two neighbors helped the king survive with his undemocratic regime.
Koirala was released after 8 years but wasnt allowed to organize people. He was compelled to go into self
exile again in India. He again tried to launch the movement from there, but Nehrus daughter, Indira, the
Indian prime minister, didnt tolerate Koiralas anti-king activities from her country. Realizing the urgency
of consolidating sovereignty of the country and hoping to make the new king, Birendra, change his mind
to open up the political system, he came back to the country with the principle of national reconciliation.
He asked for a multi-party political system where the king could enjoy some power as the head of the
state.
Instead, Koirala was again arrested while coming back to his home country. That time, from Kathmandu
airport, he was taken back to the same prison where he had spent several years before. He was charged
with several cases and the government had pleaded for the punishment of hanging him in a court. Even
from jail he didnt change his mind for reconciliation with the king for the sake of the country. But the
king had a different approach. He wasnt ready to democratize power. After all, the power was transferred
to him by his own father, the late king Mahendra. Koirala wasnt released till some senior royal surgeons
reported to the king that he had got cancer that seriously threatened his life. Then he was made free to
travel to the US for treatment.
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India, the king had declared Nepal as the Zone of Peace. He wanted to show Nepal, being the birth place
of Gautam Buddha, is a peace zone. He wanted to put a shadow on his hollow political system where
parties were banned and there was no freedom of expression. Down the line in his 14 years of active
monarchy after the declaration, he managed to secure endorsements from over a hundred countries.
Importantly, India never welcomed it.
Koiralas national reconciliation and the Kings peace of zone declaration didnt match the reality of the
political climate at the domestic and international fronts. The offer of reconciliation was rejected by the
king and his declaration of peace zone propaganda wasnt accepted by his most influential neighbor. The
kings peace declaration ultimately didnt bear any fruit. Politically conscious students rose to the street in
Kathmandu and elsewhere and compelled the king to declare a national referendum. That was to choose
between multi-party democracy and reformed party-less panchayat system.
Koirala and his colleagues got an unprecedented chance to rally around the people all over the country,
igniting the hope of democratic Nepal after a long gap. But the kings government was all desperate to
defeat the side of multi-party system, thus did every possible tactic manipulating the votes. The king
remained in active power for the next decade. Till the backdrop of the falling of the Berlin wall in 1989,
Nepal witnessed another peoples movement succeeding to reinstate a multi-party system after as long as
30 years.
Koirala had died due to the illness, much before the 1990 movement, and the reinstatement of his
envisioned system. But he is still dominates political discourse of Nepali politics. The party he founded
is at the center of politics, though the current crop of leaders is much weaker. His photos and political
books are the most used in elections and party meetings. He dominated the politics of modern Nepal and
remained as the main ideological and organizational opposition to the autocratic regimes- first of Ranas
and then Rajas, the kings.
After his death, his party, led by Gandhian Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, launched a Satyagraha movement for
democracy. That was all peaceful sit in which gave huge moral challenge to the king. The reconciliation
and satyagraha defined the much popular peaceful political tool against the suppressors. It changed the
very political party which had launched armed struggle, primarily raiding military posts in the past. The
party was realizing more of the essence, relevance and moral power of peaceful means of opposition.
I grew up in the western hills witnessing the political awareness among teachers and students. The district
of Tanahun was influenced by the NC ideals and inspirations. Thanks to the local leaders and the educated
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The king had different definitions of democracy and foreign policy. Just before Koirala came back from

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people who got the chance to have higher education in the famous neighboring Indian city of Benares
where Koirala was based for a long time during his self exile.
I saw young leaders of the party visiting secretly our villages and talking to common people. They hid
themselves from government agencies and used to avoid meeting possible government spies. They
used to explain to the innocent villagers how the kings system was running the country without any
accountability and ruining the future of children. Development of the countryside was hugely neglected
and schools and health posts were too far to reach to get services. The government was fearful of teachers
since they were the ones who were the most literate and could easily become connected to the oppositions
political ideas.
Teachers had noble ideas of social awakening. I remember my teachers at our high school privately
reminding me and my classmates how we could contribute to society by doing social service and for
that we needed to acquire some political beliefs. Whether democratic politics or politics of communists,
we had to believe in any political line to be better students. That was the message. A student with clear
political belief and commitment could be a good citizen in the future. Being under the huge influence of
democratic front leaders of the banned party, we were ready to make any sacrifice for the country.
But the restrictions were so heavy that if found involved in any political activities police posts used to
keep record. For government jobs, candidates had to provide clearance from police. Thus, the possibility
of being active in politics was to end the probability of the only available job opportunity. The private
sector almost didnt exist. Not only was political power centralized, the economy was also government
controlled. The license system was strict. But teachers suggested that we grow with political conviction
and work for a greater human cause.
The people working for the government and the local bodies, the conservative class, was the support
base of the kings system. Families largely from ethnic communities dreamed of sending their sons to
the national army, if they couldnt get selected in the British or Indian army. We still have the old treaty
of allowing our youths to get recruited in these two foreign armies. Others preferred government jobs,
including teaching. For every opportunity, one needed good connections and favor. People who were close
to the establishment used to get an easy chance. The local cronies of the system used to terrorize people
for having independent minds.
I remember pro-government local powerful man asking my father how I was growing up. If I was
brewing some political ideas then I had no chance in the future to get job opportunities. On the one hand,
the teachers who were our heroes used to promote us with political ideas and on the other hand there was
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relying on the students and teachers for their own existence. Student organizations close to the parties
became active. They launched a student movement from Kathmandu.
Nepali students were marching towards the Pakistani embassy in Kathmandu to protest against the
hanging of democratic leader Julfikar Ali Bhutto. The government mobilized police to crush the peaceful
demonstration. That ignited the student leaders across political lines and the movement kicked off. It
wasnt limited inside the capital valley. The fire was spread everywhere. The initial days of 1980 were
very different, but the courage shown by the youths made the king compromise with political leaders,
especially Koirala, to hold a national referendum to choose between a party-less or multi-party political
system. Surprisingly, the kings choice of system won, though with narrow margin.
Nepal is one of the most diversified countries, not only in geographical terms. Yes, in geographical terms it
expands from the highest point of the world, Mt Everest and eight of the 14 tallest mountains above eight
thousand meters, down south to the plains of Lumbini, the birth place of Gautam Buddha. In this different
geographic and climate zones, many different ethnic communities have resided for centuries. More than
one hundred ethnic groups exist and several different languages are spoken. The hills and mountain sides
have always remained as remote areas, and the people are neglected by the state.
Hindu is the vastly dominant religion. The kings modeled themselves as the latest incarnation of one
popular Hindu god. They always religiously followed the rituals strictly and promoted the religion.
Hence, they ignited god fearing people along with their non political state of affairs. They found it easy to
consolidate their power on the religious line. On the other hand, Koirala was also a Hindu. But he wasnt
religious minded. He was very secular in his approach and lifestyle. But the fear factor in society was so
prevalent that it was thought democracy was anti-Hindu.
Another main source of the kings power came from the national army. The armys top brass were always
selected from the royal family directly. The palace relatives were always promoted as the chief of the
defense force. That was totally a monolithic organization. The state resources were monopolized. And
the king played a foreign card. Being an active member of the Non Aligned Movement and the United
Nations, sending army to Peace keeping postings elsewhere, the king managed somehow to manage the
countrys independence. More than that, he had a good rapport with China to control influence from India.
China looked for stability in her southern neighborhood, which borders the sensitive area of Tibet. On the
other hand, the king used to give signals to India. If she pushed for democracy, he would become further
closed to Beijing. He used to pick one man as the prime minister close to India at a time to show his
confidence in New Delhi and another time used to change his man at the government who was believed to
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terror back in homes. That was a black and white kind of situation. The prohibited political parties were

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not be so close to India. That was the card and bargain he was a champion for.
The idea of the Hindu kingdom was promoted just to check the possibility of the rise of democratic
demands. Democracy in the real sense could be secular. Because of the feudal system, people were poorly
informed. Many new opposition leaders were jailed and some were hung.
Any voice of democracy was targeted and blamed as foreign influence. The system had promoted a
discourse of nationalism in their best capacity to manipulate the definition. Educational text books were
rewritten. All the kings men were the greatest propagandists. The government radio used their voices
every day. The king meant for the country and anything against the system was anti-national. The idea of
multi-party system was anti-national.
Nepal has huge potential for hydro power exploration, from her huge rivers flowing down from the
Himalayas. Still, it hasnt been realized. We are still suffering from huge electric power outages, especially
during winter, thanks to the political uncertainty. The king further made the nationalists so panicked that
the water treaties in the past during the brief stint of democratic government were intentioned to sell out
the rivers to India. We saw the wall paintings everywhere by the government blaming the banned political
party as so anti-national that they sold out the rivers. The top leaders were either in jail or exile and had
hard time coming up with convincing explanations. If they said anything there was no credible and
influential media to make their versions public. The dark shadow of narrow nationalism of the kings time
is still hanging around. If the narrow mindset becomes a state policy once, it will have a long term impact
in a nations life. Nepal is one great example.
I came to Kathmandu for higher studies, leaving my village still terrorized by the dominant state policies
discouraging freedom seeking students and teachers. Television was just introduced by the information
ministry. But the government couldnt stop international news airing. The Berlin Wall fell down. We saw
the victorious Germans on screens. The banned political parties were organized under an inspirational
leadership of one closest aid of the late Koirala. He appealed for democracy. His centrist party had
managed to be united with leftist parties in the fight against autocratic monarchy. He famously said that he
fought against the Ranas and three Rajas[kings] in his long life and that was the final moment to stand up
and rise for freedom.
People came to the streets in such numbers that it became another national peoples movement, toppling
down the autocracy in a few weeks time. The king tried to crush the peaceful demonstrations and several
innocent people died by police bullets. That fueled the movement. And it became more impressive. The
king finally agreed to listen to the parties. The multi-party political system was reinstated after 30 years.
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elections. NC again came back to power with impressive majority in the parliament. The economy was
liberalized. Constitutional guarantees had paved the way for private sector media. Government services
were provided equally for everyone. People now had easy access to make passports and travel abroad.
But the leaders, being new to state affairs, were busy wrangling in unnecessary internal power tussles.
One left party was the main opposition, and they too were very new to open politics. The royal palace
wasnt happy at all with the new development because they had to give up power. But the new system
still had given a very dignified role to the king as the constitutional head of the country. The king was
still the supreme commander chief of the army. The army wasnt under government control. The king
tried to show his displeasure and the democratically elected governments subsequently couldnt win the
confidence of the army.
As the elected government wasnt delivering much and the hugely exaggerated peoples expectations
werent being met. The economic opportunities were very limited. General people got desperate for rapid
changes in their lives. So the youths flew to Korea, Malaysia and gulf countries. In the past, the open
border with India was the only option for the Nepalese to go to a greater job market. Now the options
were multiple. Now Kathmandu is a great hub, especially for gulf airlines, flying everyday thousands of
low paid job seeker youths.
I became a journalist in the newly found free press environment. My motivation was to write stories
of general people and how their lives were changed or not changed at all. I witnessed the oppositions
political activities since the early days of my schooling, participated in student movements during school
hours and later the national peoples movement during my college days in Kathmandu. I wanted to write
about the common people who dreamt for a better future. And as a reporter I wanted to talk to them and
check out the facts with the authorities. In fact, I wanted to be a university professor or a full time writer,
but as soon as I got the chance to work in a newsroom I felt that it was what suited me best.
The democratic practice was just about to come into place after the second general election when the
Maoists party surprisingly launched their typical 20th century armed struggle against the political system.
In the name of establishing communism in the country, they first targeted the feudal structure of society.
Initially, they were active in some remote hill district, cleansing all opponent political voices. They
came out with much populist and propagandist programs of social reforms. They lacked a credible and
pragmatic political ideology to suit present day reality domestically and internationally. They called
themselves the messiah of the poor, marginalized and suppressed classes and communities. Their method
was very violent. They raided police posts, seized arms and grew to such a powerful scale that they were
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The interim government paved way democratic exercise, bringing out constitution and holding general

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powerful enough to attack army barracks and take away sophisticated modern weapons.
They created fear. The fear factor was so rampant that other people believing in other political ideologies
were targeted and eliminated. Fear is the worst form of human activity. I had sensed the same kind
of atmosphere when I was a child during the kings days, and it was now, again, a very similar or
worse situation everywhere. The Maoists were strategically smart. They mobilized the marginalized
communities, gave loud slogans in favor of them. Their aspirations werent responded to even by the
democratic system. The system was still structured in a way that many ethnic communities werent
fairly represented in state organs. Some dominant social groups continued getting privileges even in the
democratic era.
From my newsroom, I saw the democratic system at the center slowly becoming helpless to tackle the
Maoists. The youngest brother of the late Koirala was the prime minister. He was hated by the Maoists
and the royalists as well. The king didnt agree with him mobilizing the national army against the Maoists.
The rebels were attacking army barracks and district headquarters and the government was becoming
helpless.
That was the time when the crown prince killed everyone from his family including the king and the
queen in the infamous palace massacre. He had lost his balance while not getting a chance to get married
with his beloved. The younger brother of the late king was made the king. The new king happened to be
more ambitious, who wasnt reconciling the fact that the monarchy had limited power after the change of
1990. He made the prime minister resign. Another prime minister from the same party NC was in place,
but the king made the new PM agree to dissolve the parliament. The election was out of sight due to the
security situation. The king benefitted and later he sacked the PM to take full executive authority himself
and fully mobilized the army.
When my first novel Palpasa Caf was published in 2005, the war at home was coming to a climax.
On average, 8 to 10 people were getting killed every day. The country was totally in the dark as to how
to move ahead. People were frustrated, political parties were becoming more and more helpless and
hopeless.
The constitutional monarch had become the countrys executive head, taking power unconstitutionally.
The kings major power was coming from the national army, which was fighting against the Maoist
militants. A typical 20th century Peoples War waged by some ambitious Nepali communists was
dragging the peaceful Himalayan kingdom into much deeper conflict.
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fabric of the country. It was well received by critics and general readers in the sense that it was branded
as an anti-war book, and it became an instant hit. It ultimately became an all-time best seller inside
Nepal. My observation of the readers is that the story evoked the inner feeling, which was deep inside the
sufferers of the war.
As a journalist, I couldnt capture the full story from human psychology. In our newspaper, most of the
time, headlines used to be casualties. We counted the numbers of deaths. Everyday there were attacks
and counter-attacks. Though we tried hard to get human stories in our news space, it had limitations. Out
of that feeling, I wrote the novel. Both warring sides werent happy at all with the story. It was going to
expose the war which they desperately wanted to cover up.
For a writer, human is the major subject. Suffering is the main story. You would have different narratives,
different characters, different context and different perspectives. But the soul is the human, and the human
suffers. Similarly, wars might be different from one place to another, from one context to another. Every
war has impacts on human lives. Unbearable impacts are expressed in different forms. Basically, the forms
close to art, like literature, has so much relation with the impacts.
Artists and writers tend to bring the extreme sides closer. They are pro human. This is their character. They
want to celebrate human lives. But the extremists always ask for human sacrifices. This is the conflict.
Writers are on one side and extremists on another side. Writers heal the human, extremists haunt.
This is exactly what happened in our country. The extreme lefts, the armed radicals were at one extreme
end, and the king with the army was at opposite extreme side. The intellectuals, writers, journalists,
lawyers, doctors and teachers came together to give pressure naturally in a peaceful way. They provoked
the pro-peace parliamentary parties to launch a peaceful movement. This did, but their voice wasnt heard
by the king.
The Maoists changed their strategy and reached out to the political parties. The parties were in favor of
constitutional monarchy, changed their stance and agreed to remove the monarchy. After the agreement,
they called for the peoples movement. Kathmandu showed the world how a peaceful protest movement
could change a war-torn country into a political settlement.
Here comes another question in todays complex realities.
Removing the monarchy wasnt that difficult. It was a question of one decisive peoples movement. The
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My novel was basically a simple human story exposing the war and how it was destroying the social

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question was black and white. Whether to have a monarchy or not?

The question of building an enduring peace has many angles at which it can be looked at. Democracy is
the source of long lasting peace in a country. But democracy isnt a word. It is an interpretation. We in
Nepal spent four years of Constituent Assembly defining democracy and failed.
Initially, it was a question of the name of democracy. Whether real democracy, peoples democracy or full
democracy? Every political force had a different choice, emotion, text and orientation. We defined to have
inclusive democracy. It intended to lead to federal democracy.
The electoral system changed. A mixed representative system was adopted. Candidates had to be
proportional in terms of gender, ethnicity etc. The Constituent Assembly and the legislative parliament
became one solid inclusive institution for the first time. It was more inclusive than any of south Asian
country. The members took oath in their mother tongues. The oath taking ceremony was so colorful that
every member was in different attire, was so musical that every member had different sounds to make.
Nepal celebrated her unique diversity.
But the process didnt bear any results. The house couldnt deliver on the constitution. One major reason
was the inability of political parties to define federal democracy. Nepal seems a rather small country
on the globe. Why? It is between the giants- India in the south and China in the north. But populationwise, Nepal is the 40th largest country. So the issues of lasting peace and democracy are still a question of
political settlement.
The new constitution was mandated to settle all political issues. But the tenure of the house expired. There
is no future election fixed. A coalition caretaker government is ruling the country. The differences among
political parties are bound to widen.
Though the armed conflict has concluded, the problems of one of the worlds poorest countries are to
grow more in the vacuum. The transition is going to linger.
Meanwhile, I published my second novel, Mayur Times, with a story of how the law and order situation
has weakened and politicization of crime and criminalization of politics has taken root deeply in society.
Nepal is over war, but the post-war situation doesnt mean that it is good peace time.
The country has come back to almost the same situation of being governed by unelected people. Nepal
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adamant to pave way for consensus election government, and the opposition parties arent going to satisfy
themselves till there is a new caretaker government. Equally importantly, the local bodies havent been
elected for the last 16 years.
Meanwhile, the parties are becoming fragmented. The Maoist party has split, and the new Maoist party
is threatening to launch another armed struggle. And the leftist party is waiting for another break up. The
ethnic community leaders in the party are preparing to form another party. The question of the basis of
dividing provinces would be more critical down the line.
India in the south is in favor of one or two provinces in the bordering area of Nepal so that they could have
more strategic power over Kathmandu. Similarly in the north, China has given messages that the future
provinces in Nepal shouldnt be demarcated along ethnic lines. Their logic is if demarcated ethnically that
would certainly impact the bordering of Tibet.
Both giant neighbors have been aggressive in recent years thanks to their economic success. They have
been more demanding. Both of them ask for political stability in Kathmandu for their own interests. Nepal
is struggling with just three to four percent economic growth. The trade balance with both of the neighbors
is widening. Due to its own domestic reasons, Nepal hasnt been able to attract investment. Youths are
fleeing from the country. Villages have been left by the youths where only elderly people, women and
children take care of the families.
In the last 60 years of modern time, Nepal hasnt managed to stabilize its own political system. The
four subsequent kings after then have interfered in the day to day politics. Political parties have failed
in a number of occasions to prove their commitments and to deliver. The country heavily depends upon
foreign aid for development expenditure. The government isnt allowed to bring out a yearly budget. Due
to the oppositions pressure, it came out with a three month expenditure program. Thus, it has further
halted economic activities.
Nepal has always been looking for political settlement. Uncertainty and undemocratic atmosphere has
always ruled. People havent been given the dignity to vote their representative in a free and fair way.
Nepal has yet to value the core democratic human rights of its citizen. Election and periodic election is a
must for any democracy and stability. We have been unfortunate enough in this basic aspect of modern
civilization. Without accountability, the sense of democratic and transparent governance is nil. It has been
very true in our case. Corruption in every sphere of life has made common man and woman frustrated.
And there is no justice if there is no rule active.
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is probably one of the few countries that have held elections very few times. Now the ruling alliance is

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When I reflect, I see Nepal has spared most of its huge opportunities in the past. And it is so even in
the present. We have changed the constitution six times and still havent managed to draft a new one.
Thousands of people have been killed in this long political fight in different times in the last six decades,
and many have lost their properties. Many have been displaced. We are yet to come to terms.
Parties could go to any extreme side. Any organization could launch any type of struggle. The Maoists or
any type of extremist force could go underground again.
The basic dignity of a free citizen is still a far cry. That is freedom from fear. Political stability, democratic
structure, fair representation and periodic election can ensure freedom. In our case, fear factor has ruled
the dictum. We arent free from the fear.
In Search of Reconciliation
Nepal is in peace time since the Maoist rebels came to agree on participating in open competitive politics.
They surrendered weapons. Their fighters are finally being integrated into the national army after five
years of comprehensive peace treaty with the government. The table has been turned. They became the
largest party in the last constituent assembly- parliament and the coalition government is led by a Maoist
leader. But the fear isnt over from peoples mind. The Maoist party is divided, and a breakaway group of
the party is threatening to rise to arms again. They seem determined to regroup the old fighters for a new
unknown fight. They have started campaigning against the ruling coalition with much nationalist plank.
We dont have a solid peace culture. There is always history of political conflict. There is no coalition
culture in the political party level. Whereas the interim constitution was promulgated aiming for
harnessing consensus politics. Political parties naturally compete with each other; thus, consensus culture
is a far away cry in our context, more and more along the way of transition politics. Consensus politics
is for promoting culture of working together and develop a sense of co-existence. But from the political
spectrum, from far left to extreme right, it has been a herculean task. Nepal urgently needed at least a
coalition political culture to respect the diverse ethnic and regional social composition. The election
system of mixed propositional, which doesnt easily allow a single party to get majority, is for that culture.
During a decade long Maoists war, more than 16 thousand people lost their lives from both warring sidesthe state security forces and the rebels. The peace treaty promised to set up a truth and reconciliation
commission to examine the war crimes and give justice to the victims. But the parties are still failing to
constitute the commission and the families of victims are still crying for justice. The excesses of power
and brutality are supposed to be examined and the culprits be punished. But the poor families are helpless
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doesnt want to come forward for it, with universally accepted norms of a truth finding mission. They
would like to give blanket amnesty as the other parties who were in power in the past during war also
would like to avoid any situation where they themselves are exposed.
The consecutive governments formed different commissions to look after the human right violations
during the peoples movement in 1990 and 2005 after much pressure from people. The commission
reports were never publicized, and the actions were never taken against the violators. This tendency of
power has always undermined the demand of justice and has made the victim families suffer more. So the
general sense in the country is war time crimes are never investigated and the victims never get justice.
It has further spread the fear that truth would never come out and reconciliation happen. Reconciliation
is a major moral force to accept the political change and make the change lasting. Thus, the country has
been facing the acute crisis of political stability. Stability first comes from the minds of citizen. If they feel
cheated and get frustrated, there is always possibility of another surge.
The fear doesnt come from weapons. Moreover, it is from peoples mind. When war crimes arent
investigated, human right violations arent examined and the culprits arent brought to justice, fear
always dominates innocent people. The people whose property and land were occupied and seized during
the war are still asking for return. The new powerful lot which captured others land and property are
threatening the victims in return. So the war is over but the new fear of another war by another outfit is
there and peace isnt in the air. During the attempt to draft a constitution for four unsuccessful years, the
expectations of many minority groups were heightened by different political forces. Since the constitution
couldnt be drafted due to sharp polarized political division, the groups are in the process of new political
alignment. So the politics would be further polarized in the future, which will ultimately prolong the
transition. Transition of interim constitution and caretaker government might continue and there would be
no elections in the near future.
The only positive aspect of Nepali society is that the people are liberal, they have a great quality of
forgiveness and they cherish the harmony among the diverse composition of ethnic groups. So there is no
sudden outburst against past atrocities. The economic capacity of the country hasnt been expanded. Job
opportunities are very limited. Thousands of youths flee to the gulf everyday for cheap labor jobs. The
villages have been left to the elderly and the children. After the Maoists war began, the speed of youths
leaving villages has increased dramatically. More people are coming to cities. So the poor villages, where
most of the insurgent activities were concentrated, have changed- one visible change is most of them dont
have enough youths to show the vibrancy of the communities.
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in the context of political division of constituting the commission. The party in power now obviously

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Time is another great healer. Though, nobody forgets the harsh suffering. The atrocities against someone
in particular can hardly be forgiven and forgotten. For that, a civilized state should play a role. Healing
the great sufferings of common citizens is possible only when there is a just democratic political system.
The system is bound to ensure people the justice they deserve. Justice is for the dignity of citizens. Any
democratic system would embrace people with dignity. Dignity is the very right of every citizen.
The parties havent helped people to overcome the past sufferings, and they havent done enough to
help people overcome fear. Fear is the main enemy of any citizens dignity. Fear is the worst enemy
if it is coming from the inability of political parties to perform their roles. But at least the parties are
in negotiating terms and the continuous dialogue among them is giving hope to people for a positive
direction towards stability.
The resilience of Nepali people is a great asset. There isnt a single incident of people taking revenge
of any past crimes against them during conflicts, even after knowing who were involved. But still, for
a greater cause of having lasting peace and stability and to help people overcome fear of human right
violations, atrocities and the power excesses should be brought to justice. The truth finding and helping
reconciliation is very vital to give justice. Peace doesnt come from state power, rather it comes from
peoples mind.
For the last 60 years of modern Nepals tumultuous political history, the political conflicts have made
many people suffer. It is very ironic for a modern nation not to give justice to the people investigating
crimes during conflicts. Thus, it hasnt helped establish a lasting political system based on justice and
helped people overcome fear.
Both of my novels were based on the conflict, and the characters of the novels were taken realistically
from society. I see the people resembling my characters and still not getting a sense of justice. That way I
also feel helpless. But the writings and art creations on the issue for years have been one effective medium
for general people remind the sufferings of others and relate to themselves. Currently, I am writing a third
novel. This time as well, I havent overcome the historic hangover of the conflicts. This is also going to
be another novel based on the conflicts. The stories are there. They have attracted writers attention more
because the sufferers havent received justice.
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Kyung Sik Suh
Tokyo Keizai University
1. Introduction: the problem of this article

The impossibility of representation of Auschwitz or the impossibility of testimony has been recurring
themes that have been debated since the 1990s. The main problem I would like to address through this
article is to expand this debate, which has been fixed in a certain time-space of Auschwitz and in the early
20th century. I would like to bring these themes and debates to here and now for reflection. In other
words, I would like to examine how to translate concepts such as impossibility of representation and
impossibility of testimony into universal terms to reflect on our current modern society and its people. I
would also like to explore whether such reflections could be considered ethically sound.
On 11 March 2011, the great Tohoku earthquake hit the eastern shores of Japan, which led to a severe
accident at the first nuclear power plant in Fukushima. In late 2011, the Japanese government announced
the settlement of the incident with the cold shutdown of the nuclear reactor. However, I do not have to
mention that this was not a truthful statement that reflected the real state of the incident.
Facing the Fukushima incident, I began to reflect on problems of whether it would be possible to
represent and testify on this case, and whether such testimonies would be accepted. You could say such
inquiries were an attempt to examine the problem of the impossibility of testimonies and link Auschwitz
with Fukushima. If Auschwitzs impossibility of testimonies has caused the revival and continuation of
the crisis, we could make an identical case for Fukushima in the future. If there are no testimony or if the
testimonies could not be heard, Fukushima might as well continue to be resuscitated again and again in
the future. There have recently been several symptoms indicating materialization of such fear.
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Clinical Healing or Pathological Reflection: the Imagination that

Links Auschwitz with Fukushima

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2. Powerful of the earth, masters of new poisons

I have twice visited the disaster site of Fukushima nuclear power in June and November 2011. These visits
have led to an unexpected realization that the incident has challenged our imagination.
Following my visit to Fukushima in November, I gave a lecture titled The Witness of Isolation: Primo
Levi at the International Peace Museum of Ritsumeikan University at Kyoto. And I met a poem through
the occasion.
The Girl-Child of Pompei
Since everyones anguish is our own,
We live ours over again, thin child,
Clutching your mother convulsively
As though, when the noon sky turned black,
You wanted to re-enter her.
To no avail, because the air, turned poison,
Filtered to find you through the closed windows
Of your quiet, thick-walled house,
Once happy with your song, your timid laugh.
Centuries have passed, the ash has petrified
To imprison those delicated limbs forever.
In this way you stay with us, a twisted plaster cast,
Agony without end, terrible witness to how much
Our proud seed matters to the gods.
Nothing is left of your far-removed sister,
The Dutch girl imprisoned by four walls
Who wrote of her youth without tomorrows.
Her silent ash was scattered by the wind,
Her brief life shut in a crumpled notebook.
Nothing remains of the Hiroshima schoolgirl,
A shadow printed on a wall by the light of a thousand suns,
Victim sacrificed on the altar of fear.
Powerful of the earth, masters of new poisons,
Sad secret guardians of final thunder,
The torments heaven sends us are enough.
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20 November 1978
Was this a poem that sang of Fukushima? Primo Levi had passed away 25 years ago and the Dutch girl
referred to in this poem is Anne Frank. The last four verses of the poem refer indeed to nuclear weapons,
but, to me, they seem to sing about Fukushima. Levis imagination seems to linger on even after his
death providing perspectives to events such as Fukushima. His imagination goes beyond the time-space
dimension to link victims of ancient volcano bursts, victims of the Holocaust and victims of the nuclear
weapons bombing. It is a sorrowful imagination indeed.
Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. He wrote a record on
his experience in the camps titled If this is Man, which has been translated and known to the Japanese
population as Auschwitz is not over yet. Despite recognition as one of Italys prominent writers of the post
war period who sublimated his testimony into literature, Levi ended his life by committing suicide at his
homes staircase in 1987.
There is a description inside If this is Man of the daily nightmares Levi had in the camps. The dream is
about Levis familys neglect of his struggles when he tells them about it after being released. His sister
even sneaks away to the next room in Levis dream. In a collection of essays he published called The
Drowned and the Saved just a year before his death and forty years after his time at the camp, there are
hints of tiredness for not being able to rightly convey his experience despite all his testimonies.
Primo Levi was not just a witness of what actually happened at Auschwitz. He was also a witness to how
difficult it was to testify to such history, how difficult it was to convey such experience and to eventually
the impossibility of testimony itself.
3. The Tohoku earthquake and the minorities
The first thought that occurred in my mind at the time that I heard of the Tohoku earthquake of 11 March
2011 was whether the Korean-Japanese and other foreigners in Japan were okay. I was afraid not only
of the damages from the earthquake and tsunami, but also worried about violence from demagogies
that followed massive disasters. Amongst the confusion, the Asahi Newspapers published reports with
the headlines such as Foreigner Thefts, Riot Takes Place, Endless Rumours, not to be trusted on 26
March that expanded on the rumours.
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Before your finger presses down, stop and consider.

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Reading these reports, I began to fear attacks against minorities due to such groundless rumours. The
reason I harboured such fears is due to an event in history of 90 years ago in Japan.
On 1 September 1923 (Taisho 12), a magnitude 7.9 massive earthquake struck the Kanto region of Japan.
It was the Great Kanto earthquake, which resulted in over 100 thousand deaths and missing people. It is
estimated that some 6,000 Koreans and over 200 Chinese were killed along with tens of Japanese due
to the event. But following the quakes strike, rumours spread of Koreans setting fire to houses and
poisoning wells which led to attacks against Koreans by the Japanese. The army and police formed
vigilante corps consisting of youth and fire-fighter groups. The members of the vigilante groups attacked
Koreans with Japanese swords, fire hooks and bamboo spears. Since the Japanese defeat of the war in 15
August 1945, there has been no action taken by the Japanese government to find the truth, apologize or
compensate for such event.
In 2010, there were 2,134,151 foreigners registered residing in Japan. The largest group of foreigners
residing in Japan are Chinese, being 687,156. The next largest group are Koreans/Chosun with 565,989
and the third largest are Brazilians with 230,552. During the colonial era (before the end of the war in
1945), Koreans worked in coal mines or in 3D (Difficult, Dirty and Dangerous) factories near cities. There
are many mines near Fukushima and Ibaraki, and therefore there are many Korean-Japanese still living in
these regions today.
The youth have been leaving the rural farming and fishing villages of Japan resulting in a sharp decrease
in their population. The villages can no longer sustain their businesses due to the lack of workers. To solve
such problem, Japan has begun to receive foreign labourers, which they refer to as trainees. However,
because of their status as trainees they receive a very low salary and there have been problems of human
rights violations in their work environment.
On 11 June, a man working in a dairy farm committed suicide in Soma city, Fukushima prefecture. It was
after a month of throwing away milk that had been contaminated by the radioactive materials from the
nuclear power plant disaster nearby. He confronted a situation where he had to sell some 40 cows due to
a lack of income and mounting debt. He wrote his final words with chalk on the walls of the stable that
was built from a loan, saying if only there was no nuclear power plant. If you read the newspaper article
on this incident closely, you will be able to find out that the wife of this dairy farmer was a Filipino. In
an article (Parched lands and the ties of a foreign wife 25 July 2011, Asahi Newspaper) that follows the
initial report, it is reported as follows: The wife, age 33, is left alone in the isolated farm in the mountains
where there isnt even mobile phone coverage. She will have to now take care of her two children, a first
grader and a pre-schooler, by herself. Not knowing proper Japanese, she is worried and sad that she must
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it must be for this woman, who has lost her husband and is left in a place where she has difficulty with
communication and where she does not know the social system.
I am worried that the foreigners residing in the disaster areas like the Filipino wife of the dairy farmer
who are indeed members of Japanese society, may once again be abandoned because compensation
and restoration programmes like Japans restoration and Endeavour Japan are carried out based on a
nationalistic logic.
Respect of others and equal treatment is necessary to build a society that live with and accept others
including foreigners. However, Japan has not granted proper status to others that live in its society and
even the Korean-Japanese that have lived in Japan since the colonial era. Hence, I believe it is a bit
shameless for the Japanese to now start requesting more foreign workers to be allowed to come to Japan
because of their current lack of labour.
As mentioned above, the minorities are likely to be victims and their voices are unlikely to be heard in
times of major disasters, wars and severe events. I believe this to be a problem of not the minorities but a
problem of the imagination of the majorities. They lack the imagination to empathize with the pain of the
minorities.
4. The impossibility of representation of genocides
The most well known genocide is the massacre of Jews by the Nazi Germans, known as the Holocaust.
There have been layers of difficulties in creating testimonial literature based on the phenomenon of
genocides. First, the majority of witnesses of the event have literally demised due to the massacre.
Second, many survivors tended to keep their experience to themselves and suppress their own dreadful
memories. Third, even when testimonies are made, they are not conveyed to the audience and tend to be
distorted when consumed.
Furthermore, is it at first possible to represent an event such as Auschwitz? Its representation will likely
lead to problems of under-representation, staleness and commercialization of the event. These kinds of
concerns have been repeated since Theodor W. Adorno first claimed that It is barbaric to write poems
after Auschwitz.
The culture (or civilisation which is the opposite of savage) of madness that is implied in Adornos
statement is itself considered to be barbaric. If the extreme materialisation of barbarism of civilisation
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rely on her neighbours to carry out the legal procedures related to her husbands death. How painful

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itself was the Holocaust, nuclear power could also be considered another materialisation of civilisations
savageness centred on the beliefs of scientism, ultra-utilitarianism and profit-centred thinking regardless
of its military or peaceful usage as a power source.
The complexity of such problems results in the difficulty of representing and testifying on events such as
the genocides. The term of impossibility of representation or impossibility of testimony (of Auschwitz)
refers to such overall phenomena.
5. The lessons of The Diary of Anne Frank
Anne Franks family immigrated to Amsterdam, Netherlands from Frankfurt in 1933 when Hitlers regime
took power and began to suppress the population. However, by May 1940 Nazi Germany moved forward
to also occupy the Netherlands. The Franks went into hiding in May 1942 until they were captured by the
German Gestapo at their hiding place. The Franks were sent to Auschwitz after being captured, and Anne
and her sister Margot were subsequently sent to Bergen-Belsen in late 1944. At the camp, the sisters were
infected by typhus which led to their subsequent death in late February and early March 1945.
The Diary of Anne Frank continues to have a great value to this day as a textbook of remembering the
history of Jewish suppression and recognising the importance of peace-building.
However, the readers of this book should also take note of the criticism by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim
was a Jew from Vienna, born in 1903 and is a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. After
immigrating to the US he became a prominent professor at the University of Chicago, specialising in
development psychology. He left several articles reflecting on his experience at the concentration camp.
He also committed suicide in 1990.
In an article titled The ignored lesson of Anne Frank, he illustrated three psychological mechanisms that
civilised people felt when first informed of the Nazi death camps. First, people believe that these abuses
and massacres are conducted by only a mad minded few. Second, they neglect such reports of the events
as propaganda or exaggerations. And third, while they believe the report, they tend to quickly suppress
the knowledge of horror as soon as possible. The reason for the success of the book, theatre plays and
movies on the Diary of Anne Frank implies the wish to destroy the personality of the concentration camps
and oppose the murderous character of such perception.
I believe that praises for Anne Franks story cannot be explained without acknowledging that there is a
wish to forget about the gas chambers behind them. We must admit our efforts to forget the horrors by
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delicate beauty.
Bettelheim argues that the major success of the theatre plays and movies based on the Diary of Anne
Frank is due to their false endings. In the end, we hear the voice of Anne from afar. She says that Despite
all these terrible things, I believe that all people are still kind inside. These unbelievable emotions are
alleged to have come from the girl that had to witness the death of her sister before the same fate awaited
her, the girl that had to face the death of her mother and the girl that had to witness the death of thousands
of other children. These words cannot be justified by any passage that was left in Annes diary.
These emotional words on the kindness of people seem to revive Anne Frank and seem to liberate us to
confront the grave challenges that have been instigated by Auschwitz. This is the reason why we tend to
feel good after reading her words. This is the reason why millions of people love these plays and movies.
It is because that while these stories make us confront the existence of Auschwitz, at the same time they
also steer us to ignore its meaning. If all people were kind inside, Auschwitz would never, ever have been
possible and it would be impossible for a similar event to occur again.
Bettelheims claim that the Diary of Anne Frank has been distorted internally through psychological
mechanisms of suppression and defensive denial including a willingness to forget about the gas
chambers. These are grave warnings that we should take note of.
6. Frankl and Levi
Victor E Frankls Night and Mist in Japan (originally Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager or
Mans Search for Meaning for the English version) is one of the masterpieces written by a survivor of the
concentration camps.
The writer was a psychoanalyst from Vienna that studied under Freud and Adorno. However, being a
Jew his family was captured by the Nazi Germans when they took Austria and sent them to camps in
Auschwitz. His parents, wife and children died in these camps, but he lived on. This book is a record of
such bleak experience.
The Japanese edition of this book has an Introduction by the editor dated August 1956. The Introduction
has the following words.
I wish to believe that knowing for a person that seeks self-reflection is to go beyond ones limitations.
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admiring Annes struggle to run away from the looming disaster by escaping into a world of poetic and

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I also believe that we must endeavour to prevent such tragic journey happening again by political action
and determinations in our everyday lives.
The Japanese version of this book was published ten years after the war, when survivors of the Holocaust
slowly began to introduce their literature and records. The public then also started to take notice of such
publications. The Introduction by the editor mentioned above seems to illustrate the perception and
determination of the publishing community at that time. This book subsequently became a bible to study
the Holocaust in Japan and it continues to enlighten many today.
However, the very foundation of this enlightenment viewpoint that believes in peoples progress
through knowledge is being challenged today by wars, massacres and nuclear disasters brought about
by scientism and ultra-utilitarianism. We are now faced with the question of whether indeed humans are
capable of self-reflection and whether humans can go beyond their limitations through knowledge. Primo
Levi was a person that struggled with such dire and difficult problems throughout his life.
The most prominent Japanese scholar on Primo Levi in Japan, Professor Takeyama Hirohide of
Ritsumeikan University, attempted a comparison of Frankl and Levi in his recent biography Primo Levi:
the writer that saw the truth of Auschwitz (Gen So Sa, 2011).
Primo Levi and Frankl both experienced the same concentration camps but had very different approaches
to the experience. Frankl was interested mainly in the psychological changes of people in the camps.
However, his central interests were not the usual prisoners that were exhausted by forced labour and
eventually killed. His writing focused on how to survive in concentration camps and how to raise oneself
in times of extreme conditions. He thought about the meaning of agony.
Through this journey, Frankl introduced Auschwitz as an environment of extreme conditions which led to
enhancement of the human mind. He also believed there were deep meanings to be sacrificed. He even
used words such as martyrs in some of his writings.
Takeyama argued that Frankls writings surfaced a strong religious emotion in the end and evaluated his
writings to be moving but having some kind of vague dissatisfaction. What is the source of such vague
dissatisfaction?
Bruno Bettelheim who was also an Austrian survivor of the concentration camps and a psychologist had
a different position. Bettelheim argued that calling the sacrificed of the camps as martyrs was a sort of
invented distortion to comfort ourselves.
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neglecting the final respect that we could give to them. It could also be considered a denial to accept the
full meaning of their deaths. We must not romanticize their death for the slight psychological liberation
that is generated by such distortion.
According to Bettelheim, Frankls writings seem to be strengthening our defensive denial and suppression
by giving false comfort and liberation to the reader. Despite the horrible descriptions, Frankls strong
religious interest seems to lead to a moving conclusion that there are meanings to all pain. Based on this
view, Frankls writings along with the Diary of Anne Frank became bestsellers by invoking such meaning
and emotion. His writings also seem to support the impossibility of testimony.
In Takeyamas abovementioned biography, he claims that Levi, unlike Frankl, did not tend to rely on
religion and says the following.
If Levi did not rely on religion, what did he pursue? The answer to this question seems to be the meaning
of Auschwitz and why such things were built.
When Frankl tried to show where the human mind leaned against when faced with extreme conditions
such as Auschwitz, Levi focused on why such extreme conditions were made in the first place. Most
people when faced with dire, extreme conditions beyond their normal comprehension such as wars,
massacres and natural disasters, they tend to consider such event as fate and the actions of the heavens
and the gods. They tend not to understand the reasons behind the disasters for it is difficult, and they try
to rationalize such events through a transcending existence. However, if the difficulties were the result
of humans, we must strive to understand them and seek the reasons behind such actions even though it
would be difficult.
The difference between Frankl and Levi seems to be one of a clinical approach focused on how to live
in such dire conditions, and a pathological approach emphasizing the reasons behind such reality. The
two approaches are not mutually exclusive or conflicting. However, the two are often confused and seem
to confront each other being on the same level. Also, they tend to be emotionally consumed by a distorted
mindless message that says it is important to seek how to live within ones fate than ineffectively
seeking to understand what one cannot understand. While such acceptance might help the lives of some
individuals, it will not help to seek the reason behind these terrible events and preventing their future
recurrence.
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Such distortion could be considered as taking away the final perception of the sacrificed from them and

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6. The Radius Paradox

The western region of Tokyo that I live in is 200 kilometres away from the site of the nuclear disaster.
This is a subtle distance. Following the accident, the government announced the evacuation area to be
within a 20 km radius of the site and announced the 30 km range to be preparation areas for emergency
evacuation. Later on it was found that there were areas beyond the 30 km boundary which were
severely contaminated by radio-active materials. These areas were announced as planned evacuation
areas and shortly became uninhabited. However, there have also been experts that argued that the
cities of Fukushima or Koriyama, which are tens of kilometres away from the nuclear plant, have also
been contaminated by radio-active materials several times the level of Tokyo and should be considered
uninhabitable for everyday life.
Then is Tokyo, which is 200 km from the site, safe to live in? It seems not. It is likely that Tokyo will also
be contaminated by radio-active materials that will flow into the city by wind, rain, rivers and the sea. It
could also flow in through the distribution channels of various agricultural products and seafood.
While it was impossible to conduct a thorough examination following the accident, it has now been
confirmed one year following the event that it was just a work of chance that the nuclear power plant
accident did not have any direct influence on Tokyo. Following the accident, the US government ordered
its citizens residing in Japan to evacuate from within the 80 km radius range. This was not an overreaction,
but turned out to be the right action based on better information and analysis.
The Japanese government announced in late 2011 that the nuclear power plant that caused the accident
to have reached a state of cold shutdown. However, the power plant continues to be unstable to this day.
Contaminated water continues to flow out from the reactors and it would not be a surprise if the pools
containing the used fuel rods explode any day. The Fukushima nuclear power plant will continue to exert
radio-active materials for several years onward. And it could be the source of an even more severe disaster
if another accident occurs, such as another earthquake or tsunami.
Despite such facts, most people in Tokyo have no plans of fleeing and continue on with their lives as
usual. Furthermore, even people living in close distances to the nuclear accident site continue on with their
lives. What are the reasons behind such inaction?
The majority of people living further from the damaged site lack the imagination to think about the truth
of such damage. It is not easy for a Tokyo citizen to sympathize with the difficulties of a Fukushima
citizen. It is not easy for a Korean to sympathize with the vague anxiety and horror that the Japanese
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the severity of the disaster.

Then would you have a more urgent sense of anxiety and horror if you live closer to the damaged area?
This also seems not to be true. People tend not to confront the dire truth of living in these close areas and
tend to rely on easy, positive thinking. It seems that defense mechanisms such as denial and suppression
that were mentioned above are strong in play.
The people that continue to live in dangerous areas tend to rely on a fabricated truth for comfort to
console themselves. The people that are far are unable to properly imagine the event, while people close
by turn their eyes away from the painful truth. This wrong combination of forces tends to conceal the
truth, undervalue the damage and avoid responsibilities. It only seems to help the people that would like
to maintain the nuclear power plants for profit or potential military usage. In other words, they are helping
the sad secret guardians of the final thunder.
People that live further away from the damaged site should try to be more creative and imaginative in
understanding the truth of the damage. And people that live near the damaged site must have the courage
to face the harsh realities. The witnesses must endeavour to go beyond the limitations of representation
in their testimony and the common people must strive to use their imagination to go beyond their
imaginations limits. This is what our time requires from us to prevent a recurrence of such disasters.
It is without need to say that the majority must also use their imagination to understand the pain of the
minorities.
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people live with today. The further you live from the site on the radius, the more difficult it is to imagine

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Gilgamesh:
A Mesopotamian Epic in Modern War
Wai Chee Dimock

Yale University
I would like to begin with a collaboration between Pulitzer-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa and
dramaturg Chad Gracia. In 2006 these two teamed up for a stage adaptation of Gilgamesh: the text was
published by Wesleyan University Press,1 the play was performed at the 92nd Street Y in New York; at the
Chicago Humanities Festival; at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; and also in New Orleans,
Komunyakaas home for many years.
STAGING
These were lean productions, with a small crew, no set to speak of, and about six actors doing double
or triple duty, not only playing more than one role but also serving as handy stage props. Making
ingenious use of simple objects, they produced a wealth of visual effects to make up for the bareness
of the stage. In the Chicago performances by the Silk Road Theater Project, the Goddess Ishtar, for
instance, was shown only as a silhouette, a face in the moon, an effect accomplished with a flashlight
and stretched cotton over a hula hoop. Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest and Gilgameshs
main adversary, was meanwhile represented by a bamboo frame covered with green and brown fabric,
moved around by three actors.
The Silk Road Theater Project called this kind of theater stylized and actor-driven. Another name for
it would be poor mans theater, low-tech, low-cost, using nothing more than the primitive resources of
the dramatic medium. This does not mean low-quality performances: the Silk Road Theater Project is
a respected company, the theater-in-residence at the First United Methodist Church, the oldest church
1 Yusef Komunyakaa and Chad Gracia, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2006).
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Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, part of the
Chicago Humanities Festival. That season, 2008-2009, they were awarded grants from Google, IBM,
the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Their low-budget production is
rather a point of pride, the signature style of a theater with a particular vision of itself. Founded in 2002 by
Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury as a response to the anti-Arab and anti-Islam sentiments sweeping across
the United States after the 9/11 attacks, the Silk Road Theater Project set out to be a grassroots theater,
bringing back the multi-faith and multi-ethnic communities that once flourished on the trade routes linking
China and India to the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. The Komunyakaa-Gracia adaptation of
Gilgamesh was very much in that spirit.
I go into these details, because these empirical circumstances are almost never mentioned in theories
of epic. While Mikhail Bakhtin draws on the language of theater to create an analytical vocabulary for
the novel for the carnival in Rabelais the politics and pragmatics of stage adaptation are subjects
that never come up when he discusses the epic, when he dismisses it as a dead-end genre, ossified and
moribund, with only a past and no present, no future.2 What difference does it make to see the epic through
an empirical lens, through specific instances of translation, citation, and stage adaptation, instances of
recycling that bring it back, break it up, and redistribute it across a variety of genres and media? How
do these actions, often happening at irregular intervals and at locations hard to predict, complicate our
understanding of this particular genre and of genres in general, both as an evolving field across time and
as a cross-sectional spread at any given moment?
The Komunyakaa-Gracia adaptation not only reaches back to the oldest known epic, a non-Western one,
predating the Iliad and the Odyssey by a thousand years, it also reminds us of the largely local and largely
ungeneralizable contexts for recycling, some having to do with the nitty-gritty of on-site production, and
some much broader in scope, fed by large-scale events such as global terrorism and the 9/ll attacks. How
do these input networks macro and micro, and any number of intermediate ones in between bear on
the form of the epic, its morphological spectrum over the course of five thousand years, as well as the
texture and minutiae of any particular example? What is the typical scale of operation for the genre, and
how much variation might we expect as we go from one work to another, or even as we stay within the
same work?
2 M. M. Bakhtin, Epic and Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin:
Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 3-40.
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in Chicago, housed in the historic Temple Building. Their two performances of Gilgamesh were at the

Proceedings
MASHUP
The case of Gilgamesh is especially instructive. Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Sumerian epic was
written, etched into clay tablets. There were no rhapsodes here traveling around, selectively rearranging
the oral epics as they traveled. And yet, in its enormous range of variations far more extreme than
the Homeric epics this Sumerian text stands as the earliest (and still most stunning) example of a text
that was never integral to begin with, a text that came into being and continued to flourish only through
multiple acts of translating, combining, and recombining.
Gilgamesh was a historical king who ruled in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk around 2750 BCE. Legends
about him probably arose shortly after his death; they were first written in Sumerian, a non-Semitic
language with no relation to Akkadian, the Semitic language in which Gilgamesh would eventually be
circulated across Mesopotamia. This earliest Sumerian material seemed to have existed as five separate
poems for about a thousand years long after the Sumerian people were overrun by their Semitic
neighbors till about 1700 BC, when they began to be collated and translated into the cuneiform script
of the Babylonian language, a dialect of Akkadian. The best-preserved were 12 tablets collated a bit later,
probably around 1200 BCE, by the scholar-priest, Sin-liqe-unninni, and eventually brought to the library
of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (668-627 BCE).
As is clear from this brief account, the making of Gilgamesh was long drawn out even in ancient
Mesopotamia; the shape of the text and its basic features varied tremendously from one collator to another,
one translator to another. These early efforts, however, were nothing like the monumental labor in the
nineteenth century as European scholars were faced with hundreds and thousands of broken fragments of
these clay tablets.3 How to restore these to some legible order? Since the epic existed in so many different
versions, put together by so many different scribes over such a long period of time, and since none of
these had survived intact (even the most complete set, Sin-liqe-unninnis, is missing approximately onethird of its lines), guesswork was unavoidable in the nineteenth century, and unavoidable in every modern
translation. Stephen Mitchells, one of the most readable, uses Sin-liqe-unninnis 12-tablet Standard
Version as the primary source, filling in the gaps with words or lines from some other tablets and from
the Sumerian poems. Andrew Georges 1999 Penguin edition and Benjamin Fosters 2001 Norton Critical
Edition go even further. In the Penguin, Sin-liqe-unninnis Standard Version is presented along with four
other versions: Babylonian texts from the early second millennium BCE; from the late second millennium;
from the late second millennium, but from outside Babylonia; and finally, the Sumerian poems. In the
3 David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt,
2007).
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BCE translation of Gilgamesh into the Hittite language; and finally a parody called The Gilgamesh Letter.
Both the Penguin and the Norton use square brackets and ellipses to indicate either conjectural inserts or
unfillable gaps in the text.
What counts as the text of Gilgamesh what is included and what is left out, how the gaps are filled
and with what additional material reflects the editors preferences more than anything else. These
preferences can go quite far in remaking the text, giving it an up-to-date purpose, an up-to-date resonance.
Stephen Mitchell, for instance, translating Gilgameth in the twenty-first century, cannot help seeing in
the Mesopotamian epic an eerie counterpoint to the recent American invasion of Iraq. 4 Gilgameshs
sudden announcement where the fierce monster Humbaba lives/ We must kill him and drive out evil
from the world sounds in this context like the immemorial words of the original preemptive strike.
Is this really a battle of good against evil, as Gilgamesh claims? Everything in the poem argues against
it, Mitchell says. As a matter of fact, the only evil we are informed of is the suffering Gilgamesh has
inflicted on his own people: the only monster is Gilgamesh himself. Humbaba, the targeted villain, hasnt
harmed a single living being: it is difficult to see him as a threat to the security of Uruk or as part of
the axis of evil. On the contrary, as the guardian of the Cedar Forest, he is a figure of balance and a
defender of the ecosystem (having a monster of two around to guard our national forests from corporate
and other predators wouldnt be such a bad thing.) 5
Komunyakaa and Gracia do not claim for Gilgamesh quite this degree of contemporary relevance,
although, as we will see, their play is not without topical accents of its own. Since theirs is not a translation
but a stage adaptation venturing into an entirely different medium the allowable deviations are also
much greater. Komunyakaa took full advantage of these, not only inventing entirely new characters but in
some instances using the outline of the epic only as a loose-fitting shell to develop themes he had already
been exploring elsewhere. The initial idea for the play had come not from him, but from Chad Gracia.
Unlike Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, and unlike Stephen Mitchell, celebrated translator
of the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and the Book of Job, among other works, Chad Gracia is a
dramaturg operating on a considerably lower level. (On his own website he is now listed as working in
international trade and development, specializing in the Middle East.) It is fair to say that he is less the top
dog in the theater world than a persevering fan of the Sumerian epic, determined to give it a contemporary
staging.
4 Stephen Mitchell, Introduction to Gilgamesh: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Free Press,
2004), p. 26.
5 Ibid., pp. 29-30.
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Norton, four texts are offered: the Standard Version; the Sumerian poems; a late second millennium

Proceedings
CORRUPTIBLE BODY
Gracia was first introduced to Gilgamesh as a young reader, when he was reading Will Durants Our
Oriental Heritage.6 It was the beginning of a lifelong attachment. For weeks after reading it, he could
not get this line out of his head: I too must die, for am I not like Enkidu? The line is Gilgameshs. He
and Enkidu have been inseparable up to this point, it has not been an issue; after the slaying of Humbaba,
however, this inseparability begins to unravel, thematically as well as psychologically. Gilgamesh does
not want to be exactly like his friend at just this moment, for Enkidu has been singled out for punishment
by the gods: of the two, he is the one who must die. This differential outcome is in some sense the logical
extension of the initial difference between the two friends: from the first we know that Gilgamesh is part
God (through his mother, Ninsun, he is supposed to be two-thirds divine, one-third human), whereas
Enkidu seems to be part animal: he is the man-beast of the Steppe. 7 Both companions, it seems, are only
fractionally human, but fractional in opposite ways, pointing to two antithetical forms of identity. How do
these get resolved? If humans are always going to be part-animal, part-god, which of these two will rise
to the top, or realistically which of these two will turn out to be the non-negotiable baseline, the most
fundamental fact about us?
The death of Enkidu raises the question to a fever pitch. No longer fully human, is there enough humanity
left for the corpse to resist being banished to the other side? How long can it put off that eventuality, how
long can it hold on to its fractional species membership, before being relegated once and for all to a much
lower rung of the taxonomic hierarchy? The very nature of humanness seems to hang in the balance
here our place in the animate and inanimate world, our relations to other living things, and to nonsentient organic matter. Who are our kin, our kind? Especially troubling here is the physicality of the body
and its seemingly inexorable outcome. Doesnt a body like that doom us to being more animal-like rather
than god-like? What exactly does it mean to be tackled to, and coextensive with, a body that is perishable
and corruptible?
Gilgamesh is unsparing on this point. Rather than giving Enkidu a dignified and ceremonious end, the
last that we see of him is as a corpse, a mount of dead flesh, its deadness accented by a small visual detail
with maximum shock effect, a revolting close-up that we are not allowed to look away from. It is this
small detail that is stuck in Chad Gracias mind. We can think of it as a moment of microcization: in this
case, it takes the form Gilgamesh hanging onto the corpse, not letting go, until a maggot crawled from
6 Chad Gracia, Collaborating with Komunyakaa: The Creation of Gilgamesh, Callaloo 28 (Summer 2005): 541-44,
quotation from p. 542.
7 Komunyakaa and Gracia, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, p. 27.
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Gracia was reading Ernest Beckers The Denial of Death at the same time as he was reading Gilgamesh,
and it seemed to him that what Becker was saying about human beings that we are gods with anuses
could have served as well as a motto for the Sumerian epic.8 Gross physicality is, of course, a common
sight in the epic there are also numerous instances in Homer, especially in the Iliad but Gilgamesh is
unique in putting the maggot at center stage, magnifying it far beyond its objective puniness. This is the
less-than-human emblem of the less-than-human baseline of our species: it unites all of us, and it unites
our species to all other species. As common denominators go, this one is exceptionally low, setting the bar
for species membership at a level where there is in fact no sharp distinction between humans and animals,
and no sharp distinction between the so-called civilized and the so-called barbaric. Death seen up closes;
fear of dying oneself; the instant degradability of the physical body these are the basic ingredients that
make up the epic landscape, shared by humans and animals alike. The genre is primitive in this sense:
not only is Gilgamesh the oldest literature known to humans, its emotions also happen to be raw, visceral,
not complicated. From the standpoint of evolution, they represent the most elemental brain processes, first
evolved and robustly shared by a large number of animal species, having been there from the first and
likely to be there till the bitter end.
Rather than being permanently stuck in the past and cut off from the living world, as Bakhtin contends,
the epic is the genre of the living world. It is the genre that carries forward the most physically grounded
emotions known to humankind, a prehistoric continuum surviving into modern times, fears and hurts
undiminished in strength, undiminished in its sway over the species. It is able to serve as this carrier
mostly by remaining a low genre: low, both in terms of its simple, death-driven narratives, and in terms
of the deflating view of humanity that such narratives call up. This is a genre that puts us on a spectrum
shared with other life-forms gods on the one end, worms on the other not leaving much doubt where
we stand eventually. Mortals this is the label that the epic reserves for our species. It sums us up.
And, when the end arrives, as it is guaranteed to do, the epic quite often marks that occurrence with a
formal spasm of sorts: simultaneously magnifying, contracting, and disorienting, giving the end of life the
hallucinatory intensity that fills every inch of space and shrinks to a smaller and smaller point.
MACRO AND MICRO
All of which is to say that the epic is doing active work on more than one scale, going back and forth
8 Chad Gracia, Collaborating with Komunyakaa, p. 542.
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Enkidus nose.

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between the large and the small and interweaving these two, bringing one to bear on the other, if not as
an inverted prism then as a persistent counterpoint. Aristotle is wrong, then, to associate the epic only
with the vexingly large. The vexingly small is equally within its province. In fact, simply on the basis
of size, it probably does not make a lot of sense to maintain a strict separation between the epic and
other genres, since its operating coordinates are far from uniform, with a broad spectrum of variation
linked to an alternating rhythm, often crossing over into the territory that is traditionally assigned to
other genres.
In what follows, I would like to argue against a strict separation between epic and lyric. Rather than
aligning the former only with the macro and the latter only with the micro, I would like to see these
dimensional planes as up-and-down scalar variations that can be switched into and switched out of quite
routinely, without too much fuss. Epic and lyric, on this view, are complementary registers, a functional
duality perhaps present from the first, allowing the representational space to expand or contract as the
need arises, alternating between the technically neutral birds eye view and the deliberately charged close
up. While it still makes sense to think of lyric and epic as two more or less distinct genres, the lyricization
of the epic is by no means oxymoronic, but an important operational dimension of the genre, making it
scale-rich, scale-variable.
The otherwise localized phenomenon of death, happening inside just one body, can be both hidebound
and world-destroying for that reason, both center and circumference. In Gilgamesh it takes the form both
of the concentrated repulsiveness of the maggot and of a reproducible story of grief and fear, occasioned
by the corruptibility of the body and expanding to include many spinoffs from that event. It is a story
populated by a host of gods and a host of ambiguously unclassifiable creatures (such as Humbaba or
the Scorpion People). All have some relation to humans, to the mortals that we are. The epic is a multiscale, multi-species environment. It is a genre that stretches the bounds of representation far beyond the
customary borders of the real, turning the unthinkably alien into creatures visitable, conversable. It
should come as no surprise, then, that one of the names the epic would adopt in the twentieth century is
science fiction. For this is indeed one of the modern guises of the ancient genre, adding extraterrestrial
species and interplanetary travel to its plot, but otherwise sticking with the same death-driven and lifeseeking narratives, and the emotions they reproduce and reactivate. Intimation of mortality, the physical
nature of the body, and the up-for-grabs definition of humanness itself these basic ingredients of the
Mesopotamian epic are also the basic ingredient of science fiction.
This essay will indeed end with an episode of Star Trek as a twentieth-century recycling of epic, one that
reaches back in self-conscious tribute to Gilgamesh. This example, and numerous others like it, suggests
that the epic is best explored as a cascading form, with a downstream textual field exploding in volume,
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The Star Trek episode is indeed a striking example of the latter, a transcribing and redirecting of those
cuneiform tablets onto a non-text-based (or at least not strictly text-based) platform, one that is mass
circulated, low in literary prestige but high in the number of viewers. The ease with which the epic can
make it onto the TV screen points to at least three things: first, the genre seems to have an easily mobilized
set of optics, a predisposition towards images, perhaps because humans have always been more visual
than linguistic, because human emotions before the advent of language were triggered by visual cues;9
secondly, and for the same reason, popular culture is not a problem for the epic it is entirely at home
here, its primitive grieves and fears and its easily visualizable plots needing no exegesis, comprehensible
even to the unschooled; finally, the frequency of recycling speaks to lyricization as one of the most
important self-propagating mechanisms of the genre, since it is certainly not the entire epic, but a very
small group of words that are selectively highlighted, extracted, and circulated anew, gaining new
meanings and entering into new associations in an entirely different environment. It is not the large size
of the epic but the portability of a tiny fraction of it that allows it to spread far and wide, to be cited and
embedded over and over again, in countless new updates and remakes.
But if so, portability would seem to rest on something like the non-integrity of the original text the ease
with which it can be broken up, pieces of it dislodged and taken elsewhere, mixed in with new material
not only in foreign environments but often ones operating at a lower elevation. As we have seen with
Gilgamesh, the general tendency for the epic, in the thousands of years of its unfolding, is to drift steadily
downward: assimilating itself to more popular tastes, moving to more popular venues, speaking the street
vernacular of the locals and, in the case of Star Trek, the media vernacular of a popular TV series. The epic
is eminently corruptible in this sense random composting is natural to it; fragmenting, fermenting,
and disintegrating are its life-forces. Not only does the genre have a thematic interest in the degradability
of matter, it is itself a part of that process, doing so with gusto, fed by the unsparing but microscopically
vital downward percolations that carry the process forward. From this perspective, the maggot is not only
a repulsive detail, it is a counter-intuitively lyrical detail, a closeup too minute for comfort but also lifegiving in that minuteness. It keeps the epic going, just as it keeps the earth going.
9 Antonio R. Damasio and Jonathan H. Turner, among others, have argued that emotions evolved much earlier than
language did, and that pre-linguistic affect was largely visual in nature. See, for instance, Antonio R. Damasio, The
Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999);
Jonathan H. Turner, On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).
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energized by various projective arcs, and increasingly scattered across a variety of genres and media.

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THE MAGGOT AND THE BIOSPHERE

What would a play look like that gives pride of place to the maggot, dedicated to the twin concepts of
corruptibility and renewability? Chad Gracia started casting about for a playwright already thinking along
those lines. Komunyakaa caught his attention right away, since this poet already has under his belt a poem
entitled Ode to a Maggot:
Brother of the blowfly
And godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork
And flophouses. Yes you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound and mathematical.
Jesus, Chris, youre merciless
With the truth. Ontological and lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone doors of Caesars tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.
No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.10
Ode to the Maggot was published in 2000, in Talking Dirty to the Gods. Komunyakaa was probably
not thinking of Gilgamesh when he wrote this poem, and in fact its emotional orientation is significantly
different. In Gilgamesh, the maggot is harsh, unstoppable, the voice of necessity from the biosphere.
Ode to the Maggot, on the other hand, is almost a fond tribute to the little/ Master of earth, finding
something ontological and lustrous where most people would only be repelled a shift in perspective
and in scale of attention that marks a shift from epic to lyric, recognizable even within a strict definition of
10 Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001).
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it to be at home in both genres, at home in the alternating rhythm that links the two. On a lyrical note, it
reminds us that decomposing texts, like decomposing bodies, are the lifeblood of any generative process,
a thought twined around the corruptibility of matter that it executes on the epic stage. This modern-day
maggot, in short, has enough in common with the ancient one in Mesopotamia to convince Chad Gracia
that Komunyakaa had a Gilgamesh waiting inside of him all along. 11
EPIC DNA
It is an interesting idea, a theory of literature based on the virtual guarantee of cross-time reproduction.
Even as the epic carries forward the evolutionary psychology of the human species on a large scale,
it would seem itself to be enacting a micro-evolution on its own, long drawn out, but apparently not
especially precarious. What Chad Gracia is proposing, in fact, is a kind of literary genetics, a form of
transcribing and transcoding, according to which the DNA of a text might lie dormant, with a waiting
period of long duration, but eventually coming forth, spreading to unexpected places and interacting with
these environments, producing new and altered copies of that long-distance genetic material. How do we
otherwise account for the proven track record of Gilgamesh, its ability to get itself recycled over and over
again, not always predictably, but not without some degree of regularity?
Here, the answer might be both simpler and more inexorable than we think. For to the extent that the death
of physical organisms has remained a hard fact across time one of the key constants of the biosphere
and to the extent that most of us have remained unreconciled to it, unconsoled in its necessity, mortality
might turn out to be the single most potent bit of epic DNA, carried forward without diminishment from
century to century. The primitive devastations of Gilgamesh are no less devastating now than they were
5000 years ago. It is the potency and transmissibility of this particular bit of genetic material that make the
epic robust, durable, and reproducible.
In the case of Komunyakaa, though, the epic DNA reproduced throughout his corpus might not even be
mortality as a general condition, but rather the smaller, grosser pressure point that is the maggot. This
particular fascination no doubt has something to do with his background and the entwined coarseness and
delicacy surrounding death in that particular environment. Komunyakaa grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana,
40 miles north of New Orleans, the son of a carpenter. He was given the name James William Brown, but
later reclaimed the African name Komunyakaa, the name of his grandfather, a stowaway from the West
11 Chad Gracia, Collaborating with Komunyakaa, p. 544.
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Proceedings
Indies (My grandfather came from Trinidad/Smuggled in like a sack of papaya/.../ The name Brown
fitted him like trouble).12 The family was poor. One of the effects of that poverty is that there is a kind
of companionship with death, a companionship with the act of killing, and with what happens after the
killing. In the Meat section of the long poem, A Good Memory, Komunyakaa writes:
Folk magic hoodooed us
Till the varmints didnt taste bitter
Or wild. We boys & girls
Knew how to cut away musk glands
Behind their legs. Good
With knives, we believed
We werent poor Sometimes
We weighed the bullet
In our hands, tossing it left
To right, wondering if it was
Worth more than the kill.13
Someone who does this every day is going to have a very different attitude not only to meat consumption
but to the edible nature of bodies. Hunger, a perennial problem in Bogalusa, would have been much worse
if this had not been the case, if individual bodies were not so easily degradable, so easily absorbed back
into the vital processes of the biosphere. It is this recycling-based aesthetics that gives the maggot an
honored place in Komunyakaas poetry, giving it the same ontological centrality (if a somewhat different
emotional charge) that it carried in Gilgamesh. And of course it was this small, diligent, and easily
portable bit of epic DNA that would also accompany the poet as he went to war.
Komunyakaa went to Vietnam. He was there from 1969 to 1970, working for the Armys newspaper,
The Southern Cross, covering the military action, and writing articles on Vietnamese history, which won
him a Bronze Star. He also published a volume of poems, Dien Cau Dau, perhaps the most memorable
poetry to come out of Vietnam War. In this volume, there is another poem, We Never Know, seemingly
descended from Gilgamesh as well, reenacting the same divided tableau of one dying and one surviving,
and once again putting flies and maggots at the center:
12 Yusef Komunyakaa, Mismatched Shoes, in Magic City, p. 42.

13 Yusef Komunyakaa, A Good Memory, in Neon Vernacular (Hanover: University of New England Press for Wesleyan
UP, 1993), pp. 14-22, quotation from pp. 14-15.
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He danced with tall grass
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for a moment, like he was swaying

with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed red-hot.
When I get to him,
A blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
Theres no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off,
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldnt be
kissing the ground.
The dead man in the poem is a complete stranger, most likely an enemy combatant, someone the poet
has just killed, someone he is supposed to kill. Yet this death is anything but routine. On the contrary, it
is self-consciously lyrical: a spot of time special unto itself, luminous and overflowing with meaning, its
smallness amplified into something much larger. It is fitting that this subjectively magnified event should
be coupled with and offered in counterpoint to the larger narrative of war, here miniaturized in its turn,
for death in combat is indeed a classic moment of scalar instability, oscillating between two or more
phenomenal planes, between epic expanse and lyric compression, between the impersonal necessity of
killing and the convulsiveness of death as bodily event.
The poem begins, in any case, on a lyrical note, with a slightly blurred, almost hallucinatory image of the
enemy combatant swaying and dancing. But it pulls back from that lyricization as it moves swiftly to the
other end of the emotional spectrum, its descriptive lens zeroing in on the now-fallen body, with a halo
of flies already gathered. It is unsightly, grossly reductive and deflating, turning the dead soldier instantly
into a corpse just like any other corpse: edible flesh, food for worms. We could call this a moment of
ecological realism, an impersonal, across-the-board recycling downward. But if so, this particular form
of recycling is nonetheless one that acknowledges the subjectivity of each organism, rather than erase
it completely. In fact, in a double-stranded structure almost like a double helix, the ecological realism is
coupled here with a sentiment-based lyricism that counters it, a lyricism that grants the fallen soldier a
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degree of individuality almost beyond what we might realistically believe. Startlingly, completely out
of the blue, the poet announces that he has fallen in love. We dont know who he has fallen in love with,
whether it is the dead man himself, or the person in the crumbled photograph pulled out of his wallet just
before he dies. But that almost does not matter. The identity of the recipient is less important than the fact
that the sentiment is there, amplified and cherished and given poetic life. Both epic and lyric are honored
by this alternating rhythm, a scalar flexibility that unmakes and remakes, as tender as it is hard-nosed.
And the alternation persists. Komunyakaa now makes another gesture in the direction of lyric as he does
one last thing: he puts the wallet back into the dead mans pocket and turning him over, face up. These
gestures, each deliberate, each unexplained, and all non-trivial, do not change the fact that the dead man
is organic matter. They do not have the power to fend off the blue halo/ of flies that are most certainly
there. On the contrary, it is the visceral proximity of those flies that makes the cross-stitched rhythm
of epic and lyric so powerful, with two force fields intertwined and yet pulling in opposing directions,
energized by that paradox, carrying forward both the non-negotiability of our physical end and the
infinitely negotiable turns of textual reproduction.
VARIATION AND MUTATION
Since this alternating rhythm is so close to the expanding and contracting phenomenal planes of
death in combat,14 we should not be surprised that, in his more recent collection, Warhorses (2008), as
Komunyakaa turns from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, the same genetic material from Gilgamesh and
the same double-stranded structure would be brought along, put to work in these new environments. The
cross-stitching of the large and the small is reflected this time in the very form of the poetry. In a long, 14section poem called Love in the time of war, Komunyakaa devotes an entire section to the Sumerian
epic, taking in the gods, the cosmos, but also lyricizing the death of one particular individual, turning it
into an arresting micro-phenomenon:
Gilgameshs Humbaba was a distant drum
pulsing among the trees, a slave to the gods,
a foreign tongue guarding the sacred cedars
down to a pale grubworm in the tower
before Babel. Invisible & otherworldly,
14 In his classic meditation on historical method, Carlo Ginzburg also argues that war is an occasion interweaving the
extreme long shots of macrohistory with the extreme close-ups of subjective experience. See Ginzburg, The Cheese
and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1980).
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& his cry turned flies into maggots

& blood reddened the singing leaves.15
The death of Humbaba is given a context here, a psychology, not to say a visceral immediacy. Once again,
the maggots are impossible to miss, although this key signifier has now been transferred from Enkidu to
Humbaba. This unexpected shift suggests that the epic is perhaps distinguished above all by its mutating
genes, that periodic shifts in its centers of gravity might turn out to be a crucial self-propagating
mechanism, as important to the ongoing life of the epic form as anything that was written on the original
clay tablets. Which is another way of saying that, for the cross-time continuum that is the epic, variation
is the rule rather than the exception. Its ontology is the ontology of recycling: ongoing, ever-multiplying,
often randomly generated.
Humbaba is a case in point. As he appeared in the Mesopotamian texts, Humbaba was the guardian of
the sacred Cedar Forest, restricted more or less to that sole function: he embodied a divine prohibition
and, strangely, he was also supposed to be evil. Stephen Mitchell, as we have seen, has seized upon this
apparent contradiction and turned it into a fable for our own time. According to him, the supposed evil of
Humbaba is largely projected by Gilgamesh, a preemptive name-calling to justify a preemptive first strike.
Komunyakaa and Gracia do not go quite so far, but, like Mitchell, they are also struck by Humbaba less
as a substantive entity than as a cumulative rumor. With no demonstrable physical might, he is merely a
rumbling sound. The stage directions say: The marching-rolling sound of Humbabas approach is heard
circular. He is not seen. Humbaba grows into a resounding echo. 16 A creature of hearsay, Humbaba falls
apart almost instantly in the stage adaptation. Enkidu says: Humbaba is no god/ He is a small beast/ in a
big forest./ He is only a roar/ among the night trees. 17
Humbaba as a small beast in a big forest is not strictly an invention by Komunyakaa and Gracia; it is not
an absolute departure from the Sumerian epic. This ambiguously unclassified creature has always been an
agent, a proxy; he executes the will of the gods and serves at their pleasure. And the Sumerian gods are
nothing if not treacherous it is Shamash, after all, who unleashes the thirteen winds that blind Humbaba
and pin him down, turning his imminent victory over Gilgamesh into a defeat. Still, it takes the stage
adaptation and Love in the Time of War to turn the fate of Humbaba into a fully imagined story about a
low-level functionary, quite far down on the totem pole, done in by the higher power he serves, not only
15 Yusef Komunyakaa, Love in the Time of War, Warhorses (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 4.
16 Gracia and Komunyakaa, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, p. 49.
17 Ibid. p. 50.
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he was naked in the kings heart,

Proceedings
a slave to the gods (which is more or less what we might expect) but surprisingly always a foreign
tongue to them, meaningless as far as they are concerned, a tongue they never bother to learn.
In what sense is Humbaba a foreign tongue? It is a manner of speaking, of course, since there is no
evidence anywhere that the actual language spoken by Humbaba requires translation. His foreignness
to the gods his status as an alien comes rather from the fact that, existentially and taxonomically, he
belongs to a different league, a different order: they are immortal, he is not. Unlike the gods, and very
much like Enkidu, Humbaba is perishable and corruptible, and the flies and maggots are there to prove
it. These creatures are nothing new, of course: they have always been with humans, with them before
Babel. What is new, though, is that what is a given for human is now a given for Humbaba as well. Not
even remotely god-like, he is no better and no different from his supposed adversaries. The label mortal
applies to him just it does to him, making him an eternal underling, invisible and otherworldly to the
gods. If there is any previous ambiguity about how to classify Humbaba, where he stands on the spectrum
between gods and humans, the nature of his servitude and the nature of his death put that beyond doubt.
The humanization of Humbaba here, effectively a demotion is indeed a significant departure from
the Sumerian epic, a recycling so radical that I would like to call base modification. In Love in the
Time of War it is not through Gilgamesh, and not even through Enkidu, but rather through Humbaba,
that humanness is being defined, and defined in terms of its lowest common denominator, its physical
degradation and psychological abjection. If the vitality of epic comes in part from a downdrift, a
channeling of its emotional charge towards the lower rungs of the hierarchy, in the hands of Komunyakaa
that downward momentum reinvents the genre even as it redraws the boundaries between what is human
and what is not, giving us a transfigured baseline that is increasingly the center of gravity, and putting
corresponding pressures on the shape of history told from that standpoint. For Komunyakaa, no less
than for Stephen Mitchell, it is the history of the United States that recycles the Mesopotamian epic, that
brings it up to the present. And, even though slave to the gods could have been just a catch phrase, the
word slave, coming from Komunyakaa, is neither casual nor trivial. Nor is it casual or trivial that this
particular layer of American history is being called up by the Iraq war, a military operation manned by
those with no say in the process, slaves to higher powers who makes decisions from far above. What
results from this base modification is a radical redrawing of the epic map, loosening the criteria for species
membership even as it turns over the most vital part of the story to the lower ranks.
RE-SCALING
This outcome, so striking in Love in the Time of War, is not the only one possible, however. Even in the
highly charged and overdetermined environment that is Iraq ancient Mesopotamia doubling as a modern
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voice or mutating in the direction. While it is true that any gesture toward Gilgamesh would involve some
meditation on death, the descriptive radius and emotional texture can be very different. The spectrum
of variants here is as broad as can be. Even that powerful signifier the maggot turns out not to be
absolutely indispensable. It too can be set aside, giving rise to a Gilgamesh with different contours, and
a different set of features brought into relief. Indeed, an alternative mapping can be made, also revolving
around the death of Enkidu but on a slightly enlarged scale a level of resolution not centered on the
maggot but taking in the larger view of the differential fate of the two companions: one dead, the other
still alive, and still mourning, still bent over with grief. This tableau has been there as well from the dawn
of time. When the analytic lens is trained on the maggot, this larger picture tends to be in the shadow, but
when the scale is readjusted, it comes into sharp and devastating focus. Indeed, an entirely new lineup
of works emerges as being on a continuum with Gilgamesh on the strength of this tableau, including
Komunyakaas We Never Know that we discussed earlier. This slightly scaled-up bit of genetic material
is as tenacious and durable as the tenacious and durable maggot. The epic form that is Gilgamesh could
not have flourished without frequent recycling of this alternative scene.
Since the morphology of the epic form is so crucially dependent on scale, on the shifting constellations
that phase in and out as we go from one level of magnification to another, it clearly takes more than one
work, and more than the corpus of one author, to explore even a fraction of these possible outcomes. In
what follows, I would like to consider some of these alternative recycling routes by turning from Yusef
Komunyakaa to Brian Turner, another poet of the Iraq War, also citing Gilgamesh, but doing so in the
spirit of a sequence of perpetual endings and perpetual beginnings, involving more than one person, and
picked up again sometimes after thousands of years.
Brian Turner was in Iraq in 2003, stationed with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry
Division. I would like to discuss a pair of poems from Here, Bullet, a volume of poetry coming out of
that experience. Gilgamesh in Fossil Relief wears its connection to the Sumerian epic on its sleeve; A
B Negative (The Surgeons Poem) shows no sign of being connected at all. And yet this poem, about a
patient named Thalia Fields who dies on the plane taking her to the hospital, is arguably part of the same
epic cycle, returning again and again to the last moment of contact between the living and the dead and, in
that way, returning again and again to Gilgamesh:
... Thalia Fields is gone, long gone,
about as far from Mississippi
as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq
with a blanket draped over her body
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theater of war Gilgamesh can resonate in multiple ways, its variants by no means speaking with one

Proceedings
and an exhausted surgeon in tears,

his bloodied hands on her chest, his head
sunk down, the nurse guiding him
to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries,
though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard...18
The featured exhibit here is a woman, but otherwise she is much like Enkidu, stone dead, clearly and
unmistakably and insultingly so. But, true to the contrapuntal rhythm that remains a surprising constant
against the tremendous variation within the epic form, she is nonetheless not alone. The flight surgeon,
bending over her in tears, his bloodied hands on her chest, is still holding on, not letting go, even if his
labor is ultimately futile. They are strangers to each other; yet these hands are nonetheless a replay of that
five-thousand-year-old scene between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, a replay of that ever-active gulf between
the living and the dead, and our ever-active refusal to give in to it.
All of this is implicit in A B Negative (the Surgeons Story). In Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief, that everactive refusal becomes the conceptual backbone for a different story, this time coming back explicitly to
the Sumerian epic, paying homage to it but also revising its premise, its outcome, allowing for a different
form of contact now across the line of mortality, and a haphazard but not impossible continuity of labor
across time:
In the month of Ab, late summer
of the seventh century B.C.E., a poet
chisels text into stone tablets, etching
three thousand lines and brushing them by hand,
the dust blown off with a whispered breath...
In the mid-August heat of the year 2004,
an archaeologist pauses over an outline
of bone, one bodys signature in the earth,
which he reads carefully with a camelhair brush
and patience, each hairline fracture revealing.19
Once again, hands are in the foreground, in this case, two pairs of hands, almost like those of two manual
18 Brian Turner, AB Negative the Surgeons Poem, in Here, Bullet (Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books), pp. 15-16.
19 Brian Turner, Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief, in Here Bullet, p. 53.
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the help of a camelhair brush, uncovering what the other has done and restoring it to the world, bringing it
into the present.
I could be pedantic and point out that the cuneiform tablets were clay tablets, not stone, and that
Gilgamesh was in fact first deciphered, not in the 21st century, but in the nineteenth, by someone named
George Smith, not American but British, but who did in fact come from a working-class background,
someone who had to learn Cuneiform on his own by spending his lunch hours at the British Museum.20
Brian Turner sets aside this larger picture to make way for the miniaturized story he wants to tell, namely,
the story of laboring hands, performing a task begun by one and carried on by the other. Brian Turner
is not, on the whole, a utopian poet, someone driven by an overly idealized sense of what is possible.
The other poems in Here, Bullet are filled with body bags, with Iraqi policemen being blown up, and an
American private committing suicide. Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief is not a departure from these poems,
but it is a different way to come to terms with those events, turning their large traumas into small moments
of continuity that are responded to in kind and perpetuated in kind. This particular lyricization of the
Sumerian epic not only reworks war into a humanly meaningful incident, it also affirms recycling as a
death-powered form of life, beginning with mortality rather than ending with it. There is no better fate for
Gilgamesh.
20 David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt,
2007), pp. 12-15.
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laborers: one to get those 3000 lines chiseled into the stone tablets, and the other to retrace these lines with
The 2nd
Proceedings
Session 2
Plenary Session 2
Nature and Civilization, Science and Technology
The 2nd
Proceedings
Plenary Session 2
Nature and Civilization, Science and Technology
1. New Forms of Harmony between Human and Nature

/ Hwe Ik Zhang (Seoul National University)
2. B
ecoming the Alien: Avatar and District 9
/ Andrew M. Gordon (University of Florida)
3. The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Technology:

What Kind of a Future Will Human Beings Create?
/ Peter L. Rudnytsky (University of Florida)
4. Illness and Art

/ Desmond Egan (Irish Poet)
New Forms of Harmony between Human and Nature
Hwe Ik Zhang
Session 2
Seoul National University
Natures order and irregular features

The harmony between human and nature can be considered in various contexts. But the one based on the
conventional understanding of the relation between human and nature might not be very fruitful, because
our conventional wisdom concerning it is by far outstripped by our current understanding of nature and
human within it. We therefore begin by briefly reassessing what we currently understand about nature on
this occasion.
We now have a Big Bang cosmology supported by the standard model of particle physics.1 According
to it, the fundamental stuff, Higgs field, condensed into various fields and massive particles through a
process called Higgs mechanism. This is an order generating process, metaphorically compared with
the condensation of liquid water from gaseous steam. This was only the beginning of a series of similar
order generating processes. As the temperature of the universe declined further, more orders emerged:
compound particles such as atoms, molecules, and some macromolecules. Also, large structures formed:
galaxies, stars and other heavenly bodies including the planets.
In the process of this order formation, random fluctuations at the microscopic level give rise to various
temporary arrangements of matter, some of which, according to their respective stabilities, would be
chosen to persist as recognizable macroscopic orders. This kind of order forming mechanism will be
called as Higgsian, in the sense that it is a generalized form of the Higgs mechanism. This mechanism of
order formation will be contrasted to another more sophisticated Darwinian mechanism, which will be
explained later.
1 Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2004).
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In addition to the general order forming mechanism, we would consider the way how the variety of
complex and irregular features all around us, like the shape of rocks and valleys, came to be in existence.
Recently an interesting theory attempting to explain this was proposed. It is the theory of self-organized
criticality.2
From the very first moment of its birth, the universe was never in a state of equilibrium but quite active
with certain flows of energy and matter in many places. Some of them accumulate in certain places and
aggregate into an order of extensive scale. This order embedded in this extensive aggregate arises out
of the local interactions between the components which were in disordered states. The process is often
caused by random fluctuations and accidental arrangements amplified by positive feedback. The resulting
organization is generally decentralized and distributed over all the components of the system. As such, it
is robust and able to survive repairing certain amount of damage or perturbation. This process is called
self-organization, typical examples being formation of crystal, emergence of convection patterns in liquid
heated from below, chemical oscillators and many other complex patterns.
So far it is a typical process occurring in Higgsian order forming mechanism. But the really interesting
feature of it is the so-called self-organized criticality. Once the system arrives at its attractor, its
macroscopic behavior displays the spatial and/or temporal scale-invariance characteristic of a phase
transition, which means, the system bursts into pieces of every sizes distributed inversely proportional to a
certain power of the size itself. Many apparent irregularities seen around us are, in fact, the results of such
bursts from systems having arrived at self-organized criticality.
The best illustration is provided by the sand pile model. Consider a child on a beach letting sand trickle
down from the hand to form a sand pile. As the process continues, the pile becomes steeper, and some
sand begins to slide. And eventually the sand pile becomes so big and steep that avalanches of sand may
happen. At this stage the behavior can no longer be explained in terms of the individual grains. It should
instead be understood from the global property of the entire pile. This behavior of the critical sand pile
mimics several phenomena observed across many areas, which are associated with complexity.
The complex and irregular features all around us thus indicate that nature operates, in many occasions,
in the self-organized critical states. Some irregular hard fragments of broken pieces are later utilized as
building blocks for a more complicated systems serving as reliable constraints.
2 Per Bak, How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996).
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This is the picture of natures primary order, with certain irregular features, which were shaped by the
Higgsian mechanism and certain self-organized criticality. This corresponds roughly to the physical
composition of our world. We may call it primary or simple order in anticipation to the more
complicated and interesting one, called as secondary or compound order, which the Darwinian
mechanism would provide.
Order, entropy and second law of thermodynamics
through the concept of entropy. These concepts are related to our notion of microstates and macrostates.
In nature, states of physical system obey the dynamical laws and we can enumerate dynamically
distinguishable states in principle. But many of such states present identical responses to any external
probe and thus indistinguishable in practice. Therefore it is beneficial to group together a set of such
states, called microstates, and designate it as a macrostate. In many circumstances, the probability for
the system to be in a microstate is identical to be in any other available microstate. Therefore, the number
of microstates W belonging to a given macrostate corresponds to the probability of the system to be in that
macrostate. In this sense, W is often called thermodynamic probability of that macrostate.
A meaningful macrostate, to which only a few microstates correspond (i.e. W is small), would be
relatively hard to be achieved because the probability is low. Such a rarity, by definition, makes that
macrostate highly ordered. The order of a system in that macrostate is therefore related to the inverse
of W, i.e. 1/W, and formally defined by = log(1/W) =-logW for some technical convenience. Since
the entropy of that system is defined to be logW, the order defined this way is just the negative entropy.
Another measure of order associated with a macrostate in a metastable state is the time required for that
macrostate to be formed accidentally by pure chance. This is because the probability of an event and the
time required to arrive at it is inversely proportional. This point will be utilized in later discussion.
One of the most fundamental principles in nature is the second law of thermodynamics. It is in fact very
simple: Nature goes always from less probable macrostates to more probable ones. But that holds for the
overall process. Some macrostates jointly participating with others might go inverse direction toward
higher order, provided some others in the process lose order as much or more, in compensation for it. All
order forming phenomena, Higgsian or Darwinian, are examples of such local inversion.
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The concept of order seems to be abstract, but, in fact, quite concrete in the sense that it is measurable

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Natures secondary process of order formation

In addition to Higgsian, nature invented another way to arrive at order, called Darwinian, which is more
sophisticated but enormously effective. To discuss the Darwinian mechanism and the resulting compound
order, it is necessary to introduce the concept of autocatalytic local order(hereafter will be abbreviated
as ALO).3 It is a local order which performs itself as a catalyst for producing another self-similar
local order. Once such a local system has been produced, and assuming that it can catalyze at least one
such system within its expected life time, it is only a matter of time such local order will occupy all the
available sites in the whole system. And after that, the population of the ALO will persist for unlimited
duration.
Assume that a species of ALO appeared on a planet like Earth and the magnitude of the local order is the
size of a microbe. Then, after a short period of rapid multiplication, there would be millions of (almost)
identical copies of such a local order for an extended duration. This will make a favorable ground for
the mutations to occur. Some mutated sets of ALO species may appear, and coexist for a while with the
original ones. It is also possible that some of such ALOs belonging to different species might possibly
merge together to form a higher order species. This pattern of mutation may continue endlessly producing
higher and higher order species. This is the basic elements of the Darwinian mechanism.
To appreciate the efficacy of this mechanism, let us evaluate the time required for two consequent events
to occur. Suppose that time T1 is required for a local order O1 to appear by pure chance, and time T2 is
required for a mutated local order O2 to appear in the assumed presence of O1. Then the total time T
required for O2 to appear from scratch would be
T=T1+T2/n
where n is the average expected number of O1 at any moment during the period T2 (If a single O1 persists
all the time during T2, n=1).
Let us now assume that the life time of O1 is much less than T1. This is quite a reasonable assumption for
highly organized local order, because it would be very hard to be formed accidentally(T1 large), but rather
easy to be disintegrated( small).
3 The terms autocatalytic and catalyst employed here are generalizations from the terms normally used in chemical
reactions. In biology, instead of autocatalytic, the term self-reproducing is conventionally used.
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We can now compare the two processes: Higgsian and Darwinian. If the original local order, O1, is non-
autocatalytic, which means the process is Higgsian, n would be /T1(O1 appears once in T1, but stays only
after this appearance), while if it is autocatalytic, that is Darwinian, n is N, the average population of
ALO during T2.
To estimate the numerical difference, let us assume that both T1 and T2 are one million year (106 year), the
life time of O1 is 3.65 day (10-2 year), and the population of O1, is saturated at N=105. Further assume
that O1 makes two copied within its life time. It will take 17 generations (217=131,072) to arrive at this
saturated number. This means that 2 months are needed to get saturated. Then the estimated total time T
Session 2
required for O2 to appear would be

T=106 year + 1014 year
for Higgsian, and
T=106 years + 10 years + 2 month
for Darwinian.
It means that you have to wait 100 trillion years (about seven thousand times the age of universe) after the
appearance of original order to expect a mutated one in Higgsian process, while you need barely 10 years
plus 2 month to get the same mutated one in Darwinian process! We should notice that the 100 trillion
years needed to wait for O2 to occur in Higgsian process means that it is such an enormously ordered
object that it needs such a long time to achieve it accidentally. The magic of Darwinian process is that it
made an order of such an enormous quality in such a short period.
Where then lies the secret of it? We should not be deluded that the magic is hidden somewhere in the
structure of the ALOs. Even with the identical structure, if the grounding order of the system on which the
ALO locates is slightly different, the whole autocatalytic function may fail and no Darwinian mechanism
operates. It is therefore necessary for an ALO to function as an ALO it should be part of a global order in
which the autocatalytic activity is carried out in a close coordination between the ALO and the grounding
order and also between the ALOs themselves. In fact, the magic of Darwinian process lies in the ability of
the whole system to expand a local order to be spread all over the space and time and work out all together
the exploring task of higher order. In the above numerical example, 10 trillion ALOs appeared and took
part in the searching endeavor to arrive at the mutated local order of such quality.
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Proceedings
Properties of two different kinds of orders

We have demonstrated that the secondary order produced by Darwinian mechanism is so enormous
that it is practically impossible to encounter comparable order formed through more general Higgsian
process. Therefore, the two orders appear different in every respect, and look seemingly independent each
other. But, as mentioned above, the secondary order is based only on a rich terrain of the primary order,
and essentially inseparable from it. On the other hand, while the primary order is generally independent
of the secondary one, it is also affected and continues to be altered once the formation of the secondary
order is initiated. And this alteration of the primary order in turn affects the development of the secondary
order, and so on and on. In this way the two orders are intermingled as a single undivided whole, once the
secondary order gets started.
Still, there are certain noticeable differences between the two orders. One of the characteristic differences
arises in the relation between the part and whole. For the primary order, the order of the whole amounts
roughly the sum of the orders of parts. For the secondary order, however, the order of the whole by far
exceeds the sum of the orders attributed to the parts. This is another way of expressing the global character
of the secondary order. Materially the system is composed of discernible composite partners, but the order
of the system comes mainly from the relations between partners, rather than from the order of individual
partners. In this sense, it is impossible for the secondary order to separate the system into independent
parts. Once separated, the order is lost automatically. This is why we have called it compound order in
contrast to the simple primary order.
Another difference between the primary and secondary orders occurs in the stability of the order. Stability
can be defined as the capability of maintaining the order of the system against external influences. It is, for
instance, related to the ability of repairing externally imposed damages or perturbations.
Primary orders, obtained through phase-transitions, chemical reactions, etc., adjusted by external
conditions like temperature, are generally reversible and stable under external damage or perturbation.
Meanwhile, the local orders accidentally obtained through fluctuation are generally unstable or metastable,
but as we have seen such orders formed through Higgsian process are relatively poor. In many cases,
such orders are initiated, maintained, and even accumulated by external flows. One interesting case is the
one where the system arrives at the self-organized criticality. Any system arrived at this critical point will
become unstable, and burst into many irregular fragments any time with relatively small triggering effect.
Secondary orders, on the other hand, are generally located only in meta-stable states. While stable under
normal perturbation, they may be destroyed by accidental impact exceeding certain threshold. These
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orders, usually in the form of dynamic interrelations between coordinating partners, are vulnerable under
internal as well as external fluctuation or perturbation.
A model situation of the compound order
To make the discussion more concrete, we will consider a model situation. Suppose that, by any chance,
three kinds of components A, B, C are formed with certain densities of population in a large system.
Assume now that the components A and B, being conjugate to each other, can properly be combined into
Assume also that A*B, once formed, can easily combine another component C into a more mature
structure A*B*C, which can attract other A and B toward itself to facilitate the formation of another
A*B and release it. This will make a model of autocatalytic local order(ALO), which could be formed
accidentally against very low probability as a seed A*B, but once formed, grow into a mature body
A*B*C and perform the autocatalytic activity producing another seed A*B.
It should be noted here that all these phenomena are performed in highly dynamical and nonequilibrium
circumstances. Accordingly, the components A, B, C here should not all be regarded as hard bodies with
fixed material compositions. They might include relatively rigid parts which could be regarded for some
purposes as constraints, and also include flexible ones which, while maintaining reasonably distinct
appearances, could be so fluid that they might even be regarded as a part of a steady flow, constantly
exchanging their material compositions with surroundings. In this regard, the material identity of ALO,
namely that of A*B and A*B*C, is not absolute. It constantly exchanges matter and energy, and maintains
itself only in close coordination with the rest of the system. In this sense, it is an inseparable part of the
system with conditional status of existence.
By the same token, the production of the next generation, A*B, is not wholly the workings of A*B*C
alone. It is in fact produced by the whole system, the ALO performing only the role of catalyst. That
is why we prefer the wording autocatalytic, rather than more conventional self-reproducing or selfreplicating.
Stages of compound order formation
The appearance of ALO, which would initiate a new world of compound order, might not be easy to arise
from the simple primary order. The probability of the initiation of ALO will definitely depend on the
richness of the primary order prior to the happening of this event. Therefore, it is demanding to figure out
a concrete circumstance which would facilitate the onset of such an event.
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a metastable state A*B, but it is, for some reason, very difficult to be achieved in normal circumstances.

Proceedings
In this regard, one can think about a situation in which certain pre-autocatalytic local orders prevail.
Imagine that there are some locations at which conditions are favorable for the formation of local orders
with certain sophistication, including the function of sustaining itself for an extended duration. Suppose
now that such local orders are formed there and removes to somewhere else, leaving the site for further
formation of such local orders. There might appear then a large population of these local orders, on which
a possible mutation to the autocatalytic form might be expected. This imaginative pre-autocatalytic local
order, if feasible in reality, will provide a preliminary stage for the onset of compound order.
We now divide the process of compound order formation into a few stages, and briefly summarize what is
happening there.
(1) Preliminary stage
The first one is the preliminary stage in which certain population of pre-autocatalytic local order appears.
At this stage, the primary order of the whole system 0 has become rich enough to form certain seed of
local order A0, which would grow to a matured form A0*C0 and spread over a substantial range with a
population M. This will be symbolically denoted as follows.
0: {A0 A0*C0}M
(2) Initiating stage
The next one is the stage in which the first population of ALO is formed and the Darwinian mechanism
begins operating. On the basis of the preliminary stage, a seed of the first autocatalytic local order A1*B1 is
formed, perhaps A0*C0 from of preliminary stage, and grows to a matured form A1*B1*C1, performing, for
the first time, the autocatalytic function. This will eventually make a population N1, on which a mutation
occurs. The seed A2*B2 of mutated ALO will then grow to A2*B2*C2 and spread over a population N2, etc.
At this stage, the primary order of the whole system is also altered to a new value 1, mainly due to the
interaction with ALOs. This situation is summarized symbolically as
1: {A1*B1 A1*B1*C1}N1
{A2*B2 A2*B2*C2}N2
...
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(3) Matured stage

Similar processes continue indefinite times and arrive at a stage, where all the species of ALO from
Am*Bm*Cm to An*Bn*Cn coexist, while all those appeared prior to Am*Bm*Cm have been vanished, mainly
due to the maladjustment with the altered primary order 2 and the rest of the species. This situation is
symbolically expressed as
2: {Am*Bm Am*Bm*Cm}Nm
...
Session 2
{An*Bn An*Bn*Cn}Nn
What is life?
At this juncture, we can easily notice that the compound order we have discussed so far is closely
related to what we usually call life. But interestingly enough, people have had enormous difficulties in
attempting to define life to a reasonable degree of satisfaction.4 One reason for this is that by defining it
they tried to clarify conceptually what they already possess in mind. But that should necessarily fail if the
possessed one in mind is amorphous.
We here approach the problem in the reverse direction. We assume that we do not know what life is,
but instead investigate the possible orders realizable in nature. And identifying a fairly clear picture of
significant kinds of order, we are in a position to name it. In other words, the conceptual object to be
named is already clarified, and the remaining job is only to attach a name to that.
In this regard, we are completely free how to name it. But we find that what we have conceptually
clarified is, in fact, closely related to what people loosely call life. Also we find here that what they have
normally called life is in reality ontologically inseparable from what they have usually regarded as nonliving.
Now let us go back to the compound order we have described and examine the ontological nature of the
concept. Here we can either choose a synchronic view and focus on what exists presently, or a diachronic
view and connect all the stages from the beginning to the present moment. We choose the latter position
4 Ed Regis, What is Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
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and include the former as a special case if necessary.

Taking this position, our object of examination would be the whole process of order formation, which
was briefly summarized in the three stages above. Here we have three kinds of entities with different
ontological status.
The first one is the individual ALO, up from (A1*B1A1*B1*C1) to (An*BnAn*Bn*Cn). This obviously
corresponds most closely to what we unwittingly have called life. But it is not suitable to designate
the name life exclusively to it. One reason is that it cannot accommodate the very significance people
normally want to assign on it. Such early ALOs like (A1*B1A1*B1*C1) might exhibit almost no quality
conventionally associated with the concept of life. Moreover, the ontological dependence of an ALO
upon the remaining global order is so strong that it would be inappropriate to grant an exclusive title
representing life. We would therefore call it somewhat restrictively as individual life, anticipating a
contrasting concept of global character.
The second entity to be considered here is the whole network of ALOs except the underlying primary
orders. One merit to regard it as a possible definition of life is that it incorporates the inseparability of the
relations between ALOs. But it still ignores the fact that this network itself is inseparable from the primary
orders like 1 and 2. One possible reason people might prefer this definition is that it separates out the
physical primary order from the more biological secondary orders. But strictly speaking, the primary
order infiltrates everywhere, even within animal bodies, and it is utterly impossible to dispense with it.
Still, some people choose this option for the definition of life. Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno, for instance, offer
very recently a definition of life as: Life is a complex network of self-reproducing autonomous agents
whose basic organization is instructed by material records generated through the open-ended, historical
process in which that collective network evolves.5 Indeed, except the forementioned proviso, this is a
definition fairly considerate and universal. We will come back to this later in this paper.
The third entity with a clear ontological significance is the whole inseparable compound order as a single
unity. It initiates with the first appearance of ALO (A1*B1 A1*B1*C1) within the original primary order
1, and through the long evolutionary history, it presently exhibits the compound order, composing the
present primary order 2 and the extant populations of ALO ({Am*Bm Am*Bm*Cm}Nm, ... {An*Bn
5 Kapa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno, The Need for a Universal Definition of Life in Twenty-first-century Biology in
Information and Living systems: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives, edited by Georgy Terzis and Robert Arp (MIT
Press, 2011).
146
An*Bn*Cn}Nn). It is self-sufficient and self-sustaining in the sense that it requires nothing essential from
outside.
It is therefore the most comprehensive entity possessing every property the notion of life might possibly
signify. It might perhaps be claimed that it is too comprehensive, including everything but discriminating
too little. In certain sense, it is. It even looks counter-intuitive as a possible definition of life. But it should
be noticed that it includes all the bare essentials, nothing more nothing less, for a life to be a life. Nothing
less than this can be a life alone in the universe. The reason something less than this sometimes looks like
natural on earth, where all that essentials are somehow granted. But it would be completely different in
somewhere else in the universe.
Needless to say, this conception of life should not be arbitrarily extended to any unnecessary scope, say, to
the universe itself. It should strictly be a scientific concept specifically denoting the causally interconnected
bundle of matter necessitating the appearance of life within itself. This causal relations leading to the life
phenomenon should be identified by our best available knowledge including contemporary science.
To the best of present knowledge, such an entity is expected to be a rare phenomenon in the universe,
and on the spatial dimension it is extremely localized, compared to the known scale of our universe. So
far, only one such life is known, which is the one located on our solar system. Framed on the sun-earth
system, it was born some 4 billion years ago, and has been growing ever since. It includes every living
beings, living now and ever lived on earth, including ourselves and all our ancestors up to the very first
ALO on earth. It also includes all the necessary components for this compound order possible, organic
and inorganic, incorporated as a functioning whole.
Some criteria for the concept of life
There is no doubt that, if an entity really deserves the name life, it would be the third entity mentioned
above. But I have been reluctant to call it life explicitly. Instead, I have called it global life ever since
I paid attention to this entity quite some time ago.6 One reason for that is that it should be distinguished
from the concept of individual life, in conjunction with which many interesting aspects of life can still be
fruitfully discoursed.
6 Hwe Ik Zhang, The Units of Life: Global and Individual, Paper presented at Philosophy of Science Conference in
Dubrovnik, 1988. reprinted in Hwe Ik Zhang, Science and Meta-Science, HyonAmSa (2012). Also see Hwe Ik Zhang,
Humanity in the World of Life. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 24 (December, 1989): 447-56.
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a life is that we unwittingly assume the remaining part of this in existence somewhere around it. It is quite

Proceedings
At this juncture, I would present a verbal definition of (global) life employing terminologies closely
analogous to that of Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno: Life is a self-sustained system embodying a complex
network of autocatalytic local orders whose basic organization is specified by enduring material
constraints which are generated through an open-ended evolutionary process. Notice the similarity with
that of Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno except the notion of a self-sustained system, which indicates the body
incorporating the primary order.
To determine whether a concept is suitable to represent the idea of life, we can think of two possible
criteria. One is the criterion of liveliness. This concerns whether the object is alive by itself or not. A
lily is alive in the field but it cannot be alive by itself. Once plucked out and thrown into the air it loses
the liveliness. So lily by itself cannot represent the whole picture of life. It is only part of it. Same is the
case for an animal species. An animal species cannot be alive by itself. It needs food and air. Then, what
about the network definition of life provided by Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno? It also fails. It cannot be alive
without the supporting primary order. Only the global life can pass it. This is why the global life alone can
be justified to represent the life in a genuine sense.
Another criterion for an object to represent the idea of life is the criterion of death. If any entity can die,
the usual interpretation is that it has a life which can be taken away. So the lily has a life. Same is true for
an animal species, which can possibly be exterminated. Many objects that can die are, in fact, subsystems
within a larger living system. These subsystems have such a characteristic that they can die without regard
to the enclosing larger life but they cannot be alive without it. In other words, they pass the criterion of
death, but do not fully satisfy the criterion of liveliness. For such case, it is quite appropriate to bestow
the status of conditional life. All sorts of individual life defined above occupy the ontological status of
conditional life.
Gaia, global life and self-organized criticality
One of the interesting features of the compound order, i. e. the global life, is that the whole system might
have been in a state of self-organized criticality (SOC). Per Bak, who initiated the theory of SOC, asserts:
In the critical state the collection of species represents a single coherent organism following its
own evolutionary dynamics. A single triggering event can cause an arbitrarily large fraction of the
ecological network to collapse, and eventually be replaced by a new stable ecological network.
This would be a mutated global organism. At the critical point all species influence each other.
In this state they act collectively as a single meta-organism, many sharing the same fate. This
is highlighted by the very existence of large-scale extinctions. A meteorite might have directly
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impacted a small part of the organism, but a large fraction of the organism eventually died as a
result.
Within the SOC picture, the entire ecology has evolved into the critical state. It makes no sense to
view the evolution of individual species independently.7
The global organism mentioned by Bak above is Gaia of Lovelock, which can roughly be interpreted as
the body of global life. In this sense, the Gaia theory of Lovelock provides some important aspects of the
The arrival of SOC in global life is manifested in model simulations performed by Bak, and confirmed in
reality by careful examination of immense fossil records by Sepkoski8 and others. This SOC in global life,
as suggested in the above quotation, has two major implications.
Firstly, the network of species in the global life is so intensively connected that the whole system behaves
as a single organism and may even collapse as a single entity. This feature, by emphasizing the unity of
global life, greatly reinforces the conceptual scheme upon which the ontological status of global life is
based. Secondly, the SOC in global life strongly indicates the fragility of the global organism. According
to the characteristic property of SOC, a minor impact or unbalance in the system may trigger a major
catastrophe.
Other than the idea of Gaia, the concept of global life has been raised by some authors without a specific
name for it. Margulis and Sagan, for instance, characterized life in a way remarkably similar to global life:
So, what is life? Life is planetary exuberance, a solar phenomenon. It is the astronomically
local transmutation of Earths air, water, and sun into cells. It is an intricate pattern of growth
and death, dispatch and retrenchment, transformation and decay. Life is the single expanding
organization connected through Darwinian time to the first bacteria and through Vernadskian space
to all citizens of biosphere. Life as God and music and carbon and energy is a whirling nexus of
growing, fusing, and dying beings. It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction in
order to indefinitely forestall the inevitable moment of thermodynamic equilibrium-death. Life is
also a question the universe poses to itself in the form of a human being.9
7 Per Bak, How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996) Chapter 8.
8 J. J. Jr. Sepkoski, Ten Years in the Library: New Data confirm Paleontological Patterns. Paleobiology 19 (1993) 43.
9 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 49.
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physiology of global life.

Proceedings
Compound order and intelligence

The last passage in the above quotation is intriguing. How can life be a question and impose it to itself?
The life discussed so far is strictly composed of material bodies, however large and complicated it might
be. Is it then possible such a mental attribute like a question be raised out of this monster?
To appreciate this, consider an analogous situation. Computers are simple material objects in every
respect, but somehow perform fairly sophisticated mental tasks. The software, usually addressed in
contrast to the hardware, is not a distinct physical body but an alternative depiction of the same object.
One depiction may be called as the inner aspect and the other as the outer aspect of the same subject
matter.
A partner in a highly advanced compound order should, for the sake of maintaining this order, coordinate
with other partners in a very close and delicate manner, and accordingly, develop a sophisticated
dynamical mechanism for this coordination. This mechanism, at the standpoint of that partner, includes
anticipatory readiness concerning the next move of other partners.
Here comes a real surprise for this compound order. That partner, so far regarded as a material body, turns
out to be a mental subject as well. In fact, all the mental activities performed by any subject, including
mine and yours, are of this nature. The mentality and the physicality are not two distinct substances but
just two modes of the same substance, one the subjective or inner mode, and the other the physical or
outer mode.
It is sometimes possible to translate any item in one mode to that of the other. For instance, the
organization and motion in the physical mode are translated into the intelligence and behavior in the
mental mode. For a close coordination with other partners, the mental subject needs a cute intelligence and
intellectual activities. In this sense, knowledge and information are understood as necessary devices
of cooperation, expressed in the mental mode, between subunits within the whole system of compound
order.
One of the interesting feats in this regard is that the knowledge is flexible enough even to pose a question
in it. Normally the questions are answered by newly acquired information, but the process may continue
to raise ever deeper questions. All these workings are an inherent property of nature, more specifically,
of the compound order formed in it. In other words, the nature, or the universe, poses questions to itself
through the frame of compound order, which is the life itself.
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Does it mean that life is a question the universe poses to itself in the form of a human being, as
Margulis and Sagan assert enigmatically in the above quotation? To answer this question, we have to
consider the possible meaning of human being in the frame of global life.
Human being and the self-conscious global life
If there remains a real mystery, probably irresolvable by advanced science, it is the subjectivity seemingly
embodied in compound order. Any partner in the global life can be in the subjective mode, but can be
we seldom feel problematic about it. As a thinking and cognitive subject, we are already in our subjective
mode, while the objects we recognize are in their objective mode. But the fact that objects are recognized
in the objective mode does not necessarily mean that all the descriptions are made in physical terms. Many
of the physical signals from objects may readily be interpreted and translated into more familiar mental
terms.
We can readily recognize and accept that other partners in many cases are in their subjective mode distinct
from mine. But, interesting enough, it is also possible to have inter-subjective connections to form a
collective subjectivity. The partner can not only be you but also be included in we, which means, within
my subjective mode. The usual communications are familiar means making such connections possible.
The human being, in the individual as well as the collective sense, is part of the global life. And like all
other plants and animals, human acts as a partner in the global life and coordinates closely with others to
maintain the compound order. Further, like all other partners, it can be in its subjective mode inwardly,
and can be depicted in the objective mode outwardly. In this regard, human is not quite different from
any other partners in the global life. If there is a difference, it seems to be a matter of degree rather than a
matter of substance.
But we find that there is an unbridgeable gap between being a human and being any other partner in
this global life. It relates to the fact that the presently operating subjective mode, in which you and I are
involved in this discussion, is none other than the human subjective mode. There is no way to escape from
this fate once involved in the presently operating subjective mode. It is the fundamental attribute of the
subjectivity itself. Once in it, no way otherwise. We can of course extend our subjectivity to include as
many contents as the connections make it possible, but still it is extended I. Moreover, it seems that there
is no non-human subjective mode operating in a comparable degree to our present one. In other words, we
have no You to call and listen to.
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depicted outwardly only in the objective mode. Both modes of existence are so familiar to us, in fact, that

Proceedings
The only way we can proceed in our present subjective mode is to expend it. We, human being, need
intelligence and perform mental activity as a partner in the global life to coordinate with all the other
ones in it. That is the normal exercise of our intelligence and we are all familiar with it. But once we
understand, or somehow feel, that the other partners are in fact part of the undividable whole, the global
life, which can be regarded as an extended body of myself, then all these activities can be construed as
something similar to our inner mental activities of self coordination within a single human body.
We would then be in the subjective mode of the global life, the global self. We would feel pain if trouble
is noticed anywhere in our global life, and would react, if judged necessary. Human being, as far as it is
instrumental for the global self, occupies a special position in the global life. This is a position analogous
to the brain or the central nervous system in the human body. Indeed, there is a division of labor in the
body of the global life: some species specialize in transforming solar energy into nutritious chemicals, and
others in decomposing trashes into usable materials. What would then the specialty of human species be
other than the intellectual and mental activities?
Can the global life, as a whole, be qualified as a bona fide mental subject? Some controversies might arise
on this matter. But as far as subjectivity is concerned, the clearest evidence is the subjective claim itself. If
someone, whether the human being or not, explicitly claims that he or she identifies himself or herself as
the global life in his or her mind, who could deny it? Obviously, we know that the life we are subjectively
engaging is the undivided whole, the global life, and then who are we, other than the global life itself?
Interestingly, this self-identification with the global life is not a novel phenomenon. Many sages and
intellectuals of all age identified themselves with something very much like the global life.
Tragic irony encountered on the global life
It is now possible to claim that our global life has finally become a self-conscious being, since at least
some conscious beings identifying themselves as the global life appeared. Indeed, the consciousness of
the global life, if such be granted, would be the collective human consciousness which identifies itself as
such.
Once we accept this, it would be an event of cosmic significance. Our global life, born some four billion
years ago, has grown to be of certain maturity, but until very recently it has been unconscious of itself
just like a person in a vegetative existence. But now, through the human collective intelligence, it finally
becomes conscious of itself. The consciousness within an individual person is marvellous enough, never
easily imaginable on the basis of physical understanding, but the newly emerging global consciousness
is even more marvellous and promising, opening a whole new era for the global life with the blessing of
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unprecedented mental upheaval.

Unfortunately, however, this is not the whole picture. Human beings have a tendency to severely distort
the normal physiology of the global life, and even to extinguish it. This behavior of human beings
to the global life is comparable to that of cancer cells to the host organism. Cancer cells themselves
are not external agencies invading the host body, but just part of it. They simply multiply themselves
uncontrollably, interrupting the normal functioning of the host organism, and eventually leading to
the demise of it. Human beings, like cancer cells, have colonized substantial part of the global life,
It would then be a tragic irony that the global life, some four billion years after its birth, finally becomes
intellectual and self-conscious only to find itself cancerously diseased by the same agent which makes it
possible to be a conscious being.
Then, what is the reason why such a marvellous intellectual being like human can become such a
cancerous being in the global life? One clue can be traced to the prevailing rather narrow conception of
life. No sane person would gladly continue his business if he realizes that what he is doing is the very
thing a cancerous cell is doing on his own body.
But, for ordinary people, in their everyday business, it is seldom necessary or even possible to imagine
the whole picture of the global life. They normally focus their attention on each single local order, and
designate a notion of life to its active mode. This notion of life serves to protect and provide means for
the maintenance of a local order, which is of course vitally important for our normal life. This notion
of life is, in fact, so accustomed to people that they are virtually enslaved by this conception. There are,
however, costs to pay for this. First of all, it makes them fail to see the real dimension of life, vainly
seeking its essence in the local order, namely, the individual living body. This makes them misjudge the
value associated with life: overestimating the value associated with individuals while failing to see the real
value the global life deserves.
How can the harmony between human and nature be achieved?
As every other species, the survival instinct of the human being is engraved on its genetic information.
This instinct is naturally of two kinds. One is the preservation and multiplication of the individual self and
the other is the cooperation with and conservation of the rest of the global life. Otherwise, the subsistence
of the species would be endangered. But the balance between those two opposing tendencies may not
always be sustained in an ideal position. As human civilization developed, it turned out that the instinct
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transforming it for the sake of their own prosperity and multiplication.

Proceedings
engraved on the gene is not sufficient, because certain extra need of cooperation arises. The social laws
and morality are one form of the cultural devices to amend the balance toward the cooperation and
conservation.
This amendment of balance, however, can be achieved more naturally by other means, namely, the
acquirement of a higher self-identity, like a family, a community or a nation. With such a new self-identity,
it is necessary only to invoke the instinct of self-preservation and make it directed toward the acquired
higher order self. Human beings somehow possess the ability to shift inclination even by the mental
manipulation of artificial self-identity. This tendency is most clearly demonstrated in the phenomena like
sports. Once they take sides to one party (the artificial self), then there naturally appears the favoring
tendency toward that direction. It is therefore expected that once they understand themselves as members
of a human family, certain collective self-identity would appear, and this might solve many ethical
problems within the human society. We can of course go one step further, and identify ourselves with the
global life. This ultimate self-identity, regarding the global life as ones own body, would help greatly to
solve the global predicament mentioned above.
There is, however, another problem which should be engaged by human being. It is the fundamental
fragility the global life inherited within its compositional structure. As we have mentioned earlier, the
global life is located at the point of self-organized criticality (SOC); by its characteristic property, a minor
impact or unbalance may trigger a major catastrophe. But we should notice that, while it is a phenomenon
of the global scale which should be understood from the global property of the entire system, it is
fundamentally based on local interactions between the components which compose the system. Therefore,
although the statistical character of the global phenomena remains unaffected, the local situation may be
changed by inner maneuver of the participant agencies. For instance, whether a portion of the global life
including the human species would be destroyed, or some other remote portion of it would get the tragedy,
may depend on the local situation for which certain intelligent maneuvering is possible.
Undoubtedly, human is the only being in charge of this. His intelligence as well as his mind is critical on
this matter. Less than wisest judgment might trigger the demise of the human race and the most precious
part of the global life.
In summary, the relation between human and nature is not a relation between two independent agencies,
but between two parts of a single living body, the global life, just like the relation between the brain and
the remaining part of the body. The harmony between human and nature should, therefore, be the harmony
between the brain and the remaining body, as well as the harmony between mental and physical activities.
If the harmony between the human and nature is in danger, it means that the physical and mental health
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of the global life is in jeopardy. Therefore, the most urgent task is to provide a whole new vision of life, in
which the physiology and the possible malady of it should be understood and properly be diagnosed. The
new forms of harmony between human and nature should then be explored and established on the basis of
such endeavor.
References
Per Bak, How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996).
2002).
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2004).
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).
Kapa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno, The Need for a Universal Definition of Life in Twenty-firstcentury Biology in Information and Living systems - Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives,
edited by Georgy Terzis and Robert Arp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011).
Ed Regis, What is Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
J. J. Jr. Sepkoski, Ten Years in the Library: New Data confirm Paleontological Patterns. Paleobiology 19
(1993), 43.
Hwe Ik Zhang, The Units of Life: Global and Individual, Paper presented at Philosophy of Science
Conference in Dubrovnik, 1988. reprinted in Hwe Ik Zhang, Science and Meta-Science, HyonAmSa
(2012).
Hwe Ik Zhang, Humanity in the World of Life. Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 24 (December,
1989), 447-56.
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Michael Boulter, Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man (New York: Columbia University Press,

Proceedings
Becoming the Alien: Avatar and District 9
Andrew M. Gordon
University of Florida
The recent science fiction films Avatar (2009) and District 9 (2009) deal with similar themes: the abuse
of advanced technology to despoil the environment and to oppress and slaughter minority populations.
Although both are fantasies set in the future, they are also relevant to contemporary environmental and
racial conflicts. And Avatar and District 9 have similar plots: the protagonist, a member of the white
oppressors, is sent to aid in the displacement of aliens from their homes. In both cases, the minority
groups are the most alien beings possible: an extraterrestrial species. In the course of the narrative, the
heroes are first physically and then psychologically transformed, taking on first the biological form and
then the psychology of the alien race. Gradually, the hero crosses over and ends up leading the alien
rebellion against the white imperialists. Both heroes are treated as race traitors and marked for death, yet
both survive and aid the alien groups they have joined. In both films, becoming an alien, both physically
and mentally, is envisioned as a radical form of healing from the sickness of human civilization. As
Neill Blomkamp, the director and co-writer of District 9, says, As he [the hero] becomes more alien, he
becomes more human (Blomkamp 2009).
As a critic mentions, Avatar and District 9 are a continuation of white guilt fantasies in the movies. For
the most part, in such movies we dont see the aliens through their own eyes but through white eyes, and
whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way (Newitz). Avatar and District
9 are conversion narratives, cures for the disease of whiteness, part of a nearly century-long tradition
in film, the myth of the white male hero who goes native, seen, for example, in the various cinematic
retellings of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, 1962, and 1984) and the tremendously popular western,
Dances with Wolves (1990) (Vera and Gordon 2003, 67-83, 137-42). In such films, the hero begins as a
colonial oppressor. He must be cured by prolonged separation from Western civilization, converted from
imperialist to anti-imperialist by being inducted into a native tribe. In Mutiny on the Bounty, English sailor
Fletcher Christian is seduced by a Pacific island paradise, a happy tribe, and a beautiful native maiden. He
finally refuses to return home and leads his shipmates in a rebellion against the tyrannical Captain Bligh.
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In Dances with Wolves, Lieutenant John Dunbar, a Union soldier wounded in the American Civil War,
goes to the western frontier at the time of the Indian wars. There he is seduced by the paradise of the wide
open plains, the noble savages of the Lakota Sioux, and a beautiful maiden (born white but raised by the
Sioux). He renounces his white identity, takes the Indian name Dances with Wolves, refuses to return
home, and leads his tribe against the U.S. cavalry.
Avatar might be subtitled Dances with Aliens (Gordon and Vera 2009). In Avatar, the Marine Jake
Sully lost the use of his legs in a future war and is offered a second chance on the distant moon Pandora,
the paradise of a wild forest, a tribe of noble savages and a beautiful native princess. Ultimately, he refuses
to return to Earth and leads the tribe in rebellion against their colonial oppressors, who are out to level the
forest and force the natives from their homes.
In contrast to these previous films, however, District 9 radically revises the cinematic myth of the hero
who goes native. One critic defines Avatar as a liberal narrative and District 9 as a radical one (Reider
2011). District 9 rejects the persistent strain of romantic mythology in the previous dramas about going
native. The protagonist Wikus is at first made deliberately unsympathetic, neither a respected naval
officer like Fletcher Christian nor a wounded warrior like John Dunbar or Jake Sully but a smug, petty
bureaucrat in charge of the eviction of the extraterrestrial Prawn from a Johannesburg, South Africa
slum. The Prawn are not handsome, noble savages but insectoid aliens, a hive rather than a tribe. Their
environment is not a paradise but a slum into which they have been forced. There is no beautiful native
princess; in fact, the hero acutely misses his human wife. Most significant, the transformation of Wikus is
neither willed nor witting but accidental and involuntary, triggered by exposure to an alien chemical that
alters him biologically into one of the Prawn. District 9 is a highly ironic tale about an anti-hero, a hero in
spite of himself, a movie with strong elements of body horror, black comedy and political satire. It offers a
scathing critique of the ills of contemporary civilization and a radical cure.
The transformation of Jake Sully in Avatar from a white Earthman to an alien warrior on a distant planet
is structured as a myth of the birth of a hero. Many popular science fiction and fantasy film series are
myths about the coming of a messiah, a superhero who will liberate the city, the world, or the galaxy from
the forces of evil: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Star Wars, The Teminator, Harry Potter, The Matrix,
or Avatar. Otto Rank argues that, like paranoid delusions, the hero myth is egotistical, merely the means
for his own exaltation (Rank 1959, 94). Often this mythic hero has a dual identity: an everyday identity
as Clark Kent or Jake Sully, versus a superhero identity as Superman, or, in Avatar, Toruk Macto.
Sometimes the hero shuttles between two worlds and suffers a confusion between two identities, or he
must symbolically die in order to be reborn into the heroic identity, as in The Matrix and Avatar.
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operating by remote control an avatar, a replica of one of the humanoid natives. There he is seduced by

Proceedings
Avatar is set in a dystopian future in which the Earth is a dying planet and has begun to colonize other
planets in search of land and resources. Jake is torn between two worldsa real world and a kind of
dream worldand two identities: his real world identity and his avatar self in the dream world. His
ordinary identity is Jake Sully, a white man from Earth, an ex-Marine Corporal in a wheelchair. But his
superhero identity in the dream world is that of his avatar, which has the appearance of one of the Navi,
a ten-foot tall, blue-skinned native. In the lush forests of Pandora, Jake has full use of his legs and is swift
and powerful.
The distinction between the two worlds is likened to the difference between waking and dreaming. Jake
says in the opening, voice-over narration, When I was lying there in the VA [military veterans] hospital
with a big hole blown through the middle of my life, I started having these dreams of flying. I was free.
Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up. Yet the apparently dream images that accompany
this opening narrationof swooping through clouds and over lush green forestsare prescient, for Jake
will later experience these same views in reality on Pandora when he is transformed from a human into an
extraterrestrial and learns to fly a banshee.
To emphasize the distinction between the real and the dream worlds, Avatar references the film The
Wizard of Oz. Colonel Quaritch tells the mercenaries newly arrived on Pandora, Youre not in Kansas
anymore, alluding to Dorothys line when she arrives in Oz. Pandora has some of the same scary,
beautiful, overwhelming potential as the dream world of Oz. Just as Dorothy can realize herself in Oz, so
Jake can realize his true, heroic self on Pandora.
Throughout the film, the images of dreaming and waking are connected with repeated images of sight and
of death and rebirth. The film begins with Jake awakening in a capsule after almost six years in cryogenic
suspension on the journey from Earth. Right after Jake says, you always have to wake up, there is a
close up of Jakes eye opening, an image which will be echoed in the films closing image of the eye of
Jakes avatar opening. He says, In cryo, you dont dream at all. When the capsule opens, and Jake floats
out in zero gravity, it is if he is being reborn from a tomb or womb.
Continuing the motif of death and rebirth, as the ship descends into Pandoras atmosphere, Jake flashes
back to his twin brother Tommys cremation, and he says, One life ends. Another begins. Tommys
death means a new life for Jake, who will take his brothers place on Pandora. And the film ends as Jake
lets his human body die so that he may live permanently in his alien body. In both the opening and the
closing scenes, One life ends. Another begins. Jakes last line in the film is Its my birthday, after all.
In Avatar, the hero must be reborn and grow up anew so he can become the messiah of this new world.
Jake finds himself in his new avatar body, alone and lost in the forest at night, threatened by wild animals,
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only to be rescued by the beautiful native princess Neytiri, who tells him, You are like a baby. No fear.
But stupid! Ignorant like a child! Neytiri becomes the mentor/mother/lover figure who will help him to
grow up.
At the opening of the film, Jake still defines himself as a Marine, even though he is a disabled vet. He says,
Theres no such thing as an ex-Marine. You may be out, but you never lose the attitude. I told myself I
could pass any test a man could pass. But, as a Marine, he feels inferior to his twin brother Tommy: Yeah,
Jake has money problems. Of his paralysis, he says, They can fix a spinal, if you got the money. But not
on vet benefits. Not in this economy, suggesting the unfairness of this technologically advanced future.
He takes the place of his dead twin as an avatar operator because, as a disabled veteran, its the best and
perhaps the only offer he has. As the company tells him, Itd be a fresh start. On a new world. And
the pay is good. Very good. He has contempt for the thief who killed his brother for the paper in his
wallet and contempt for his fellow ex-soldiers on Pandora: Back on Earth, these guys were Army dogs,
Marines, fighting for freedom. But out here, theyre just hired guns, taking the money, working for the
company. Ironically, Jake is in the same position, taking the money and working for the company.
The nameless corporation for which Jake works is only interested in money. Parker Selfridge, the
company representative on Pandora, tells the scientist Grace Augustine, who is in charge of the Avatar
program, This is why were here: unobtainium. Because this little rock sells for $20 million a kilo. To
Selfridge, the Avatar program is a little puppet show; to the mercenary commander Col. Quaritch, it is
a bad joke. They tolerate the program only because the natives are living on top of one of the richest
deposits of the precious mineral, and the company is looking for a diplomatic way to force them to
resettle.
Although he believes that he could pass any test a man could pass, Jake quickly accepts the deal offered
by Col. Quaritch, who represents the bad father. Quaritch, a fellow ex-Marine, flatters Jakes military
accomplishments when almost everyone on Pandora rejects him: his fellow soldiers look down on him
as a useless cripple, meals on wheels, and the scientists with whom he works consider him a jarhead
dropout, not a brilliant scientist like his dead brother. Quaritch, however, calls Jake son, treats him like
a Marine under his command, and promises him newly functioning legs when he returns to Earth, saying,
Son, I take care of my own. He needs a man on the inside he can control, a Marine in an Avatar body....
I want you to learn these savages from the inside. I want you to gain their trust. I want to know how to
force their cooperation or hammer them hard if they wont. So, out of mixed motivesSemper Fi
loyalty to his Marine identity and to the commandant, along with a desire to be made whole againJake
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Tommy was the scientist. Me, Im just another dumb grunt going someplace hes gonna regret.

Proceedings
becomes a spy.
Jakes compromise means he begins his mission with divided loyalties: Is he working for the good
mother Grace, a botanist who respects Pandoran ecology and Navi culture? Or is he a traitor working
for the bad father Quaritch, who treats the Navi like Custer treated the Indians? Later Jake also becomes
split between his human identity as a Marine from Earth, and his alien identity as a Navi warrior.
Jakes movement between the two worlds later creates in him inability to decide which is the real world
and which the dream world, and a resultant confusion of identity. Not until Jake resolves this identity
confusion can he attain his predestined status as Toruk Macto, the mythic savior of the Navi. Neytiri
tells him that Toruk Macto means rider of the last shadow, the great bird. Toruk Macto is mighty: he
brought the clans together in a time of great sorrow.
Jakes transformation from human to alien is gradual and goes through many stages. The first turning
point occurs in the comic scene when he first operates his alien avatar. The awkward Jake towers over
the humans in his alien body, has a long, waving tail, and is wearing only an embarrassing hospital gown
open in back. He is so overexcited at regaining the use of his legs that he starts to run through the camp,
faster and faster. When he stops, he wiggles his toes in the dirta simple pleasure which had been denied
him for years as a paraplegic. This is the beginning of the freedom of which Jake had been dreaming in
the hospital.
He may have the alien body, but he knows nothing about the alien environment. On his first expedition
with the science team, he flees a huge predator, gets lost in the woods, and tries to survive the night while
surrounded by a pack of ferocious, hungry beasts. After Neytiri rescues him, he thanks her and asks her to
teach him, but she rejects him: You are like a baby making noise, dont know what to do. You should
not be here. Go back.
At this point, fortuitously, Jakes body becomes covered by floating luminous plants, seeds of the sacred
treevery pure spirits, which Neytiri takes as a sign from the goddess Eywa that Jake himself is a pure
spirit. So she brings him home to her clan. This is the second major turning point in Jakes transformation,
and the first sign that he is destined to be the chosen one.
Her father Eytukan, the clan leader, says Jake is the first warrior dreamwalker we have seen. To call the
avatars dreamwalkers implies that they are somnambulists: they lie in capsules like coffins and seem
asleep (or dead), and yet at the same time they walk around in false bodies. So Eytukan orders Neytiri
to teach him to speak and walk as we do, so that he will no longer be a sleepwalker but awake like the
Navi. So begins the next part of his transformation, his training by Neytiri, which leads ultimately to his
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initiation into the tribe.

At first, Jake is clumsy and they mock him. But he learns quickly, saying, With Neytiri, its learn fast or
die. And he grows stronger: My feet are getting tougher. I can run farther every day. I can trust my body
to know what to do.
But Jake still does not fully understand or respect the Navi nature worship. He tells Grace that Neytiri is
always going on about the flow of energy, spirits of animals. I really hope this tree-hugger crap isnt on
Jakes third turning point, a major step in his acceptance into the clan, happens when he tames and flies a
great bird. On his first flight, Jake experiences again the exhilaration of his first run with his new legs, a
feeling underscored by swooping camera movement and soaring music. Now he is living his dreams of
flying and feels truly free: I was a stone cold aerial killer; death from above.
Jake now spends more and more time in his avatar body and neglects his human body, rarely bothering to
eat, sleep, bathe, or shave. But he is growing increasingly confused about his identity. In his video log, he
says, Everything is backwards now. Like out there [among the Navi] is the true world and in here is the
dream. Its hard to believe its only been three months. I dont know who I am anymore. When Quaritch
tells him that his work is over and he can leave that night for Earth, Jake stalls for more time to go through
the tribal initiation ceremony. He no longer really wants to go home and give up his wonderful new life.
He wants to become an alien, to be one of them.
Jakes voice-over narration at the initiation ceremony continues the motif of rebirth: The Navi say that
every person is born twice. The second time is when you earn your place among the peopleforever.
Soon after this, he mates with Neytiri.
At that point, things rapidly worsen. Jake stops a bulldozer from leveling the forest, rebelling against the
company and showing his changed identity. He tries to warn the clan, Do not attack the Sky People.
Many Omaticaya will die, but the warrior Tsutey will not listen. Quaritch cuts Jakes connection with
his avatar and slugs him, saying, You found yourself some local tail and you just forget what team youre
playing for? Later, when he confronts Jake in the climactic battle, he accuses him of being a race traitor:
Hey, Sully, how does it feel to betray your own race? You think youre one of them? Time to wake up
(my emphasis).
Jake and Grace fail to persuade the people to evacuate, and Quaritch and his helicopters attack with tear
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the final. Grace urges him to try to see the forest through her eyes.

Proceedings
gas and incendiaries. When Home Tree burns and falls, it evokes 9/11. When her father dies in the attack,
Neytiri rejects Jake as a betrayer. Repeating what has become a refrain, Jake narrates: I was a warrior
who dreamed he could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you have to wake up (my emphasis).
When Jake next returns to his avatar body, he finds himself alone in the burned forest: Outcast. Betrayer.
Alien. I was in the place the eye does not see. When he says alien, he means human; at this point,
the usual meaning of the terms has been reversed, just as the waking life and the dream life have been
reversed. Outcast, with nothing else to lose, Jake tames the giant bird, flies back to the clan as Toruk
Macto, the messiah, and they fall to their knees in awe. It is the only way he can return and unite the clans
to defeat the company.
The climactic battle is reminiscent of the fight of the Ewoks against the Imperial Stormtroopers in Return
of the Jedi (1983): primitive forest dwellers use ingenuity and knowledge of the environment to defeat an
opposing force possessing overwhelming technological superiority. In Avatar, Mother Nature takes her
revenge, as even the beasts of the forest and the birds of the sky attack the invading Earthmen. Neytiri
kills Quaritch by piercing his body with arrows. Then, in a Piet image, she cradles Jakes human body in
her huge arms and revives him with an oxygen mask.
Aside from the death of the villain, the bad father, Jake also has a rival who must be eliminated. As Otto
Rank writes, the mythological heros doubles are shadowy brothers who, like the twin brother, must die
for the heros sake (Rank 1959, 90). In Avatar, the heros twin brother dies so that Jake can be reborn, no
longer disabled, and become the messiah.
Later Jake faces another rival in Tsutey, the chief warrior and next head of the clan, his rival for the
love of Neytiri, and the man who dismisses Jake from the tribe. Although Tsutey allies with him when
Jake becomes Toruk Macto, Tsutey is killed in the climactic battle. In the mythic pattern, not only the
evil father figure but all the heros doubles, brothers, or rivals must be eliminated for him to become the
messiah.
That Jake is crippled is in line with other disabled mythical heroes, such as Oedipus, whose name means
swollen foot. Otto Rank suggests that the physical defects of certain heroes is a means by which the
reproaches of the father for possible defects or shortcomings are incorporated into the myth[] the hero
being endowed with the same weakness which burdens the self-respect of the individual (Rank 1959,
92).
The villains in both Avatar and District 9Col. Quaritch and Col. Koobusare similar characters:
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despicable racists whom the hero must finally confront in a duel to the death. As critics note, the Marine
commander Quaritch is hyper-masculine. one dimensional, exaggerated (Reider 2011, 46). He is
a cartoon villain, a ruthless, trained killer. Quaritch has a dragon painted on the cockpit of his attack
helicopter, and his code name in battle is Papa Dragon. Ironically, Jake resembles Quaritch: both are
tough, wounded Marines who show no fear, and in the final battle, Jake rides a flying dragon (Fore 2011).
Quaritch is not Jakes double but an evil father figure, possessing Jakes potential but turned to destruction.
Although Quaritch is in certain respects admirablefearless, determined, and hard to killhe is a racist
terror with terror. A fascist, he stands in for the patriarchy, a scapegoat for capitalism and colonialism
who must suffer spectacularly violent punishment (Rieder 2011, 46).
In contrast, the Navi is a matriarchal society. Their goddess, Eywa, is associated with Mother Nature,
which they venerate, whereas Jake says of Earth: Theres no green there. They killed their Mother, and
theyre gonna do the same here. Unless we stop them. At the end of Avatar, Jake says, The aliens
[meaning the Earthmen] went back to their dying world. Avatar reinforces its ecological message through
eye-popping visual effects, digital and 3D imagery, creating a beautiful alien landscape, a lush, tropical
paradise complete with exotic flora and fauna.
Avatar is a moral tale painted in broad strokes: the evil corporation and the mad mercenary, who are
racists, destroyers of the environment, and care only for profits, versus the natives, who are noble savages
spiritually attuned to nature, literally through their connection to the tree of life. When an ecological
paradise and a noble people are threatened with destruction by technologically overwhelming invaders,
the audience of course knows which side to root for. The hero realizes that his world is corrupt and
destructive and that the natives are good, so he goes native. To underscore the racial allegory, the villains
are white, whereas the Navi are played by non-white actors: Latinos and Latinas, African Americans, and
Native Americans.
On the one hand, Avatar sends numerous positive messages to an American and a global audience: it is
progressive about the disabled, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-gender equality, and, above
all, pro-environment. It has been called the most expensive environmental advocacy commercial ever
made (Scheib 2009). It also mocks the imperialist rhetoric of the George W. Bush administration about
pre-emptive strikes and shock and awe and the use of mercenary armies such as Blackwater. On the
other hand, these liberal messages are purveyed through a regressive myth about a white messiah and the
noble savagesa white messiah who is reborn as the noblest savage of them all (Gordon and Vera 2009).
The plot of Avatar is a pastiche, recycled from a dozen movies about the adventures of a mythic white
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villain. He echoes George W. Bush, saying, Our only security lies in pre-emptive attack. We will fight

Proceedings
hero in a distant land or on a distant planet, including Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dune (1984), Dances
with Wolves (1990), and The Last Samurai (2003). The elements are predictable: the hero shows
tremendous ability, quickly learns the native ways, woos the beautiful native princess, is inducted into the
tribe, and leads them in a struggle for survival and freedom against evil outsiders. The white American
racial imagination seems to require such stories (Gordon and Vera 2009).
Avatar is a racial fantasy for the Age of Obama. Like Obama, Jake is racially mixed: although he starts out
as white guy, he ends up inhabiting the body of an aboriginal on an alien planet. And, like Obama, Jake is
accused of being anti-capitalist and anti-white. Yet the movie is a very expensive capitalist product which
resolves white guilt by dividing whites into two kinds: the evil mercenaries who destroy the environment
and kill the native population on behalf of the greedy corporations; and the noble white messiah who goes
native and leads the tribes (and a few good white allies) in a successful battle to preserve their land and
their way of life against the evil whites (Gordon and Vera 2009).
District 9 has many of the same elements as Avatar: both are fast-moving, special-effects SF adventures
about an evil corporation and its evil mercenary army, featuring a white hero sent to relocate sympathetic
extraterrestrials from their home, who is transformed into an alien and in the end takes up their cause.
Nevertheless, although they may have similar stories, Avatar is a romantic myth continuing the Hollywood
tradition of tales of the noble white hero who goes native and joins the noble savages, whereas District 9
was made outside the Hollywood orbit and has many of the marks of independent or Third World cinema.
Avatars production budget was between $250 and $350 million dollars; District 9s was only $30 million
(Cho 2009).
Moreover, Avatar is rated PG-13, targeted to a family audience, whereas District 9 is rated R, aimed at a
more adult audience, and is more hard-edged, complete with graphic violence, swear words, and sexual
content. For example, District 9 includes vomiting, bloodshed, and gross-out scenes of body horror; the
protagonist Wikus all-purpose expletive is fuckin; there is mention of interspecies prostitution; and
Wikus himself is falsely accused of having intercourse with aliens, doing it doggy style with a demon.
District 9 co-writer and director Neill Blomkamp says, The film is two things: it is a Hollywood popcorn
movie. but it also needed to be as real as possible and as grounded as possible (Blomkamp 2009).
Half of the film is pseudo-documentary, consisting of interviews and television news reports or pseudofound footage, such as laboratory experiments and surveillance tapes. Many shots are done with handheld camera, images caught on the fly rather than the beautifully composed shots of Avatar. To further
the realism, it was shot largely on location in Soweto, the densely populated Johannesburg, South Africa
black ghetto, in a section with a hundred abandoned tin shacks built on landfill. Although the events
164
are fantastic, the environment is real: garbage-strewn and disgusting. To add to the authenticity, the
mercenaries use contemporary South African military vehicles, uniforms, and weapons.
Aside from favoring realism over romantic mythology, District 9 also differs tonally from Avatar
because of its strong elements of horror, black humor, and political satire. Avatar has no horror, takes
itself seriously, and lacks satire except for Quaritchs echo of a George W. Bush line. Simply by virtue of
being set in contemporary Johannesburg, District 9 comments on South Africa under apartheid and post-
It is very much a local film. Neill Blomkamp is a young, white South African who moved to Canada. In
Vancouver, I started working as a special effects artist. then directing music videos and commercials
(Abramovitch 2009). In 2005, he returned to make a short film, Alive in Joburg, in which he interviewed
black South Africans for their opinions about recent black immigrants to South Africa from Zimbabwe
and Nigeria. Given the opportunity to make a feature film by the New Zealand producer/director Peter
Jackson (of the Lord of the Rings trilogy), he kept some of the documentary features and changed the
immigrants into extraterrestrials.
Blomkamps interest was in Western SF placed in Southern Africa. He says, Johannesburg is
science fiction to me [] I fear that Johannesburg represents the future of the planet [] where were
going with lack of resources and overpopulation [] Five percent of the population controlling all the
wealth, and everybody else lives in abject poverty. If you want to see that future, just take a plane trip
to Johannesburg. He saw the contrast between the exclusive gated communities of the wealthy and the
vast, sprawling slums of Johannesburg, and he wanted to capture the atmosphere of an urban prison
(Blomkamp 2009). The title, District 9, alludes to District 6, a mixed-race area in Cape Town, South
Africa, whose citizens were forcibly evacuated in the 1970s so that the district could be leveled and rebuilt
for whites only (District Six).
The genesis of the film, he says, was layering science fiction into the apartheid world (Blomkamp
2009). In 1982, 28 years before the films present, a million Prawn arrived in a disabled spaceship
hovering over Johannesburg. The premise resembles Alien Nation (1988), except that in that film the
aliens look much like humans and want only jobs, whereas the Prawn are insectoid and unassimilable
(Zborowski 2010). Helpless and destitute, the Prawn were housed in a temporary camp. A sociologist
comments for the documentary: What was a temporary holding zone soon became fenced, became
militarized, and, before we knew it, it was a slum. Even though the wall around District 9 has an
idealistic sloganPaving the Way to Unityand a battered iron statue of a Human and a Prawn
holding hands, the reality is ugly, as the Prawn are confined to their ghetto, exploited and brutalized.
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apartheid.

Proceedings
Signs proliferate: No Prawn Allowed. One black woman, interviewed on TV, says, Theyre spending
so much money to keep them there, when they could be spending it on other things. But at least theyre
keeping them separate from us. Another black citizen bluntly says, on camera, They must just go. The
neighboring humans begin to riot, and it is decided to relocate the aliens.
This black vs. Prawn conflict can be considered a political allegory about the xenophobia of the postapartheid South African society, in which poor black South Africans rioted against destitute Zimbabweans,
even killing some immigrants. According to Blomkamp, they hated the Zimbabwean refugees as aliens
who had arrived in their communities (Blomkamp 2009).
The Navi in Avatar live in harmony with their planet, and have a sophisticated culture and direct
biochemical links to the ecosystem; the humans are the alien invaders. Jake says of the Navi, There is
nothing that we have that they want. In District 9, however, the Prawn are the aliens intruding on planet
Earth. But they come neither as the typical invading aliens out to conquer the planet nor as wise and
peaceful visitors but as homeless indigents, undesirable aliens who can never be integrated.
For most of the film, we are kept at a documentary remove from the Prawn. Our first glimpse of them is
documentary footage of first contact aboard their stranded ship by a South African exploratory team. The
Prawn are caught in a floodlight: a horde of grey, shambling monstrosities that initially elicit shock and
horror. A reporter tells us, The creatures were extremely malnourished. They were very unhealthy. They
seemed to be aimless. They are helpless refugees, charity cases.
An entomologist says in an interview that they are insectoid, hive creatures. The Prawn in the colony
are drone workers who lack initiative because they lost all the upper leadership, for whatever cause, we
presume illness. They scavenge the garbage piles for anything usable and are thieving magpies who
will steal the sneakers off your feet and engage in seemingly random violence. A sociologist says that the
derogatory term Prawn implies something that is a bottom feeder that scavenges the leftovers. Not
mentioned is that there is in Johannesburg a cricket called the Parktown prawn, capable of large jumps
when threatened, often ejecting an offensive black fecal liquid. These pests eat anything, including cat
food (Parktown Prawn). The movie gives the aliens all the attributes of the Parktown prawn. Unlike the
handsome humanoids in Avatar, the Prawn are ugly, shiftless pests, ideal targets for racist paranoia. In the
racist imagination, ethnic and racial others are viewed as animals or insects. As Quaritch says when he
destroys the natives home, Thats how you scatter the roaches.
Nevertheless, despite their insectoid features, the Prawn are relatable through their anthropomorphic
shape: they have two arms, two legs, and a head, and they walk upright. Says Neill Blomkamp, Because
166
you have to empathize with the aliens, they needed to have a humanlike face. You can see that theres
an intelligent, sentient being behind the eyes, but its gross and you dont want to be sitting next to it on
the bus (Blomkamp 2009). Like Spielbergs E.T., they are ugly but have large, expressive, humanoid
eyes. In addition, some of the Prawn comically adopt bits of human clothing.
Moreover, despite the apparently aimless behavior of the drones, the Prawn are not primitives but possess
an advanced technology that carried them across the galaxy. They have something the humans want:
advanced weaponry. MNU (Multi-National United), the corporation tasked with relocating the Prawn,
interacts with their DNA. Whoever unlocks the secret, so that humans can operate Prawn weapons, will
make billions of dollars.
For that reason, MNU engages in grotesque medical experiments in a hidden lab, trying to uncover the
secrets of Prawn DNA. Blomkamp says the idea of medical torture was taken from Nazi experiments, but
there were also racial medical experiments during the apartheid regime. For example, They were trying
to develop pathogens that could affect a black genetic group and not a white genetic group (Blomkamp
2009).
Just as we are at first distanced from the aliens for most of District 9, so we are distanced from the hero.
Jake in Avatar is a crippled warrior made sympathetic through his voice-over narration. But Wikus van
der Merwe, the white South African protagonist in District 9, is a weasel of a guy with a ratty mustache,
a petty bureaucrat who zealously does the corporations dirty work of evicting the aliens. We are kept at
a documentary remove from him. His mother says, Wikus was not a very smart boy, and his father-inlaw says Wikus was never very strong. At first, his only positive characteristic is his deep love for his
wife. Blomkamp says, Hes a complete bureaucrat, this very anal, rule-following kind of guy. Hes a.
passive racist, an indirect racist (Blomkamp 2009).
Nevertheless, in the course the film, Wikus changes dramatically for the better. As Blomkamp says, he
goes through this staggering arc. As he becomes more alien, he becomes more human (Blomkamp
2009).
In the opening, the documentary alludes to an unspecified disaster which happened during the evictions.
Wikus was blamed, and apparently he is either missing or dead. His mother and wife are very sad, but
some co-workers denounce Wikus as a betrayer who cant be forgiven. This arouses our curiosity at the
beginning as to what he did and whether he is still alive.
Wikus is elated and proud at being promoted by his father-in-law to field officer in charge of the eviction,
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wants those weapons. An MNU scientist says, Their technology is engineered in a biological manner and

Proceedings
a dubious promotion due to nepotism. He takes his new authority very seriously and goes door to door
among the Prawn shacks, grasping his clipboard, asking each alien to put a scrawl on a pseudo-legal
eviction notice which most of them do not understand. Helicopters hover overhead, and heavily armed
soldiers force unarmed Prawns to their knees and murder any resisters, like the Nazi liquidations of the
Jewish ghettos. One South African critic attests to the authenticity of the scene: The obvious value of
turning the shack dweller into a real alien is that the film can deal with the [] processes by which we
turn people into aliens, contain them, criminalise them, beat them and then evict them for their own good
[] although it is a fantasy it contains more reality than were likely to find in [] the official consensus
(Pitmore 2009).
Wikus is a zealous enforcer for the corporation, using briberycans of catfood for the adults and candy
for the child aliensand threats: when the alien called Christopher Johnson refuses to sign, he threatens
to put his little son into child custody.
Wikus is elated when he uncovers illegal caches of alien weapons or technology, but he is most
despicable when he discovers an alien hatchery. He begins aborting the alien eggs by unplugging them
from nourishment, a dead cow carcass. Then he is gleeful as the incubator is destroyed by flamethrower,
explaining to the documentary filmmaker that the popping sound, almost like popcorn, that they hear
is the sound of the Prawn eggs exploding. At this moment, Wikus seems not that different from the brutal
mercenary Col. Koobus Venter, who smiles when he shoots a wounded, unarmed Prawn in the head.
Things begin to change drastically for Wikus when he discovers a capsule in Christopher Johnsons lab.
He accidentally squirts himself in the face with the black fluid in the capsule, which is spaceship fuel, and
the contamination begins the process of his transformation into a Prawn. He becomes weak and feverish,
vomits, oozes black fluid from his nose, loses control of his bowels, and, most scary, starts to lose his
fingernails. That evening, he vomits black fluid and collapses.
At the hospital, when they cut the cast off his arm (he had been injured during the evacuations), to his
horror he discovers that his left hand has changed into an alien claw. Immediately, Wikus is placed in
quarantine and evacuated to the MNU lab. There he is poked and prodded and forced to shoot targets
with alien weaponry. When he refuses to kill a live Prawn, they shock him with an electric cattle prod.
Wikus is horrified.
When they prepare to operate to harvest his valuable mix of human and alien DNA, Wikus goes berserk,
jumps off the table, seizes a hostage, and escapes. For the rest of the movie, he is on the run from MNU,
who want to recapture him because he is the most valuable business artifact on Earth. As Blomkamp
168
says, Our protagonist flees to the area that he is responsible for creating and ends up in a shack, which is
precisely what this guy kind of deserved (Blomkamp 2009). Wikus now finds himself in a place similar
to Jake after the fall of Hometree: alien, outcast, and alone.
Yet the fundamental difference is that, for Jake, being an alien is voluntary and a reward, whereas for
Wikus it is involuntary and a punishment. In that sense, District 9 resembles movies in which a white
character is transformed against his will, by magic, into a person of another race, such as Finians Rainbow
(1968), Watermelon Man (1970), and Zelig (1984) (Vera and Gordon 2003,146-50). Wikus is a racist who
But his physical and psychological change into an alien is gradual.
At first, Wikus falls back on legalities and white privilege, as when he demands that a fast-food restaurant
is legally obliged to serve him. And when he discovers an alien ship beneath the alien Christophers shack.
Wikus says, This is very illegal. This is a find. Are you fuckers trying to fly this? You sneaky fucking
prawns! His mindset as an MNU bureaucrat and enforcer of the law in the ghetto comically clashes with
his present situation as an outlaw who is half-Prawn and needs a place to hide.
To his disgust, Wikus gains the alien taste for catfood. Next his teeth start falling out. When his wife rejects
him on the phone, in despair Wikus attempts to chop off his alien left arm with a hatchet, succeeding only
in amputating a claw. Later he is appalled to find the skin peeling off his body as it is being replaced by
a Prawn carapace. Blomkamp calls this body horror. Theres nothing more horrifying that the idea
that your body is coming apart at the seams. You are turning into another being. Does the structure
of your brain turn into something else as well? At what point is Wikus no longer Wikus? (Blomkamp
2009). In this respect, the film recalls the physical and psychological torment of the hero of the horror
movie The Fly (1986) who because of a botched lab experiment is slowly transformed into a monster,
half-human and half-insect.
Despite his accelerating physical transformation, Wikus still clings to his human identity. When
Christophers little son compares his arm to Wikus, saying We are the same, Wikus denies it: Were
not the fucking same. Yet if he is not yet a Prawn, nevertheless he is no longer the same heartless fascist
bureaucrat. He admits to Christopher and Christophers son that the relocation camp he was touting is more
like a concentration camp.
When Wikus learns that Christopher can change him back into human shape if they can get to the
mothership, he hatches a plan to recover the capsule containing the black fuel. He becomes a desperado,
stealing alien weapons from a Nigerian gang and shooting his way out, then breaking into the MNU lab
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can only be redeemed by literally forcing him into the skin of the despised race he has been oppressing.

Proceedings
with Christopher, killing several mercenaries and escaping with the capsule. According to Blomkamp, the
film questions how far a man can be pushed until he crosses over to become this mercenary rogue guy
(Blomkamp 2009). Wikus has now been pushed so far that he will stop at nothing.
Stopping at nothing means that he is even willing to betray his Prawn friend. Christopher now says
he must go home in the mothership to get help to rescue his people from the medical experiments he
witnessed in the MNU lab, and he will return in three years. Unwilling to wait, Wikus hits Christopher in
the head and takes off in the command module with Christophers son. When he slugs his friend, it makes
us hate Wikus again, says Blomkamp. Because, at his core, hes kind of a dick (Blomkamp 2009). You
begin to wonder whether this character is redeemable.
After that, the action speeds up to the climactic showdown, which is a three-way shootout between the
mercenaries, the Nigerians, and Wikus. At first, Wikus flees like a coward from Koobus, but when he
overhears Koobus plan to kill Christopher, he returns to rescue him. This is the turning point of the film:
Wikus, who previously acted only for himself, now stays behind to fight so that his alien friend can get to
his son, go to the mothership, and return home.
Because of Koobus sacrifice, Christopher and his son succeed, and the mothership takes off. There may
even be a religious allegory in a character named Christopher who wants to save his people, ascends into
the sky, and promises to return, not in three days but in three years (Smith-Rowsey). The conversion of
Wikus could then be seen almost as a religious conversion.
In the climactic battle, Wikus in a robotic exosuit fights off the mercenary army and Col. Koobus. It
resembles the climax of Avatar, but with weapons reversed because in Avatar the mercenary Col. Quaritch
had the enhanced powers of exosuit armor. Finally, an exhausted Wikus crawls out of the damaged
exosuit. Now further transformed, Wikus has one human and one enlarged alien eye. Koobus holds a gun
on him, saying, You half-breed piece of shit, Im just gonna kill you myself, like Quaritch in the climax
of Avatar calling Jake a race traitor as he prepares to kill him. And, just as Jake is rescued at the last
moment by the native woman Neytiri, so Wikus is rescued by a mob of the Prawn, who tear Koobus apart
limb from limb .
The film ends with a return to the documentary mode. District 10 now houses 2.5 million aliens and
continues to grow. No one knows if Christopher Johnson will come back and declare war on us, and
no one knows what happened to Wikus. His wife Tania has not given up hope; she just found a little metal
flower on her doorstep, typical of the handmade gifts Wikus used to give her. In the films last shot, we see
a Prawn on a garbage heap shaping a little metal sculpture. In his commentary, the director says, I hope
170
the audience feels theyve gone along on this journey with Wikus and that he redeems himself in the end
(Blomkamp 2009).
Both films were very popular and have been widely praised and criticized. Avatar was praised for its
beautiful cinematography, groundbreaking effects, and some of its liberal messages, but criticized for its
clichs, bad dialogue, and preachiness. District 9 was lauded for its novelty, realism, and relevance to
contemporary globalization and South African problems in the post-apartheid period, but criticized for
One representative critic writes of District 9, It decries xenophobia but presents a situation where
progress and integration are rendered unimaginable. The film creates the alien identification figure that its
plot requires [Christopher], but the script does not do enough to help us understand how he fits in with
the other aliens (Zborowski 2010).
In particular, the film spurred outrage among some Africans for its apparently racist representation of the
Nigerian immigrants who have settled in District 9 and exploit the Prawns, and who are represented as
vicious gangsters led by a superstitious and savage warlord. One critic wrote that this portrayal spits in
the faces of the millions of Nigerian citizens who devoted themselves to the anti-apartheid movement
(Ray 2010), and an online petition site asked the filmmakers to apologize to the Nigerian people (District
9 slander 2010). But another African critic responded, If District 9 hates Nigerians. then it hates
its powerful, white characters even more. Blomkamp is forcing us to challenge our own perceptions
about race and equality. He makes it clear the Nigerians are no better or worse than their white (or
alien) counterparts, creating an unsettling sort of equality among the characters. And while the film may
occasionally play on clumsy racial stereotypes, it also encourages us to challenge them (Azikiwe 2009).
Other critics concur: No single group within South African society is presented in a sympathetic way,
neither the MNU people or the military, nor the people on the streets or the experts interviewed (Gunkel
and Konig 2010).
In conclusion, I would have to say that District 9 is a more thoughtful movie than Avatar. Whereas
Avatar sometimes spells out its messages in a heavy-handed way, District 9 allows the audience to sift
through its various layersfaux-documentary and cinematic narrativeand reach our own conclusions.
I enjoy Blomkamps dark sense of humor, his bureaucratic nerd hero and bizarre aliens who, unlike
Camerons Navi, are ignoble savages. At first, both hero and alien are deliberately unsympathetic. In a
typical science fiction movie, the Prawns would have been the villains, incomprehensible extraterrestrial
monsters. We come to sympathize with the hero and the aliens only later, when we see that the fascist
multi-national corporation and its mercenary army is far worse, more inhumane (and inhuman) than
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being politically confused and perhaps reinforcing the racist messages it seems to be trying to deconstruct.

Proceedings
anyone else in the film.

Blomkamp says, The thing of District 9 is that Im not trying to be overly metaphorical or have
any preachy lessons or any political standpoint other than I grew up in that environment, and I love
science fiction, and Im merging the two (Abramovitch 2009). While writing the script with co-author
Terri Tatchell, Blomkamp says he became aware that all these very serious topics about racism and
xenophobia and segregation would start to shine through the science-fiction-esque veneer. I had to be
very careful that I didnt get too close to these serious topics with a film thats mostly a summer thrill ride.
He told himself, Its your first film. Use it as satire. Chill out (Corliss 2009).
If we consider District 9 as a satire, then its strategy becomes more understandable: it is not a racist film
but rather a satire on racist stereotypes. Satire aims to ridicule people, institutions, or attitudes by pushing
them ad absurdum, like Jonathan Swifts A Modest Proposal. District 9 takes all the stereotypes of
xenophobia and racist paranoia and realizes them in the Prawn, who are totally Other: ugly, violent,
insect-like, shiftless, erratic, not that bright, thieving, incomprehensible in their language, and low and
vile in their eating habits and behavior. They are straight out of a racist nightmare, inhuman creatures
possessing every single negative attribute which the xenophobic imagination projects upon the Other.
Having created these monsters, the film then challenges us nevertheless to sympathize with them, for they
are stranded on a planet where they do not belong and will never fit in. Through Wikus interaction with
Christopher and Christophers little son, we come to realize that they are intelligent beings who care for
each other and have moral values, are our technological superiors, and are worthy of respect and decent
treatment, not to be shunted aside into slums, to be exploited and brutalized.
Both Avatar and District 9 suggest that contemporary Western civilization is so drastically ill that the cure
might be for white people to become radically other, to transform themselves into aliens. Although I enjoy
both films, District 9 is the more challenging and thought-provoking work. As one critic says, District 9
serves to highlight just how far cinema has come by depicting the human Self and the alien Other as two
halves of the same whole (Jones 2010, 122).
References
Abramovitch, Seth. 2009. District 9 Director Neill Blomkamp: The Movieline Interview.
http://movieline.com/2009/08/11/district-9-director-neill-blomkamp/
Avatar. 2009. 20th Century Fox. Director/Screenplay: James Cameron. Producers: James Cameron
and Jon Landau. Photography (3-D): Mauro Fiore. Music: James Horner. Cast: Sam Worthington
172
(Corporal Jake Sully), Zoe Saldana (Neytiri), Stephen Lang (Colonel Miles Quaritch), Sigourney
Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Joel David Moore (Norm Spellman), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy
Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Parker Selfridge), Laz Alonso (Tsutey), C.C.H. Pounder (Moat), Wes
Studi (Eytucan), Dileep Rao (Dr. Max Patel).
Azikiwe, Abayomi. 2009. District 9 Film Generates Controversy Over Depiction of Nigerians. Pan
African News Wire. September 8, 2009.
http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2009/09/9-film-generates-controversy-over.html
Blomkamp, Neill 2009. District 9 DVD commentary.
18th, 2009.
http://www.theawl.com/2009/12/avatar-part-2-with-david-cho-who-remembers-district-9
Corliss, Richard. 2009. District 9 Review: The Summers Coolest Fantasy Film. Time, August 13,
2009. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1916009,00.html
District Six. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_Six
District 9. 2009. Tristar. Director: Neill Blomkamp. Writers: Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell.
Producers: Peter Jackson, Carolynne Cunningham. Co-Producer: Philippa Boyens. Music: Clinton
Shorter. Photography: Trent Opaloch. Production Design: Philip Ivey. Cast: Sharlto Copley(Wikus
van der Merwe), Jason Cope: Christopher Johnson, David James (Col. Koobus Venter), Vanessa
Haywood (Tania van der Merwe), Louis Minaar (Piet Smit).
Fore, Dana. 2011. The tracks of Sullys tears: disability in James Camerons Avatar. Jump Cut 53.
http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/foreAvatar/index.html
Gordon, Andrew M. and Hernn Vera. 2009. Dances With Aliens. Racism Review. http://www.
racismreview.com/blog/2009/12/30/dances-with-aliens-james-camerons-avatar-movie-and-whitesaviors/
Gunkel,Henriette andChristiane Knig.2010. You are not welcome here: post-apartheid negrophobia
& real aliens in Blomkamps District 9. Dark Matter: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture. 7 Feb
2010.
http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2010/02/07/you-are-not-welcome-here/.
Jones, Matthew. 2010. District 9: Review. Film & History 40.1: 120-22.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/film_and_history/v040/40.1.jones.
html
Newitz, Annalee. When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?
http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar
Parktown prawn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parktown_prawn
Pitmore, Richard. 2009. Hold the Prawns. The South African Civil Society Information Service
website, September 14, 2009. http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/352.1
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Cho, David. 2009. Avatar Part 2, with David Cho: Who Remembers District 9? The Awl. December

Proceedings
Rank, Otto. 1959. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings, ed. Philip Freund. NY: Vintage.
Ray, Carina. 2010. Humanizing Aliens or Alienating Africans?: District 9 and the Politics of
Representation. http://www.zeleza.com/symposium/949
Reider, John. 2011. Race and revenge fantasies in Avatar, District 9 and Inglourious Basterds. Science
Fiction Film and Television 4.1: 41-56.
Scheib, Richard. 2009. Review of Avatar. http://0to5stars-moria.ca/sciencefiction/avatar-2009.htm
Smith-Rowsey, Daniel. From Santa Mira to South Africa: Updating the Invasion Narrative for the 21st
Century. JGCinema.com: Cinema and Globalization.
http://www.jgcinema.com/single.php?sl=invasion-body-snatchers-dossier-horror
Vera, Hernn and Andrew M. Gordon. 2003. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Zborowski James. 2010. District 9and its World. Jump Cut 52. http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/
zoborowskiDst9/
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The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Technology:

What Kind of a Future Will Human Beings Create?
Peter L. Rudnytsky
1
In the sublime first stasimon of Sophocles Antigone, the Chorus sings of the seemingly limitless powers
enjoyed by human beings. Man, the Chorus proclaims, can sail across the ocean in swift ships, plough
the unwearied earth, capture beasts of land, sea, and air, learn languages to express his thoughts, build
houses and cities, and even discover remedies for once-incurable diseases. There is only death, the Chorus
somberly notes, from which man cannot escape.
Even this rough paraphrase may suffice to convey something of the essential duality in the attitude
expressed by Sophocles Chorus: on the one hand, the ode celebratesmuch as will Shakespeares
Hamlet two millennia laterWhat a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite
in facultywhile on the other hand, by its reminder of the finality of death, the Chorus likewise
foreshadows Hamlets melancholy question, And yet what to me is this quintessence of dust?
Indeed, the tension between exuberant optimism and tragic pessimism in the ode as a whole is distilled by
Sophocles in its haunting first line, which reads in the original Greek:

The Victorian translation of R. C. Jebb is instructive as much for what it gets wrong as for what it gets
right about the line: Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man. For the words that
Jebb translates as wonders and more wonderful, and , are both formed from the
adjectival noun , which, according to the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon of classical Greek, has three
principal meanings: (1) fearful or terrible; (2) marvelously strong or powerful; and (3) clever or skillful.
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Jebb, it is clear, has captured the second of these meanings, and possibly also the third; but nothing at all
of the first, which portrays the power of what is deinos not as something benign but rather as something
inducing fear and terror in those who are exposed to it.
Thus, Heidegger, in his profound philosophical meditation on this chorus in An Introduction to
Metaphysics, translates deinos as unheimlich or uncanny, while Hlderlin, in his inspired poetic
rendering, opts even more radically for ungeheuer, meaning terrible or monstrous:
Ungeheuer ist viel. Doch nichts
Ungeheuerer, als der Mensch.
Or, in English:
There is much that is terrible. But nothing
That is more terrible than man.
As Heidegger comments in part, the deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overpowering power which
compels panic fear, true fear; and in equal measure it is the collected silent awe that vibrates with its own
rhythm. On the other hand, Heidegger continues, deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who
uses power; and, in summary, the verse says that to be the strangest of all is the basic trait of the human
essence, within which all other traits must find their place.1
What Heidegger formulates in existential terms can also be understood from the vantage point of
psychoanalysis. For it is clear that deinos is what Freud would call a primal wordthat is, a word with
two antithetical meanings, such as the Latin altus, which means both high and deep, or sacer, which
means both sacred and accursedand in translating deinos into German as unheimlich, Heidegger
joins up with Freud, who devotes a paper to the phenomenon of the uncanny, which he explains as
something encountered either in life or in art that one experiences as strange precisely because it is only
too familiar (heimlich), except that it has been alienated from the subject by a process of repression.
With the aid of Heidegger, Hlderlin, and Freud, therefore, we have found in the first line of Sophocles
choral ode a starting point for our investigation into the paradox that makes humans the strangest of all
beings, at once the most wonderful and terrible of creatures, a perspective that will guide as we turn now
1 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1959), pp. 149-51.
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to reflect on the place of the work of art in the age of digital technology, and thus what it might mean to
speak of the creative human being of the future.
2
In giving my address at the Second World Humanities Forum in Busan the title The Work of Art in the
Age of Digital Technology, I mean to pay homage to Walter Benjamins classic essay of 1936, The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Written during what we can now recognize to have
continue to preoccupy us in the current postmodern era.
Benjamins central concern is to elucidate what he terms the social bases of the contemporary decay
of the aura,2 with reference above all to the quintessentially twentieth-century arts of photography
and film. For Benjamin, the aura of a work of art emanates from its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be, and, because the presence of the original is the requisite to the concept of
authenticity, it is precisely the aura that withers in the age of mechanical reproduction (pp. 222-23).
In Benjamins analysis, the power of mechanical reproduction at once substitutes a plurality of copies
for a unique existence and detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. In keeping
with Heideggers exposition only one year earlier of the antithetical meanings of Sophocles definition of
man, moreover, Benjamin notes that both these consequences of technology are intimately connected
with contemporary mass movements, and that their social significance, particularly in its most positive
form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional
value of the cultural heritage (p. 223).
Benjamins formulations are astonishing in their prescience. His task, let me reiterate, is to examine the
effects of technological innovation on the nature and experience of the work of art, a project that the
ever-accelerating rate of change makes even more urgent in our own time. As if he could foresee the
iconic Campbells Soup Cans of Andy Warhol, Benjamin writes, To an ever greater degree the work
of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproduction (p. 226). Or, in a harbinger of
the astonishing popularity of reality TV, Benjamin remarks: Any man today can lay claim to being
filmed (p. 233). And, calling attention to the way that the proliferation of newspapers and other print
media has changed the relationship between writers and readers, Benjamin anticipates the emergence
of Internet blogs when he observes that the distinction between author and public is about to lose its
2 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, trans. Ralph Manheim
(London: Fontana Books, 1973), p. 225. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically.
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basic character, and at any moment, the reader is ready to turn into a writer, who, as expert, in some
domain or another, gains access to authorship (p. 234).
In short, Benjamin anticipates the advent of postmodernism, which Jean Baudrillard has characterized
as marked by the emergence of a third order of simulation. In Baudrillards historical schema, the first
order of simulation is associated with the premodern period in Western culture, in which the sign or image
stands in place of the real object, while the second order arises during the modern period as the distinction
between image and reality breaks down due to the proliferation of mass-produced copies in the Industrial
Revolution. This shift from the first to the second order of simulation is the transformation in sensibility
registered by Benjamin in his essay. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, humanity has
collectively reached the third order of simulation endemic to postmodernism, in which the sign usurps
the vacated place of the thing, the copy becomes ontologically prior to the original, and there is only the
simulacrum.3
Consider, against this backdrop, Benjamins quotation from Paul Valrys 1928 essay, The Conquest
of Ubiquity, concerning the impact of technological progress on aesthetic experience: Just as water,
gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal
effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple
movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.4 It is, again, uncanny how what Benjamin, with the aid
of Valry, has to say about the way photography foreshadows the advent of the sound film in the modern
era applies even more strikingly to the postmodern era, in which it is on our computers that images appear
and disappear with a simple movement of the hand, and that which flickers before us on the screen is
indeed hardly more than a sign.
Valrys notion of the conquest of ubiquity figures centrally in Benjamins argument. For integral to
Benjamins contrast between painting and film as visual media is the paradox that film offers, precisely
because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality by mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality
which is free of all equipment (p. 236). In other words, the terrible yet wondrous power of mechanical
equipment creates the illusion of an unmediated access to reality that depends on the spectators
obliviousness to his reliance on the very equipment that makes the experience possible. By extension,
the aura of a work of art that is embedded in a tradition, but which withers when art is mass-produced,
3 Given that my subject is postmodernism, I have taken the liberty of relying on the summary of Baudrillards schema
found in Wikipedia. For his own more nuanced exposition, see Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 1-42.
4 Quoted in Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 221.
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has as its precondition the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be (p. 224), whereas
the countervailing desire of contemporary masses to overcome the uniqueness of every reality by
accepting its reproduction has as its corollary for Benjamin an equally ardent impulse to bring things
closer spatially and humanly (p. 225), that is, the manufacture of a sense of immediacy that is all the
more factitious for seeming to be indistinguishable from reality itself.
It is, for Benjamin, the heightened importance of the mass in twentieth-century culture that ultimately
provides a matrix from which all traditional behavior towards works of art issues today in a new form
mirrored by the rise of the crowd or mob as a force in social and political life. Benjamins essay, indeed,
is structured around a series of binary oppositions that turns on the contrast between the responses to
art by the individual spectator and a collective entity or mass. In Benjamins words, distraction and
concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a
work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art, whereas the distracted mass absorbs the
work of art (p. 241). The individual spectator is to the mass, that is, as concentration is to distraction, as
presence is to representation, but also, in a seeming paradox, as distance and detachment are to immediacy
and participation, and as tradition is to what Benjamin terms proletarianization (p. 243).
One has only to recite this litany of polarities invoked by Benjamin to be reminded of yet another, even
more famous antithesis that has been deployed in a treatise on aesthetic experience to account, specifically,
for the power of Greek tragedy. I refer to Nietzsches opposition between the principles embodied in the
deities of Apollo and Dionysus, whom, in The Birth of Tragedy, (1872), he equates, respectively, with the
plastic arts and music as well as with the realms of dreams and intoxicationor, in Schopenhauers terms,
with the dichotomy between the world of appearances and the underlying substrate of the will. But if, for
Nietzsche, the rebirth of tragedy in the modern world was dependent on a reawakening of the spirit of
musicwhich, at this early stage of his career, he believed to be instantiated in the operas of Wagner
and, by extension, on a revival of the intuitive wisdom of Dionysus, for Benjamin it was, conversely, the
gathering storm of collective intoxication that was responsible not simply for the disappearance of the
aura of art works in an age of mechanical reproduction but above all for the threat of catastrophe that, in
1936, he could see looming over Europe and, indeed, the world.
The exact circumstances of Benjamins death in 1940 in the Spanish Pyrenees remain shrouded in
mystery, but there can be no doubt that this German-Jewish Marxist mystic was one of the millions
engulfed by the conflagration of the Holocaust. Thus, what Benjamin has to say about the destructive
as well as the positive aspects of contemporary mass movements has at once an acutely personal
and a broad historical significance. As he writes in the epilogue of his essay, the destructiveness of
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(p. 241). The role of technology in the mass-production of arts such as photography and especially film is

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war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that
technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society (p. 244).
Benjamins warning on the eve of World War II concerning the dangers lurking in technology to human
beings who may not be mature enough to harness its powers wisely returns us to Sophocles double
vision in the choral ode of Antigone, and it confronts us even more starkly at the dawn of the twenty-first
century.

3
In the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush, a primary organizer of the Manhattan
Project and Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which promoted cooperation
between the scientific establishment and the United States government, published an article, As We
May Think, an abridged version of which was reprinted in Life magazine on September 10, 1945. Not
coincidentally, it was in the interval between the two appearances of Bushs article that the atomic bombs
were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a turning point in human history in which Bush himself played
a decisive role.
Although Bushs article has garnered considerable attention from contemporary scholars, it is still far less
well known than Benjamins essay, to which it forms an intellectual and spiritual sequel. For whereas
Benjamins essay takes stock on the eve of World War II of the changes wrought in human consciousness
by advances in the modern technologies of mechanical reproduction, Bushs article forecasts in truly
remarkable ways the further revolutionary changes that are currently taking place in our own postmodern
era of digital technology.
Although it is impossible to read As We May Think without being reminded of the atomic bomb, it is
alluded to only obliquely by Bush at the outset of his paper. Secure in the knowledge that the war not only
in Europe but also in Japan had already been won, Bush looks ahead to the coming time of peace and
poses the question, What are the scientists to do next?5 Bush is concerned especially with physicists,
who, of all scientists, have been thrown most violently off stride by their participation in the war effort,
which has inspired them to invent strange destructive gadgets, as a result of which it has been possible
for America to turn back the enemy and for those enlisted in the heroic struggle to feel themselves part
of a great team (p. 101).
5 Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, p. 101. Subsequent page references will be given
parenthetically.
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In words that echo the chorus of Antigone, Bush begins the main portion of his article by asking, Of
what lasting benefit has been mans use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought
into existence? (p. 101). He responds by asserting that these inventions have increased his control of
his material environment, specifically citing improvements in food, clothing, and shelter. Even more
sweepingly, Bush credits science with bestowing upon mankind a progressive freedom from disease and
an increased span of life. The dividends paid by these new instruments, he contends, extend from the
physical realm to improved mental health.
to humanity in a variety of ways, there is, by comparison with Benjamins analysis, a nave and indeed
utopian quality to Bushs celebration of progress. For when he states that the wonders of technology have
not only improved mans material lot but have also increased his security and released him from the
bondage of his bare existence (p. 101), he seems oblivious to the reality that, despite Americas postwar
economic boom, this was not a time of political security but rather of what W. H. Auden, in a poem
published in 1947, christened the age of anxiety. It is as though, having himself been implicated first in
the discovery and then in the use of atomic weapons, Bush is unable to grasp the cataclysmic potential of
the strange destructive gadgets he and his colleagues have, as though in a fulfillment of Mary Shelleys
prophecy in her Romantic tale of the mad scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein, brought into existence in
their laboratories. Seen from this vantage point, Bushs paper, prescient though it is in its anticipation of
the Internet and other breakthroughs in the technological domain, takes on its greatest significance as a
symptom of an anxiety exposed in the poetry of Auden and Sophocles but that he himself, as a scientist, is
forced to repressnamely, that the same powers of the human mind that, as Bush affirms so eloquently, in
the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, make it awe-inspiring beyond
all else in nature (p. 106), are also what have brought us to the brink of collective annihilation and to the
irreversible dissolution of, in Shakespeares words from The Tempest, the great Globe itself, / Yea, all
which it inherit.
Still, Bushs blindness to the dark side of scientific progress is matched by his capacityno less
astonishing than that of Benjaminto envision a future that has become our present. Bush focuses on the
challenges posed by the rapidly accelerating accumulation of human knowledge, which is of little benefit
if it cannot be accessed by those who seek it. As he sets forth the problem, publication has been extended
far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is
being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to
the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships (p. 102). But,
as he notesand everyone who has watched the steadily dropping prices of computers, cell phones, and
practically all other electronic products would have to agreethe world has arrived at an age of cheap
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complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it (p. 102).
Like Benjamin, Bush instances photography as a centerpiece of the technological changes that will
continue to transform human life. Proposing a thought experiment, he conjures up for his mid-twentiethcentury reader the camera hound of the future who wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a
walnut (p. 102). Inside of this protuberance, there is film . . . for a hundred exposures, and Bush notes
that it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately (p.
103). Continuing his experiment, Bush imagines that the Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to
the volume of a matchbox (p. 103), and he goes so far as to recognize the indispensability of wireless
technology in picturing a future investigator in his laboratory whose hands are free, and he is not
anchored (p. 104), as he moves about and simultaneously photographs his observations and dictates his
comments into a recorder, which are then synchronized with his visual images. Bushs futuristic vision
culminates in what he calls the memex, which he defines as a mechanized file and library, that is, a
device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized
so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is, Bush continues, an enlarged
supplement to his memory (pp. 106-7).
In the version of Bushs article published in Life magazine, illustrations of both the walnut-sized camera
and the memex are included, the latter of which is clearly what we would now recognize as a desktop
computer. Bush describes it as consisting of a desk, on top of which are slanting translucent screens, on
which materials can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and
levers (p. 107). Bush has, therefore, forecast not only the personal computer and the digital camera but
also, as we have seen, the extent to which so much of contemporary communication is hands-free or
wireless. Even the electronically downloaded book is anticipated when Bush details how, on the memex,
the user, by moving one of its levers, runs through the book before him, and can add marginal notes
and comments to the text being viewed on the screen, while the guiding principle of the Windows
operating system is reflected in Bushs statement that since there are several projection positions, the
operator of the memex can leave one item in position while he calls up another (p. 107).
But though Bush accurately predicts so much of the contemporary world, our reality has outstripped his
imagination in at least one respect. Despite the fact that his miniature camera allows the user to see the
picture immediately, as is the case with digital equipment, Bushs conception of microphotography
(p. 103) still relies on film, and hence he has not fully made the transition from modernism to
postmodernism or, in Baudrillards terms, from second-order to third-order simulation. But this limitation
is inconsequential when compared to his most profound insight, which is, as I have already noted, that it is
not enough to be able simply to improve how records are made and stored if one does not at the same time
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tackle the problem of how this vast summation of human experience is to be accessed and consulted.
With respect to what we would call today the search engine, Bush makes the point that the human
mind works not by artificial systems of indexing, whether alphabetical or numerical, but rather by the
association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain
(p. 106). It is this realization that gives rise to Bushs panegyric to the faculty of memory as awe-inspiring
beyond all else in nature. If we set aside Bushs assumption that the memex must utilize microfilm and
instead read back into his description our contemporary awareness of the Internet, this makes only the
associative indexing, whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically
another (p. 107). Thus, when we have purchased or even simply viewed a book on Amazon, this principle
allows the computer to suggest other books we might also like to consider ordering. What is more, just
as the mind lays down memory traces based on intricate webs of association, so, too, in the memex
numerous items can be joined together to form a trail, andas Freud said of the neuronal networks
in the unconsciousthese trails do not fade (p. 107). Indeed, despite his assumption throughout most
of his paper that the memex will employ a material substance such as microfilm, Bush concludes by
proposing that, just as information is transmitted between nerve cells and the brain by means of electrical
vibrations, so, too, it is possible to imagine that in the technology of the future it will not always be
necessary to transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon
to another (p. 108). Here Bush achieves the conceptual turn to postmodernism, as data conveyed
electronically are no longer confined to any physical space, in a way that would allow us to distinguish an
original from a copy, but are rather set free in a virtual universe comprised entirely of simulacra in which
we have, in Valrys phrase, completed the conquest of ubiquity.
But if we now pause and reflect critically on Bushs essay as a whole, what lingers even more indelibly
in the readers mind than his gifts as a visionary is, as I have argued, his blindness to the dark side of
scientific progress. It is as though, like the Victorian Jebb, he has translated Sophocles word only
as wonder, and left out its antithetical meaning of man as something fearful or terrible. In his final
paragraph Bush proclaims that the applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and
are teaching him to live healthily therein (p. 108). But if, as both Sophocles and Heidegger ask us to
remember, it is only from death that human beings cannot escape, it is precisely this tragic awareness that
has been forgotten by Bushforgotten in the sense of being actively repressed from consciousness.
And the death that confronts us is not merely of each of us as an individual but, for the first time in human
history, that of our entire speciesindeed, of all living speciesa specter unleashed and symbolized by
the strange destructive gadgets that are the demonic counterparts of the angelic memex. In diametric
opposition to Bush, from Heideggers perspective man dwells not in the well-supplied house of science
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more astonishing his recognition that the essential feature of his futuristic invention is its capacity for

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but rather in the realm of the uncanny that is the basic kind of Being-in-the World, even though in an
everyday way it has been covered up.6 And if the notion that any kind of technology can teach us to live
healthily is itself a delusiona symptom of the mass psychosis that has put the entire planet in perilit
may be up to an enhanced respect for nature, cultivated by receptivity to the aura emitted by works of art
embedded in a tradition, to save us.
4
Thomas L. Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, begins
The World Is Flat, the first of his two recent books on globalization and the fate of America and the world
in the twenty-first century, by recounting a visit to Infosys, a leading information technology company
headquartered outside Bangalore, India. It was here, upon pondering the statement by the CEO of the
company that the playing field is being leveled in the global economy due to the revolutionary changes
made possible by the emergence of a worldwide communication network, that Friedman came to the
realization encapsulated in the title of his book, The World Is Flat; and he describes himself as being at
that moment filled with both excitement and dread.7
That Friedman should have experienced in himself these antithetical emotions is not surprising since,
though he does not use the word, they mark his entry into the twilight zone of the uncanny that, as has
been my contention throughout these reflections, is integral to the surpassing power of the mind that
makes human beings the strangest of all creatures. By way of conclusion, therefore, I shall first show
how Friedmans analysis of globalization in The World Is Flat extends the inquiry into the inherent
ambiguity of technological progress of which the essays by Walter Benjamin and Vannevar Bush are
landmarks for their respective eras; then I shall compare Friedmans fundamentally optimistic vision in
The World Is Flat to the far more sober assessment of where we are headed as a species and a planet that
emerges from his sequel, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, published only four years later, in 2008.
Among the striking points of contact between Friedman and both Benjamin and Bush is that Friedman,
too, cites photography as an example of the transformations in everyday life that have been wrought
by the latest advances in technology, though Friedman, unlike Benjamin, is referring not to mechanical
reproduction but rather to digitization; and he therefore is able to experience in actuality what Bush
6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. John Macquerrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p.
322.
7 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), pp. 7-8. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically.
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could only see as a possibility on the horizon. As Friedman reports, not only is mail now something that
one sends digitally from a computer rather than on paper through a post office, but the same is true for
photography:
Photography used to be a cumbersome process involving film coated with silver dug up from
mines halfway across the world. I used to take some pictures with my camera, then bring the film
to the drugstore to be sent off to a big plant somewhere for processing. But once the Internet made
it possible to send pictures around the world, attached to or in e-mails, I didnt want to use the
developed (And by the way, I didnt want to be confined to using a camera to take them. I wanted
to be able to use my cell phone to do it.) (pp. 64-65).
Similarly, just as for Bush the user of the memex possesses an enlarged supplement to his memory
that makes accessible the summation of human experience, which can be consulted with exceeding
speed and flexibility, so, too, Friedman quotes Jimmy Wales, the originator of Wikipedia, as saying that
he has one simple goal: to give every single person free access to the sum of all human knowledge (p.
95). Not to be outdone, it is likewise the aim of the search engine Googlethe name of which is derived
from the word googol, which means 1 followed by 100 zerosas stated on its home page, to organize
the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information on the Web, just for you (pp. 152-53). And
just as Bush recognized that the essential feature of the memex would be its capacity for associative
indexing, whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another, in
consonance with the requirements of the user, so too, as Friedman points out, the key breakthrough that
enabled Google to become first among search engines was its ability to combine its PageRank technology
with an analysis of page content, which determines which pages are most relevant to the specific search
being conducted (pp. 154-55).
At the most general level, Friedmans argument in The World Is Flat is that what he dubs the triple
convergenceof the collapse of the Soviet Union along with the rise of Internet technology, of new
ways of doing business, and of several billion new competitors in the global marketplacehas produced
a transformation in contemporary life. As he summarizes his thesis, It is this triple convergenceof new
players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaborationthat
I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the twenty-first century
(pp. 181-82). According to Friedman, the interconnected changes that came to a head at the turn of our
present century have inaugurated the third great era of globalization. Globalization 1.0, he says, lasted
from 1492, when Columbus opened trade between the Old World and the New World, to approximately
1800, and was driven by the power of nations. Globalization 2.0 extended from 1800 to 2000 and was
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silver film anymore. I wanted to take pictures in the digital format, which could be uploaded, not

Proceedings
spurred by multinational companies, which profited first from falling transportation and then from falling
telecommunications costs. Finally, Globalization 3.0, which commenced around the year 2000, derives
its unique character, in Friedmans view, from the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and
compete globally, thanks not to horsepower or hardware but to software, in conjunction with the
creation of a global fiber-optic network that has made us all neighbors (p. 10).
Although formulated independently, Friedmans analysis of the three eras of globalization dovetails with
Baudrillards schema of the three orders of simulation, and it helps to elucidate the connection between
economic and political developments and changes in the theory and practice of representation. Ever the
realist, Friedman reminds his readers of the dangers of nuclear terrorism and the ways that the resources
of the Internet can be exploited by the forces of darkness as well as of light. Still, the predominant
tenor of Friedmans outlook toward globalization in The World Is Flat is resolutely optimistic, to the
point that he seems much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush than to Walter Benjamin, to say nothing of
Martin Heidegger. Thus, Friedman stresses how the newly flattened world gives newfound power
to individuals rather than to states or to corporations, and he sees the fundamentally benign and wealthproducing changes brought about by digital technology as the most important force shaping global
economics and politics in the twenty-first century. Indeed, as he writes at the close of his book, playing
on the coincidence that the attack on the World Trade Center took place on 9/11/01, whereas the opening
of the Berlin Wall took place on 11/9/89: the two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of
protectionismexcessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal
securityand excessive fears of competing in a world of 11/9 that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in
search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world (p. 469).
It is not necessary to dispute Friedmans defense of free trade to question his assertions that the two
greatest dangers facing Americans are economic and political protectionism. Surely both the United
States and the world are in far deeper trouble than that, and the sense of uncanniness that led Friedman to
describe himself as filled with dread as well as excitement during his visit to Infosys in Bangalore,
India, invites closer scrutiny as a symptom of an existential malaise that returns us to the unflinching
meditations on Sophocles choral ode in Antigone by both Heidegger and Hlderlin.
As his titles makes plain, Friedmans understanding of the dangers facing humankind in the twenty-first
century has undergone a profound evolution between The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded. In
place of the triple convergence of new economic actors, new technologies, and new forms of horizontal
collaboration, Friedman now underscores how the technological revolution that has leveled the global
playing field cannot be isolated from two other enormously powerful forces that are impacting our
planet in fundamental ways, namely, global warming and soaring population growth. As Friedman
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sums up his revised thesis, distilled in the three adjectives of his title, it is actually the convergence of
global warming, global flattening, and global crowding that is the most important dynamic shaping the
world we live in today.8 Instead of referring to the present age as Globalization 3.0, Friedman now terms
our epoch the Energy-Climate Era.
A few of the statistics included by Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded suffice to tell us most of what we
need to know. The population of the world, which stood at 2.5 billion in 1950, is now over 6.7 billion,
and is projected to grow by 2050 to 9.2 billionan increase equivalent to the total number of people on
28). Roughly one quarter of the worlds people, moreover, still do not have regular access to an electricity
grid (p. 155). By 2100, temperatures worldwide are expected to rise between 3 and 5 degrees Celsiusor
5.4 and 9 degrees Fahrenheitover preindustrial conditions, with catastrophic increases in sea levels,
droughts, and floods as consequences (p. 44). Even now, one species is going extinct every twenty
minutes, which is one thousand times faster than in the past (p. 141). Since the Industrial Revolution,
the amount of carbon dioxide in the earths atmosphere has shot up from 280 parts per million to 384
ppm, which is higher than it has ever been in twenty million years, and, if present trends continue, we are
projected to reach as much as 560 ppm by 2050, and an unthinkable 800 ppm by 2075 (pp. 119, 212).
Although avoiding this death spiral would require a huge global industrial energy project (p. 212), at the
present time the United States invests a meager eight billion dollarsequivalent to the cost of nine days
of fighting in Iraqin research and development in energy, or only 0.8 percent of its revenues in a onetrillion-dollar-a-year industry (p. 185).
Taking a synoptic view, the underlying problem is that we have created a vicious spiral, in which, as
Friedman puts it, rapid economic growth and population expansionflat meets crowdedis driving
the destruction of forests and other ecosystems at an unprecedented rate. The destruction of these forests
and biodiversity-rich environments, in turn, contributes to climate changeflat and crowded meet hot
and make it hotterby releasing more carbon into the atmosphere (p. 301). Hence, Friedman adds,
when it comes to climate change, human society has been like the proverbial frog in the pail on the
stove, where the heat gets turned up very slightly every hour, so the frog never thinks to jump out. It
just keeps adjusting until it gets boiled to death (p. 48). One of the most profound insights to emerge
from Friedmans analysis is that, in contrast to the traditional notion of human beings as the masters of
creation, the truth is that we are the only species in this vast web of life that no animal or plant in nature
8 Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America (New
York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), p. 26. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically. I sometimes
omit the names of the sources quoted by Friedman in my own citations from his work.
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earth as recently as 1950. Almost all of this growth, moreover, will take place in less developed regions (p.

Proceedings
depends on for its survivalyet we depend on this whole web of life for our survival (p. 152). Tragically,
however, although no other species depends on us for its survival, as we depend on nature, we do possess
the power to destroy not only ourselves but also much of the life on the planet, whether through a nuclear
cataclysm or through the slow burn of irreversible global climate disruption.
What, then, are we to do about this grim picture? Although Friedman declares himself a sober optimist
(p. 411), I think the truth concerning climate change is better expressed in the words of Harvard
climatologist John Holdren: The more aspects of the problem you know something about, the more
pessimistic you are (p. 125). What is clear, above all, is that it is no longer possible to reverse course
by tinkering around the edges of the problem or through the efforts of individuals alone, however
important these may be. Rather, what is required is a massive worldwide effort, led by the United States
and seconded by China, to replace the Dirty Fuels System with a Clean Energy System, a radical
transformation in our collective way of life that Friedman calls a green revolution (p. 199).
Perhaps the greatest single obstacle to this change in systems is the lack of political will in the United
States, a condition of lethargy and moral blindness that made even the recent modest reforms in our health
care system a feat of Herculean proportions, and that seems likely to doom any efforts at comprehensive
energy and climate legislation for the foreseeable future. Unless the United States is prepared to wean
itself of its dependency on fossil fuels and make massive investments in clean-energy technology, it will
be simply impossible for other countries to break the vicious spiral of an increasingly hotter, flatter, and
more crowded world; and I see, alas, little evidence to justify optimism in any form.
Still, one can continue to make the arguments in hopes of changing peoples minds. There are, I think,
two fundamental points to be made. The first is pragmatic. It is that, in the words of one of Friedmans
authorities, Mother Nature has not been fooled (p. 260). Traditionally, capitalism has functioned by
treating environmental waste as what economists term an externality, that is, a cost of doing business
that is not borne by any of the parties involved in the transaction, and hence could be simply ignored. But
now we are coming up against the limits imposed by the ecological logic of capitalism (p. 57). Thus, as
another of Friedmans sources explains, Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell
the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological
truth (p. 259). This is why the only solution to our problems lies in government regulation of the market,
to begin forcing business and consumers alike to bear the true costs of their carbon footprints, as well as in
providing support at the federal level for clean-energy technologies. Given the entrenched resistance in the
United States to big government and higher taxes, however, it is again difficult for me to see how there
is any chance of a major course correction while there is still time.
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The second point is moral and spiritual. Ultimately, as Friedman eloquently pleads, the deepest truth of
all is that love for the environment is a value that needs to be preserved in and of itself, not because it
makes your bank account richer but because it makes life richer and always has (p. 314). Whereas in
political conflicts, such as the space race, there may be winners and losers, in the earth race either we
will all win or all lose (p. 366), because a disaster in one country is a disaster for the entire world. Thus,
for any country to go green, it must be committed to the idea that there is something bigger than itself,
its own community, and its own bordersthat the state of the world really matters too (p. 180). For the
United States to embrace such an ethic of energy efficiency and environmental conversation would be a
recent decades, most egregiously by the invasion of Iraq in a tragically misguided response to the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001.
The dilemma we face as human beings is that the interests on whose behalf an appeal is most urgently
needednature, children, and the futureare those with the least power and influence on their side. That
is why, as Friedman argues, quoting the words of Rob Watson, CEO of EcoTech International and one of
the best environmental minds in America (p. 6), our most precious commodity at the present time is the
one faculty that distinguishes us as human beingsthe ability to imagine. We need imagination, Watson
continues, in order to be able to grasp the impact of the nonlinear, unmanageable climate events that
could unfold in our lifetime (p. 119).
And this is where the arts and literature come in. We study the arts, above all, not as a means to a
utilitarian end, but as an end in themselves, as a way of sparking our imaginations and educating ourselves
as whole persons. It follows, therefore, that in order to save nature we also must cherish art, because only
if human beings cultivate the power of imagination and empathy will we continue to have a future to
create. I began by quoting from the first stasimon of Sophocles Antigone, precisely because of my belief
that it is from artistic masterpieces that we still have most to learn about the human condition, and that the
essential paradox that makes man at once the most terrible and most wonderful of creatures remains as
true today as it did in ancient Athens, notwithstanding the advances in technology that have profoundly
transformed not only how we experience works of art but also every facet of our material existence.
Although it will be necessary to await future meetings of the World Humanities Forum to discover
what will have become of the earth in the next fifty or one hundred years, I would like to conclude by
drawing two seemingly antithetical morals from these meditations on the theme of the work of art in
the age of digital technology. The first is that science alone can never supply the wisdom that will guide
us in its proper use. To suppose that we can reap the benefits of mans awe-inspiring power to control
nature without also assuming the dreadful costs of this responsibility is to forget the lesson elucidated
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sign of humility that would, in turn, enable it to regain much of the moral authority it has squandered in

Proceedings
by Heidegger in his existential reading of Sophocles choral ode that to be the strangest of all is the
basic trait of the human essence, and there is no escaping the uncanniness that haunts our being at every
moment from its encounter with the finitude of death.
But if science alone cannot save us, it is equally evident that unless we are finally prepared to face the
impact of our collective actions on nature that we will be irrevocably lost as a species. Mother Nature,
Friedman quotes Rob Watson as saying, is just chemistry, biology, and physics, and everything she
does is just the sum of these three things (p. 139). Given that there is no abrogating the laws of nature,
it is impossible to escape the realization that postmodernism, with its siren song that there is only the
simulacrum, is but the mirror image of a nave faith in science and technology, and must be discarded
as an intellectual luxury we can no longer afford. Indeed, as a byproduct of late capitalism, life inside
the postmodernist bubble is the philosophical counterpart to our addiction to fossil fuels. It cant go on
forever. In his influential treatise, The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Franois Lyotard states that whereas he
employs the term modern to refer to any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse
. . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, he defines the postmodern as an incredulity
toward metanarratives, and he attributes this skeptical attitude to progress in the sciences, which has
replaced the grand narratives of the past with many different language games.9
As the synergistically interacting pressures of climate disruption, rising energy consumption, and
exponentially increasing population compel us to recognize, however, it is ultimately the grand narrative
of evolutionnature as altered by the feedback loop of human behaviorthat will seal the fate of our
unique and irreplaceable planet. In The World Is Flat, Friedman quotes a passage from The Communist
Manifesto, published in 1848, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reflect on the way that the
Industrial Revolution, impelled by capitalism, has dissolved previous forms of human identity. Marx and
Engels write:
All fixed, fast, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,
are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.10
Everything that Marx and Engels say about the Industrial Revolution, which is synonymous with the age
9 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxiii-xiv.

Quoted in Friedman, The World Is Flat, p. 202.
190
of modernism or Baudrillards second order of simulation, is even more true for the Energy-Climate era,
which is also the age of postmodernism or the third order of simulation. On the one hand, all that is solid
melts into air, as information technology completes the conquest of ubiquity and the economic playing
field is leveled. On the other hand, man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions
of life and his relations with his kind, as we have at long last to come to terms with the ecological
logic of capitalism. Whether we can marshal the resources of the imagination to face the reality of the
environmental catastrophe that is already upon us, as well as to remove the still-looming threat of nuclear
annihilation, will determine whetherand for how longthere will be creative human beings in the
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future.
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Illness and Art
Desmond Egan
Irish Poet
Madness, frenzy, je ne sais quoi, the sublime, inexplicable, ineffable, unnameable, indefinable,
inexpressible, neuter, trace. These are some of the concepts used in Western culture to recognise
the obscure movement by means of which literature composes itself into a strangely secret body of
language. 1
Taking Frias Martins comment as a summary of the situation, I wish to address the question, Is there a
necessary connection between Literature and ill-health or neurosis. I declare a special interest here, in that
I ask the question as a poet.
A necessary connection, I emphasise; not an accidental one. Art is created by human beings, by people
who have all the limitations that flesh is heir to. This truism should be borne in mind in any discussion of
art and illness - hence my opening quotation from Martins as a summary of popular misconceptions in
the area of art and illness. Some artists, writers, poets will happen to be unhealthy in one way or another.
Illness is part of life. It is an experience which, like any other, may have an influence on the artist. True,
but there is a difference in kind between work undertaken as therapeutic exercise - by patients, say - and
that of, someone like Frieda Kahlo or Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were sufferers, yes, but being artists
they could pierce through their individual problems to some universal perception of a truth.
No one escapes illness, of one kind or another; and all of us have to face up to the deep mystery of death.
Because of his/her intense reaction to things; because of a greater capacity to feel, to understand and to
express, the creative person is somewhat different from others; in some respects an outsider (as Colin
1 Manuel Frias Martins, Em Theoria / In Theory, 2003, Ambar, Lisbon; p. 193.
192
Wilson famously explored); generally more vulnerable. We might expect that a poet, musician, or creative
artist, because of his/her hyper-sensitivity - something well recorded in biographies and anecdotes - would
seem and be more open to neurosis and eccentricity than the average, extrovert, person; and it is probably
so. But to posit a necessary link between creativity and disease is to go too far and to misunderstand the
already mysterious processes of any work of art. This leads, inevitably, to a simplified understanding, a
vulgarisation of the concept, artist.

For this reason, we should address the fundamental question, Is art born out of neurosis? Is there a
at best? Crucially, the artist is in control of his material/ fantasy/ emotion whereas the neurotic is
controlled by it and is not, therefore, its master. This is the core of the matter - and Lionel Trilling, in his
groundbreaking study, Art and Neurosis 2 has pointed out as much, more than 60 years ago.
Our emphasis on the question of control does not mean that we should overlook the fact that in creating,
the artist gains some kind of release - as one does from doing anything well. Shakespeare suggests as
much, as does his near-contemporary, John Donne (1572 - 1651), and quite explicitly, in his poem The
Triple Foole:
I thought, if I could draw my paines
Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay.
Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse.
Yes - but, let us not overlook the phrase he tames it, nor the verb fetters. They emphasise the crucial
issue of the poets taming or controlling the feeling rather than of being controlled by it.
This, too, is surely why genuine art has something salvific to offer not only to the creator but to a suffering
world, a world consumed by false values, a world that has lost its way and its nerve. Such relief, however,
as Donne himself makes clear, is incidental to the creation, not descriptive of it. At this stage, may I be
allowed to refer to a personal situation. Asked by an Amnesty group to write a poem for Peace,3 I became
convinced that at the heart of the worlds search for peace lies the conflict between what is beautiful, in
nature as in art, as against the neurosis of fear, of pride, and of excess - so what I wrote, for whatever it is
worth, became an attempt to express both the healing beauty of the ordinary and the conflict which denies
2 Lionel Trilling, Art and Neurosis (USA, 1949).

3 C.f. Egan, Elegies, Goldsmith, Kildare, (1996).
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necessary link, as is often assumed: the poet or painter as some kind of weirdo, a little crazy; a neurotic

Proceedings
so much of the world that contact with nature:

PEACE
just to go for a walk out the road
just that
under the deep trees
which whisper of peace
to break the bread of words
with someone passing
just that
four of us round a pram
and baby fingers asleep
just to join the harmony
the fields the blue everyday hills
the puddles of daylight and
you might hear a pheasant
echo through the woods
or plover may waver by
as the evening poises with a blackbird
on its table of hedge
just that
and here and there a gate
a bungalows bright window
the smell of woodsmoke of lives
just that
but sweet Christ that
is more than most can afford
with the globe still platted in its own
crown of thorns
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too many starving eyes

too many ancient children
squatting among flies
too many stockpiles of fear
too many dog jails too many generals
too many under torture by the impotent
screaming into the air we breathe
too many mountains of butter selfishness

too many poor drowning in the streets
too many shantytowns on the outskirts of life
too many of us not sure what we want
so that we try to feed a habit for everything
until the ego puppets the militaries
mirror our own warring face
too little peace
At this stage, perhaps we should consider the use of some of the artistic disciplines, such as painting,
writing, sculpture.. as healing exercise? Therapeutic writing that is caught up in illness of one kind or
another may be valuable as a kenosis, an emptying or getting rid of some mental or physical ailment
- but it cannot of itself offer the energetic shaping of human experience, the plerosis, which true art
exemplifies. The root of all neurosis, Norman Mailer once suggested in an interview, is cowardice, that
is, an unwillingness or an inability to face up to reality. Therapeutic work may well help in this area but it
is a different thing from artistic creativity. The latter always offers that confrontation which is part of its
essence: all art is a confrontation, with no holds barred. Again, we are talking about somehow controlling
experience rather than being controlled by it.
This is the core of what I have to say. Any discussion about art and the artist must begin from a
recognition of the basic gift of an artist: the ability, no matter what his/her personal human problems are,
to shape experience in tranquillity, as William Wordsworth suggested, that peculiar tranquillity which
can accommodate and objectify an expression of some aspect of the mystery of life. We do not deny the
carpenter or electrician his craft; we must not deny the artist his/her peculiar gift and the fearlessness at
its heart. The admonition most often given by Jesus Christ was, Do not be afraid. Not even of dying: his
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too many dreams stuck in money jams

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was a call to a world obsessed, at root, with death. The artist in his creativeness is not afraid. Therapeusis
for those who are unwell may be fine and even necessary but we only create confusion by making false
claims for it or by confusing its productions with something completely different. Part of the problem in
distinguishing the valuable from the superficial in art nowadays lies precisely in such confusion.
The fearlessness of the artist, his/her willingness to pierce through the temporary, the death-bound, so as
to arrive at something of permanent truth, would seem important to confront the disease of fear. And that
is why the therapy of genuine Art is so valuable for us all, and why mankind has always had its art and its
artists. I do not say that art is useful basically as a therapy - though it may well be; I do say that Art is a
kind of medicine. I do say that it and only it can offer the katharsis (catharsis) of pity and terror of which
Aristotle speaks in his Poetics4: that peculiar feeling of enlargement as humans which we experience even
in viewing a tragic drama. The release which comes from coming in contact with the expression of some
emotionally charged insight - and therefore with the control of emotion.
What Aristotle teaches us about dramatic tragedy is relevant to our experience of any of the other arts.
Through our vicarious encounter with some profound issue; through the creators battle to understand and
to express it and, in so doing, to discover something permanent in the face of all that is passing, we can
gain a deeper insight into life, a greater compassion, and even, perhaps, a greater strength in facing up to
death itself. As John Donne puts it in his wonderful poem, Death, Be Not Proud,
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
One way or another, art offers some kind of eternal awakening.
The world is full of physically or mentally sick people - but there are very few poets. If poetry is merely
the outcome of disease, how explain this? How explain, for example, what Matisse said of Renoir in old
age, after arthritis had caught hold of his fingers, gone so swollen and distorted that he had to tie the brush
to his hand to hold it,
While his body wasted away, his soul seemed to gain strength and he expressed himself with
increasing ease.5
4 Aristotle, Poetics, 6, 1449 b.

5 Quoted in Sandblom, Creativity and Disease, London 1992; p. IV.
196
Art is a going-inland, to take Patrick Kavanaghs phrase6; a seeing into the heart of things coupled with the
ability to express this life-complexity, be it in musical, poetic, visual, sculptural, theatrical or film form.
Such an act demands great psychic energy and the full commitment of someone who, by refining his/her
talent, has achieved a personal style adequate to,
snatch out of time the passionate transitory7
The artist, in personal life, may be diseased, neurotic, even a little crazy - but in his art he is whole and full
very opposite of sickness or madness, though the intense demands it makes may at times drive a hypersensitive person towards ill-health.

And the artist, by definition, is hyper-sensitive, more vulnerable, never quite fully at home, as Rilke
puts it,8 in the hurly burly of everyday mindless living. Easily misunderstood, an outsider, to one degree
or another; never quite fitting-in. For that reason, he will often be considered eccentric, a weirdo, slightly
mad. But in the moment of creation, no one is saner, more wholly attuned to life, than the artist.
Nor will he depend on the approbation of any audience more knowing than that of himself. Here we have
the difference between a creative person and a dilettante. The history of Literature is littered with the
stories of those who died unknown, under-appreciated, rejected by the outside world and often povertystricken - Hopkins, Kavanagh, McKenna, Pessoa, Mangan, Kafka... but who nevertheless persisted in
their work, sustained by a belief in it and by the thrill of making it. Ars gratia artis: literary achievement is
not defined by acceptance; au contraire: what fires the writer is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it in his
last poem,9
The fine delight that fathers thought...
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation
Take the case of Hopkins; what he achieved in his poetry; where it came from; what it shows us about
the suggested link between Art and Neurosis; and most of all, what we gain from his work. Much
emphasis has been given - utterly disproportionately, in my opinion - to the sick melancholy of Gerard
6 Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems, Goldsmith, Kildare, 1984.

7 Patrick Kavanagh, op cit.
8 Rilke, The Duino Elegies, no.1, Selected Poems tr. Leishman, Penguin, London, 1964.
9 Gerard Manley Hopkins, To R.B.
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of energy. Nietzsche somewhere remarks that all art is positive, an affirmation; optimistic at heart. It is the

Proceedings
Manley Hopkins(1884-1889) during his last five and a half years in Ireland.10 Those who do so, choose
to see his terrible sonnets as purely autographical, making the most basic of academic mistakes since a
distinction always, and willy nilly, exists between the protagonist in any writing and its creator: I is never
just I. Parallel to that, the strange integrity of an artistic theme, its amalgam of memory, imagination,
thought, feeling - the mysterious, core of a poem - is being treated as somehow akin to a journalistic
record of personal experience. To see Hopkinss version of Jobs lament, Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord,
as an autographical outpouring of near-despair, a neurotic expression of personal suffering, is to miss
the point. Its amazing energy, its virtuosity of language, its mastery of the resources of poetry... are all
expressions of vitality rather than of sickness; of belief, rather than of despair. Schiller once remarked that
All art is dedicated to joy (Alle Kunst ist der Freude gewidmet). Nietzsche offered a similar insight
when he maintained that there is no such thing as pessimistic art, since all art is an affirmation of some
kind of belief in life. To create a poem that is a poem takes enormous psychic energy. Those who harp on
Hopkinss sickness during those last Dublin years mostly overlook that. Nor have they any explanation
for the magnificently affirmative sonnet, That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire (And Of The Comfort Of The
Resurrection), written a year before he died. It concludes with the powerful affirmation of those lines,
And this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.
What, then, about Hopkinss sonnets of desolation (as W.H. Gardner labelled them), all of which he
wrote in Dublin? As a writer, I can tell you how Hopkins felt after the outpouring of doubt and grief and
almost (but not quite) despair that each of these wonderful poems embodies: he felt great! These dark
sonnets should be called sonnets of hope. For a start, not a single one of them declines into hopelessness.
They are full of energy, itself a kind of belief. They also exemplify the flowering of his poetic genius in a
crowning virtuosity of technique, despite the extremes of depression that Hopkins explores and catches in
them. Take, at random, a few of the darkest, most anguished lines from one of these dark sonnets, No
Worst, There Is None:
O the mind, mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall
Frightful. Sheer. No man fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who never felt their steep or deep.
Technically, this writing is exciting, fresh, and inventive. One is struck by the force of that repeated word
mind; by the compound adjective, no-man-fathomed - a neologism and wonderfully evocative; by

C.f. Norman White, Hopkins in Ireland, (Dublin:UCD, 2002).
198
the assonantal play of steep/ deep; the mountain imagery itself with its cliffs of fall is an amazingly
suggestive metaphor, one which he develops with an inventiveness worthy of Shakespeare and so on.
Such mastery of the capacities of language is what helps to make possible this sonnets unflinching look
at the human tragedy. Even those harrowing lines quoted are energised by a a belief in language itself and
in the sacred function of poetry, which is to catch life on the wing. The poem is charged with belief, with a
refusal to give up in the face of extreme anguish. With hope,

Here! creep,
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
Not very cheering, I agree, but he does look-for and mention, some kind of comfort (this for a third time
in the poem); and gives it weight at the finish. No tagged-on clich or easy way out, no superficial formula
- and yet, some kind of affirmation in living-on. This writing is not the product of neurosis.
We need such poetry because it manages to catch in a few words the experience of struggling along
in dark times, while refusing to cave-in. This is a hope sonnet, hope not least in poetry itself and in its
resources, including those of rhythm, musicality, metaphorical reach. Hope, fundamentally, in the Word
- for a Christian, the Lord of language and of creativity. The poem includes a cry to The Holy Spirit as
Comforter and to Mary, mother of us. - and it finishes on a note of patience. St. Ignatius in his Spiritual
Exercises advises,
Let him who is in desolation strive to remain in patience, which is the virtue contrary to the
troubles which harass him11. Interestingly, Hopkins wrote Patience, Hard Thing, in the spring of the
following year.
In his last poem, To R.B., written in April 1889, Hopkins acknowledges the energy necessary to write,

with aim
Now known and hand at work now never wrong.

Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this;
My aim in this short Lecture is to defend for Poetry the psychic wellbeing which it demands; to

Quoted in Mackenzie, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, OUP, Oxford, 1992; p. 460.
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Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

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acknowledge that it takes shape in spite of, not because of, whatever limitation or illness the creator may
be enduring. Or may not. Magnificently, art derives from energy, not from illness. Philip Sandblom, in his
study, Creativity and Disease reaches the same conclusion,12
In great artists, the passion to create generates a willpower strong enough to defy the worst disease.
So, if we need art and its affirmation, what are we to make of the position of the arts in to-days world?
A recent issue of the Swiss Pro Helvetia journal, Passages, asks,13
Is the allegedly art-loving public staying away from artistic events in droves?
The answer, as anyone involved in the arts would agree, would seem to be Yes. Classical concerts are,
for the most part, poorly supported; poetry books do not sell; ballet and theatre companies struggle for
subsidies to survive; the novel has been replaced by mindless, journalistic, lit. A main reviewer for The
Sunday Times publishes a book arguing that there are no criteria for art and that, therefore, the popular
taste is decisive; a reviewer in The Irish Times, asked to choose her books of the year (2011) chooses 40
titles. The recent closing ceremony for the London Olympics, which might have been a showcase for the
great heritage of English culture, turned into one more Pop concert - resulting, as W.B. Yeats put it, in,
The beating down of the wise
And great art beaten down.
But surely if, as I suggest, culture encapsulates the truth of things, and insight, and sanity and if The
truth shall set you free then the statement by Portuguese critic Frias Martins14 that,
Contemporary culture has displaced Literature from its centre, preferring more immediate
pleasures such as (pop) music, video clips, cinema, multimedia performances etc.
then this anti-literary apocalypse which we all see unfolding is expressive of a global neurosis, that
sickness in being of which the philosopher Gabriel Marcel has spoken and written so persuasively. A
world without cultural values tends to be one in which real culture is not valued: a neurotic world, one
more in need than ever of the healing and wholeness which great art can offer.

Sandblom, op.cit., p. 200.

Pro Helvetia, Passages, 51, vol. 3, (Zurich, 2009).

Martins, op. cit., p.238.
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The 2nd
Proceedings
Session 3
Parallel Session 1
Perspectives, Approaches, and Practices
Parallel 1-1. Healing Humanities: Criticism and Defense
Parallel 1-2. Who Should Be Listened To?
Parallel 1-3. Healing Practices in the Humanities
The 2nd
Proceedings
Parallel Session 1-1

Healing Humanities: Criticism and Defense
1. Humanities and Healing from Perspectives in and around

Environmental Ethics
/ Johan Hattingh (Stellenbosch University)
2. N
otes Toward a Typology of Consolation: Healing and Cultural
Difference
/ Yasunari Takada (The University of Tokyo)
3. F
eminism and the Humanities as Means for Healing: Focused
on the Issue of Female North Korean Defectors
/ Heisook Kim (Ewha Womans University)
4. H
umanities and the Crisis of Politics: from Kallipolis to Blade
Runners L.A.
/ Luca Maria Scarantino (IULM University)
Humanities and Healing from Perspectives in and around

Environmental Ethics
Johan Hattingh
Stellenbosch University
1. Introduction
In the broad field of environmental philosophy and ethics, three different approaches, or groupings
of perspectives, can be distinguished (Zimmerman 1993, vi-ix). The first could be identified as
environmental ethics in the narrower sense of the word, characterised by the assumption that the solution
to grant moral considerability to non-human entities (Zimmerman 1993, vii). Holmes Rolston III, one of
the founders of environmental ethics in this sense of the word in the 1970s delineated the central tasks of
this approach to environmental ethics as follows:
In practice the ultimate challenge of environmental ethics is the conservation of life on earth. In
principle the ultimate challenge is a value theory profound enough to support that ethic. We need
an account of how nature carries value, and an ethics that appropriately respects those values
(Rolston 1991, 92).
For the purposes of exploring the theme of the humanities and healing from perspectives in and around
environmental ethics, I will discuss two examples of this approach to environmental ethics as it was
articulated in the ethics of respect for nature of Paul Taylor, and in the land ethic of Aldo Leopold.
A second approach to the broad field of environmental philosophy and ethics can be identified as radical
ecophilosophy. Drawing on the countercultural movement in Western society, radical ecophilosophy
includes deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology (Zimmerman 1993, vii), and to this could also be
added the perspective of bioregionalism. As a radical approach to ecophilosophy, all of these perspectives
endeavour to uncover the root causes of our environmental crisis as they can be found in fundamental
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to our environmental problems lies in moving away from our conventional human-centric ethical attitudes

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conceptual frameworks, basic attitudes, social institutions and the organizational formations of society.
These perspectives also argue that our environmental crisis will not be resolved without a paradigm shift
or revolution in society, entailing a profound transformation of the basic structure of society as well as
the attitudes and philosophies underlying it. As such, these perspectives are sceptical of merely reforming
certain aspects of society with a view to resolving our environmental crisis, for example by introducing
tighter controls on industrial pollution or promoting recycling. These represent only the symptoms of our
environmental crisis; what we need rather is to address its root causes (Zimmerman 1993, vii). For the
purposes of this paper, I will also focus on two examples of this approach, namely the deep ecology of
Arne Naess, and the ecofeminism of Karen Warren.
A third approach to the broad field of environmental philosophy and ethics, however, argues that it will
not be possible to introduce a profound expansion of our moral horizon to make provision for the moral
consideration of non-human entities, and that it would be naive to hope for a profound cultural revolution
that will bring an end to our environmental troubles. Zimmerman (1993, viii-ix) refers to this approach as
reformist anthropocentric ecophilosophy, because it basically assumes that the only realistic, and perhaps
most powerful basis to argue for the protection of nature and ecosystems is the instrumental value they
have for humans, ranging from direct use value to amenity values, aesthetic values, spiritual values and
existence values. According to this approach, it is ignorance, greed and short-sightedness that lies at
the root of our environmental crisis, and this can be addressed by education, smart policies, appropriate
incentives, and legislation all geared to promote the wise and sustainable use of nature. For the purpose
of this paper I will discuss one example of this broad approach that builds on its strengths, and in my
view overcome many of the problems posed by this approach. This is represented by the environmental
pragmatism of Bryan Norton that emphasizes the multiplicity of values that humans have to take into
account when making environmental decisions, and when they try to resolve environmental issues.
With this in mind, it appears as if one can establish a clear link between environmental philosophy and
ethics on the one hand, and an explicitly formulated aim to the healing of the earth on the other hand, to
the healing of our ecological systems through reforming our decisions and actions, expanding our moral
horizon, or radically transforming our thinking, culture and society as they relate to the natural world and
how we interact with it. The general aim of environmental ethics indeed can be described as an effort to
move humankind away from an environmentally destructive and an ecologically unsustainable mode of
existence to one that rather contributes to the flourishing of all life on earth in a manner that is sustainable
over time.
In my experience though, such a link between ethics and healing is not in the forefront of environmental
philosophy and ethics, at least not as I have encountered it over two decades of reading and studying its
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main texts. The explicit link rather made is that between environmental philosophy and ethics on the one
hand, and critical thinking radical critique, for that matter and in this critique to question, to question
deeply, to confront, to oppose, to unsettle, to change, and to transform thinking and practice. The general
argument in environmental ethics seems to push the notion of healing into the background, if the notion is
entertained at all, and to rather focus on the problematic, destructive side of the thinking and practices that
only takes into account aspects or parts of reality (for instance narrowly conceptualized human interests)
and not the whole of life as it exists in its diversity and mutual ecosystemic inter-dependence.
Against the background of these general observations I would like to focus in this paper in broad outline
on the target of five important approaches to environmental philosophy and ethics with a view to
sketch something of the thinking and practices that they point out are environmentally destructive but
in everyday life we tend to gloss over and effectively do very little about. My goal with regards to each
perspective will be to show how they conceptualize the problem of environmental ethics, how they
suggest we should analyse it, and how they propose we should position ourselves in relation to it, working
towards overcoming it.
In this overview I will also touch on what emerges positively from environmental ethics, formulated in
leading to our environmental problems and also discuss the conditions that are envisaged from the point
of view of each perspective as prerequisites for these alternative thinking and practice to become visible,
recognized, implemented and maintained.
Being critical of laying a direct link between environmental philosophy and ethics and healing, I wish
to preface this overview with a short exposition of the broad critical tradition of which the humanities,
environmental philosophy and ethics alike form an important part. In this preface I will not only touch
on some of the formal aspects of this critical tradition, but also point to some of the substantive ideas
that emerged from this critical tradition, one of which is the insight that humans, in order to survive and
flourish, need to acknowledge and respect their dependence on one another, in spite of any national,
religious or cultural differences that may exist between them. Another insight is that humans, in order to
survive and flourish, should acknowledge their fundamental dependence on natural ecosystems, and that
human survival and flourishing are in fact dependent upon the survival and flourishing of non-human life
on earth.
2. Critical thinking and the humanities
The central thesis informing this paper, is that western environmental philosophy and ethics forms
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general terms, as an alternative to the destructive mode of thinking informing the destructive practices

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part of a broad critical discourse also present in the humanities in which highly problematic aspects of
typically western thinking and practices are identified, unmasked, questioned and challenged, and highly
useful ideas about human existence, survival and flourishing have been articulated. One of the central
characteristics of this critical discourse is the process of endless self-questioning (see Derrida 2007). While
such a process of endless self-questioning at first glance appears to be a perpetually self-undermining
enterprise, a second, informed look at it quickly shows that it is precisely this process of endless selfquestioning that over centuries constituted the heart of this critical discourse, yielding not only substantive
positive insights, but also actively resisting efforts to determine and fix prematurely our ideas of what
health and a healthy society may entail. Below, a few instances of this process of endless questioning will
be sketched, together with some of its results and what it protested against.
One of the manifestations of critical thinking in the humanities as a process of endless self-questioning
can be found in the so-called hermeneutic turn in subject fields like philosophy, history, and the social
sciences. While the history of philosophy as well as the social sciences was for a very long time dominated
by a positivist ideal of knowledge according to which only empirical facts yielded knowledge that can be
taken seriously, the hermeneutical turn represented a shift towards a critical interpretation of all of those
factors, including the so-called subjective side of life, ideologies and power games playing themselves
out in society, that influence the understanding of facts. This shifted the central question of understanding
away from What is the case? and Why is it the case? to critical questions such as: How come that we
accept this or that as the case, and what are the social effects and implications of this? Who wins or who
loses from accepting this and not that as the case, and through which mechanisms do some in society win
and others lose?
Clear examples of this kind of questioning can be found in the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who
have all been characterized as masters of suspicion (Ricoeur 1970, 32), since none of them accepted
any interpretation of social reality as a true depiction of it, but rather as an epiphenomenon that can be
related to deeper lying factors. For Marx, for instance, the liberal consciousness of the bourgeoisie
believing in the idea of universal progress through growth of the market economy was an expression of
a false consciousness, neglecting to recognize how social reality was produced by an unfair distribution
of economic power. For Marx this false consciousness at the same time legitimised the dominant class
position of a certain sector of society, thus fulfilling an ideological role. Nietzsche, in turn, saw dominant
social ideas as the manifestation of a will to power, while Freud maintained that human behaviour could
be better explained and understood as a from a rationalisation of the libido than from reason or rationality.
Building on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, this critical hermeneutics was taken further, each in his
own way, by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault focused on the mechanisms through which
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identity and self are formed in western society, and showed how the format of knowledge, systems of
normativity and subtle disciplinary practices circulating in the institutions of society create certain forms of
individuality that are actually imposed on humans and not chosen freely by themselves. In fact, Foucault
puts serious question marks behind the notion of free, individual choice, and rather calls for processes of
becoming conscious of the societal mechanisms forming ourselves, and how these mechanisms not only
limit us to certain forms of being, and preventing us from taking up others, but also enable and empower
us to form identities that we concretely realize. As such, this critical consciousness, to some extent, limits
the hold of societal power on our existence, and opens up new or other possibilities of being that can be
explored, subject to the proviso, however, that societal power also generates and forms our thinking about,
and realization of these alternatives. Foucault thus does not see in critical thinking a total liberation from
context and societal power; he rather steers us into the direction of accepting the fact that we will never be
totally free from power, but rather that we, to some limited extent, can question, challenge and limit that
power by endless self-questioning (see Foucault 1984 and 1990).
Derrida points us in the same general direction with his focus on the language we speak and how we,
through a process of deconstruction, can become aware of the many ways in which we endeavour to
determine meaning finally, containing and fixing it as it were to become stable and controllable. For
alternative meanings, leading to processes and institutional arrangements that close down possibilities
of growth and renewal, instead of opening them up in provocative and challenging ways. To resist this
violence of determination and closure, Derrida suggests we uncover and become aware of the processes
in language by which we construct meaning and truth claims that are portrayed to be more coherent
and rational than they actually are. For Derrida, the primary tool to achieve this is by showing how
language can have the opposite meaning to what it is claimed to mean. This process of inversion of
meaning he refers to as deconstruction which is central to the strategy that he also refers to as endless
self-questioning. As such, he sees deconstruction not as a self-undermining, futile exercise, destroying
language and meaning. He rather sees it as our only hope to deliver us from the danger of final, eternally
determined meanings. Our only hope to learn to finally live, he stated in his last interview, is this process
of endless questioning (Derrida 2007; see also Derrida 1981).
A second manifestation of this tradition of radical questioning in western culture has culminated in a
vision of humankind as single human race with the earth as the common homeland of that race (The
Universal House of Justice 2002; see also Laszlo 1994, and Morin and Kern 1999). In this vision, humans
from different nations, cultures and religious backgrounds are not seen as fundamentally in competition
with one another, but rather as mutually dependent upon one another for survival and flourishing,
dependent as they all also are on the earth and the different natural systems characterising it for their
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Derrida this process of determination entails the danger, and even the violence, of excluding other or

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survival and flourishing. This notion of unity and interdependence clearly goes against the grain of the
current organisation of international relations characterised as it is by tension, competition, violence, war
and self-interested decision-making and action. This notion also goes against the grain of a conventional,
western notion of the subject as an abstract entity standing loose and apart from any context, and able to
realise itself in pure isolation from everything else.
Both this organisation of the international order, and this notion of self are rejected from the point of
view of unity and interconnectedness the first in favour of an international order organised around
principles of universal respect for human rights, fairness, social justice, participation and democracy,
and the second in favour of notions of a relational self, embedded in a concrete context characterised by
time and place, permeated by social institutions and ecological systems that evolve over time and have
their own interrelated histories, affecting one another in many particular ways. In the perspectives from
environmental philosophy and ethics that will be discussed below, these themes will be picked up again.
A third manifestation of the tradition of radical critical thinking in western culture can be found in the
liberal arts approach to tertiary education as it is most commonly practiced in the USA, drawing as
it does on the philosophy of education of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Nobel Prize winner
Rabinadranath Tagore of India, Friedrich Frbel of Germany, Johann Pestalozzi of Switzerland, Bronson
Alcott of the USA and Maria Montessori of Italy (Nussbaum 2011, 18, 19, 35). Criticizing the sharp
division that is conventionally made between the natural and the human sciences, as well as efforts to
eliminate beauty, creativity, imagination, self-exploratory questioning and critical dialogue with peers
from serious education in favour of measurable outcomes that will guarantee financial success in
the world, the liberal arts approach to education emphasises that all students require these humanitiesoriented components in their education in order to help form democratic world citizens that can approach
problems and problem solving from a broad, inclusive, global point of view, instead of the narrow partisan
perspectives often emanating from sectional, regional, national or cultural interests. As such, this approach
to education openly makes a choice to foster and promote those characteristics and dispositions in
students that can make a positive contribution to the building of democratic institutions, characterised by
participation, respect for differences, dialogue, imaginative problem solving and partnerships (Nussbaum
2011) strengthening the emerging vision of humanity as one race with the earth as common homeland.
Taken together, these three manifestations of the western tradition of critical discourse articulate a strong
vision of humankind dependent upon one another and the ecosystems of the earth for its survival and
flourishing. Common to all three of these manifestations, is the strategy of endless questioning, that
suggests that any and every vision of humankind, and any and every form of interaction cannot be
accepted on face value, but should rather be questioned deeply and endlessly to determine its origins,
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structure, mechanisms of functioning, and its effects on fellow human beings, as well as the earth and
its ecosystems. In the section that follows I would like to give an overview and interpretation of five
perspectives from environmental ethics that all, in their own manner, contribute to, and form part of this
critical discourse a discourse that never ceases to question and challenge. These perspectives will only
be sketched in broad outline, focusing on the respective targets that are distinguished in each case,
as well as the questions why these targets are identified, how they are questioned, and what kind of
responses are envisaged with each perspective to overcome the problems posed by a particular target.
3. Five perspectives from within and around environmental ethics
3.1 The ethics of respect for nature of Paul Taylor
The target of Paul Taylors ethics of respect for nature is, in short, human arrogance (Taylor 1986).
For Taylor, this arrogance entails the view that humans are superior to all other living entities, with the
practical implication that only the interests of humans are worthy of moral consideration. Taylor begs to
differ strongly from this view on three grounds: firstly, he sees humans as members of the community of
life that has evolved on earth; secondly, from an evolutionary point of view humans are fairly late arrivals
have no interests that are worthy of moral consideration.
According to Taylor, all non-human living things should be viewed as teleological centres of life. This
means that every non-human living thing has in interest to realise its own good in its own way. An
elephant, for instance, has an interest to flourish as an elephant in the way elephants flourish, and so does
a tree and a fern to flourish as their respective kinds in their own way. This further means that non-human
living things have interests that are independent from any human use value that can be derived from them.
For Taylor, this implies that non-human living entities have intrinsic value value of their own that they
pursue in their own unique way, and as such, this intrinsic value deserves moral respect and consideration.
An ethics of respect for nature has three elements to it, Taylor argues; The first element entails acquiring
objective knowledge about the general conditions under which non-human living entities thrive in
nature, and to progressively deepen and expand this knowledge through science. In many respects this
is knowledge that humans to a large extent do not have, and thus it should be actively pursued. The
second element is to recognize the individuality of non-human living organisms, which is to grasp their
particularity. This entails a process of getting to know non-human living things in their uniqueness, how
they differ from one another, and what their individual needs are. The third element entails a heightened
consciousness characterised by a full awareness of that individuals standpoint, i.e. its interests, and
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in this community of life; and thirdly, because it is simply wrong to assume that non-human living entities

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then to ensure that the conditions under which these interests can be realised, are maintained and even
improved upon. In practical terms, this entails the conservation of habitats, as well as their improvement
or restoration where they are damaged and the damage can be reversed.
The further aspect of Taylors ethic of respect for nature entails doing justice to non-human living entities
in cases where the satisfaction of legitimate human needs compatible with an ethics of respect for nature
has inevitable impacts on non-human living organisms. For this purpose, Taylor has formulated certain
priority principles that should be followed, boiling down to avoid interference with the lives of non-human
living organisms as far as possible, and when interference cannot be avoided, to reduce that effect of it to
as little as possible in terms of numbers and intensity, and to compensate for that impact. The latter could
for instance be done by recreating a habitat elsewhere if it is destroyed in a certain place, or relocating
individual non-human organisms to other places if they or their habitat stand to be destroyed for the sake
of, for instance, building a library or a harbour essential to satisfying human needs.
With an ethics like this, Taylor thus argues for biocentric egalitarianism. All life in all of its forms needs
to be respected, since every living organism has interests and independent value that cannot be ignored
from a moral point of view. In this, humans have no position that, from a moral point of view, makes them
superior to any other form of life. Humans should rather behave as members of the community of life,
and vice versa, any non-human living organism should be treated and respected equally as member of
the community of life. There are no grounds for any exceptions, although Taylor makes provision for the
principle of self defence in cases where non-human organisms are dangerous to humans, and humans do
not venture wilfully into their territory to provoke them, and use minimum violence in such self-defence.
3.2 The land ethic of Aldo Leopold
The target of Aldo Leopolds land ethic is the destructive power of mechanised man (Leopold 1949).
While not a professional philosopher, and in fact preceding the emergence of theoretical environmental
philosophy and ethics in the 1970s, Leopold articulated from the point of view of a practical
environmental manager in the first half of the 20th century what happens when the interaction of humans
with the land is mediated by technology, framed within a utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits: land
becomes a commodity, and humans the conquerors of the land. For Leopold, this represents a crude
reduction of both land and humans to something far less than they actually are, or can be. For him, land
represents the community of life, and everything else that supports that life, and he argues that humans
must become ordinary citizens of that community in a manner that their voices and votes do not count
more than that of any other citizen. Such an ethic, however, Leopold points out, is not self-evident for
the utilitarian oriented mechanised man. It is something that he will have to develop and learn, and as he
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suggests in what is arguably one of his most famous essays (Thinking like a mountain), such learning
often takes place when it is too late, and irreversible damage to an ecosystem, or damage that is very hard
to reverse, has already been caused.
In this essay, Leopold relates how he as a young field ranger in the Rocky Mountains participated in a
wolf-eradication programme, assuming that it would be possible to replace wolves with hunters in order
to keep the deer population under control, and through that, by removing wolves from the mountain
range, enabling stock farmers a guaranteed income and preventing them from going bankrupt. However,
when Leopold noticed how the deer population exploded after the last wolf and mountain lion was
destroyed, because the hunters that were supposed to take their places proved to be inefficient, and the
deer population destroyed the mountain range, and then died from lack of adequate grazing, he concluded
that only a mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. With this powerful
metaphor he pointed out that the vision required to respect the community of life as a whole and every
member within it, required much more than the short-term perspective of financial security dominated
by cost-benefit analyses and the atomistic-mechanistic assumption that nature consists of discrete nonliving parts that can be replaced at will by other parts with no real effect on the functioning of the
whole. Instead, Leopold argues that nature should be seen as a living whole, a community of life, whose
have to be very careful about our economic decisions, and always assess them for the impact they may
have on larger spatial and temporal units. Ultimately, he argues, we should also consider geological
time, the vision of a mountain, determining whether our decisions and actions will cause irreversible and
permanent damage to the political, social, cultural, and ecological systems in which they are embedded.
With this focus on the impact of decisions on the wider contexts within which they are embedded,
Leopold (1949, 262) then formulated the central tenet of his land ethic in the following injunction: A
thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is
wrong when it tends otherwise.
With this perspective, Leopold expands our moral horizon to include not only non-human living entities
as that which should be morally considered, but also the land, the waters, the ecosystems and inorganic
natural processes that make the existence of the community of life possible in the first place. But he goes
further, and also argues for a transformation of our conventional human ethics that only takes human
interests seriously. In his land ethics he calls for a reorganization of our moral thinking to focus on
context, interdependence and interconnectivity, history, evolution and geological time. In this manner
he articulated already before the actual emergence of environmental philosophy and ethics a theoretical
academic field insight that has proven to be central in the transformative thinking of both the humanities
and the environmental thinking of today.
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functioning is both complex and fragile, and of which we do not have complete knowledge. We therefore

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3.3 The Deep ecology of Arne Naess

The theme of a radical critique of the metaphysics and self-conception underlying consumer society
is taken up in the deep ecology of Arne Naess (1982 and 1986). For him the target of environmental
philosophy is the narrow, egotistical notion of self informing the consumerist life-style that has come
to dominate the world. For Naess this self is immature in that it strives for realization through the
accumulation and consumption of material goods and a high standard of living, and its only ecological
worry is a shallow concern about pollution and habitat destruction that may jeopardise the consumerist
project. Instead, Naess proposes a deep ecology that focuses on the root causes of our environmental
predicaments. As Naess sees it, this root cause is the metaphysical notion of humans as separate and apart
from nature, standing over and against it. Criticizing the image of man in nature, he rather develops the
notion of mankind as part and parcel of nature drawing among others on Gestalt theory, phenomenology
and the philosophy of Mahatma Ghandi as sources of inspiration.
Under these assumptions, Naess argues, a mature self, a big spirited self can emerge by using the mental
strategy of identification with ever larger circles of being in which we as humans are embedded. In a
though experiment to determine where the self is located, Naess points out that the self is not found
somewhere within the mind or even the body of an individual; what we refer to as the self is rather
formed by all of the relationships within which we are embedded that contribute to the formation of our
consciousness and identity: the family, the clan, the village or town or city we live in, our immediate
surroundings, the landscape, the continent we come from. All of this is part of ourselves, and we are
connected to and part of it. Accordingly, Naess would not see environmental action as something that
humans do for and on behalf of the environment. Protest against a dam that will be built in a valley, for
instance, will rather be an act of self-defence.
Arne Naess thus also emphasises ideas of interdependence and interconnectivity, and calls very strongly
for a transformation of our deepest assumptions about nature, self, identity, consciousness, and selfrealization with a view to overcoming our environmental crisis. He is criticized, however, for not taking
ideology, domination and power relations explicitly into account in his deep ecology, which is clearly
done in ecofeminist circles, in particular in the ecofeminism of Karen Warren, to which we turn next.
3.4 The ecofeminism of Karen Warren
In her famous essay The power and the promise of ecological feminism Karen Warren (1990) argues
that patriarchy should be singled out as the root cause of our environmental problems since it is
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characterized by a logic of domination and exploitation that not only informs the interaction of men with
women, but also that of humans with nature. This logic of domination, she points out, is characterized by
three elements: dichotomous thinking in which a number of simplistic binary oppositions are clustered and
combined to reinforce one another; hierarchical thinking in which the one pole of the binary opposition
is given a positive value, while the other one is given a negative value; and an argument in which those
associated with the positive values are portrayed as superior and justified in dominating those associated
with the negative values and are portrayed and treated as inferior.
As Warren correctly shows, the human-nature dichotomy and the male-female dichotomy are still
functioning in an analogous and mutually reinforcing manner in many sectors of mainstream popular
culture, and are supported by a wide array of similar dichotomies, each of which are given a place within
a value hierarchy that allocates positive value to the male or human side of the dichotomies, and negative
value to the female or nature side of the dichotomy. Combined with the argument that the superior side of
a value hierarchy can legitimately dominate and exploit the inferior side, the social effects of this dualistic
and hierarchical thinking is the portrayal of the domination of both women and nature as part of the
normal order of things, and something that does not deserve any questioning or critical discussion.
in society: it privileges patriarchal power to dictate agendas of action, and silences through various
mechanisms any protest and opposition that could be raised to that agenda. One of the mechanisms
often used in this silencing, is the portrayal of any protest as unreasonable or not normal. In particular,
Warren argues, the voices of those women who are dominated and exploited by this logic are silenced,
they are rendered speechless, so that even if they tried to speak out, their voices in protest and opposition
are not heard. Accordingly, Warren formulates the agenda of ecofeminism as unmasking, opposing and
overcoming this logic of domination and its silencing effects in any and every one of its manifestations in
society.
Central to this agenda for Warren is the strategy of giving voice to those who have been silenced by the
logic of domination, something that could be achieved by foregrounding the experience of women who
have become victims of patriarchy in their own lives, but also have become victims of the domination
and exploitation of nature. As she argues forcefully in her article, dominated and oppressed women have
many stories to tell and to share with the world, and the best way to capture these stories is by listening
to the first person singular narratives of those who have become the victims of the logic of domination
of patriarchy. In these I-narratives, Warren argue, experiences will be and are articulated that are not
commonly found in theoretical writings. Instead, these narratives will be concrete and specific, articulating
what was lived through in the context from which the narrative speaks, placing living and real issues in a
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With this observation, Warren draws attention to the ideological functioning of the logic of domination

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vivid and direct manner on the agendas of those concerned about environmental and feminist issues, and
as such serve as inspiration for activist responses.
Ultimately, Warren argues that this ecofeminist agenda and its strategies to give voice to the experiences of
the victims of patriarchy will enable society to discard the logic of domination, its central argument and its
dualist and hierarchical thinking. This could be done, she argues, in mode of thinking that does not discard
the differences between men and women, or humankind and nature, but acknowledge these differences
albeit in a manner that does not have the end result of domination and exploitation. What Warren argues
for in the place of dichotomies and hierarchies is thus relational thinking in which differences are seen
as nuances on a spectrum, the end points of which are not regarded as dichotomous poles but rather
possibilities in a continuum.
With these perspectives Warren articulates a radically transformative agenda for ecofeminism in which
not only the identities of male and female, or humankind and nature are rethought, but also the relationship
between them, that is: their mode of interaction. Together with Val Plumwood, Karen Warren thus makes
a positive contribution to the articulation of selves and identities in terms of their interdependence and
internal connections. Her critical thinking points us in the direction of rethinking differences in a manner
that does not see differences as a source of domination and exploitation, but as a source of building new
connections and enriched selves and identities.
From the practical world of environmental governance and management, however, the criticism is often
heard that the radical, transformative perspectives likes those of deep ecology and ecofeminism discussed
above, while making many legitimate points, have long-term agendas that will take too long for the
positive results of societal or cultural transformations to really come into effect, and that environmental
decision-makers who have to address environmental issues today require guidance that can be used
immediately, and articulated in a practical language that can be understood by politicians and managers
alike. A bold effort in the articulation of such a pragmatic approach can be found in the environmental
ethics of Bryan Norton.
3.5 The environmental pragmatism of Bryan Norton
In his environmental pragmatism Bryan Norton (1991, 2003, 2005) responds to the embarrassment of
environmentalists and managers alike that they have no common, practical language in which to articulate
our environmental problems and the paths to follow towards resolving them. He argues that we have
to move beyond theoretical, metaphysical and ideological language in this endeavour, and also beyond
language that only makes use of single principles or value perspectives to articulate issues and solutions.
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We rather need to accommodate a multiplicity of values in combination with one another, taking into
account different kinds of environmental risks that we are exposed to, as well as the realities of the costs
to address them.
To develop such a language, Norton makes use of an approach in which learning from experience, the
actual experiences and struggles of communities confronted with particular environmental challenges,
and multiple scales of analysis stands central. Norton refers to this generally as the bases of adaptive
management, in which the question of how communities actually value and make sense of things,
environmental challenges and possible solutions included, should strategically speaking, be the point of
departure.
As Norton sees it, adaptive management is essentially an iterative, participative and democratic enterprise
in which management targets, outcomes, plans and strategies are not defined unilaterally and finally
by managers from a distant and technocratic point of view, but provisionally and in dialogue with the
communities in which environmental problems have to be addressed. In such a process, Norton argues,
it is important to identify clear indicators on which the communities involved agree in terms of which
management success or failure can be measured, and if mileposts are not reached or overshot, adjustments
A short illustration of what Norton has in mind with this pragmatic approach and practical language can
be given with reference to a simple decision square (see Figure 1 below) that he has designed to guide
thinking about different kinds of environmental risks and how to respond to them. The point of departure
of this decision square is a risk typology that ranges from mere inconveniences to irreversible catastrophes.
[Figure 1] Bryan Nortons decision square depicting a risk typology, linked to severity and reversibility (Norton 2003, 172).
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can be made in time, before it is too late, to adjust targets, outcomes, plans, or strategies.

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On this continuum, increments in risk severity can be indicated as varying degrees of real resource costs,
severe economic dislocation, cultural or political impoverishment, biological impoverishment, and
distinction (Norton 2003, 172). On this square, reversibility and irreversibility could be entered on the
bottom line, with the most reversible inconveniences placed in the bottom right hand corner, and the most
irreversible catastrophes like species extinction in the left hand corner. On the vertical axis low cost can be
entered at the bottom, and high cost at the top. In combination with one another, all of the factors in this
decision square could be portrayed as follows:
With such a guide, one can plot in broad outline environmental risks and responses to it, and from its
location on the square inferences can be made about the kinds of values that need to be considered in order
to better characterize the risk and to think more clearly about possible responses. Small inconveniences
that can be reversed at low cost will clearly require mostly short-term financial or economic values to
decide about, while the location of a repository for nuclear waste storage that can have long term sociopolitical implications for a region or even cause biological impoverishment, and will be very expensive
not only to locate but also to shift if it were to be initially located in the wrong place, will require processes
of careful and sensitive political dialogue, community participation and long term thinking, over and
above financial cost-benefit analyses to decide.
By introducing the category in the decision square of irreversible catastrophe that will incur very high,
if not incalculable costs to deal with, Norton is able to articulate the notion of non-negotiable thresholds
that need to be defined by society, managers and experts in dialogue with one another. Thresholds like this
will represent hard limits beyond which society has decided it should not go, and also stimulate policies
designed to discourage decision-makers to approach these limits, creating safety margins that should be
respected. When these non-negotiable thresholds are approached, Norton argues that cost-benefit calculus
and purely utilitarian considerations are trumped by societal interests in safety, security, and stability, and/
or considerations preventing biological impoverishment or extinctions. This is another way for Norton of
saying that we should spare no costs in ensuring that we do not approach these non-negotiable thresholds,
and that in certain contexts when confronted with certain risks those risks cannot be traded off against
possible economic gains that can be gained from it.
While representing thus a reformist anthropocentric position in environmental ethics, Nortons pragmatic
approach need not be seen as a weak approach. On the contrary, it could function as radical as any of
the other positions in environmental philosophy and ethics discussed above, and perhaps even have the
advantage of speaking the language of managers, planners and politicians that can understand it from the
outset.
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4. Interpretation and Conclusion

With this broad overview of a selection of perspectives from within and around environmental ethics it is
possible to draw three strong conclusions about the theme of the humanities and healing:
1. From the overview it is evident that environmental philosophy and ethics in its theoretical, practical,
reformative, transformative and radical formats are primarily concerned with critical thinking that
questions and poses challenges to conventional ways of thinking and conventional practices that lead
to environmental risks and destruction. While these different perspectives in environmental ethics all in
their own ways make a contribution to the transformation of our ethical thinking, to the expansion of
the circle of what can and should be included in the realm of moral considerability, to taking seriously
ecological and societal considerations that have been neglected before, to transforming practices and
mental frameworks, to changing the structure and functioning of society, and to putting in place newly
conceptualized practices, processes, institutions and modes of self-realization, little if any of these are
linked directly by environmental philosophers and ethicists to the healing of society or nature in the
conventional sense of the term healing. Instead, the link is rather made to a confrontation or engagement
with society at large, prompting it to move away from an unsustainable and destructive development path
2. From the overview it is also evident that the different perspectives in environmental philosophy and
ethics, sharing as they are in a broad critical aim, contribute in their own ways to a wider global discourse
in which interdependence, democratic participation, and the unity of humankind as one race with the earth
as common homeland are emphasized. In this discourse interdependence, democratic participation, the
unity of humankind, and respect for the earth are emphasized as prerequisites or boundary conditions for
the flourishing of human and non-human life on earth alike, together and in interaction with one another
in a shared history, co-evolving in interaction with one another. As it is typical of the western tradition
of critical thinking, these boundary conditions are not seen as substantive definitions or determinations
of what this flourishing should entail, or what direction this history of co-evolution should take. It is
rather a future oriented mode of thinking that is in principle always open for change and transformation,
and as such calls for a continual process of exploration of possible ways of identity formation and
self-realization, as well as a never-ending process of self-questioning in which any constraints to the
flourishing of life and its openness to the future are identified and challenged. As it has been shown above,
environmental ethics in its many different formats make an important and substantive contribution to this
process of endless exploration and self-questioning. The enthusiasm and vigour with which environmental
philosophy and ethics have taken up this role in the past four decades is a clear indication that its critical
thinking and questioning is seen as part of a healthy process, without prescribing or pre-empting in any
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to one that is sustainable and restorative in its main thrust.

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way what exactly should be regarded as the final standard in terms of which the health of society should
be determined.
3. In the overview above it has been demonstrated that western environmental philosophy and ethics
challenges the ideal and practice of unrestrained physical growth and development that is still to a very
large extent prevalent in industrial societies, arguing that this ideal and practice is unsustainable in the
sense of destroying not only the physical, or ecological basis of life on earth, but also the spiritual basis
of human existence, i.e. the sense of wonder and respect for life on earth as an unfolding and evolving
process with a worth of its own independent from the interests of human beings. In the overview above,
it was also demonstrated that the unsustainable and destructive development path of industrial society is
in part the result of the reduction of decision-making criteria about development to short-term economic
considerations, and in part the result of the reduction of the notion of self-realization to that of acquiring
material wealth and consumption of material goods. As such a critical enterprise, environmental ethics can
easily be framed as a healing endeavour its central aim and focus can easily be depicted as an effort
to heal humankind from the illnesses of materialism, consumerism, autism, fragmentation, isolationism
and abstract idealism. The irony, however, is that such a focus on healing will typically become part of
the critical questioning of environmental philosophy and ethics itself, unravelling as it will do what the
notion of health may entail in this context, questioning how the meaning of health was constructed and
determined, how this meaning circulates and functions in society, who wins what by this through which
mechanisms and who loses what ... So, as it was argued in the main thrust of this paper, instead of linking
environmental philosophy and ethics with the notion of healing, environmental philosophy and ethics
rather seem to suggest that it is healthier to question the notion of health and to keep on subjecting it to a
process of endless questioning, rather than to try to finally determine what exactly health means and to
try to implement that meaning in the world. Indeed, many efforts in the recent past to restore society to
a state of health have ended in catastrophe, many dimensions of which have been irreversible and have
come with incalculable costs. At least, this has been the experience in western culture.
References
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Derrida, J. (1981) Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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Laszlo, E. (1993) The Multicultural Planet: The Report of a UNESCO International Expert Group.
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Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press.
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Nussbaum, M. (2011) Niet Voor De Winst. Waarom De Democratie De Geesteswetenschappen Nodig
Heeft. (A Dutch translation by Rogier van Kappel of Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the
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Rolston III, H. (1991) Environmental ethics: Values in and duties to the natural world. In F. Herbert
Haven: Yale University Press.
Taylor, P. (1986) Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton University Press.
The Universal House of Justice (2002) Message to the Worlds Religious Leaders. Available at http://
www.bahai.org/selected-writings/message-worlds-religious-leaders/
Warren, K.J. (1990) The power and the promise of ecological feminism. Environmental Ethics, Vol. 12,
No. 2, pp. 125-146.
Zimmerman, M.E. (1993) General introduction. In Zimmerman, M.E. (general editor), Environmental
Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
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Bornmann and Stephen R. Kellert (eds.), The Broken Circle: Ecology, Economics, Ethics, New

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Notes Toward a Typology of Consolation: Healing and Cultural

Difference
Yasunari Takada
The University of Tokyo
1. 3.11 and Healing

Japan still remains in the aftermath of the 3.11, the disaster that happened in 2011, now officially named
the Great Earthquake Disaster in the Eastern Japan. The disaster, as you know, was twofold: one
is the natural disaster of earthquake and tsunami and the other the man-made disaster of radioactive
contamination that happened at Fukushima no. 1 nuclear power plant. In both kinds of disaster, natural
and/or man-made, those who suffered from them have clearly been in need of healing. When I was told
the topic of the present conference it was natural that I was immediately reminded of the 3.11 disasters.
It goes without saying that for the victims of the disasters, both natural and man-made, urgent was the
healing, ranging from surgical treatment to psychiatric counseling. And after one year and a half it still
remains the case. But my concern here is not with these aspects of healing: it is proper that they be dealt
with in various departments of medical science. Instead, what I am concerned with here is the relationship
between healing and culture because cultural difference matters much, as I understand it, in defining
the characteristic and practice of healing. The idea may sound trite and it even belongs to a common
knowledge, but it seems to me not worthless to examine this problematic of healing and culture as it
presents itself in and around the 3.11 disaster.
2. Two Impressive Features of 3.11 and Two Kinds of Healing
When one talks about the 3.11 disaster, there are two impressive features that cannot be left unmentioned.
One is the disciplined behavior of the people who suffered from the earthquake and tsunami, and the other
is the confused state of affairs among those who were supposed be in charge of the nuclear power safety
control.
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It is said that nothing was more impressive than the self-discipline and peace of mind with which those
who had undergone the horrendous earthquake conducted themselves. Foreign media reporting the
disaster and its aftermath seems to have been particularly struck with the general composure the people
showed in face of such a crisis. A few explanations are proposed for this admirable phenomenon. Some
say that part of the reason can be sought in the fact that the Eastern Japan is sparsely populated and there
is no big city in the areas badly hit by the earthquake and tsunami.1 Others say that it is because of the
backwardness and the severe weather of the Eastern district, due to which its people are used to patience
and endurance. Each of the explanations may have a grain of truth in it but are not particularly convincing.
A more general theory, as it happened, was proposed more than eighty years ago by a noted physicist,
Torahiko Terada (1878-1935). According to him, nature in Japan has two faces, one being that of
beautiful loving mother and the other that of terrifying strict father. If the former can find its exemplary
representation in the beautiful landscape filled with a large variety of hilly features, the latter sees its
expression in the frequent and violent earthquake. Both of them, however, have their ultimate origins in
the volcanic activities.
In Japan the mercifulness of Nature (the loving mother) is so profound and profuse that its
her arms, while at the same time the severe punishments of Nature (the strict father) cut them to the
bone to such an extent that its inhabitants think it useless to revolt against him. As a consequence,
while sufficiently enjoying the blessings of nature, they have given up their will to revolt against
nature and tried instead to accumulate the experience and knowledge about nature so as to
accustom themselves to it.2
In Teradas view, nature in Japan has in it both benign and malign sides. But they both have acted in
a kind of collusion to produce the kind of mentality (human nature) that tends to feel at once comfort
andresignation toward nature. Following Teradas theory, it is not impossible to say that we witnessed a
manifestation of this inherited second nature behind the self-discipline and composure of the victims of
the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami.3
1 In the Great Kanto Earthquake that hit Tokyo in 1923, indeed, there was triggered off a massacre, in which a number of
Koreans became the victims of groundless rumors. But basically, this was a politically motivated happening.
2 Torahiko Terada, The Japanese View on Nature (1935), in Natural Disaster and the Japanese, ed. Tetsuo Yamaori (Tokyo:
Kadokawa, 2011), pp. 123-24.
3 Related to this feature of composure the victims of the natural disaster showed in the face of crisis is the nation-wide
movement of compassion called kizuna, or ties or bonds both between the people and with the native land. Again,
Terada sought a kind of its origin in the complicated and labyrinthine structure of natural topography, which has been
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inhabitants can easily feel themselves saturated with it, finding themselves comfortably nestling in

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The second impressive feature was observable not in the behavior of the victims of the natural disaster but
in the conduct of those in power who were responsible for the control and management of nuclear power.
Admittedly, how those concerned (the cabinet, TPCO and NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency))
went about in risk management and what they did and did not has not yet been fully clarified and still
awaits full investigation. But this much can be safely said: there was a panic, where proper control and
management was hardly at work. That there seems to have been no command system ready to cope with
the situation will reveal that no proper provision had been made against this kind of crisis. Beyond all
expectations is the characteristic phrase those in the responsible position have kept repeating to describe
the situation.
We must be cautious about making judgments on the Fukushima incident until a full report will come out,
but I think I am not alone in perceiving in the characteristic phrase beyond all expectations what Terada
had to say about the typical Japanese attitude to nature, particularly in its terrifying aspect of strict father.
The severe punishments of Nature (the strict father) [earthquake and tsunami], he says, cut them to the
bone to such an extent that its inhabitants think it useless to revolt against him. As a consequence, []
they have given up their will to revolt against nature. The invention of nuclear power is nothing if not
an ultimate instance of the revolt against nature. It is therefore not permissible for those engaged in this
revolt against nature to confess that they failed to take every measure of prevention against any possible
occurrence of disaster nature has in store, of which earthquake and tsunami are unfortunate but familiar
stocks in trade. The confession of beyond all expectations that those responsible for nuclear power
unwittingly made is revealing in that they were unaware of being engaged in the daring business of the
revolt against nature. The origins and causes of this serious unawareness are obviously too complicated
to elucidate, but there seem to be two major underlying assumptions that helped to make the confession
possible. Firstly, it is likely that they simply regarded the business of nuclear power not as the ultimate
case of the Western scientific tradition but simply as one of the imported technologies. A technology is a
technology because of its being transferrable from one cultural tradition to another without carrying with it
its background world view. And behind the invention of nuclear power is a distinct tradition, what Terada
calls the analytic science of the West, whose ultimate origins Terada suggests have closely to do with
the Judeo-Christian world view.4 Secondly, because of the traditional attitude toward nature that has been
persistently fostered on the Japanese Isles they found it difficult to recognize the basic distinction between
further strengthened by the characteristic volcanic activities. Such topography is not conducive to a nomadic people but
instrumental to settling a people in a place. Those who are settled in this way as natives came gradually to assume their
own local characteristics while accustoming themselves to their local climates. And at the same time they came to form a
strong attachment to their native lands where they were settled (Ibid., pp. 111-12). The similar argument and theme was
to be further substantiated by Tetsuro Watsuji in his Fudo (1935, Climate and Change in English translation).
4 Ibid., p. 124.
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natural and man-made disasters. Beyond all expectations is a phrase that naturally comes out from those
who have given up their will to revolt against nature and tried instead to accumulate the experience and
knowledge about nature so as to accustom themselves to it.
The point Id like to make based on the distinction between natural and man-made disasters is that there
is a corresponding difference in healing as well. At the risk of oversimplification the case can be made
that the natural disaster calls for a course of affective adjustments while the man-made disaster demands
a process of rational understanding. For the natural disaster is in its nature inexplicable and something
ineluctable to comply with whereas the man-made disaster is susceptible rational analysis and something
one can and must answer for.
Discussion Ive made above of the two impressive features about the 3.11 disaster indicates that the
Japanese culture seems to be programmed to produce a peculiar mental disposition. Namely, it has a
relatively high capacity to accommodate itself to natural disasters, while it shows, on the other hand,
a rather limited capacity when it faces a man-made calamity. Now, this in turn suggests the possibility
of cultural difference in the way the two kinds of healing take their effect. There can be a culture, for
example, where, in sharp contrast to the Japanese, the mental disposition is programmed to accommodate
the supposed peculiarity of the nature and structure of the Japanese culture.
3. Nature and Structure of Japanese Culture
What I picked up for the examination of Japanese culture are the three intellectuals representing the high
culture of postwar Japan: Shuichi Kato (1919-2008), Masao Maruyama (1914-1996) and Toshihiko
Izutsu (1914-1993). Shuichi Kato, perhaps best known to the English-speaking world as the author of A
History of Japanese Literature, was veritably a versatile intellectual. Trained as medical doctor but taught
himself in literature, philosophy and art of both East and West, he established himself as a cosmopolitan
intellectual and remained long as a leading critic. He is also remembered as a life-long civic activist
in defense of the Article 9 of the Constitution.5 Masao Maruyama, professor of political philosophy at
the University of Tokyo and in his time an influential scholar-critic, was perhaps also familiar to the
English-speaking world through a couple of his representative works, Studies in the Intellectual History
5 ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce
war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To
accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be
maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
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itself less to natural disasters than to man-made calamities. But first it is necessary to take a close look at

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of Tokugawa Japan and Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics. Although the former
work received a due criticism of scholarly inaccuracy of over-reading or under-reading of Confucian
scholar in the Edo period, it should be read in the same spirit in which the latter work was written, i.e.,
the philosophical diagnosis of Japans ultra-nationalism in its pre- and interwar period and the search
for its remedy. For Maruyama, and for Kato as well, the fiasco in which the Fifteen Years War (from the
Manchurian Incident of 1931 to the total capitulation in 1945) had come to an end proved the failure of
Japans modernization, especially in its spiritual aspects. They were of the opinion that Japan was still
in need of proper modernization in its spiritual sphere: modernization for them remained an unfinished
project. Now, Toshihiko Izutsu, our third figure, is a slightly different kettle of fish. Well-versed in
numerous languages, both classical and modern, he accomplished a comparative study on a variety of
religious experiences in East and West to eventually become a world-noted Islamist. In 1962 he left Japan,
where he had taught at Keio University for more than ten years to assume a professorial appointment
at McGill University, Canada. And then in 1975 he was invited from the Imperial Iranian Academy
of Philosophy at Teheran, where he stayed until 1979, when the outbreak of the Islamic revolution
forced him to return to Japan. Among his numerous books in English are Ethico-Religious Concepts
in the Quran, Sufism and Taoism, and Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. He preferred to be a
cosmopolitan, wandering scholar, and as such belongs to the rare species among Japanese intellectuals,
which includes Kato as well.
These are the three personages, through whose examination I would like to bring out the nature and
structure of the Japanese culture. But what strikes us most at first glass is their diversity: a critic, a
scholar of political philosophy, and a philosopher of Oriental religions, but there are in fact two reasons
why I chose these three intellectuals among others: (1) precisely because they were different from those
philosophers of Kyoto school who were intent on building either a national philosophy or an Oriental
philosophy serving the national end. It is true that one of Toshihiko Izutsus works, Consciousness and
Essence (1982), purports to build a synchronic system of Oriental philosophy but it has nothing to do
with any form of parochial nationalism. As for Kato and Maruyama, it was exactly with the critique of the
wartime nationalism that marked the point of departure for their lifelong activities. Secondly I chose them
(2) because Katos last work, Space and Time in Japanese Culture (2007), as I understand it, will provide
us with a broad scheme, through which both Maruyamas and Izutsus works are to be interrelated.
3-1. Kato
People in Japanese society, at its all levels, have a tendency to live only for the present, letting
bygones be bygones and leaving the future up to the wind. The meaning of the present events is
defined not in their relation to the past history or future prospect but on its own, irrespective of
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what is gone and what it to come.

The typical community, where days are spent in the characteristically present-oriented way, []
has such distinct boundaries that the behavior and attitude of its members toward its insiders is
contrastively different from the one toward its outsiders. Behind such difference in their behavior
and attitude is probably a strong communal sense of belonging together. Since such a community
for them is a life-world, the strong sense of belonging together implies that their world is nothing
but here. [] It seems to be the case, therefore, that in Japan people have found themselves
living here-now. 6
The upshot of Katos argument in his Space and Time in Japanese Culture is that the essentials of the
Japanese culture can be found in its characteristic attitude toward and predilection for here and now. By
this here and now he means that in the sharp distinction the Japanese culture will make between inside
and outside, greater store is set of the inside (here) while in the perception of time, too, much is made of
the momentary and ephemeral now rather than the long-term temporal perspective. Kato tries to prove
this thesis in a comparative way, using the European conception of space and time as a kind of foil to
While time in the Judeo-Christian tradition was conceived of as linear progression with its distinct
beginning and end, time in the Japanese culture, as can be seen in the national foundation myth of the
Kojiki (712), was considered linear but without its definite beginning and end. Genesis of the world in
the Japanese tradition is characterized not by creatio ex nihilo but by spontaneous emergence without
creator and without end. If in the Judeo-Christian tradition every event happening there happens once for
all and its meaning is defined by its reference to the past and future events, in the Japanese culture the
sense of such temporal coherence is feeble: it is often said and seriously that let bygones drain in the
water, meaning let bygones be bygones. In the Judeo-Christian tradition time, being finite and onedirectional, is susceptible of being structured and hence the history was conceived as a forward movement
progressing toward its end, whereas in the Japanese culture time, taken essentially as an emergent
moment, will not articulate itself into a structured history in its European sense of the word.
The Greek conception of cyclical time without beginning and end (anakuklesis -- eternal return)
indeed seems to offer a structure similar to the Japanese but with the difference that the Greek one was
conceived on the model of the movement of the celestial spheres whereas the Japanese one does not look
6 Space and Time in Japanese Culture (Iwanami-shoten, 2007), pp. 3-4.
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reveal the Japanese distinction.

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up for a transcendent model but remains in and with nature. Its predilection for the ephemeral now can,
therefore, find its local cohabitation with the sense of the natural cycle of four seasons.
By the same token, Kato conducts a comparative diagnosis with regard to the conception of space
peculiar to the Japanese culture. While the ancient Greek world was characterized by the diversity in
and mobility among its peoples with different cultural and religious backgrounds, the Japanese culture,
due to its geopolitical condition, has had a poor experience of being exposed to outsiders and strangers.
If the demarcation that separated the Greek world from others was not fixed and its cultural space was
always open to strangers (the only marker of distinction being solely in the use of the Greek language), in
the Japanese culture the whole society is structured on the principle of distinction between insider and
outsider. The Greek urge toward openness and universality was to be further strengthened by the Pauline
revolution of Christianity in Europe, whereas in Japan its deep-grained tendency to distinguish the inner
and the outside and then valorize the former was to be further consolidated by the two occasions of long
seclusion policy, the first one in the period from 10th to 13th century for about 300 years and then the
second one in the Edo period for about 250 years. In this way, the so-called primitive village mentality
was preserved together with the principle of insider and outsider distinction, which exerted and in a
sense still exerts its formative power in the basic conceptions of not only family and the country but also
international relations.
Now, the structure of subjectivity that will be formed under this temporal and spatial dispensation of the
Japanese culture would be easy to surmise. Time will not structure itself, be it at the individual or at the
historical plane, to bring about a trans-natural horizon: on the contrary, it can easily merge itself with
nature at large. The subjectivity of such disposition is a far cry from the one formed in the Judeo-Christian
tradition where time structures itself, at the supernatural level, in the contractual relationship between man
and God. In short, time in the Japanese culture is not conducive to nurturing the independent and integral
subjectivity. By the same token, the perception of space in the Japanese culture is prone to turn a blind eye
to what is unfamiliar and foreign. The subjectivity formed in such a culture structures itself in a kind of
narcissistic way and has a difficulty in breaking off and going beyond the horizon in which it always and
already finds its cozy habitation.
The conclusion Katos diagnosis reached that the essentials of the Japanese culture lie in its predilection
for here and how sounds unexciting. Of course, he does not fail to see its positive aspects, especially
in the exemplary instance of refinement in literature (e.g., haiku), painting (e.g. the Rimpa schools7),
7 Subjectification of the suibokuga (painting in India ink of Chinese origin).
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architecture (e.g., the tea-ceremony room) and folk craft. These are the rare products the culture of here
and now can take proud in, but they are almost all of them limited in the fields of esthetics. In other areas,
particularly, history and philosophy, there are not many the culture of here and now can boast of in way
of things or ideas. And the last thing it can boast of is its manifestation in the socio-political dimension:
so-called village mentality and the structure of non-individualized subjectivity. That Space and Time in
Japanese Culture concludes with a chapter that deals with the problem of exodus from here and now
tells a lot about this state of affairs. To Katos ambivalent mind, the Japanese culture is praiseworthy in its
esthetic dimension but as a political entity it is an ideological field to get away from.
3-2. Maruyama
Masao Maruyama was similarly concerned with and about the traditional cultural milieu of what Kato
calls here and now. For, as they understood it, the persistence of the pre-modern mentality, was a
good deal responsible for the devastating results of WWII. This recognition was decisive in their future
intellectual career. (When the war ended Maruyama was at the age of 26 and Kato 21.) They were at
one in thinking that the atrocious devastation of WWII had its origins in (a) the failure of modernization
in its spiritual enlightenment and (b) the underestimated tenacity of the undercurrent of pre-modern
The Japanese version of modernization was underdone in that it neglected to implant the individual
and integral subjectivity, one of its essential components in its cultural soil, which alone could have
countervailed the political manipulation of pre-modern emotions. Maruyama, therefore, took upon
himself the twofold project that aims at firstly (a) an installation of an ideological apparatus, with which
to help create the individual and integral subjectivity and secondly (b) an archeological study on the
obstinate undercurrent of the pre-modern mentality --- he calls this obstinate undercurrent famously the
basso ostinato of the Japanese cultural tradition. The investigation into the basso ostinato was done
with vigor and rigor, for instance, in The Japanese Thought (1961) and Thought and Behavior in Modern
Japanese Politics (enlarged ed. 1964), the latter being a study about its tenacious manifestations in modern
Japan.
Unlike the archeological study of basso ostinato, the attempt to install an ideological apparatus to
foster the integral subjectivity is entrammelled with difficulties. Maruyama perceived that to realize the
integral subjectivity, something of a superstructure approaching Judeo-Christian God would have been in
order. He called this something Das Allgemeine and took to an arduous task of searching in the course
of Japanese intellectual tradition after the very moments in which the seminal occasion for providing
Das Allgemeine was left undiscovered. On one occasion, he believed that he found a version of Das
Allgemeine in the thought of a Confucianist (in the person of Ogyu Sorai 1666-1728) and his school in
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mentality (the so-called village mentality), which had been fully manipulated for the service of fascism.

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Tugawa era. The study was published as Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (1952)
but was criticized for being tainted by his wishful interpretation. On another occasion, this time more
ingenious, he thought he could retrieve a kind of hidden Das Allgemeine by looking closely into the
thought and behavior of those revolutionaries in Meiji era who fought out in the midst of the horns of a
dilemma between pledged loyalty and self-convinced revolts.8 Set in the context of the Meiji Revolution,
when the choice of allegiance (whether to the Emperor or to the Shogun) was as crucial as the decision as
to whether or not to end the seclusion polity,9 the questioning of loyalty-or-revolts seems to have carried
the theoretical possibility of bringing about a version of Das Allgemeine. Frankly, I cannot tell whether
it has achieved its end or not. But what eventually matters is Maruyamas impassioned search for Das
Allgemeine --- the search as obstinate as is the presence of the basso ostinato of the Japanese culture.
3-3. Izutsu
If Kato and Maruyama had to find in the culture of here and now something seriously problematic,
Izutsu saw in it an occasion for philosophical possibility. At the beginning of his philosophical reflection
was a mysterious experience that Zen Buddhism apparently opened up for him. It was literally beyond
description and it was precisely this unnamable that he decided to take up as the object of his lifelong
scholarly analysis. It is no coincidence, therefore, that his consistent concern was with the questioning of
the relation between concept and reality, or differently put between articulation and experience.
Now, what is the reality-experience of Zen that is by nature beyond description? From the outset, there
is an insuperable difficulty because the philosophy of Zen, i.e., the philosophical elaboration of Zen
experience, is itself a contradiction in terms. If philosophy implies the process of rational, discursive
thinking and conceptualization, then the Zen experience, its analytic object, will defy any kind of such
process.
[T]he Zen student is always rigorously admonished not to fall into the pitfall of conceptualization
and ratiocination. He is to grasp the truth [reality] directly through an act of spiritual realization,
away from all entanglements of thought. The intricacies of conceptual thinking about the truth
[reality] are of such a nature that they inevitably induce the Zen student to deviate from the right
path, thereby closing the door to the real --- as Zen understands it --- experience of reality. And,
as a matter of fact, there have occurred in the past not a few cases of philosophical distortion of
Zen, i.e., the rational or intellectual manipulation of Zen ideas by those philosophers who have no
8 Loyalty and Revolt (Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 1992).

9 Revere/Restore the Emperor and Expel the Foreigners; Loyalty to the Emperor vs. Adherence to the Shogunate.
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experiential grasp of them.10

The reality-experience of Zen is immediate in its grasp. Any mediatory access to it, be it conceptual,
rational, or intellectual, is not only wrong but also misleading.11 The reality-experience that lies at the heart
of Zen is something absolute and prior to any act of articulation. In a word, it is ineffable. The greatest
paradox of Zen, however, is that the non-articulated does not remain eternally non-articulated. In fact,
it cannot but express itself --- in language. This is by any account a non sequitur for those who are
familiar with the Western philosophical tradition, at the base of which lies rational. But Izutsu insists, [t]
he emergence of language out of the Zen awareness of reality may ontologically be described as an event
of the self-articulation of the non-articulation. How can we make out this mysterious phenomenon?
Fortunately, a hint or clue can be found in the history of Western philosophy. The Zen awareness of nonarticulated reality bears a likeness to the position and awareness inherent in nominalism in medieval
Scholasticism. Nominalism, as it was unfolded in the so-called controversy of universals, is the doctrine
that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality. In other words,
nothing really exists but particular and singular objects. The question that immediately arises is how to
grasp these particular objects without the mediatory assistance of general concepts, that is, linguistic
is conceptual generalization. Imagine the case that we had to grasp a particular object without recourse to
any general concepts and ideas, and we can see the type of difficulty, with which the Zen reflections are
supposed to grope their way. Their end is the immediate grasping (not begreifen but greifen) of a particular
reality. And, importantly, nothing is more particular and singular than a reality here and now.
Now, as the analogy of nominalism implies, the opposite of the Zen type of reality-recognition is the one
which harbors the aspirations toward and the predilection for the universal (as opposed to the particular).
If the Zen type of reality-recognition aspires to the immediate grasping of the particular reality (here
and now), then the universalist type aspires to reach the universal reality (the transcendent). There are
then two types of reality, one particular-oriented, the other universal-oriented, and they are diametrically
opposed one to the other in the vector of valorization. Usually the distinction between two opposing types
of reality is emphasized neither in Western philosophy nor in Eastern thought. According to Izutsu,
10 Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (Boulder, Colorado: Praj Press, 1982, p. x; originally Tehran: Imperial Iranian
Academy of Philosophy, 1977).
11 [T]he world of Zen is a world of silence. [...] Philosophically, the Silence is the metaphysical Oneness of absolute nonarticulation, the reality before it is articulated into myriads of forms --- your own Face which you had prior to the birth
of your father and mother, as Zen often says. (pp. x-xi).
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articulation. The whole problem is bound up with the fundamental assumption that linguistic articulation

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however, the distinction actually belongs to one of the prerequisite knowledge in the tradition of Islam
philosophy. The universal-oriented reality is called mhyah and the particular-oriented, huwyah.
Taking advantage of this basic recognition, Izutsu went on to build a synchronic system of oriental
religious experiences in his landmark study Consciousness and Essence (1983). Here I cannot enter
into any detail about this fascinating work. All I can and must do for the present purposes is to make the
following three points.
Firstly, the fundamental distinction of mhyah and huwyah in Islam philosophy gave rise to, in its
curious transaction with medieval European philosophy, a pair of important terms in Scholasticism, viz.
quidditas and haecceitas. The Latin terms are said to be invented by Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) and
their dictionary definition says, Whereas haecceity refers to aspects of a thing which make it a particular
thing, quiddity refers to the universal qualities of a thing, its whatness. The mhyah means literally
what it is (in conceptual articulation) and it is, therefore, together with quidditas, a descendant of the
Aristotelian to ti en einai. It is concerned with essentia (in contradistinction to existentia) insofar as
it is grasped in conceptual articulation. The huwyah reality, in contrast, has nothing to with conceptual
recognition. It is interesting to note in passing that when Duns Scotus (alias, Doctus Subtilis) regarded
haecceitas as ultima realitas entis (the ultimate reality of being) he came close in spite of himself to the
Zen master.
Secondly, the oriental philosophy (including that of Zen), in Izutsus view, is largely characterized by
its familiarity with depths psychology. The ultimate reality is believed to reveal itself from the profound
realm of the unconscious. The unconscious realm is therefore not monolithic but conceived as layered
strata of different degrees of unconsciousness. The function of ordinary language that articulates through
concepts is there replaced by symbolic signs and images. If the ultimate case of haecceitas (the here and
now recognition) is an event of the self-articulation of the non-articulation, it could be only grasped by
means of these symbolic signs and images. And it should not be forgotten that since the case of haecceitas
defies any form of conceptual articulation, it belongs to an instance not of esentia but of existentia.
Thirdly, and this brings us to the conclusion of the present paper, i.e., the proper recognition in a binary
opposition of the two types of reality, mhyah and huwyah, quidditas and haecceitas, or esentia
and existentia will be useful, in several ways, for our purpose of configuring the postwar Japanese
thought. As we have seen, Katos attitude to the Japanese culture is divided between his criticism of things
political and his admiration of things esthetic. In the light of the two-reality perspective, it now becomes
clear that his criticism is done on the side of mhyah, quidditas, or essentia while his admiration
of here and now on the side of huwyah, haecceitas or existentia. The ambivalence he shows
in his attitude to the Japanese culture is, as it turns out, actually a proof of his well-rounded perception
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on the two types of reality. The same holds true of Maruyamas invention of the working hypothesis of
Das Allgemeine, a version of mhyah-quidditas-esentia principle that is wanting in the Japanese
culture of here and now. Finally, Izutsus attempt at a synchronic system-building on the realityrecognition of haecceitas (here and now) gives us an occasion to recognize that the philosophysing on
the basis of nothingness cannot be a monopoly of Japanese philosophy but is rather prevalent among the
traditions of Asian thought.
All in all, if one has to present a characteristic picture of Japanese culture in its nature and structure, it
should be a dynamic one that has in mind the two types of reality, with mhyah- quidditas-essentia
on the one hand and huwyah, haecceitas and existentia on the other. Must there be a room for what
Kato calls here and now, there must be, in the same vein, a passionate regard to what Maruyama calls
Das Allgemeine. This, in fine, is the lesson the great three masters of the postwar Japan has left for us
for our frame of reference.
4. Types of Healing and Cultural Difference
My observation on the 3.11 disaster suggested that there be at least two kinds of calamities and these
earthquakes and tsunami is, it is easy to imagine, different from the kind of healing operative in the case
of man-made calamities like radioactive contamination. If the former requires a hard and thorny course
of affective adjustments, the latter calls for an arduous and persistent process of rational explication of the
real facts of the case.
My observation on the twofold disaster of the 3.11 also suggested that the Japanese culture seems to be
characterized by its innate strengths in healing those who have suffered from natural disasters, while it
is not well equipped with the healing resources in dealing with the victims of man-made disasters. This
hunch of mine is corroborated by looking at the three representative thinkers of the twentieth century,
who examined the nature and structure of the Japanese culture from their own respective standpoints.
Based on the fundamental distinction in reality-recognition between existentia (here and now) and
essentia (the transcendent), the three thinkers were of the opinion that the Japanese culture is far and
away more predisposed to existentia (here and now) than to essentia (universal and eternal,
i.e., the transcendent). For the cultural tendency of constant focus on here and now helps to create an
environment (both human and natural) that is favorable to affective adjustments. In contrast, it would
be largely for want of essentia perspective that those responsible for the management and control of
nuclear power behaved so poorly.
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in turn require two kinds of healing. The kind of healing effective in dealing with natural disasters like

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Now, if the above holds true, further reflections are in order by way of conclusion. The Japanese culture,
as it so happens, shows its inveterate attachment to the mode of here and now, which accommodates
the people, in terms of healing, to natural disasters relatively better than others. In reverse is the case with
regard to the man-made disaster and its healing. This means, to look at it from another perspective, that
there can be another culture, where the two kinds of healing are differently disposed, where the people
find it easier to be healed in the process of rational conviction than in the course of affective adjustments.
Which type of healing has a better hand is decided by the nature and structure of a given culture. What
is important, therefore, is the cultural self-knowledge. It is all the more important because culture is so
programmed as to look natural and transparent to those inside, and those inside tend to be blind to the
nature and structure of their culture.
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Feminism and the Humanities as Means for Healing: Focused on

the Issue of Female North Korean Defectors
Heisook Kim
Ewha Womans University
1. The Humanities as Means for Healing and Healing of the Humanities

The humanities are a discipline that is built based on peoples understanding of themselves and self-examination. The therapeutic power of the humanities comes from the existence of mankind and peoples examination and reflection of their own lives. Both in the western and eastern parts of the world, reflexivity
ple. In Hak-Lee(Constant Learning) of The Analects of Confucius, Zeng Zi, one of Confucius disciples,
stated that everyday, I examined my body and mind in three ways (). That is, he examined
his behaviors and thoughts based on the three questions: Am I paying enough attention to others and serving others? Am I building mistrust while maintaining relationships with friends? And am I paying enough
attention to studying and practicing what Ive learned? Although the details of self-examination can differ
from person to person based on personal background and context, what Zeng Zi wanted to emphasize in
major Confucian classics such as Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean is the attitude to reflect
on ones thoughts and behaviors and to be modest and reserved in speech and manner. In The Book of
Change, the attitude of being always reserved and mindful of what you say and do, being humble even
when one is in his or her heyday and the cautious attitude of preparing for the worst are being highlighted.
Such attitudes are reflective, making people constantly try to look back on their lives and to take lessons
from the past. In the western world, the emergence of Cartesian Self resulted in vibrant philosophical
discussions on the existence of reflective self-consciousness and its functionality. The so-called reason
speculative reason as opposed to deductive reason means the person is engaged in voluntary reasoning activities without having any external input with a strong emphasis on self-reflection.
In the humanities, as a means for self-reflection, the eyes are always fixated on the inside even when
discussing outside issues. For instance, even when discussing lifeless things, natural and social
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(reflectivity) has long been considered one of the important philosophical methods of understanding peo-

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phenomena, their relation to mankind, their relation to me and my experiences are always being examined
and analyzed in the humanities. If we exclude the meaning of things in my life and others lives in
the humanities, it will become a very ambiguous discipline with uncertain identities. There could be
criticism on how subjective and first-person perspectives can lead to knowledge. As people in todays
society believe that scientific knowledge is the essence of knowledge, knowledge of the humanities is
often considered fake knowledge or an arbitrary attitude toward life. There have been and will be a lot
of discussions on how we should define the characteristics of knowledge of the humanities. In order for
the humanities to secure its strong identity in the current era with highly-segmented disciplines, it should
have its own unique methodology and contents that stand out from other natural sciences and social
science disciplines. And it should be held accountable for its unique identity as an independent academic
discipline.
Consilience, or the unity of knowledge, which has been promoted by some evolutionists and scientists
as a breakthrough method of integrating different disciplines, is essentially about integrating the study
of humanities understanding of people in natural science. It makes the understanding of people remain
superficial and on the brief end of the spectrum. The study of humanities is a discipline based on thorough
and serious self-examination and its therapeutic power originates from having a deep understanding of the
inside of people. The study of humanities as means for healing is not a science discipline; rather, it is more
like religion or arts. Unlike artistic work and religious belief, however, the humanities attempt to build a
house in a systematic manner and to develop necessary tools and sophisticated skill-set training methods.
As anyone can go into and come out from the house that is built in such a systematic manner, it can be
said that the humanities have openness and flexibility. Openness and flexibility of the humanities can be
regarded arbitrary when compared with objective knowledge concepts discussed by natural scientists.
However, that is where the unique power of the humanities comes from. The power of the humanities
lies in free and creative spirit and thoughts of people. The study of humanities builds a house based on
thorough reasoning and critical thinking experiments conducted on humans. The world and people seen
through the process of building the house in freedom encourage people to reflect on their lives and build
a better understanding of their sorrows and emotional roots. Healing in the humanities comes from soulsearching and introspective understanding of people. We first need to understand the world we live in
when we want to make peace with the world while we need to understand our being and life in order to
heal the pain we experience.
Given the premise that healing in the humanities is based on introspection and good understanding
of human being, what does the healing of the humanities mean? It starts from considering the study
of humanities itself as the target domain to be introspected. The tradition of the humanities has been
formulated based on the text called Cannon both in the western and eastern parts of the world. The
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Cannon texts called classics played a huge role in creating the agenda of the humanities. These texts
were based on strong character traditions, reflecting the value and worldview of the group using particular
characters. Those who were marginalized from educational opportunities were not able to read and write
the language they speak and became invisible and inaudible in the tradition of the humanities. Even when
they were visible and audible, they were strictly portrayed as the object or others, not the actors who
could express themselves freely in their language. In case of Korea, those who were not able to read and
write Korean were mostly women and some disadvantaged men who lack essential qualifications to act
as important players in the society. In the character-oriented tradition of the humanities as high culture,
there was no place for those who were not able to read and write language. They had no other choice but
to remain quiet, inaudible and invisible while lacking the ability to leave their story in history. They only
had physical body, the sole method for expressing themselves in the world, and lacked the ability to read
and write language. Thus, when their body disappeared, they also disappeared from the world and became
invisible in literature, history and philosophy. They belonged to yin - the dark shadow or shade - in the
concept of yin and yang.
In deconstruction theory, they were people who are like traces of the existence and people who built the
history of humans in a physical manner (using their physical body). Those who were excluded from and
refers to junior officials in the army and the group with no power in the complicated dynamics of power
relations (Kim Ae-Ryeong 2012, 36-37). This term is used as a similar term to the concept of others.
The process of making women as others visible in the tradition of the humanities has been led mainly
by feminist humanities scholars and was not easy, although it is duly required. The difficulty of making
women as others visible lies in the fundamental root of the reality, not in the reality itself. In other words,
there were limited spaces for female authors and female narrators in the tradition of the humanities,
making subaltern, or yin (), inaudible and invisible. To make them audible and visible, the official
domain of the humanities has to be abandoned or renounced. In the western world-oriented academic
ecosystem, which is written in English, Korean scholars using Korean language share similar difficulties
with yin (). The healing of the humanities can be made through the process of searching for who is
speaking, who remains silent, what is heard and what is not being heard in the traditional history of the
humanities. The study of humanities itself should be healed first and should be able to include voice from
diverse entities in order to promote the study of the humanities as means for healing.
2. Women, Reflective Viewing and Listening
Women are typical others, or subaltern, symbolizing yin (). Then, do women view the world differently? When various entities who speak many different languages come into and play certain roles in
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vanished from the official existence of the world are called subaltern. A dictionary definition of subaltern

Proceedings
the world of the humanities, how will the world be changed? Sexlessness () was a principal agent in
viewing and understanding the world in the tradition of the western worlds epistemology. By analyzing
the phenomenon of I know, epistemology explores various conditions for objective perception of the
world. The agent goes through the process of conscious perception and examination to build knowledge
and a better understanding of the object. In this process, it doesnt matter whether the object is male or
female because the judgment snow is white is not affected by the gender. Is that really true? It is no
exaggeration to say that the gap between the feeling of experience that is not expressed in language,
perception and belief (structure) constitute the basis for the discussions of the western world on legitimacy
of knowledge. Still, there are others elements to be considered.
Speaking about certain phenomena itself is not a conditioned reflex or an automatic response coming from
an automated machine. Rather, it is an essential medium for communication required to build relationships
between people who try to lead meaningful lives. The fact that such activities always take place in the
context of lives complicates problems in epistemology. The correlation between perception and interest
and between perception and value (ethics and politics) and the relationship between perception and culture
(belief structure) constitutes the basis for feminist epistemology. The social reality that makes people
not to be able to call his own father father (Hong Gil-Dong), the social dynamics that force married
women to live and endure like a deaf, blind and speech-impaired person and the horrible discrimination
between those who can say snow is white and those who cant say snow is white make us skeptical of
dominant perception and objective knowledge in society (Harding 1998, 124-45).
Perception of people is created by peoples efforts to determine certain objects (in an objective manner).
In other words, perception is the act of judgment made by people to determine chaotic reality as
something. Then, the person decides on action based on the judgment made on objects and the world,
which in turn formulates a certain structural foundation or existence in the world. Such process of actions
gets accumulated, and the world begins to take a certain shape and create culture. The reality facing me
makes me engaged in certain behaviors, which in turn forms a new reality or phenomena. The judgment
on a closed door in front of me the door is closed is the basis for my behavior and my behavior
is in turn creating a new reality or new phenomena. The world that I determine as the object is in fact
the world (culture) created by numerous people who lived before me. The object and objectification
(objectifying) or the activities of defining the object are inseparable while the entity of making perception,
the entity that is taking action and the entities in the world are inseparable. This is the background behind
the fundamental grounds for explaining the correlation between knowledge and power.
In the history of mankind, womens experiences have been formed differently compared with mens
experiences. Despite cultural differences, womens experiences, based on the physical body of women,
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have some degree of universality. Although the conscious I of women is unstable in metaphysical
philosophy just like the conscious I of people in general, there have been people who were called women
in the Confucius patriarchal culture throughout history. They were called women and those women
formed the foundation for conducting the analysis of social reality (systematic reality such as religion,
laws and politics). The perception or the will to the truth to figure out and explore the truth in the social
reality paved the way for feminist philosophy.
By reflecting upon this form of the existence of women, the humanities will experience healing in two
ways. On the one hand, the healing of the humanities themselves and, on the other, the healing of women
who have long been considered mere objects. Such process of healing can only be possible by having
a reflective and soul-searching attitude. Reflectivity, one of the important methods used in philosophy,
is essential in feminist theories (Harding 1991, 149-50, 161-63; Harding 1998, 188-94). Philosophical
reasoning cannot be made without having critical attitudes. In order to remain critical of something,
you have to keep a certain distance from the object for a while. The distance should not be too long, too
far or too separated. When the negative connotations of critical mindset are pulled out, we get to meet
with a reflective attitude. Reflectivity is created when the person is not too far from the object and is
not entrapped in the object; rather, reflectivity is created when the person is able to go in and out of the
and womens experiences is a method to look into the lives of women who have remained invisible and
inaudible in history so far.
Those who examine the lives of women are typically not in a position with power or privilege because
they are not in an absolute third-party position where they can form an appropriate distance from the
object - not too far and not too close to the object. They are in a constantly changing position, not in a
fixated position. This position is a good way of making the object visible and expressing the objective
features of the object. When determining the object, those who examine the object should continue to
ask questions about this position in order not to be affected by prejudice based on bias and stereotypes.
When approaching reflectivity based on the concept of for self-examination, of self-examination and
about self-examination, self-examination can be degraded to a mere theoretical concept of infinite
regress. In order to avoid such infinite regress, we have to keep a critical distance from the object for
self-examination. That is, we have to break away from asking speculative questions without having any
relations with the object and look into the object only in the dynamics of relationship with the object. In
this way, we will be able to avoid the infinite regress of for self-examination, of self-examination and
about self-examination.
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object freely. That is why I would like to call reflectivity thinking at the boundary. Reflecting on women

Proceedings
3. Female North Korean Defectors and Their Experiences

We need to keep an objective distance while being empathetic about women in order to understand the
true reality of womens experiences. Korean women have undergone various experiences throughout
the eventful journey of Korean history. As they experienced both the third world and the first world, an
unprecedented and unique history of experiences is depicted by Korean women. Recently, there are newly
emerging social phenomena triggered by the emergence of North Korean defectors in Korean society.
Over 70% of them are women and their painful and traumatic experiences are as diverse and complicated
as the experiences of South Korean women. Therefore, I would like to explore the issue of female North
Korean defectors based on feminist reflectivity.
The Phenomenon of North Korean residents defecting from North Korea has become a familiar
phenomenon in recent years. So it is not difficult to find North Korean defectors around us. As of 2012,
Ewha Womans University received 11 North Korean defector students (a gross total of 20) and the
number is expected to grow further down the road. The number of North Korean defectors was fewer than
1,000 even in the early 1990s and surpassed 10,000 in 2007 and 20,000 in just three years in 2010 (as of
Nov 15, 2010). The average number of new North Korean defectors is estimated to be 3,000 a year, while
the number of North Korean defectors in China stands at 30,000~50,000 according to the 2005 survey.
The number began to grow drastically since 1998, and about 78% of North Korean defectors are women.
The number of North Korean defectors grew markedly as North Korea underwent hardships, experienced
the collapse of its social system and the number of people who died of hunger increased during the period
of 1995-98. After the North Korean government began to distribute meals to only a limited number of
workers, the socialist rationing system in the country began to fail and collapsed eventually, forcing North
Korean residents to secure food for themselves and their family members. Since the year 1998, female
North Korean defectors have been literally sold to China (the fact the phrase sold is used for women
living in the civilized world of the 21st century and the fact that such a disparaging phrase is used for
the victims of human trafficking is lamentable) to take care of their parents, husbands or children, some
voluntarily and some not-so-voluntarily. The reason many female North Korean residents escape from
North Korea is that the North Korean government carries out a massive search for the missing head of
family when the head goes missing under the countrys feudal patriarchal family system and that it is
much easier for women to survive in China when they escape from North Korea. For example, many
female North Korean defectors had to be engaged in the business of human trafficking organizations in
China. The above example shows us the sorrow of female North Korean defectors had to experience. One
Korean-Chinese female historian portrayed the tragic reality of facing North Korean defectors, saying
that although we are not in war, about half of our people are in worse situations than the comfort women
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during the Japanese colonization period.

In order to understand the difficulties facing female North Korean defectors, we need to understand
the lives of female North Korean defectors themselves and the life of women in North Korea. The
experiences of female North Korea defectors in North Korea, South Korea and China are hard to be
generalized because individual experiences are formulated based on many different conditions. Hence,
it is challenging to trace diverse experiences and, at the same time, it is important to look into the culture
of North Korea as the perspective or worldview that constitutes the dominant perception of them, which
is essential to build a better understanding of emotional and cultural incongruity of female North Korean
defectors in the Korean society. Vice Principal Cho Myung-Sook mentioned three kinds of culture
defining North Korean society. First is the Confucian patriarchal culture, which culminates in the worship
of the Dear Leader and forms a political hierarchical structure that has taken firm root in North Korean
society. Second is militaristic culture, which is straightforward and extreme and constitutes a method of
survival survive or die. In North Koreas militaristic culture, residents become aggressive and get away
with doing bad things under extreme situations, making people make more desperate efforts to win or
die, rather than learning the virtue of tolerance. Such attitudes of North Korean defectors are considered
brazen in South Korean society, resulting in the further marginalization of North Korean defectors. Third
we have been lied to and fooled by visible things and people, so how can we believe in invisible things?,
highlights the cold and cynical mindset North Korean residents have about non-materialistic values. This
also makes us think that it would be possible that North Korean society might put more emphasis on
materialistic values than South Korean society does. North Korean people tend to believe that what they
have to believe in is only money and power in the hands of them, and North Korean society overflows
with such materialistic attitudes.
1) Confucius Patriarchal Culture
Confucius patriarchal culture constitutes a foundation of both North Korean and South Korean societies.
In the case of North Korea, Confucius patriarchal culture has been strengthened to sustain the countrys
political, legal and cultural system of worshiping the Great Leader and affects economically-active North
Korean women in a paradoxical and comprehensive manner. One research paper stated that the prolonged
economic difficulties in North Korea allow the government and men to intervene in the activities of
women in the form of systematic suppression, physical violence and bureaucratic exploitation (Hong
Min 2010, 6). In the name of supervising and managing residents, men take advantage of and suppress
women inside and outside of home in everyday life. Inside the home, women are dependent family
members who rely on the male head of family for survival. Let us take a little closer look at North Koreas
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is materialistic culture. The attitude that North Korean defectors show about God in Christianity, saying

Proceedings
Confucius patriarchal culture as follows:

- Residential system based on patriarchal family system: In North Korea, there are patriarchal family
documents that constitute the basis for the patriarchal family system. The late North Korean leader
Kim Il-Sung ordered a dictionary-like resident document to be made and established a designated
organization under the Resident Security Administration. Later, Kim Jeong-Il ordered to re-examine the
countrys thoughts and ideology and the designated organization investigated residents and purged the
oppression forces. As complaints were raised, those who were involved in the activities of Shim-hwajo (reformation) were sent to the reformation center for punishment. If men (the head of family) or
other family members were involved in scandal or incident, all the family members, including the head
of family, are held accountable for the problem under the guilt-by-association system and are penalized
under the law (subject to reformation, rather than putting the issue to the court) (Choi Jin-Lee 2010, 74).
In this case, women become dependent in a subordinate relationship with the male head of family under
the North Korean legal system.
- Discrimination against single women: Single women are excluded from the allocation of houses under
the national resident protection system and prohibited from taking business trips overseas. Married women
are allowed to work within the residential area of her spouse.
- Gender discrimination in food distribution: On July 1st, 2002, the North Korean government decided to
exclude women from the target list for food distribution (at the official price that is one hundredth of the
market price). Since then, women were forced to be engaged in economic activities and had to purchase
rice at market price and the market was considered the place only for women, forcing women into a
desperate situation to make money to survive. That is why women were forced to be engaged in economic
activities on the market in North Korea. When the volume of food the male family head received from the
government is small, women had no other choice but to leave the country to work to support their family
members.
- Gender discrimination in education and labor: Although the North Korean government promoted the
policy of ensuring equality in provision of educational opportunities, such a policy was used as a mere
mechanism to reinforce the power of the governing class. Social background is one of the factors limiting
educational opportunities (e.g. entering into prestigious universities) in North Korea and women are
concentrated in commercial colleges, light industry, nursing and educational colleges. In those typical
sectors where women are concentrated, women receive less pay and are treated unfairly and they even
take discrimination for granted. The following is what a North Korean woman had to say about the
discrimination she faced:
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Since my father was in a coal mine, I naturally thought I have to work in the coal mine too. So
I dont get discouraged or helpless because of discrimination. Even when we are engaged in the
same work, men have their responsibilities and their share of consequences. Men are men. Women
can work in the positions like a manager or supervisor of the restaurant or warehouse but I know
that higher-level positions are open only for men. Plus, men get paid more even when men and
women work the same hours. You know men are the head of family and thus they should get paid
more. I dont think it is discrimination (Go Young-Soon 2009, Hong Min 2010, 10).
In North Korea, male workers are assigned to white collar work positions while women workers are
assigned to less paying and harder work. Well paying hard work involving machinery or equipment is
said to be given to male workers. According to Choi Jin-Lee, delivering goods on ox cart in rural areas,
driving heavy machinery and other work that doesnt require using cold water or using spade to cultivate
farmland are all given to male workers. On the other hand, female workers have to be involved in harder
work using cold water, bending the body forward to plant rice plants and weed rice paddies until finger
nails crack. Still, female workers in North Korea get paid less than the male workers (Choi Jin-Lee 2010,
76).
of society (scholars, farmers, artisans and tradesmen), in North Korea it is considered embarrassing,
shameful and low class to be engaged in trade. The official labor-force world is considered the domain of
male workers whereas family and marketplace are considered personal places and the domain for female
workers. The market is considered a private space in North Korea because the socialist North Korean
government views the market as a place where private economic activities take place. According to one
research paper, the North Korean authorities forced female merchants to wear skirts in the market,
showing the fact that there is strong social prejudice in North Korean society. The market is not properly
recognized as the official economic activity place and therefore those involved in market activities are
excluded from social security benefits while they had to work constantly to earn bread as the bread
earners of family (Hong Min 2010, 12). As North Korea promotes socialist economy, the market is
regarded as the private space - not the official space - that is managed mainly by women. Women are also
obliged to take part in political activities of civil groups in addition to taking care of their regular hard
work. Due to the heavy burden of work and having to make money to support other family members,
female North Korean workers often suffer from malnutrition, various diseases and other problems in the
process of pregnancy, childbirth and childcare. Without receiving any benefits from the socialist regime,
those female workers in North Korea are merely taking on all familial responsibilities under North Koreas
patriarchal family system. In North Korea, it can be stated that women are placed on the periphery of the
authoritative society or on the periphery of the countrys patriarchal family system.
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- The market as the place for women: According to the Confucius value of the traditional four classes

Proceedings
- Sexual exploitation: North Korean women have been exposed to sexual exploitation and forced to
provide sexual favor as bribes to make a living since the 1990s. As husbands do not assume family
responsibilities and the government turns a blind eye to the harsh reality facing women, women are
exposed to psychological, linguistic and physical violence perpetrated by men in the market and other
places for economic activities. Most women who have participated in market activities reported that they
were harassed by police, market managers, party officials, transportation workers and soldiers. Hong Min
called such a frame in North Korea the structure of government public officials and men living off women
and exploiting and sexually harassing women. One North Korean defector said there is a saying that
female merchants and workers on the train are served for safety officers, a vivid example showing the
harsh reality facing women in North Korea.
The emphasis on innocent and obedient women: Many pregnant female North Korean defectors
who were caught and repatriated by Chinese authorities were forced to go through abortions or kill
the infant right after giving birth, believing they were not being faithful and became pregnant with
Chinese seed. In extreme cases, pregnant women died in the process (Choi Jin-Lee 2010, 79).
- A male-oriented society: According to Choi Jin-Lee, women are considered to have about 50%
of physical and psychological capacity of men in North Korea. And after getting married, women are
considered sexual slaves in male-oriented society and their positions in the family are relatively low due
to social and systematic reasons. Therefore, women should be obedient in the face of violence perpetrated
by predatory men in North Korean society (it is prohibited to defy male violence) (Choi Jin-Lee 2010,
77).
2) Military Culture
It is a widely-known fact that North Korean society is established based on military culture. As the history
of North Korea is formed through the male-oriented anti-Japanese reform movements, women have been
strictly excluded in North Korean history (Hong Min 2010, 8). The establishment of North Korea is based
on the concept of reformist protests and armed struggle. In addition, constant anti-American protests,
military confrontations with South Korea and efforts to bring down the South Korean government have
played a pivotal role in the political operations of North Korea, justifying chauvinistic culture and thus
marginalizing women in North Korean society. Hong Mins approach is worthy of consideration: Women
can register their name only when their names are called by the Dear Leader Kim Il-Sung and his antiJapanese reformist forces. Anti-Japanese armed protest and movements are merely a means of portraying
women as faithful and selfless wives. In North Korea, the Dear Leader Kim Il-Sung was above the law,
implicitly allowing other men in North Korean to behave like the Dear Leader in their respective homes.
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Such a political regime was the reason behind violence running rampant at homes in North Korea (Hong
Min 2010, 8).
- Authoritative and violent domestic culture: North Koreas patriarchal family system put more
emphasis on keeping mens appearance and men reigning over women rather than on men assuming
responsibility as the breadwinner of the family. The financial difficulties forced North Korean housewives
to bear the double burden of domestic and outside work, taking care of house chores, childcare as well as
making money to support her family members. Under the North Korean patriarchal family system, men
dont have to work hard to provide for their families and so they behave like parasites on women. Choi
Jin-Lee stated that North Korean men are brutally beating their wives again and again and there is no
legal system in the country to protect battered wives (Hong Min 2010, 8).
- Devaluing life: In North Korea, the issue of abortion is very serious and there are no proper measures to
protect maternity rights.
As North Korea was in a state of war and under many other urgent financial circumstances and as gender
equality was being promoted as part of socialist values, women were expected to work the same hours as
North Korean society, where feudal Confucian culture is combined with the socialist gender-equality in a
weird manner, placing women under the multi-layered oppressive culture. North Koreas military culture
allowed violence against women to take firm root in society. Since the economic recession in North Korea,
the lives of North Korean women are deemed to be tainted with the worst combination of socialism +
patriarchal family system + military culture. Amidst the collapse of the countrys free food rationing
system, childcare and education and national medical care system, North Korean women became the
victims who assume all the responsibility.
3) Materialistic Culture
According to Marx who viewed religion as the opium of the masses, religious activities in socialist
societies are severely restricted. North Korea is also a socialist society with materialistic worldview
where people are not allowed to have religion or freedom of thought. After going through the economic
recession, North Korean people began to believe that survival is the highest value and it is extravagant to
talk about other abstract philosophical values. The lives of North Korean people were focused on making
money and finding foods while their philosophy was also concentrated on Juche ideology. Thus, it is no
wonder that North Korean people lack the ability to think philosophically and pursue an ideal vision while
focusing only on visible and materialistic things. When people put materialistic ownership before other
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men. Hard and grueling work that women had to perform in North Korea was considered reasonable in

Proceedings
values, their perspectives and views are changed accordingly.

- Women as body: Hong Min said that women were viewed as obedient bodies or objects that are used as
labor-machines, childbirth-machines, childcare-machines and as tools for exploitation and mobilization to
attain the countrys political and economic goals. In North Korea, womens bodies have been viewed as a
tool for reproduction in the male-oriented hierarchical structure and as an industrial tool. Womens bodies
were severely consumed throughout the industrial period in the 1950~60s and women were forced to use
contraceptives to control childbirth and the population in the 1970~80s. Entering into the 1990s, North
Korean women were exploited as reproduction machine to replace the workers who starved to death.
Womens bodies have been exploited as means for engaging in labor in the name of protection(Hong
Min 2010, 9). This issue facing women is not confined to North Korea. In South Korea, women
have been exploited as foreigner whores, tools for Korean geisha tourism and factory workers during
industrialization. As shown above, even in South Korean society, there is a social mechanism to consume
female bodies as tools used in the adult entertainment industry.
What is unique in North Korean society is that both male and female bodies are owned by the government.
It is known that a considerable portion of income of female loggers working in Russia and female North
Korean workers who have worked in Eastern European countries was by the government. North Korean
people are merely viewed as labor force working for the country. Under the materialistic notion, people are
degenerated into tools for sustaining politics and the labor market. Karl Marxs worldview of promoting
an ideal relationship between human beings and the world and protecting the dignity of humankind via
non-marginalized true labor was distorted and disfigured in North Korea to define people as mere labor
units or means for producing economic results that are owned by the central government. The reason
is perhaps that North Korea was built based on an autocratic political system, which culminates in the
worship of the autocratic Great Leader.
- Background (personal background and class): There is no need to mention the significance of building
materialistic foundations under the materialistic worldview. Nevertheless, the concept of such material
foundation seems to be translated into a wider concept of encompassing social background of people. In
North Korea, getting married for a better social status is deemed very hard. It is no exaggeration to say
that personal background or material foundation is a determinant factor in defining almost everything in
the North Korean society. Such personal background or material foundation has been one of the most
important factors in determining peoples jobs and educational opportunities as well as marriage.
In North Korea, when a lower-class person gets married to an upper-class person, their marriage is bound
to fail no matter how much they love each other. For instance, if I get married to an upper-class military
246
officer or undergraduate student, he would have no future because of the fact his wife is lower class. Due
to the fact that his wife and families-in-laws are lower class, he is facing obstacles and suffering from
disadvantages in society. If he wants to continue his married life with his lower-class wife, he would have
to give up his career and social life because he would be excluded from opportunities like joining the
socialist party and getting promoted to a higher position (Moon Kyung-Soon 2009, Hong Min 2010, 11).
North Koreas cultural background can be characterized into the above-mentioned three cultural
characteristics. Those in the vested interests in North Korea say that it is easy to live in North Korea if
you just turn a blind eye to the fatal and endemic problems existing in society. As time passes slowly and
people dont have to worry about food under socialist North Korean society, it doesnt seem bad to live
as women within a comfortable circle of life. But the problem is that such a circle is not guaranteed until
death, and those within the circle have to make continued efforts to remain within the comfortable circle
while feeling a sense of guilt towards those outside the circle.
4. Who is Asking Us to Analyze Female North Korean Defectors?
Those who major in North Korean Studies say that there are one hundred different stories when we
North Korean residents defecting from the North for survival.
Still, we might be able to try dividing such experiences of female North Korean defectors into the
two categories: the first category of female North Korean defectors is those who arrive in China first
before coming to South Korea and the second category is those who directly defect to South Korea.
Vice Principal Cho Myung-Sook stated that those North Korean defectors who come directly to South
Korea suffer from less emotional trauma while having a low understanding of South Korean culture and
experiencing difficulties mingling with the South Korean society whereas those who cross into China first
before coming to South Korea have more serious emotional trauma but have a higher understanding of
South Korean society and adapt easily into society. Those who spent their adolescent years in the North
Korea society during the collapse of the socialist regime after undergoing years of hardship have had a
harder time adapting to South Korean society, organizational culture and educational system due to the
collapse of values in their minds. It is because they tend to lack the capacity of determining what they
should do and what they shouldnt do and dont feel any sense of guilt or shame for being illegal (In North
Korea, when people live by law, they are bound to starve to death). Therefore, North Korean residents tend
to lack capacity to think in a rational manner, have low self-esteem as well as a low sense of responsibility
unlike South Korean residents who have legitimate fundamental values and conscience. That is why
North Korean defectors experience difficulty mingling with South Korean society, language and culture.
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interview one hundred North Korean defectors, indicating the difficulty of generalizing the experiences of

Proceedings
The chaotic circumstances in North Korean society make North Korean people less competent in situation
analysis and problem solving. That is why North Korean defectors remain on the periphery of South
Korean society when they defect to the South.
In South Korean society, North Korean defectors are considered ignorant and unreliable people who
dont know much, people who become the burden of society, people whose minds are always on their
family members left in the North, sick and chauvinistic people(Hong Min 2010, 16). Unfortunately, we
dont know much about the current human rights conditions in the North, the physical and mental health
of North Koreans and dont even know if there are programs in South Korea designed to help them adapt
to the new society. As a matter of fact, South Korea doesnt have a well-organized and sophisticated
adaptation programs for North Korean defectors. Vice Principal Cho Myung-Sook is highly skeptical of
the education programs provided for North Korean adolescents who have defected to the South over the
past ten years, being unsure of the effects of such education programs. In the case of female North Korean
defectors, it is urgent to heal physical and emotional wounds inflicted on them. If South Korean society
fails to provide healing and make them live on the periphery of the society, as it has done over the past
long history of human rights violation against women, and if it just made passive efforts, it would take a
step back to 50 years ago or 100 years ago. There have already been some cases of female North Korean
defectors who were degenerated into prostitution in the red-light district of Japan.
The stories of North Korean defectors and North Korean women who defect to the South are still
unfamiliar to many of us. Most South Korean people dont know about North Korean culture and society,
making it hard for them to understand the lives of North Korean people due to conflicting ideologies.
Female North Korean defectors experience inconceivable hardship and thus get to have a complicated
and protective psychological mechanism, making it difficult for others to truly understand what they have
gone through and feel. As they had to undergo unimaginable sufferings and hardships, North Korean
defectors dont trust or rely on others and dont want to talk about themselves. Recalling her stay in China,
one female North Korean defector said that Koreans are even harder to be trustedI had many close
friends but Ive never talked about my deep feelings and problemseven when I was drunk and crying,
so when my friends asked me why Im crying. I was not able to tell them my feelings and experiences, so
I just said I dont know why Im crying. It is hard to become true friends with them on a person to person
basisI cannot tell the truth that Im a defector from North Korea. No, I cannot trust them (Choi HyunShil 2012, 37). The stories of female North Korean defectors are shared through word of mouth and, in
some cases, they are reproduced and distributed by mostly South Korean counselors, researchers or North
Korean defector-turned-researchers or counselors.
How should we regard the lives of female North Korean defectors from the perspectives of reflective
248
humanities and the humanities as a means for healing? Is it possible for us to remove several layers of
curtains and listen to frank voices of female North Korean defectors? The documents available for us tend
to be deeply affected by ideology. The documents that are used as one of the important references for this
research paper are ones published at the seminar hosted by the right-wing Rep. Park Seon-Young. Leftwing politicians have low interest in the issue of North Korean defectors and thus dont conduct researches on them. Rep. Yim Soo-Kyung called North Korean defectors traitors while drunk. Because of the
lack of information on North Korea, we dont know much about male and female North Korean residents,
defectors and their family members who are left behind in the North, which makes it difficult for us to
determine the social identity of North Korean defectors and makes us form a linear judgment about their
experiences.
From the philosophical point of view, it is always difficult to determine the truth of things and events.
Figuring out the relationship between visible and invisible things and between the belief and the facts is a
philosophical challenge. Still, in analyzing and reasoning about humankind, reflectivity in the humanities
can serve as one of the useful philosophical methods. The lives of people are changed on a consistent
basis, and thus it is difficult to determine our lives at one go. In order to understand the life of a person or a
group, we first have to admit that our observations and viewpoints cannot remain neutral. We are looking
for the process of observing and understanding female North Korean defectors. We hear a lot about them
both directly and indirectly and in some cases we hear from female North Korean defectors themselves.
However, even if we hear directly from North Korean defectors, that doesnt change the issue. Female
North Korean defectors themselves have to recall their experiences to tell others about their defection.
Therefore, what they tell about their experiences is not always true even if the defector makes an honest
statement. Reflective attitude in the humanities attempts to go in and come out from such overlapping
multi-layered stories in order to view things in a more objective way (Tanesini 1999, 160-85), helping us
learn how to approach the stories of people who suffer from wounds and traumatic experiences and how
to show empathetic responses to such stories. When listening to the stories of North Korean defectors, we
have to think about who makes them speak, who is representing them, why they are saying such things
here and who is listening. Also, we have to try to understand the grammar of their language. Such multilayered methods of looking and listening allow us to look inside and listen to the voice from inside them,
thereby formulating the core of reflectivity. As explained above, reflectivity is one of the key elements
exposing the objective facts (Harding 1993, 56-63).
Talking about ones experiences, looking at the experiences, listening to and writing about the experiences
are essential for reflectivity. Such processes are required steps for healing. However, those North Korean
defectors are not able to speak in the same manner as South Korean people and are not familiar with rhe-
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at things in a particular context or circumstance, based on which the judgment is made. The same is true

Proceedings
torical expressions and tones commonly used by South Korean people. In other words, they tend to lack
adequate ways to express themselves. There are violent and wild expressions used by North Korean people such as cutting ones throat and cutting the throat open. North Korean defectors have different
ways of expressing themselves as opposed to South Korean people (for instance, they dont usually say
thank you to show appreciation), making them to think it would be better to remain silent to get along
with South Korean people. If North Korean defectors get to learn sophisticated and elaborate methods of
expressions used by South Korean people, it might be even harder for us to read their emotions hidden
in the innermost corners of their heart. We ask questions and provide answers casually without putting
special meaning, but such process is actually very daunting and challenging. While doing so, we express
ourselves, look at and listen to others and again offer words to others. In such an interactive communication process, both the speaker and listener get to intervene in the existence of each other and to experience
changes in life. In order to have reflective communication, those engaged in communication must be
truthful and sincere. When people talk to each other in an insincere manner, they are not considered to be
having reflective communication and not able to talk to and listen to each other in a truthful way.
How can we build truthfulness and sincere attitude? If they are built through the language engagement
process of speaking, talking and listening, we would fall into a cycle. Donald Davidson, an American philosopher, talked about the principle of tolerance saying that we have to assume that the person is talking
the truth so as to have truthful and sincere communication in the primitive interpretation process (Davidson
1984, 134-37). Only when we assume that the person we are talking to is telling us the truth, are we able
to continue the dialogue. In this manner, the truthfulness of both the speaker and listener is part of the intuitive requirements in communication (Kim Heisook 1999, 208-11). The truthfulness is something that
should be considered - intuitively - part of preconditions, but is not something that can be proved through
experiences.
What should we pay attention to when I -as a female philosopher- approach the issue of female North
Korean defectors? First and foremost, I should make their voice heard and view the world from their perspectives to reveal the multi-layered nature of conversation and then interpret their message so that South
Korean people can understand what North Korean defectors really meant to say. Then, I should help them
examine their low self-esteem and the chauvinistic value they internalized in order to build a better understanding of democracy and the value of their bodies. However, it is not easy to help female North Korean
defectors, who are used to living within the strong groupist values and control in North Korea, to understand autonomy and responsibilities and have interest and desire to develop and grow themselves. It is not
easy for female North Korean defectors who face the harsh reality of trying to survive to take some time
to reflect on their lives and thoughts. They have to work every day to survive and thus might think selfexamination and reflection are a luxury to them, which is the attitude that contributes in part to placing
250
those women on the periphery of society. However, the efforts to understand culture can be made in their
everyday lives as they get to meet with other people and having communication with others can contribute
to boosting their self esteem. For female North Korean defectors who were entrapped in a closed circle
without a way out, living in South Korean society is like solving an equation of higher degree. Only when
the humanities are healed from the perspective of feminism will we be able to have power to heal the deep
wounds inflicted on female North Korean defectors and provide them with support to solve the difficult
equation of higher degree.
References
Kim Ae-Ryeong 2012, Listening to Different Voice: Speaking Agent and Inaudible Anisotropism,
Korean Feminist Philosophy Issue 17, Korean Association of Female Philosophers, 2012.
Kim Heisook 1999, Culture, Language and Existence, Philosophy Edition 61, Korean Association of
Philosophy.
Noh Gwi-Nam 2012, Understanding North Korean Defectors and Anisotropism, Korean Feminist
Philosophy Issue 17, Korean Association of Female Philosophers.
Choi Jin-Lee 2010, The Issue of North Korean Womens Human Rights and the Experiences of Imjingang
North Korean Women, hosted by Rep. Park Seon-Young, sponsored by the Alliance for Promoting
Human Rights of North Korean Women, the 27th Policy Seminar (2010. 4. 28, Meeting Room in the
Representatives Office Building at the National Assembly) Documents.
Choi Hyun-Shil 2012, The Body of Women on the Korean Peninsula in the 20-21 Century, Womens
Study Research Institute at Pusan National University, the Joint Seminar Booklet of Korean
Association of Female Philosophers (2012. 5. 19).
Hong Min, 2010 The Human Rights Issues facing North Korean Women, Im Reporting this Issue:
Human Rights Infringement Against North Korean Women, hosted by Rep. Park Seon-Young,
sponsored by the Alliance for Promoting Human Rights of North Korean Women, the 27th Policy
Seminar (2010. 4. 28, Meeting Room in the Representatives Office Building at the National
Assembly) Documents.
Davidson, D. 1984, Radical Interpretaion Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Harding, S. 1991, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
__________ 1993, Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology, Feminist Epistemologies, New York: Routledge.
__________ 1998, Is Science Multi-cultural? Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Tanesini, A. 1999, Feminist Epistemologies, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
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Publishing in Solving the Issue, Im Reporting this Issue: Human Rights Infringement Against

Proceedings
Humanities and the Crisis of Politics: from Kallipolis to Blade

Runners L.A.
Luca Maria Scarantino

IULM University
This paper addresses the idea of the healing power of the humanities If any in a way that focuses
on their cultural and disciplinary autonomy rather than on externally defined agendas and sets of
problems. On the one hand, it argues for an increased transdisciplinary approach within the humanities
themselves as well as in relation to the social and natural sciences. On the other hand, it will show that
the humanities, through their concepts and their critical function, are playing a role that goes far beyond
the national scope where political governance historically belongs. The decreasing capacity of politics
to rule the global changes of our world is often leading administrators to overlook the importance of the
humanities; however, these disciplines play an essential role in opening human minds to an increasing
cultural complexity. As such, they represent a major tool for cultural survival and coexistence in the
global, intercultural space of present humanity.
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The 2nd
Proceedings

Who Should Be Listened To?
1. T
herapeutic Function of the Humanities: Black Studies and the
African American Experience
/ Tunde Adeleke (Iowa State University)
2. S
olidarity of the Subaltern Confronting the Globalization of
Suffering: A Transmodern Critique of Zygmunt Baumans Liquid
Modernity
/ Yong-gyu Kim (Pusan National University)
3. D
ivorce Disputes, Property Right, and Legal Pluralism in a North
China Village
/ Zhao Xudong (Renmin University)
4. D
ifficult Dialogues: Perpetrators, Victims, Power, and the
Legacies of Mass Violence
/ Henry C. Theriault (Worcester State University)
Therapeutic Function of the Humanities: Black Studies and the

African American Experience
Tunde Adeleke
Iowa State University
The Black American experience embodied suffering at its worst. It was an experience birthed and nurtured
in perhaps the most tragic and violent of human encounters. The enslavement of millions of Africans and
their forcible transplantation to the New World which lasted for about three centuries unleashed a reign
of terror, violence and dehumanization that had far-reaching and profound global consequences. Many
contend today that black Americans still bear the scar of that suffering. Recalling his first encounter with
slaves, eleven years old Olaudah Equiano wrote,
the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among
my people such instances of brutal cruelty.The shrieks of the women and the groans of the
dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivableEvery circumstance I met with
served only to render my state more painful, and heighten my apprehensions and my opinion of the
cruelty of the whites.1
The evil, fear and inhumane vibes European slave traders emitted foretold the greater horror and terror
that awaited African captives in America. Equianos observation proved prophetic. The savagery he saw in
the faces of those white slave traders mirrored the essence of what became the American Souths Peculiar
Institution, and shaped the daily lives of slaves and experiences of generations of their descendants.
Abject misery and dehumanization characterized slavery.2 Imprisoned within this wall of degradation,
1 Paul Edwards, ed., Equiano Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. Long Grove: Illinois, 1996, pp. 24-25.
2 Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956. Eugene
Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaveholders Made. New York: Pantheon, 1969.
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his European captors as he was being loaded into the ship along with other bewildered and frightened

Proceedings
blacks had to device means of retaining a semblance of dignity and humanity. In other words, blacks were
thrust into the most inhumane of environments which subverted and denied their humanity. As James
Sidbury surmised;
Over the course of the eighteenth century several factors, including the intensification of the
Atlantic slave trade, the increasing economic and cultural integration of plantation America into
European society, and the growing currency of Enlightenment notions of human progress, helped
produce a conventional image of Africa in the Western imagination as a primitive and pagan place.
Africans, according to this view, were a savage people who existed outside of the narrative of
Western progress.3
The slave masters constructed a world of violence and brutalities. Within this world, slaves existed as
beasts of burden. To justify slavery, slaveholders and their intellectual and pseudo-intellectual theoreticians
from different disciplines including science, history, geography and theology developed a transmogrified
portrait of Africa, and pontificated about the darkness and barbarism of the continent, and the inherent
inferiority of Africans.4 Notwithstanding this overwhelming force, blacks did not succumb or totally
surrender to the dominant discourse of negation. Instead, slavery nurtured the seeds of its ultimate
destruction. The brutalities and violence of slavery ignited in blacks a resistant and self-deterministic
consciousness. Leading black nationalists of the time realized that the black struggle in America had to
have as its component an intellectual arm, since much of the pains and anguish blacks experienced derived
from intellectual falsehood.5 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Equiano, Ignatius Sancho,
Quobna Ottobah Cugano, Phyllis Wheatley, and many others struggled against the misery and debilitation
of an imposed collective identity of negation African. They humanized themselves by not only
contesting negation, but also counterpoising an empowering identity of survival and personal affirmation.
They initiated a countervailing discourse on African identity; one that redefined Africa in positive and
ennobling terms.6 This counter-hegemonic and regenerative discourse would engage generations of black
3 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007, p. 6.
4 Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1968. Idus Newby, ed., The Development of Segregationist Thought. Homewood, Ill: The Dorsey Press,
1968. George Frederickson, Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 18171914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, also his, Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2002.
5 John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Stephen Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical
Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
6 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America, Chs. 1-3.
256
activists. In other words, challenging and deconstructing the dominant and dehumanizing worldview
became a trans-generational endeavor among black Americans.
The brutalities and terror that defined the daily operations of the Peculiar Institution are etched
indelibly in the memories and memoirs of slaves and former slaves. Frederick Douglass recounted in
horrifying details how slavery destroyed the humanity of slaves, and the depth of terror and anguish
that defined daily lives on the plantations. In both his Narrative (1845), and Life and Times (1881),
Douglass left vivid accounts of this historical pain for posterity.7 David Walker addressed in similarly
gut-wrenching details the violent and demeaning character of slavery in his epic Appeal (1829) to my
much afflicted by suffering brethren, in which he identified slavery as the source from which most of
our miseries proceed.8 Walker declared his full and unshaken conviction, that we, (colored people of
these United States) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the
world began9 Walkers conclusions are corroborated in hundreds, if not thousands, of testimonies of
former slaves compiled by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, and in the narratives
and autobiographies of countless other slaves.10 One consistent theme in the narratives is the terror and
bestiality that defined the institution of slavery. And it did not end with slavery. The theme of suffering
was a continuum from slavery right through to the present. The violence of slavery was succeeded by
culture which lasted through much of the second half of the 20th century. During this period, the American
landscape was littered with horrifying human fruits. Lynching; the spectacle of black bodies hanging
from trees, the stench of burning flesh emanating from human barbecues polluted the nation. The
age of lynching (1880-1945) witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of hangings and burning of blacks,
occasioned by sadistic orgies and frenzies, oftentimes involving whole families, including children, who
congregated in main streets and town squares to bask in the torture, mutilation and burnings of black
humans.11 Such was the American racial and cultural landscape which lasted from the late-nineteenth
7 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: Signet Classics, 1997 (originally published in 1845). Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York:
Bonanza Books, 1962 (originally published in 1881).
8 David Walker, David Walkers Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (revised edition). New York: Hill & Wang,
1995, p. 1. (originally published in 1829).
9 Ibid.

John F. Bayliss, ed., Black Slave Narratives: Life Under Slavery as Told by its Victims in America. London: Collier
Books, 1976. Norman R. Yetman, ed., Voices From Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives (African-Americans). New
York: Dover Publications, 1999. See also his, When I Was a Slave: Memories From the Slave Narrative Collections.
New York: Dover Publications, 2002.

Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2002. C. Vann
Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3rd revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Ralph Ginzburg, Hundred Years of Lynchings. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1988. Joe H. Mitchell, 150 Years of Lynchings:
257
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an equally, if not more, dehumanizing post-slavery reign of terror encased within a pervasive Jim Crow

Proceedings
century to the second half of the twentieth. Key episodes that gripped national attention included the
lynching of fourteen-year old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi in 1955; an episode that ignited the
flames of the civil rights movement, and the 1996 lynching of James Byrd in Jasper Texas, described
by many as the last reported lynching of a black person in America. James Byrd was tied to the back of
a truck by three white supremacists and dragged through a three-mile gravel road, and was slowly and
sadistically dismembered. At the end, nothing of him was left. Human flesh littered the gravel road.12
The terror Equiano saw in the faces of his captors became the reality that ruled what many characterize
as the American house of bondage. From its inception the black American experience exemplified
dehumanization. As Herbert Aptheker emphasized, from the beginning, blacks confronted the critical
challenge, among many others, of claiming and affirming their humanity. This was the existential struggle
to reclaim their humanity in a culture/environment, and within the context of an institution, built on a
denial and negation of that humanity.13 It was not just the slave laws and state constitutions that were used
to foster the culture of violence and terror; it was also education, or more appropriately, dis-education;
that is, the denial of access to learning and the systematic use of ignorance to perpetuate and legitimize
a culture of dehumanization. During slavery, it was a crime in most states to teach slaves the alphabets.
Slaves simply did not go to school. Thus, slavery thrived on a culture of ignorance that socialized its
black victims to develop self-loathing and inferiority complex, reinforcing in them a consciousness of
negation and nothingness. Blacks were told they had no history, culture or heritage worthy of pride; and
that they came from an environment of barbarism, primitivism and darkness. The intellectual foundation
of black negation; the alleged absence of civilization in, and caricaturing of, Africa; the construction of
Africa as a dark continent occupied by backward and primitive people; justified the enslavement and
subordination of blacks. The goal was to legitimize enslavement by portraying slavery as a civilizing and
positive force, the violence and horror notwithstanding. Over time, as Samuel Dubois Cook rightly noted,
blacks developed a tragic conception of self, identity, history and heritage.14 Though blacks confronted
a destructive and disempowering culture, they refused to accept its reality, and struggled to challenge and
reverse it. However, blacks soon realized that in order to effectively affirm their humanity, to overcome
Americas Bloody Record in the Press. Joe Mitchell, 2002. Stewart Tolnay & E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An
Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter
Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

Joyce King, Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Dina TempleRaston, A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Towns Struggle for Redemption. New York: Henry Holt
& Company, 2002. Stephen J. Whitefield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Baltimore, MD: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Herbert Aptheker, Slave Resistance in the United States. In Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson and Daniel M. Fox, eds.,
Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol 1 to 1877. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 161-173.

Samuel Dubois Cook, A Tragic Conception of Negro History. Journal of Negro History, 45, October, 1960.
258
this culture of violence and suffering, to succeed in this existential struggle, they had to invoke not just
physical responses such as escape, resistance and rebellion, but also epistemological. They had to attack
and destroy the intellectual edifice of violence, the very ideological rationale of slavery.15
Since slavery and racism nurtured in black Americans a negative consciousness which served to
undermine and negate their humanity, leading blacks realized that overcoming this existential challenge
required self-deterministic affirmation of the will and desire to survive. In essence, this meant the forceful
affirmation of their humanity. However, since that humanity was negated by a culture of intellectual
racism, its reclamation would require frontal assaults on the edifice of that culture. In other words,
to claim and exercise their humanity, blacks must challenge the prevailing and dominant intellectual
discourse of invisibility, negation and negativism that had defined their existence in dominant national
historical narratives. They had to reclaim for posterity, a noble, empowering and positive heritage and
culture. Eighteenth century blacks such as Wheatley, Equiano, Sancho and Cugano developed positive
counter-narratives of, and discourses on, the meaning of Africa. They theorized a different Africa; a
positive Africa which soon functioned as a collective identity for resisting Eurocentric ideas.16 Building
upon this foundation, early nineteenth century black leaders of different backgrounds and orientation
launched the abolitionist movement. To challenge slavery, they had to vigorously contest and debunk false
and hegemony. In the process, these Pioneers in Protest, as the late Earl Thorpe described them (James
Pennington, William Wells Brown, William Cooper Neal, George Washington Williams, etc.), embarked
on exposing the fallacies of American historical writings, and rescuing the black heritage and experience
from its stranglehold by researching and publicizing the truths about American history and African
heritage. They strongly believed that illuminating and highlighting the truths about their African history
and heritage would eradicate the fallacies that were used to justify their enslavement.17 As Stephen Hall
underscored, these early black intellectuals;
understood the necessity of focusing their challenge on contemporary nineteenth-century
contradictions of history that privileged the rise of the Western hemisphere as the starting point for
American history. For the black writers, the rise of the West coincided with the development of the
slave trade and the demise of Africa. To respond to these charges, black writers in more expansive
wayshoned a well-crafted historical discourse that accentuated their complex role in human

John Ernest, Liberation Historiography. Stephen Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race.

James Sidbury, Becoming African in America.

Earl Thorpe, Black Historians: A Critique. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1971.
259
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ideas about their history and heritage. They had to challenge American culture of intellectual negation

Proceedings
history []18
They were not just troubling the pages of the writings of historians who had misrepresented their
history, but also they worked consciously and aggressively to present a just view of black origins.19
For these pioneers, there was no better point of departure than the very continent that had become the
subject of caricature and negation; the one maligned to justify denying to them their humanityAfrica.
They launched a gradual, systematic and determined efforts to research, study and publicize their African
background and roots, to discover and publicize not just their rich history and culture, but also to affirm, in
the process, their humanity and thus claim for themselves subject-status as agents and positive contributors
to American development. David Walker discussed this issue in his Appeal. For Walker, as Stephen Hall
argued;
Rethinking the African American role in Western civilization required a systematic engagement
with black achievements, ancient and modern. Walker turned to classical source to make an
important point about the place of Africa in the history of the world: When we take a retrospective
view of the arts and sciencesthe Pyramids and other magnificent buildingsthe turning of the
channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among them learning originated and was
carried thence into Greece, where it was improved upon and refined.20
In the referenced passage, Walker advanced a theme that would become a central canon of black
intellectual protest; one that subsequent activists, including Martin Delany, would amplifythe antiquity
of civilization in Africa, and Africas influence and impacts on Western civilization and culture. The
rescuing of African history from the depths of Eurocentric neglect and more significantly, the reaffirmation of Africas preeminence in world civilization became a recurrent theme in nineteenth century
black intellectual activism. Delany built his nationalism on a strong foundation of African historical and
cultural preeminence.21
Regardless of their intellectual imperfections, the writings and publications of the Pioneers laid the
foundation for future generations and genres of black intellectual activism. They wrote about their rich
ancestry in Africa and their enslavement. They repositioned Africa and blacks as active and positive

Stephen Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, p. 51.

Ibid, p
.
52.

Ibid, p
.
42.

John Ernest, Liberation Historiography, Stephen hall, A Faithful Account of the Race. Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky,
1998.
260
agents in world civilization. Most significantly, they claimed a central role for blacks in American national
history from the Revolution through the Civil War and beyond. In their collective narratives, black protest
intellectuals insisted that American achievements could not be accounted for absent black contributions.
Thus, there was a connection between the historic pains and sufferings of black Americans and the rise of
an intellectual avante-guard. Their humanity denied through intellectual deceits and fraudulent claims and
assertions, blacks fought back and attempted to reclaim and reaffirm that humanity through the creation
of an intellectual tradition that highlighted the essence and worth of Africa. The New Negro History
Movement of the early twentieth century further solidified the foundation of Black history. Led by William
E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Brawley and many others, the New Negro intellectuals
used their education, research and publications to solidify a foundation for, and gain respectability for,
African History. They created the institutional structures and intellectual resources that established Black
History as a respectable mainstream discipline, and, in the process, they laid the foundation for the future
of Black Studies.22 There was consequently a direct connection between the sufferings of black Americans
and the emergence of an intellectual discipline: Black Studies.
Black Studies emerged and institutionalized in the late 1960s out of the pains and anguish of the black
struggle. Its roots are embedded in the riots, boycotts, protest marches, police brutalities and racist
discipline that embodied the pains of black Americans, but the panacea for soothing, moderating and
ultimately eradicating those hurts. This linkage between Black Studies and the black struggle, as this
paper establishes, was birthed in the earlier attempts by eighteenth and nineteenth centuries back leaders
and activists to use knowledge as a weapon of change; a means of challenging the dominant hegemonic
narratives. From the beginning, therefore, the black struggle in America was about challenging and
debunking a debilitating philosophy and worldview which entrapped blacks in a socio-economic,
cultural and political house of horror; the Plantation. Thus, the black struggle was about overcoming
and transcending this dehumanizing environment. This called for the creation of a countervailing,
life-affirming intellectual heritage; a counter-hegemonic response to the dominant tradition, one that
validated the black past, reversed centuries of deliberate and systematic mis-education, and functioned as
a disciplinary intellectual frame for the black struggle. The civil rights movement brought this vision to
fruition. The struggle was not just about civil and political rights. At its core, the civil rights movement
was also about comforting and easing the historic pains that had become magnified in racial violence and
brutalities. However, there was no consensus among civil rights activists on the course of action. While

August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Darlene Clark-Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, Future. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
261
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attacks of the civil rights movement. This context would transform Black Studies into not only a

Proceedings
mainstream leaders focused intensely on civil and political rights, student activists grew increasingly
impatient with what they perceived as the slow pace of change. Determined to accelerate the pace, they
embraced and adopted the radical Black Power philosophy which ultimately would direct the attention
of the activists to college campuses.23
The Black Power activists of the Students Movement concluded that civil and political rights
would be hollow accomplishments without education; and were convinced that real knowledge was
inconceivable absent engaging and obliterating the legacies of mis-education that continues to torment
blacks psychologically and emotionally; legacies that, in their judgment, the colleges embody and
nurture. Put differently, the student activists considered black liberation meaningless without uprooting
the Eurocentric pedagogy that shaped American education. The need for intellectual and psychological
emancipation, therefore, redirected the attention of black activists to educational reforms.24 They sought
education that would rid their minds and consciousness of ideas and ethos that had nurtured selfabnegating consciousness, ideas that had subverted black self-deterministic capacity, and induced selfhate and loathing. These activists realized that centuries of slave violence and racism; of exploitation
and impoverishment, of helplessness and powerlessness had resulted in a fatalistic disposition of selfhate and self-loathing. Black self-esteem and confidence had to be restored through education that taught
blacks to appreciate their heritage, their culture; to appreciate their roles as active historical persona in the
American drama. This would only happen, they insisted, if blacks had their own space within American
higher education; a space within which to nurture and propagate those counter-narratives that would
reshape black minds positively. They began to advocate the creation of Black Studies; the foundation for
which had already been solidified by earlier generations of activists. Their efforts ultimately resulted in
the establishment of the Black Studies Program at San Francisco State College in late 1968, popularly
acclaimed as the first in the nation. This became the catalyst for programs at other institutions such as
Princeton, Yale, Columbia, New York and Ohio State.25
Within the Black Studies purview, blacks hoped to validate their history and experiences. Black Studies
would become the disciplinary arm of the black struggle. It would function as the intellectual means of
redemption, as well as the tool with which to heal the pains that continue to torment blacks. Ridding

Noliwe M. Rooks, White Money, Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of
Race in Higher Education. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Talmadge Anderson & James Stewart, Introduction to African
American Studies, Trans-disciplinary Approaches and Implications. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 2007, Ch. 2.
Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline.
Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

Ibid.

Ibid. See also, Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies.
262
blacks of the tragic worldview became crucial to survival. Black Power advocate Malcolm X, for
example, offered knowledge of African history as anti-dote for self-destructive ideas and consciousness,
the key to overcoming and obliterating the psychological and emotional pains inflicted on blacks through
centuries of slavery and intellectual racism.26 Thus, the institutionalization of Black Studies heralded a
new approach to African history and culture. It offered blacks their own distinct racial/cultural lenses
through which they perceived their African heritage and culture. It afforded blacks a positive view
of themselves, as well as a renewed self-confidence that enhanced self-esteem and worth. Africa, the
foundation of Black Studies became the source for a new positive identity; a new sense of the self, and
the means of psychological and emotional freedom from the shackles of the past. Malcolm X and fellow
Black Power spokesperson Stokely Carmichael saw increased knowledge of Africa as the means to a
new self and identity. It was not just knowledge of Africa, but reeducation about Africa, about heritage
and culture that would help blacks defeat and overcome Eurocentric mis-education. As the quest for
intellectual emancipating and empowering knowledge became part of the civil rights movement, black
activists and emerging intellectuals used Africa to construct a counter-hegemonic epistemology; an Africacentered epistemology which became the intellectual bulwark against cultural emasculation and a weapon
in what was perceived as an existential struggle against Eurocentrism. This African-centered philosophy
(Afrocentricity) shaped the early Black Studies programs through the 1970s, and ultimately became a
The Black Consciousness and Community Orientation concept developed by the founding father
of Black Studies forged a problematic link between the discipline and the social and psychological
challenges of the black community.27 Also, perhaps unintentionally, it set the stage for the racialization
of the discipline. The intension no doubt was to create a mutually reinforcing relationship between Black
Studies and the black community, reflecting the social dynamics of the context of institutionalization.
The objective was for Black Studies to cater to the needs of its primary community and constituency;
one that had been abandoned by America and had suffered and continues to suffer the scourge of neglect.
Blacks would have to be imbued with a sense of responsibility to use their knowledge to improve the
black community. Unfortunately, this had the unintended consequence of further racializing the discipline.
The injunction to merge the academy with the community implied the marriage of theory and praxis.
This underlines the healing power of the discipline. Black Studies cannot just be about researching
and publicizing the truth about black history and culture, neither should it focus solely on exposing
the fallacies of Eurocentric/American history. However soothing and therapeutic the exposure of such
fallacies, they (i.e., the fallacies) constitute just a dimension of a greater problem. The other critical

Malcolm X, Malcolm X on Afro-American History, New Edition. New York: Pathfinder, 1990.

Talmadge Anderson & James Stewart, Introduction to African American Studies, pp. 35-36.
263
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dominant disciplinary paradigm by the late 1980s.

Proceedings
dimension, the praxis required black intellectuals to identify with, and use their knowledge to develop the
neglected, powerless and helpless black community. This constitutes black intellectuals as avante-guard in
the struggle to heal the deeper and larger wounds of the community. However noble this praxis function,
ultimately it sets the stage for a ghetto-centric construction of Black Studies.28 Emphasis on healing
the historic pains and exposing the lies that had been used to inflict those pains and hurts undergird the
problematic of intellectual credibility in Black Studies. Preoccupation with positively effecting black selfesteem has had far-reaching implications for what is taught in Black Studies, how it is taught, and by
whom. There developed almost a schizophrenic preoccupation with ensuring that what is taught, and how
it is taught, conform strictly to the dictates of Afrocentrism. This suggests, therefore, that those deemed
alien to the black experience, whether by virtue of race or ethnicity become suspect, regardless of
disposition and qualification.29
The belief was that only the victims and those who directly or indirectly share in their anguish could be
trusted to interpret and represent the experience accurately. The use of race and ethnicity to determine
qualification, competence and authenticity within Black Studies reinforced a siege/fortress mentality which
further compromised intellectual credibility. The case against whites teaching Black Studies, according
to one Afrocentric scholar, is fundamentally because they would be reporting on it and interpreting
it through the prism of their European experience (when what is needed is) an authentic presentation
of the (black) experience.30 Another critic is opposed to whites teaching Black Studies because their
historic experiences disqualify them. In his words, discrimination can best be taught and understood
by those who experience it. It is hard to read a textbook and understand what discrimination is about. It
is a different thing altogether to live it.31 Asante is equally skeptical of whites teaching Black Studies.
However, he concedes that it is possible for whites to teach Black Studies if such a person is willing to
make the necessary commitment to teach accurately and Afrocentrically (emphasis mine), and has the
ability to frame blacks as historical agents.32 Such white professors must demonstrate not just knowledge
of, but also sensitivity to the genetic, social, and cultural links between Africa and Europe. He insists on
a priori vetting their intellectual location, social orientation and moral investment.33
Almost from the start, Black Studies assumed an ideological burden which would have far-reaching

Tunde Adeleke, Enduring Crises and Challenges of African American Studies. Journal of Thought, vol. 32, number 3,
Fall 1997, pp. 65-96.

Ibid.

Ibid
.
, p
.
73.

Ibid.

Molefi Asante, Where is the White Professor Located? Perspectives, vol. 31, number 6, September 1993, p. 19.

Ibid.
264
implications for scholarship. The ideological context of institutionalization created a racialized essentialist
identity for Black Studies. It quickly became, in the perception of many, a discipline created by, and for,
blacks. This racialization reflected the historical context. But there were also other considerations. Those
who taught and administered the program in its early years were mostly black activists whose credentials/
qualifications derived largely from the fact of being black and the ability to claim affinity with, or
having actively participated in, the black struggles. Academic qualification was simply not a priority.
However, this would change as the field grew and expanded with the training of more professionals.
Nonetheless, for over two decades after its inception, racial/cultural jurisdiction and credentialism shaped
Black Studies. Whether by design or not, several of the early programs and departments were run by allblack faculty. There seemed to pervade an unwritten, racialized intellectual code; one that mandated an
all-black faculty for Black Studies. The few whites who ventured into the field had difficulty gaining
acceptance and credibility. Regardless of qualification, they were suspect. Race and ethnicity became the
overriding credentials, and experience, rather than academic qualification, was much valued.34 Thus,
being black was presumed to confer to authenticity in Black Studies. There was an underlying fear and
concern that whites could not be trusted to teach with the same conviction and passion as blacks; they
simply could not be trusted to tell it as it should be told. This was premised on the belief that because of
the centuries of Eurocentric mis-education, for Black Studies to be truly emancipated, it had to be rooted
Afrocentric essentialist paradigm which assumed dominance from the late 1980s through the early 1990s.
Adopted by leading Black Studies programs and departments, Afrocentrism became not just a defining
paradigm for the field, but functioned as well as an ideological panacea for easing and eradicating the
psychological and emotional pains blacks had experienced, and continue to experience, from Eurocentric
mis-education.35
Thus, Black Studies developed a paradigm which fundamentally racialized the discipline. Race became
the basis of legitimacy and authenticity. Advocates insisted that the field had to be constructed and
taught Afrocentrically for it to truly accomplish its mission; otherwise it would just be another variant
of Eurocentrism. Essentially, Afrocentrism locates Black Studies strictly and wholly within African

Tunde Adeleke, Enduring Crises and Challenges, also Robert Blackey and Howard Shorr, eds., (Teaching Innovations
Forum) White Professors, Black History: Foray into the Multicultural Classroom. Perspectives, vol. 31, number 6,
September 1993, pp. 6-19.

Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric Idea in Education, Journal of Negro Education, vol. 60, number 2, 1991, pp. 170179. See also his, The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987; Afrocentricity. Trenton, NJ: Africa
World Press, 1988; Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990; On Historical Interpretation. In his Malcolm X as Cultural Hero and other Afrocentric Essays. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993.
Tunde Adeleke, Black Studies, Afrocentricity and Scholarship: A Reconsideration. Griot: Journal of African American
Studies, Vol. 12, number 1, Spring 1993.
265
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in Africa; it had to be truly a discipline by, for and about blacks/Africans. This racialized ethos defined the

Proceedings
cosmology; reframing in the most positive sense, the history, culture and accomplishments of African
civilizations, and the systematic use of the knowledge gained to empower blacks in their struggles.36
The injunction to teach Afrocentrically, therefore, suggests a willingness to affirm and validate Africa/
Blacks; to research and teach Black Studies strictly from an African perspective. This calls for forcefully
critiquing and denouncing Eurocentric education, especially in regards to its negative impacts and
enduring legacies. Most importantly, teaching Afrocentrically implies the instrumentalist combination
of knowledge creation and dissemination with social engineering. This entails the therapeutic use of
Black Studies to deal with and eradicate those negative, demeaning and self-loathing ideas that shaped
black consciousness for centuries. In other words, the role of the instructor is not just to teach, but also
ideological; to use Africa to empower students by challenging and reversing legacies of destructive and
negative socialization. Due to paradigmatic imperative, Black Studies combined both academic and nonacademic (instrumentalist) functions. It became a discipline for addressing not just the emotional and
psychological pains, but also for eradicating the ills of the black community.
The adoption of a racialized and ethnicized paradigm for Black Studies is intellectually problematic,
especially in the context of emerging perspectives in the humanities and social sciences which privilege
interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship and discourses. As humans become citizens of emerging
global village, and gravitate toward cultural citizenship, race and ethnicity become anachronistic as
identitarian constructs and intellectual anchors. Put differently, just as the nation-state loses its grips on,
and monopoly of, identity, so do race and ethnicity. The challenge for Black Studies scholars and scholars
in the humanities generally is how to embrace this globalizing perspective without being constrained by
the Afrocentric or any primordial identitarian ideology. The global and globalizing character of the
black experience problematizes the use of race, ethnicity, or even culture, as paradigmatic frame for Black
Studies. The ability to engage, validate and affirm multiple and complex experiences is at the core of the
humanities. We live in a mutually reinforcing, mutually reflective universe defined by crosscurrents of
influences and values. No credible humanities discipline can exist in isolation, driven solely by racially
defined experiential ethos. It is important to clearly demarcate between an intellectual discipline and an
ideological movement, each is characterized by fundamentally different objectives. While there may
be shared and overlapping interests, the goals are fundamentally different. Black Studies cannot be
constructed instrumentally and Afrocentrically and at the same time retain intellectual credibility. The
Afrocentric paradigm is racially and culturally constricting. For intellectual credibility, the discipline has
to be shared. This means not only that the field is open to everyone, but also that its philosophical frame
privileges critical discourses with others; that it is an intellectual stream from which everyone is free to

Ibid.
266
drink, an embodiment of experiences that are not enclosed in, or delineated by, racial, ethnic or cultural
walls.
The sufferings of black Americans cannot effectively be relieved by a discipline grounded in the
philosophy of pain; one which isolates blacks behind a cultural and racial boundary that discourages
engaging other experiences. A paradigm rooted and grounded in pain would not foster interdisciplinary
and inter-cultural researches and discourses. It would replicate an epistemology of pain that feeds the
consciousness with negative and inhibiting recollections which hinder critical engagement with others.
Pains are better relieved by experiences that inculcate in the victims the understanding that, however
real, the pains do not, and should not, define ones essence. In fact, it is in seeing how much blacks share
with others, even the historic counter-hegemonic other that those pains are better analyzed, understood,
and their effects relieved. An intellectual paradigm rooted in pain and defined by counter-narratives of
negation, one which seeks to demonize and delegitimize the other, only replicates the very problem
it was designed to eradicate, by evolving into what fundamentally is a disciplinary ethnoscape (to
borrow Appadurais concept).37 The pain is not relieved, but encased and perpetuated. Thus, Afrocentric
fixation on race and identity politics negatively frames Black Studies as a protest discipline, a discipline
fixated on shaping and re-shaping identity, constantly and perpetually on guard against perceived threats
more about authentication and restoration of identity than anything else. This entraps the discipline in
a conceptual bind which institutes the very problem it was created to destroythe act of imposing a
unified identity upon a huge population of disparate people.38 There is also what Early characterized as the
political baggage of the origins of Black Studies. This baggage compelled the imposition of a uniform
identity upon a people without consideration for the wealth and complexities of their backgrounds and
experiences.39 As Early underscored, the anti-establishment origins of Black Studies created a political
baggage which encouraged dogmatic teaching, the quest for Afrocentric orthodoxy, and a pure African
perspective of the world.40 The result is a cynical, anti-intellectual disposition that views with suspicion
established canons of intellectual respectability. This is reflected in the postmodernists denunciation of
objectivity as Eurocentric, producing a vacuum that can be filled only by correct leftist or nationalist

Arjun
Appadurai,
Disjuncture and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy. In Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity. London: Sage, 1990, pp. 297.

Gerald Early, A Place of Our Own. The New York Times (on the web), April 14, 2002, p. 2.

Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. London: Verso, 1998. Clarence E. Walker, We Cant
Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. London: Oxford University Press, 2001. Yaacov Shavit History in
Black: Afro-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past. London: Frank Cass, 2001. Tunde Adeleke, The Case Against Afrocentrism. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

Gerald Early, A Place of Our Own, p. 3.
267
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from the dominant society. As Gerald Early rightly noted, the entire Black Studies enterprise seems

Proceedings
politics. 41 There is also the racial demarcation of the curriculum which, according to Early, has worked
against the best interests of both the black professor and the black students by defeating a fundamental
purpose of a liberal education: to learn about and to become experts in experiences outside yourself.42
Further isolating Black Studies and thus eroding its intellectual credibility is the Afrocentric distrust
of, and reluctance to embrace, mainstream education. Afrocentric scholars deem mainstream education
inherently harmful to blacks.43 Under the guise of scientific objectivity, rationalism and universalism,
mainstream institutions function as conduits of Eurocentric hegemonic values. Rejecting rationalism,
empiricism and objectivity, Afrocentric scholars advance relativism, and the construction of Black Studies
within a racialized essentialist perspective rooted in, and one that positively reflected, the African world.44
This became the weapon of liberation, conceived dualistically and simultaneously to include academic
and ideological dimensions. This racial essentialist epistemology became, for leading Afrocentric
scholars, such as Molefi Asante, Amos Wilson, John Henrik Clarke, Marimba Ani, Maulana Karenga,
Terry Kershaw and Naim Akbar, the one and only viable and credible perspective for Black Studies
and for educating blacks. Afrocentrism also functions as a kind of collective consciousness paradigm
that uses racially and culturally shared negative experiences to shape in blacks an awareness of their
collective pains. This shared awareness would supposedly inspire self-determination. This heightened
state of intellectual vigilance which informs the Afrocentric paradigm shapes Black Studies in ways
that conforms strictly to the goals of black liberation; the need to combat and deconstruct vestiges of
Eurocentric education and socializing.45 It is this construction of Black Studies that validates the racial
credentialist problematic which delegitimizes anyone or interpretation not in conformity with Afrocentric
view of history and reality; or anyone deemed racially and culturally alien to the unique experiences of
the race. In other words, suffering, or the ability to claim a heritage of suffering, became a credentialing
and legitimizing criteria and consideration. It soon became the defining and unifying underpinning of the
essentialist pedagogy. Shrinkages in opportunity, coupled with renewed and relentless onslaughts on civil
rights, and upsurge of ultraconservatism that targets social welfare reforms have exacerbated the crises of
the black communities (poverty, unemployment, etc.) and bolstered the Afrocentric appeal as a weapon of
liberation rather an intellectual paradigm. Oba TShaka urged continued adoption of Afrocentrism because

Ibid.

Ibid.

Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990 (originally published in
1933). Mwalimu J. Shujaa, ed., Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A Paradox of Black Life In White Societies.
Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994.

Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity, pp 50-52. Terry Kershaw, The Emerging Paradigm in Black Studies. in Talmadge Anderson, ed., Black Studies: Theory, Method, and Cultural Perspectives. Pullman: Washington State University Press,
1990, pp. 17-24.

Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity, Ch. 3.
268
black communities are in criseswe have become infested by the western worldview.46 Amos Wilson
presented Afrocentrism as the means of redressing historical wounds inflicted upon blacks, physical,
psychological and emotional. He saw no more effective weapon of dealing with the myriad of challenges
confronting blacks in America than to invoke and unfurl their Afrikan identity and heritage.47
How realistic is a racialized essentialist framing of Black Studies in the context of globalization and
growing emphasis on connectivity and inter-disciplinary scholarship in the humanities? Can the
humanities combine academic and extra-academic functions, especially if the latter are race-specific and
culturally provincial, in a context, and in an intellectual milieu that privileges inter-disciplinary scholarship
and discourses; one in which culture and identity fluctuate, and old cultural and ethnic boundaries
become obsolete? Black Studies could conceivably assume extra-academic functions of therapeutic
and instrumentalist nature due to the circumstance of its origin. The problem occurs, if and when, such
functions become the essence of the discipline. For Black Studies to embrace and reflect emerging
perspectives in the humanities, the discipline has to disengage from, or at the very least deemphasize,
cultural and racial instrumentalism. Black Studies scholars, like others in the humanities must engage other
experiences freely, and black students must expect exposure to a wide range of complex perspectives.
The future of Black Studies depends on this openness and flexibility. The paradigm should acknowledge,
replicate racialized or culturally hegemonic grand paradigms or perspectives that shaped the context of the
black experience; perspectives that were used to delegitimize others while being falsely represented as
universal and objective. As indicated above, Afrocentrism developed largely in response to what was
perceived as the prevailing tendency to exalt as universal and objective, canons rooted in Eurocentric
weltanschauung. Consequently, blacks felt that their heritage and contributions were neglected; and their
values and cultures caricatured and delegitimized. Everything was conflated into a supposedly universal
and objective worldview; a framework, in the judgment of Afrocentric scholars, for European hegemony.
Afrocentrism was meant to free and protect blacks from this bondage, while also disrupting the legacies of
their historic hurts.
The Afrocentric construction of Black Studies, therefore, reflects a rejection of post-modern emphasis
on inter-disciplinary discourses. There is clearly a reluctance to embrace post-modern or post-colonial
assumptions, especially with respect to notions of globalism, connectivity and inter-culturalism. Suffering
remains at the core of the problem. The critical question is: in what ways, if any, is the black American

Oba Tshaka, The Art of Leadership. Richmond, CA: Pan African Publications, 1990, p. 71.

Amos Wilson, The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Afrikan World InforSystems, 1993.
269
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affirm and validate the human experiences in their richness and diversity. Black Studies should not

Proceedings
condition (poverty, racism, inequality, etc) moderated or mediated by post-modern or post-colonial

developments? In other words, are the sufferings moderated by changing circumstances? Does the
post-setting, however it is conceived (modern or colonial) necessarily safeguard, protect and preserve
untrammeled, black rights and privileges? Does it preserve the fruits of their historic struggles? Indications
are not reassuring. The upsurge of ultra-conservative attacks on social welfare reforms and public policies
perceived to disproportionately impact the poor have only reinforced a sense of unease among black
Americans. More recently, persistent attacks on civil rights culture, and blatant attempts in Republican
controlled states to roll back the Voting Rights Act (1965), by restricting voting opportunities of minorities
have only opened old wounds and reinforced the feeling that though the physical violence and sufferings
of the past may have subsided, the political and cultural contexts remain pregnant with ominous
consequences. Thus, for blacks, talks about trans-nationalism and cultural citizenship ring hollow. The
enduring legacy of suffering and the looming threat of an unrepentant ultra-conservatism underscore
the relevance of cultural vigilance and racialized worldview. We may live in a postcolonial world;
the colonial is still very much alive for black Americans. Even in the postcolonial and transnational
contexts, the violence, pain and anguish of the colonial establishment remain raw and fresh for black
Americans, perhaps because for them, the concept postcolonial remains a distant illusion. The colonial
era is still very much extant. Perhaps a postcolonial America, if and when it comes, would result in the
easing of black sufferings. Contrary to some expectations, even the election of the first Black President
has not ushered in the post-racial; a critical subtext to the postcolonial. In fact, as many now argue,
the election of Barack Obama has, more than at any other time in American history further deepened the
racial divide and animosity. It has revealed how distant the nation is from the postcolonial or post-racial
termini.
Afrocentric scholars, therefore, deem the trans-national vision an illusion. It is difficult to envisage any
transcending, be it racial, ethnic or cultural in a global environment which continues in some form or other
to replicate privileges; where racial inequities and inequality prevail. Hence, Afrocentrists who subscribe
dogmatically to a conflict-driven perception of reality remain skeptical. They deem transcending of any
sort a ruse; the trans a higher level of the old hegemonic order, an elevated platform for Eurocentric
domination and exploitation, and thus an expanded terrain of black sufferings. Hence, they are leery
of international/global engagements.48 For them, black sufferings cry out for global attention. Blacks
continue to languish beneath the veneer of American democracy. Their sufferings have morphed and

Molefi Asante, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics. Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press, 1990; Preface & chapt1. Marimba Ani, YURUGU: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought
and Behavior. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994. Haki Madhubuti, Enemies: The Clash of Races. Chicago: Third
World Press, 1978.
270
emanate from complex and often subtle sourcesjudicial, social, political and economic inequality
and inequities, institutional and color-blind racism, and an unrepentant and virulent ultra-conservatism.
This reality underscores, for many, the ever-present need for a distinct racialized pedagogy of resistance,
an intellectual safety-valve, an ethnoscape even in an age when humans are supposedly increasingly
being drawn closer, and traditional boundaries of racial, cultural and ethnic delineations deemphasized.
In their judgment, blacks have yet to attain this noble utopian reality. Thus, Black Studies, a humanities
discipline would remain saddled with this essentialist counter-hegemonic paradigm of Pain, even as
humanities scholars worldwide explore ways of dismantling rigid disciplinary boundaries.
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Tolnay, Stewart & E.M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930.

Proceedings
Solidarity of the Subaltern Confronting the Globalization of Suffering:

A Transmodern Critique of Zygmunt Baumans Liquid Modernity
Yong-gyu Kim
Pusan National University
The Incident of Ssangyong Motor Company and the Globalization of Suffering

Last summer, Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek made a sensational visit to the incense altar installed in
front of Daean Gate, Deoksu Palace, during his trip to Korea. The altar was set up to commemorate a
sequence of people who committed suicide or passed away in the wake of the 2009 lay-offs at Ssangyong
Motor Company and the police suppression of strikes raged by workers. As many as 22 people killed
themselves or lost their lives, including some striking workers and their family members and some nonstriking workers gushed into an abyss of despair over the lay-offs. Why did so many people die? The
foremost reason might have been extreme anxiety and pain experienced by people who suddenly fell into
poverty after the lay-offs. But in her reportage on the Ssangyong Motor incident entitled Euijanori (Chair
Play), writer Gong Ji-yeong attributes the most critical cause of the tragic deaths to the post-traumatic
stress syndrome suffered by workers and their families over the polices ruthless crackdown of the strikes.
They were, in a sense, driven to death from the psychological shock of having the security of their lives
shaken from the roots, the enormous violence committed by state power dashing their hopes and will for a
rebound, and the trauma of disengagement and indifference of people around them.
Personally, I cannot confront the despair they must have felt, nor do I have the courage to. Because
approaching the complex reality of the incident is not easy and because trying to sympathize with their
suffering would be presumptuous. However, the incident has too much in it for us to just walk away.
Various complicated issues are implicated in it, such as how the neo-liberalist capital, a leading force of
our contemporary society, has made workers powerless and to what extent global capital affects our local
lives.
Looking into the nature and character of the stakeholders related with the incident, we can see that the
274
2009 Ssangyong Motor incident in Pyeongtaek was a very significant one in which local, national, and
transnational problems were concerned all at once. Ssangyong Motor Company was sold to Chinas
Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation in 2004 and then handed over to Indias Mahindra Group in
2009. This indicates that the identity of the capital was increasingly becoming transnational and blurred.
Workers were confronted with unclear liquid ghostlike capital. The capital has completely different
characteristics from domestic capital operating within the country. It is, basically, very exploitive of the
labor it uses. When the dominant power of the nation-state was not weak as it is now, domestic capital
maintained a certain level of attention to the welfare and protection of workers and their reproduction in
the nation-state to secure a stable reproduction of labor and supply of good-quality human capital. But
transnational capital seeks only capital at the expense of the wellbeing and welfare of its workers.
Meanwhile, the nation-state, which is supposed to watch over this and protect workers or its citizens,
is incapable of doing it and even tends to acquiesce in the abusive capital. Colluding with many legal
consulting companies which support the interests of transnational capital, the state ignores or oppresses
the demands of workers, its citizens, using the police force. Just as capital wanders around like a ghost,
transformed into zombie capital whose identity is ambiguous, the nation-state abandons its role as the
social statewhich intermediates conflicts between labor and capital, protects workers, and manage
against workers in order to protect the generation of enormous profit for transnational capital.1 As capital
and state transforms in nature, the status of labor undergoes a drastic change from the past. Workers
are violently suppressed by the state which they expect to stand up against foreign capital to protect their
rights. The bargaining power of labor unions weakens before the complex reality of capital, leaving
workers with no one to turn to. They are pushed outside the legal protection through ruthless violence
executed by those who do not see people as people but as costs to be disposed of. 2 Before capital and
the state, workers are like bare life in Agambens terminology.3 In this condition, workers have to
engage in life-or-death competition with fellow workers for survival in order to become regular workers
or to maintain their non-regular employment. In short, non-regular work no longer means a temporary
condition of suspension before entering regular work. It is a normal condition and reality of labor today.
The real problem is that the survival game not only drives the players into a whirl of infinite competition
1 On the security state, see Zygmunt Bauman, 2005, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, (London: Open University
Press, 2005, 2nd ed.), pp. 96-100.
2 Gong Ji-yeong, Euijanori (Chair Play) (Seoul: Humanist, 2012), p. 88.
3 On homo sacer and bare life, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1998).
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their stable reproductionand changes into the security state which does not even mind having a war

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but also throws the entire society into a maelstrom of intense competition. It even divides us, who stay
outside the competition, into I and the other, or, we and they. Further, it makes us turn a cold shoulder
to the plight of others, or, at best, be content with expressing sympathy. Because both disengagement
and sympathy are based on separation between I and the other and between we and they, they obstruct
the formation of an understanding of the fundamental relationality between we and others. In Regarding
the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explains very well how dangerous both sympathy with and apathy to
others plight are. She notes that insofar as we are indifferent to or feel sympathy with others suffering,
we are barred from feeling that we are accomplices to what caused the suffering. According to Sontag, our
sympathy with others suffering is, indeed, nothing but our impotence and our innocence. The indifference
and sympathy are equal to our inability to understand the relationality between we and they and between I
and the other. To overcome this, Sontag calls to set aside the sympathy we extend to others and urges us
to reflect that our privileges are an extension of their suffering and may ... be linked to their suffering. 4
What we need to do right now is to realize that my life is implicated in others suffering and they are
implicated in my suffering. Moreover, we should realize that not just they but I can be a bare life before
the violence of capital and the state. This awakening will enable us to understand the relationality and
mutuality of suffering, to learn how to see the world together, and ultimately, to seek solidarity.
The Crisis of Democracy and the Generation of Redundant Lives
The Ssangyong Motor incident in Pyeongtaek demonstrates a typical case of revealing the manifestation
of painful life beyond the boundary of a locality in Korea under the globalizing capital. Further, the
incident demonstrates well how the global domination of capital drives democracy into crisis and how
much suffering it generates and how widely it spreads it. Nowadays, democracy gradually erodes from
ruthless violence executed by people who do not see people as people but as costs to be disposed of.
The spread of violence results in the diffusion of suffering. The globalization of capital surpasses the
effective zone of conventional democracy, more likely to leave democracy merely in hollow form and
institution in the process. Many contemporary theorists refer to the crisis of democracy originated from
tyrannical capital as the end of democracy, de-democratization, and post-democracy.
In Post-Democracy, Colin Crouch argues that we are entering an era of post-democracy, in which formal
elements of democracy still exist but politics and government are increasingly slipping into the grip of
the privileged elites. 5 He maintains that given the difficulty of sustaining anything approaching maximal
4 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 103-104.
5 Colin Crouch, Yi Han trans., Post minjujueui (Post-Democracy) (Seoul: Mijibooks, 2008), p. 11.
276
democracy, declines from democratic moments must be accepted as inevitable. 6 Wendy Brown, who is
a more radical political scientist than Crouch is, defines the contemporary reality as de-democratization
noted for the domination of politics by capital, the overtaking of democratic rationality by neoliberal
rationality and the juridification of politics, globalizations erosion of nation-state sovereignty as well as
the detachment of sovereign power from nation-states. 7 According to her, de-democratization brings
about two important consequences: on the one hand, democracy loses a necessary political form and
container, and on the other, the state abandons all pretenses of embodying popular sovereignty and
carrying out the will of the people.8 In addition to those scholars, many theorists generally agree that
democracy is facing a crisis since the globalization. What is problematic with the crisis of democracy
is that the conditions of our lives have turned extremely uncertain and vulnerable from the foundation,
as the responsibility for institutional protection and safety is shifted from the state to the individual. In
consequence, people falling out of the system increase in quantity and those in wretchedness explode in
number. Suffering is more and more generalized and individualized.
There seems to be few theorists who capture this change better than Zygmunt Bauman. Because his
writings superbly unravel how deeply and widely this change transforms our lives, I use his theory as
the main basis of my argumentation in this paper. Bauman is well known to us for his concept liquid
phenomenon that all that is solid melts into air, in that institutions and human relations, which were
considered long-term and solid, e.g., individuality, time and place, life, labor, community and the like,
melt fast and become liquid and ephemeral. Even human ideas such as death, life, love, aesthetics and
so on are not exempt from the rapid change. In Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Bauman
notes, based on the concept liquid modernity, that challenges never before encountered emerge in the
developed parts of the world, generating a series of new and interconnected departures in culture. He lists
five characteristics of those departures. First, as mentioned previously, modernity has made a passage
from the solid to a liquid phase. The liquid phase refers to a condition in which social forms, previously
regarded as solid, disintegrate and can no longer keep the same form as before as they decompose faster
than the time it takes to become solid. Second, there has been the separation and divorce of power and
politics, which were like a couple under an umbrella since the emergence of the modern state until quite
recently. Much of the power to act effectively that was previously available to the modern state is now
moving away to the politically uncontrolled and extraterritorial global space, while politics is unable
6 Ibid., p. 19.
7 Wendy Brown, We are all Democrats Now..., in Giorgio Agamben et al., Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 48.
8 Ibid., p. 49.
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modernity. As Karl Marx declared in The Communist Manifesto, liquid modernity refers to the modern

Proceedings
to respond effectively to globally operating power since it remains local as before. Third, as communal
and state-level support systems for individual failure and ill fortune no longer operate as before, the
social foundations of social solidarity and collective action crumble. Community does not function in a
meaningful way, and interhuman bonds, once woven into a security net worthy of a large and continuous
investment of time and effort, and worth the sacrifice of immediate individual interests ... become
increasingly frail and admitted to be temporary. Fourth, the framework and system of long-term thinking,
planning and acting collapse. This leads to a splicing of both political history and individual lives ...
into a series of short-term projects and episodes which are in principle infinite, and do not combine into
the kinds of sequences to which concepts like development, maturation, career, or progress (all
suggesting a preordained order of succession) could be meaningfully applied. Fifth, the responsibility for
resolving the quandaries generated by vexing, changeable and liquid circumstances is passed from society
to individuals. Individuals appear to be free to choose, but in actuality, they only bear the consequences
and responsibilities for their choices.9
Those five characteristics, which form the basic assumptions of many of his books, do not look entirely
unexcessive, but what Bauman tries to say here is that we have entered into a condition that individuals
and capital are in direct confrontation without any mediation, as solid (pre)modern devices and solidarities
such as state, community, society, and values, which used to intermediate capital and individuals, are
left only in an empty crust or disassembled. In liquid modernity, liquid refers to departures which are
generated from the elimination, weakening, or disappearance of mediation. This change is manifest in two
real changes. The protective covers and laws which used to defend individuals are no longer effective. If
law is to write the continuation of the mediation into rules, the elimination and weakening of the mediation
results in the weakening and disappearance of the law. Particularly, as the existing law is governed by
other laws or powers outside its influence, the boundary between law and non-law is obscure, and chaos,
disorder and lawlessness is routinized. In other words, those exceptional emergencies become normal.
Further, in a lawless condition, individuals stand defenseless, like bare life, before the exploitation of
capital without any protective devices or a safety mechanism. Therefore, individual life and labor may be
treated as redundancy anytime if it is no longer useful to capital.
Bauman interprets this change as a shift of paradigmatic criterion from unemployment to redundancy.
According to him, unemployment presupposes the normal state of ones employment in the future
although one may be currently unemployed. That is, unemployment assumes that employment is the
normal condition and complete employment is an ideal one. In contrast, in the concept of redundancy,
9 For the summary of the five characteristics, I refer to and cite from Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of
Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 1-4.
278
redundancy itself is the normal condition. Redundancy signifies lives that are not used again or dumped in
society, i.e., wasted lives.
What is more serious than the generation of human refuse is that the redundant are regarded as thoroughly
valueless in nature and also dangerous. It is defined as a cancerous growth gnawing at the healthy tissues
of the society, and a public enemy which threatens our way of life and our core values.10 Bauman
mentions various specific examples of superfluous populations, of whom he draws special attention to the
underclass and refugees. The underclass and refugees are exemplary redundant products of globalizing
capital. The former is the refuse produced in the process that capital exploits people in developed countries
where it has already reached the limit. The latter are generated in the process that globally mobile capital
exploits people and their lives in various latecomer countries and regions. Specifically, the former is
produced out of already saturated well-trained labor in developed countries, whereas the latter are
superfluous populations created in the process that global capital exploits impoverished and poor regions
around the world.
In Baumans view, the underclass is the human excess that is imagined in a completely different
manner from the conventional working class. While the working class is represented from the view of
an image that it is able to play a useful role in society and make a meaningful contribution to social life,
but the underclass is imaged in an entirely different way from the working class. They are imagined
as a class of people who are beyond classes and outside hierarchy, with neither chance nor need of
readmission. 11 They have no role to play, make no useful contribution to the lives of the rest, and exist
beyond redemption. Their only role in society is making impoverishment and poverty look normal.
Hence, their existence makes people regard poverty and destitution as an individual problem which does
not require the society or the state to fix it.
While the underclass is branded the enemy within, there are groups of people who are called external
enemies flown in from outside. They are immigrants and refugees. Originating from somewhere outside,
they pose a threat to Western society and cannot be incorporated into it. Refugees, the displaced, asylum
seekers, migrants, the sans papiers, they are the waste of globalization. 12 Staying in camps installed in the
periphery of the Western world which they cannot even enter, the human waste is unable to play any role
in the place of their arrival or sojourn. They are treated as strangers who are everywhere and nowhere
10
Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 41.
11
Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Bershire: Open University Press, 2005), p. 71.
12
Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, p. 58.
279
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employment, the underclass is represented from that of refuse. Further, the working class is posited in

Proceedings
at the same time (in the case of refugees) 13 or as the human waste of distant parts of the globe unloaded
onto our own backyard 14 who threatens the security of the Western world, like the underclass (in the case
of migrants). Whether they are admitted to the Western society or not, they live wasted lives in indefinite
alienation in camps or ghettos.
As shown above, Baumans reasoning of liquid modernity and globalization unmasks amazingly well
how fast human life and institutional forms like state and community are transforming. His analysis
on the production of wasted lives and redundancy illustrates succinctly how much human suffering
the globalization of capital creates and how fast their anxiety and pain increases with the shift of
responsibilities from society to individuals. His delineation on the wasted lives of the underclass, migrants,
and refugees, who are pushed to the margins as useless existences for making no contribution to society,
presents an important theoretical reflection on how many subalterns are created by the globalizing capital.
In addition, his discussion on redundancy makes a great contribution to developing Agambens analysis
of the concept of homo sacer in the modern nation-state into an examination of the mode of life of homo
sacer at the global level.
The Limits of Liquid Modernity and Transmodern Solidarity
Despite his excellent reflection and analysis, the alternatives and solutions suggested by Bauman seem
to be pessimistic and rather weak, relative to the sharpness and richness of his analysis. He compares
wasted lives to the old and the new big brothers toward the end of his book. The old big brother was that
of inclusion which controlled people and watched and prevented their deviance, whereas the new big
brother is that of exclusion which selects unfitting ones, labels them waste and banishes them. What is
more noteworthy comes in the next part. He argues, at the dawn of the new century the biggest question
to which we should find an answer is which of the two big brothers we would select. 15 While we would
like to make a different choice or have an alternative suggestion by which to forego making a choice, the
question binds us constantly within the dilemma of choosing one of the two. It is a pessimistic question, as
it tends to eliminate the possibility of asking many other questions. On the other hand, in the conclusion of
Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Bauman suggests an ideal alternative, which is very different from
the one in Wasted Lives and very unlikely to be realized. Noting that the creation of ubiquitous redundant
lives originates from the work ethic that payable labor is accepted as the sole value of labor, he urges to
ponder on making a transition to an economy in which labor is separated from the labor market, that is,
13
Ibid., p. 80.
14
Ibid., p. 56.
15
Ibid., p. 133.
280
one in which the integrity and dignity of human labor is acknowledged, for instance, a moral economy in
opposition to the capitalist economy, or workmanship ethics.16 These alternative options look plausible,
but he hardly examines or addresses where the power and actors to execute the transition come from, thus
making it sound hollow and idealistic.
Now, let us take a critical look at the limits of Baumans theory. In my view, the reason why he cannot
present a realistic alternative and a specific solution is that his analysis dwells too much on the liquid
modernity which produces countless wasted lives and the grandiose unilateral process of the globalization
of capital and overlooks the existence of various confrontational lives and the creation and continuation
of values against the tide of the grandiose process within society. For him, the redundant are powerless
and their lives are isolated from those of others. Paying so much attention to the one-way process in
which the underclass, refugees, and migrants are represented in wasted lives, he fails to recognize the
fact that they have the potential capacity to debunk the logical fabrication of society which creates them
or represents them as redundancy and refuse. In this regard, Baumans redundancy is both at once similar
to and different from the subaltern as postcolonial theorists have said. While the redundant are clearly
represented and readily defined, the subaltern are more fundamental, thus impossible to be represented in
the existing diction and discourse. Their invisibility unveils that the established systems are parasitic to
article, Can the Subaltern Speak? From the position of invisible subaltern women, Spivak sharply
discloses the accompliceship of British imperialism and Indian patriarchy over Indian colonial women
(widows) who were forced to commit suicide by their husbands brothers after their deaths. In Jacques
Rancieres scheme, Baumans redundancy is seen from the view of the police, whereas the existence of
the subaltern is unveiled from the perspective of politics. Ranciere defines the concepts of politics and
police as the method and system of classifying the ways that people act, exist, and speak into different
categories. The police carries out the function of ordering various places and positions composing the
society, i.e., differentiation and distribution. It divides people into those who have a share in society and
those who do not and controls or excludes the latter by giving them a certain fixed identity. In other words,
the police is a community of identities, set places and roles. 18 Meanwhile, Ranciere defines politics as the
process of subjectification disintegrating the distribution of set places and roles. 19 Politics disassembles
and then reassembles the way of distributing shares on the principle of equality. According to this scheme,
16
Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, pp. 117-121.
17
Gayatri Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
18
Jacques Ranciere, Yang Chang-ryeol trans., Jeongchijeokin geoteui gajangjarieseo (Margins of the Political) (Seoul:
Gil, 2008), p. 28.
19
Ibid., p. 30.
281
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them and sustain themselves by wielding violence to them.17 An example of this may be found in Spivaks

Proceedings
Baumans analysis of redundant lives and existences approaches the viewpoint of the police. Unlike
Spivak, Bauman does not seem to agonize over who will be the subjects to practice a new distribution of
parts and shares against the globalization of capital which creates suffering of many lives.
Here I would like to take a closer look at the limits of Baumans theory, as they seem to be connected
with his unique concept liquid modernity and further, the Eurocentric perspective. The concept of liquid
modernity has three characteristics, which distinguish his theory from others on modernity. First, his
theory on liquid modernity supposes, like postmodernism put forth by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard,
and Jean-Francois Lyotard, that contemporary culture is not a new cultural phenomenon or logic separated
from modernity, but it originates in it, only with a different speed of liquidity. In other words, liquid
modernity is an extension of modernity, so its change can be comprehended by understanding the modern
culture. This is similar to the theory of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The globalization of capital
is not a break with modernity but a critical momentum of accelerating the liquid culture of modernity
in virtually all aspects, including time and space, humanity, life, emotions and so on. That is the second
characteristic of his theory. The third one is that based on this conception, he asserts that liquid modernity
is clearly different from the previous solid modernity. Liquid modernity signifies the liquid, temporary,
and disintegrating cultural reality of today, a drastically different reality from the one criticized by critical
theorists such as Max Weber who stressed the protestant ethic of work, Michel Foucault who analyzed
modern disciplinary regimes of surveillance and discipline, and Adorno and Habermas who criticized
totalitarian society and mass culture based on the rationality of control and identity. The greatest strength
of Baumans analysis is that it captures the new cultural logic and phenomenon of modernity which is
missing in the existing critiques of modernity. The cultural reality probed by the previous theories on
modernity is different from the one we live in, which is a changed one. Hence, liquid modernity is not a
break with modernity, as in postmodernism, nor a mere continuity of modernity, like in the conventional
logic of modernity. Rather, it is a theory on internal departures of the extension of modernity. Despite
those distinct features, however, Baumans modernity concept is not much different from those of
other thinkers. His concept of liquid modernity shows a strong tendency of interpreting the postmodern
analysis of cultural phenomena not as postmodern phenomena but as internal departures from modernity.
Whether it is internal departures from modernity or a break from it, it is a very controversial issue. But
this question is not a radical one as it presupposes a certain notion on modernity itself. The notion
hinges on two presuppositions on modernity. The first one is that modernity is based on rationality as a
philosophical principle, scientific rationalism as a principle of comprehending nature, and Enlightenment
as political thought, and human subjects develop progressively from a subjugated immature state to an
autonomous mature one. The second one is that modernity began in modern Europe with several breakups
and departures and then spread to the entire world, whether it was an imperialist expansion characterized
by violent exploitation, or the diffusion of advanced civilizations. They are the two most important
282
presuppositions which buttress the Eurocentric view on modernity. Baumans notion of liquid modernity
is also grounded on his own interpretation of the two presuppositions. While liquid modernity is an altered
interpretation of the first presupposition, the globalization of capital is that of the second one. That is,
liquid modernity represents the phenomena that with the deepening of the first presupposition, institutions
and human relations which used to appear long-term, continuous, and perpetual became liquid, temporary,
and fashionable. And the globalization of capital represents the process that liquid modernity originated
in Europe turns planetary and produces countless wasted lives and suffering of the redundant around the
world.
However, the Eurocentric perspective of modernity regarding modernity has been widely challenged. Its
most critical problem is that it banishes out of modernity various forms of lives, existences, and values in
numerous places within and outside of Europe. Negri and Hardt stress that modernity must be understood
as a power relation rather than in terms of reason, Enlightenment, the break with tradition, secularism,
and so forth.20 To understand modernity as a power relation means to give less focus on the dominant
characteristics or the origin of Western modernity than on the lived experiences of domination and
resistance in the West and of oppression and struggle between the Western and non-Western worlds. In
particular, Negri and Hardt reject the perspective of origin and expansion and employ that of encounters. In
and compromises of different forces and colonial encounters of the Western and non-Western worlds.
Working from the standpoint of colonial encounters, two facts unveiled: that precolonial civilizations
are in many cases very advanced, rich, complex, and sophisticated and that the contributions of the
colonized to so-called modern civilization are substantial and largely unacknowledged. 21
Negri and Hardt do not say it directly but Enrique Dussel argues early on the close relationship between
modernity and coloniality. In a paper titled Ethnocentrism and Modernity presented in Frankfurt in
1993, Dussel criticizes that the Ethnocentric narrative on modernity is an irrational myth. Enrique Dussel,
Eurocentrism and Modernity, 22 He emphasizes that the modernity concept was constructed on the basis
of a complete concealment of the colonialization of America (dawned in 1492) and its consequences.
Further, he distinguishes two opposing paradigms on modernity, the Eurocentric and the planetary.
The Eurocentric paradigm is built on the logic of origin and expansion mentioned before. For Dussel,
modernity is solely a European phenomenon: Modern sovereignty develops spacially, according to
20
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 67.
21
Ibid., p. 68.
22
Boundary 2, 1993, p. 65. For a detailed discussion on this, see Kim Yong-gyu, Transmodernity and Ecology of Culture:
Colonial Differences and a Critique of Eurocentric Modernity, Cogito 70 (August, 2011).
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this perspective, modernity did not occur in the specific place named Europe but in the process of clashes

Proceedings
the Eurocentric paradigm, from the Italy of the Renaissance to the Germany of the Reformation and the
Enlightenment, to the France of the French Revolution. 23 In this paradigm, Europe is the center and
only Europe can achieve universal modernity. Meanwhile, the planetary paradigm does not deny the
central position of Europe in modernity, but highlights that the European centrality does not develop by
itself, but from its relations with others existing outside Europe. European modernity is the culture of
the center of the world-system achieved through the incorporation of Amerindia and a result of the
management of this centrality. In other words, the centrality of European modernity is not the sole fruit
of an internal superiority accumulated during the European Middle Ages against other cultures. Instead, it
is also the fundamental effect of the simple fact of the discovery, conquest, colonialization and integration
(subsumption) of Amerindia. 24 This expands the existing notion of Western modernity to the global level
on the one hand and requires its fundamental revision on the other.
This view emphasizes that the dark underside of modernity is coloniality. Dussel stresses the need for a
complete shift in understanding modernity in the quest for a comprehensive reassessment and liberation
of the cultures and values of numerous others who are oppressed and concealed by modernity/coloniality.
For this, he proposes a new concept, transmodernity, by which he tries to embrace and transverse the
duality of achievements and limitations of Western modernity by acknowledging oppressed others and
their cultures. While Western modernity has been founded on the culture of the rational myth built on
the identity of the self without acknowledging others and their cultures, Dussel stresses a transmodern
thinking based on the reason of others who are oppressed by the culture of the self. Others and their
cultures have been derogated as being utterly worthless, meaningless, trivial, and useless. 25 In his view,
those people and their cultures did not disappear despite tantamount violence and oppression. That is
because they were not completely integrated into the totality of the modern/colonial world-system and
maintained the relationship of otherness and exteriority to it, i.e., living labor. Here, exteriority, a concept
of Levinas, means transcendental otherness that cannot be integrated into totality; for Dussel, that is
the condition which enables liberation from totality. According to him, because of the exteriority which
hinders incorporation into the logic of the totality of Western modernity, or an omnipresent and latent
alterity, 26 they still harbor vivid cultural richness. Relying on the rich cultures of others, Dussel defines
that transmodernity (as a project of political, economic, ecological, erotic, pedagogic, and religious
liberation) is the co-realization of that which it is impossible for modernity to accomplish by itself 27. It
23
Dussel, Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi
(eds.), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 4.
24
Dussel, p. 5.
25
Dussel, Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation, p. 17.
26
Dussel, p. 17.
27
Dussel, Ethnocentrism and Modernity, p. 76.
284
seeks mutual realization of liberation through an incorporative solidarity ... between center/periphery,
man/woman ... different ethnic groups, different classes, civilization/nature, western culture/Third
World cultures, etc. Dussels concept of transmodernity enriches the notion of subaltern even more and
contributes to specificating the necessity of political solidarity. Thus, the subaltern not only plays the role
of opening up the existing space in a new way at the conceptional level, but also emerges in the political
stage as people seeking political solidity for the realization of equality.
Now we understand why Baumans analysis of liquid modernity and globalization of capital is weak and
idealistic in proposing alternatives and solutions. We also understand why Bauman excellently shows that
the globalization of capital causes the globalization of suffering and produces so many wasted lives and
immeasurable agony to them but does not view them as having potential capacity for change. To him,
they are literally waste generated by liquid modernity and globalizing capital. Being controlled, surveilled,
and deprived of political ability, they are merely the targets of the police. They cannot be connected with
others in suffering because their suffering is individualized and separated. Therefore, there is no possibility
of political solidarity among them.
We need to look at the globalization of capital from an opposite standpoint from Bauman, that is, that of
of capital, but we should look at it from the view of the subaltern, living labor. Bauman has a top-down
stance, but we need a bottom-up approach. This shift in position means more than having a different
perspective; it enables us to posit a completely different understanding of suffering, i.e., the politics of
solidarity. Those lives of refuse and waste are dead ones chased away by globalizing capital. What does
suffering mean in modern-day capitalistic life? It means that living labor is used solely for producing
capitalistic values in subjugation to the capitalistic relations, or they do not recognize themselves as such
and live wasted lives thrown out of the loop of capitalistic relations. They suffer as slaves or excesses of
capitalistic liquid modernity. The globalization of capital makes living labor into refuse and waste, but at
the same time, it creates the subaltern of living labor around the world. An alternative way to confront the
globalization of capital would be to connect their suffering and not individualize it. This ultimately means
to cut the chain of the competitive game of survival which makes others living labor into redundancy,
realize the relationality with others and spur their lives as well as our own, and build a new relationality on
that basis.
285
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the subaltern. Bauman speaks on the creation of redundancy and waste from the view of the globalization

Proceedings
Divorce Disputes, Property Right, and Legal Pluralism in a

North China Village
Zhao Xudong
Renmin University
there is no place in the world where a marriage was seen as a privacy of the spouses themselves
that anybody else couldnt take an interest in. Fei Xiaotong (1981, 33).
Introduction
The history of Chinese people can be seen as one of recyling by which many current social phenomena are
made sense. To the problem of marriage, it is also no exclusive. The ideology of modern China once has
dominated under the basic tone of revolution. Anyway, revoulution (geming) will be sought as an excuse
under which any rule or custom, unsatified the interest of some kinds of class, would be legitimately
demolished under the name of bad custom (lousu). In this sense, a successful revolution, symbollically,
is no more than a replacement of old custom with a new fashionable one. As a ridical transformation of
the revolution, when it is exposed some kind of shortcomings, the socalled old custom will be revenuated
and caught its own legitimate position in a social structure. The process is familer in social anthropology
that is often called model of oscillation (Leach 1954) by which the developmental line of the Chinese
modern history can also make sense. Pertain to my concerning about rural marriage and divorce, every
revision on The Marriage Law might must be seen as a consequence of this kind of thought of revolution.
This kind of revolutionary transformation was happened in the beginning in the urban area and then
spreaded into the rural area. In the same time, marriage custom would be changed in a slow way in
traditional village community than in urban settings. This hypothesis can be checked from my own
collected divorce cases in the Li village of Hebei province in Peoples Republic China, where I have done
fieldwork for four months. On the one hand, there is a powerful state law of marriage; and on the other
hand, there is also much more local costums on which the indegious ideas of marriage and property are
circumscribed.
286
Marriage contract and its custom

The Li village, readdressed under my own naming, is situated in the eastern part of the county Zhao. The
village was lived about 1100 households and 5000 people when I studied there in 1997 (Zhao 2003, 31).
Marriage of the village, learned from my informants, was approval of being engaged as they were very
young. A child, for example, even in his or her two or three-years-old, mother of the child would like to
find a marriage target as soon as she had had a chance in talking with someone else. Once she knew a
child of a family would be satisfied her own ideal target, she would find a matchmaker to help her to make
a marriage appointment with the family of the ideal target. If the family agreed with the appointment, the
mother of the child would exchange a formal tie (a note of marriage appointment) with the parents of the
family. The tie is often written on a piece of red paper and exchanged in a selected day, i.e., jiri (a lucky
day). The most important message that should be written on the tie is so-called shengchen bazi, meant the
born time of children of both sides.
Generally, each village always has men or women to whom they can calculate by themselves the harmony
between someones born time and her or his future life. Those persons are often respected and called
xiansheng (a mister). In Li village, they are often called nengren (an able man). Li Qinggang was at lest
the village before he died in 2001. He used to apply the traditional way of mingli (a rational of fate) to
decide a fitness on born time between a boy and a girl. He once had showed his own collected book under
the title of The Lucky or Unlucky Tables of Marriage Fitness Between a Man and a Woman (nann nayin
mingpei jixiong biao) which is written in a poetic form that is an expressive index of an mutual relational
meaning of the different fitness, such as, jin (metal), mu (wood), shui (water), huo (fire), and tu (earth),
between various men and women with different born time. It is also summarized in the following eight
different kinds of combination. We are told:
Wood pluses wood is forest.

Their children should be educated.
Male wood female wood

The wood will be broken as wind is coming. Many quarrels between the pair of spouses.
Would be supported but not satisfied.
Would be fallen into illness, weakness,
and sadness.
Male wood female fire

Wood and fire can be given birth each other. Harmony would be emerged just by
Happiness would be come if you were
obligation.
tolerant.
A son born in the year of horse would be
given emoluments.
Wood is created from earth.
Wealth and treasures would be full
of a basin.
Male wood female earth

Seed would be matured followed the
flowering.
A little regret of you is your son in
weakness.
287
Quarrel would be happened once in a while.

A long life you are and wife is virtuous.
Husband and wife would be much more in

harmony.
Waiting for a lucky after practice on your
moral integrity.
Session 3
one of nengren in Li village from whom I learned a lot from him on the knowledge about the custom of

Proceedings
Metal overcomes wood and changed into

useful things.
Charity with a deep belief.
Male wood female metal

You must be careful when you are walking.
Peace and good in every year.
Male wood female water

It is smoothly that wood is born from water. It is going against when water upon water.
You will be flourished in the end.
Farm land surrounded kitchen smoke and
much more cows and horses are grown.
It will be half lucky because of its birth in

going against.
There is trust between the husband and
wife.
Fire is more powerful as it being added
another fire.
You should make a concession between
each other.
It is harmony just because earth is born
from fire.
Wealth and treasures would be full of
your home.
The most basic thing is to work hard

and save.
Happy with your sons and grandsons.
It is taken more efforts on your family
property.
More and more sons and daughters you will
have.
Male fire female wood

The wife is dominant but the husband weak. It will be high on your fame and gain.
You will have many more sons and
You would be no sons if you harmed a
daughters.
virtue.
Male fire female fire
There are many quarrels between the
Family disturbance will be emerged.
husband and the wife.
Sons should be given more education.
Worries on catastrophe then will be avoided.
Male fire female earth
Harmony and happiness will be got between A long life like a pine tree.
the husband and the wife.
Many sons and daughters will be born of.
Both of you will be supported.
The fitness of a boy and a girl just got through above checking of born time is often led a marriageable
marriage between them. A tie of marriage proposal will be asked written down on the male side. A general
form of the tie is written as: Request the honour of your permition, with a golden promise, the inferior
dependant Li Wenzhong with respect. 1 When the female side received the tie, rechecking of born time
is necessary. After it has been done that there is no conflict between the two couples, a tie of marriage
agreement is asked, a replying tie is often written as: With the honor of your request: Our respected
dependants of affinity with our respect Yue Zhongtai.2 The first exchange of tie is also called huantie
which will be kept by the parents of both sides. When their children have grown up till the marriageable
age, the male side should find a matchmaker to whom the affair of the engagement will be consulted.
The engagement is also called xiatie (sending a note) which should be sent on the male side. The female
side should be xietie (thanks for the note) after the note of the male has been accepted and received. The
note of the male is often written as: Request the honour of your clear meaning, with a golden promise.
[Name of] the dependants of affinity.3 A xietie of the female is often written as: With the honour of your
request: Our respected dependants of affinity. [Name of] the dependants of affinity.4 Finally a banquet
prepared by the male side is also needed that in which some of relatives of both sides and the matchmaker
288
will be companied and through which the date of wedding should be fixed.
In generally, every village has special persons to write this kind of marriage notes (huntie). In the Li
village, those tasks were charged by Li Qinggang before his death in 2001. He himself had kept A Manual
Book of Notes (tiepu) in which many kinds of notes were included, such as note for son born, funeral rites,
and for congratulation to the elderly people, etc.
In rural China, high betrothal gifts (caili) given by the female side are often needed. Otherwise, it is
said that the betrothal gifts would be absent to the girls of Li village although in the nearby villages the
betrothal gift is still expensive. It is certainly that small money about 500 to 2000 yuan should be given by
the male side on the day of engagement. But about a ten thousand yuan valued dowry will be returned to
the male side on the day of wedding. By the way of high expensive dowry of the female side, the marriage
would be thought of benefit to the girl because she would be little insulted after she has been married into
the home of the male side.
The ceremony of dowry receiving is often a public event in a Chinese village. In a general way, the dowry
would be took and presented by the female side in the early morning of the last day before the wedding
of the male side will come out to receive the dowry. The whole village of the male side would also go
together to view the lively event of dowry carrying to the home of the male. It is spread at once in the
whole village that how many dowry and their concrete terms and the gossip about the wealth or poverty of
the bride are.
A wedding day in the rural area is often full of ritual and fun in public view. In the early morning as the
sun not yet raised, the bridegroom will be accompanied with several village people to go to the brides
home by cars. When they arrived at the brides home, she had often intended delay a period of time by
which to denote her unwilling to leave her own parents home. It is also a time that the relatives of the
bridegroom and of the bride can communicate each other.
Before the bridegroom takes with the bride going out of the door of her home, the relatives of the
bride daubed the bridegrooms face with some of black pot ash. The bride afterward is carried by the
bridegroom into the first one of the vehicle procession meeting the bride and her relatives. Firecracker
will be fired as soon as the vehicle procession is being emerged on the entrance of the bridegrooms
village. In the same time, the brides family at once prepared their rites to meet the bride and her relatives.
Participants taking part in those rites are those relatives of five-submission (wufu) on the bridegroom side
and some key relatives of the bride side. It is certainly that all of the villagers of the bridegrooms village
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day. When the dowry is arriving, firecracker will be fired by the female side in the mean while persons

Proceedings
would be welcomed. The whole day of the wedding is occupied by the rituals, such as bai tiandi (to
worship the Heaven and the Earth) and ren daxiao (to identify relatives in orderly), which should be done
by both bride and bridegroom. By the way of those rites, a marriage relationship between the bridegroom
and the bride is recognized that is obviously not recognized by the way of written forms than that of public
rituals. In other words, after those lively rituals and events, anybody in the village knows whos who is
a new wife of somebody in the village. Feast after the rites of meeting is necessary in which relatives of
both sides are treated with kind hospitality.
Divorce in Traditional China
Marriage is one kind of social ties by which a family is formed. An average family can be expressed
in a reverse triangle pattern on the two top points of which are occupied by a pair of spouses and the
lower point is their child or children (Radcliffe-Brown 1926, 160). Professor Fei Xiaotong declares
that the relationship between the husband and wife can be seen as the contractual one. Not only can it
be fitted in the society of one husband and one wife, it is also applied in the society of polyandry and
polygamy, because all those societies are based on the marriage contract relationship between two or more
individuals (Fei 1981, 77). If we accordingly saw a marriage relation as one kind of contract, it must have
some kinds of condition or principle by which a contract would be concluded or canceled. Those kinds
of condition or principles, if there were, would be combined with a society rather than with individuals.
Under this sense, we had to talk about some transformation of marriage morals.
In the same sense, one kind of marriage arrangement believed unreasonable in the present could be taken
for grant in ancient societies; and an approved marriage in our culture would be thought of the slandered
in other cultures. There is no other reason that can be used to explain those variations unless the different
principles on the marriage contract being concluded or canceled were proposed. Divorce with wife, for
example, in ancient China, which is often called chu (to send forth), qi (to abandon), fang (to send away),
or xiu (to oust) etc. (Tai 1978, 77), would be never thought of a slandered thing. According to Dadai
Liji (Book of Rites of Elder Dai), a classic of Confucianism, a husband is given power to send forth his
wife if she is thought of under the following seven conditions, such as, being un-filial to her parents-inlaw, having no son, adultery, jealousy, malignant disease, talking to much, stealing (Tai 1978, 85; Tao &
Ming 1994, 254-61).5 Generally speaking, kindred people of an abandoned wife have no good reason to
argue with the husband that why his wife should be sent forth. Otherwise when somebody asked for the
5 The Seven Conditions was given a little more revision and then kept in Tang Ordinances (Tang Ling) in a sequence as:
having no son, adultery and licentiousness, being unfilial to the parents-in-law (or failing to serve them with care), talking
to much, stealing, jealousy, malignant disease. Cited from: Tai (1978, 85).
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condition of the wife, the kindred people of the wife would manage to answer with the rhetoric words,
such as dagui (great coming) or laigui (coming back), because people in that time conceived that most of
responsibility should be attributed to the female side if she was expelled (Dong 1995, 277-85).6
In eras of the imperial China, before a modern nation-state was established, the relationship between the
husband and wife was not directly controlled by a central state rather than a lineage or an ancestor. The
status of a wife, in a consequence, would be affected by three kinds of power, i.e., power of ancestral
temple or lineal orthodoxy, of her mothers brothers and fathers sisters, of her husband (Tao 1934, 48).
Many stories therefore haven been talked about that how a wife to whom her husband deeply loved also
had been sent away as a punishment because the husbands parents had had little harmony with the wife.7
Those ideas have been inevitably undergone some transformation. At least in a society of contemporary
China, there is never a personal right of treatment on the dissolution of a marriage relationship at all. This
kind of rights has been entrusted to an institutional authority under which all of divorce disputes would be
resolved by the way of mediation or an adjudication being sent. The agency of the institutional authority is
obviously of the national court located in different administrative levels.
As a basic-level court, how does it work on a villagers divorce dispute? What are the principles that it
will be depended? How are those principles fitted to or conflicted with the local logic of life? All those
questions are my special considerations and tried to answer based on my own fieldwork and archives
collection in Li village.
In a nutshell, divorce is not a easy thing in the village. Bickering between the husband and wife is not
always seen as a disordered thing in a family. Several couples even quarreled to the step of divorce but it
had been in the finally ended and never mentioned again just through various mediations in the village. A
real divorce would be happened if the bickering between the husband and wife never mediated at all. The
6 It is certain that the divorce right on the side of husband doesnt mean there is an absolute freedom. There are also rules
of The Three Limitations (san buchu) by which some limited rights of a wife are being protected. The Three Limitations
is recorded in Da Dai Li Ji as a. If the wife has no place to return to. b. Having observed three years mourning for the
parents-in-law. c. If the husband had been poor and humble at the time of marriage, and become rich and noble later (Tai
1978, 85).
7 In Li Ji (Book of Rites), a Chinese classic, there is a section titled li nei ze (Rules of Governing Wife) that can also be
seen as the principles of divorce. Some words concerned about inharmony between a wife and her parents-in-law which
are recorded as: A son is very approved his wife, nevertheless, his parents have no pleasure to her, she is therefore sent
forth (Cited from: Tao 1934, 49).
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Property seeking in the divorce disputes

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court mediation named shuohe (to persuade to bind together) will be initiated through which a final result
of shuohe or panli (divorce through adjudication) will be achieved. In other words, divorce dispute will be
resolved either in success by the way of mediation or failure into divorce via the adjudication of the court.
The former one is called shuohe and the latter panli.
Shuohe (persuade to bind together)
There are several sets of binding rites that will be initiated after two families were engaged into quasimarriage relatives. Those rites would have been hold as the two families were met in the first time till
wedding had been hold. It is obviously that those rites would have been disappeared as a pair of couples
could not live together anymore. In some occasions, a reasonable argument between the two sides of a
marriage would be raised.
When the husband and wife was falling into quarrels, a strategy most often mobilized is that of the wife
will go back her own parents home living for a period of time. In the period, both sides of the spouses
would be engaged into private mediations trying to restore an ordered state of the family. If one side of the
spouses did not feel good after the private mediations had been done, generally speaking, their family life
could not maintained on going, cadres of the Villagers Mediation Committee (cunmin tiaojie weiyuanhui,
VMC) will come into the view to do mediations on the dispute. Nevertheless, a cadre of the committee
told me that what they can do just some of limited things meeting a divorce dispute. If the husband and
wife are being in a stage of bickering and wrangling (chaochao naonao), their neighbors and the cadres
being called acting as mediators might be enough. If a pair of spouses had been bickered to the stage of no
other way being picked up than that of divorce, the court would be played as the final mediator. Villagers
wouldnt go to court on the spur of the moment when they were just falling into a dispute. Otherwise,
especially pertaining to the divorce cases, clients often go to the court for a resolution. Mediators in the
village level will avoid of the dispute as soon as they recognize that a dispute at hand had been so difficult
to be resolved.
In the period as the wife lived in her parents family, one side of the couples may initiate to accuse to the
court if she or he was being felt remaining difficult to live together after the various mediations of shuohe.
The court will notice another client to prepare his or her reply and then follow a series of court mediation
which is locally called zuo gongzuo (to do work on thought). The procedure of zuo gongzuo wouldnt be
initiated only by the legal institution itself. Popular authorities, such as old men and lineage leaders on
both sides, also a formal mediator of the VMC, would be mobilized to fall into the case, though, not done
in all such cases. The place of mediation would be happened in court, in homes of the clients and in an
authorized institution, such as the VMC, etc.
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If a success was achieved through zuo gongzuo, anything could be fine, the family would be renewed into
a harmony, otherwise, a failure achieved, the most difficult thing for the court was how to identify and then
divide the original personal property of both sides. Although many of fayuan panjueshu (a court letter of
adjudication) would be written down as One can take away ones own things, 8 many cases were faced
the blurred problem of what the meaning of ones is. Several wrong clients in the village conceived that
the final adjudication of the court on property division would have been implied some kind of unfairness.
The difficulty the court faced, however, is that there are almost few literal materials kept as evidence to
certify ones property. It is also obvious that when the husband and wife were being married, there was
no necessary to record ones property in a written form, or made clear on the division of ones property.
It is also difficult for a judge that which one of the things should belong to somebody or somebody else
when a pair of couples falling into disputes and went to the court for a divorce. A judge would be often
met some cases that on the female side something, such as ten suits clothes, as dowry would be argued,
but on the male side they replied that there is nothing on the issue proposed by the female side. A dispute
on marriage property, as a result, would be followed at once. A divorce dispute in this sense is resolved in
distinct with other kinds of property dispute.
According to above description of Li village, the establishment of marriage relationship is undergone a
than that of a private thing. In other words, the relationship of husband and wife, in their own right and
responsibility, is recognized through the way of the gift exchange. Dowry of a bride is socially required
to be sent in the public. Details of the property would be deeply impressed and easily remembered by
the relatives and villagers of both sides. It is certainly that the property wouldnt be written down and
prepared as an evidence for the court once the pair of couples was falling into a divorce dispute some day.
The adjudication of the court, in contrast, is declared just according to the evidence that can be verified.
There is confusing on idea of property. According to the law of the state, a property was approved only as
it could be verified, but transforming of property in a marriage is realized through series of ritual display.
The process of property transforming can be seen as an exchange of mutual trust through procedure
of exchange from xiaotie to datie. An exchange of xiaotie witnessed before a matchmaker which is
signified a mutual relationship might be seen as a rough recognition. As the boy and girl have grown up,
8 Many divorce cases, the final adjudication letter will be written the words One can take away ones own things. An
adjudication letter of a divorce case happened in 1950s is recorded as One can take away ones own things. Also the
male side should give a set of quilt and the nurture fee of children altogether 16 yuan to the female side in two times, one
of which is on the fifteenth in eighth month of lunar year and another of which the fifth of the fifth month. Eight yuan is
given in each time (Cited from: The Divorce Archives of Zhao Countys Archives Bureau, Vol, 2, July, 1956). This form
of adjudication writing can be found in many the adjudication letter of divorce.
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extreme complex process. This process, just as Fei (1981) mentioned, is being of a public displaying rather

Proceedings
a datie would be exchanged also before the matchmaker. Eating together of the parents on the both sides
with the matchmaker is necessary. A formal affiliation would be really established and recognized after
the exchange of the datie. Wedding day in harmony and lucky according to the lunar calendar will be
arranged on the male side on which the bride will be taken and before day of which her dowry received.
All of the rites, whether before or on the day of wedding, would be hoped to bind these two alien families
into together and also a new small family could be created. Under the folk mentality, property division,
in those ritual days shouldnt be mentioned even just in words. The bridegroom wouldnt be asked by the
bride to write down a note to verify so and so dowry is belonged to the bride herself. It is obvious that
each one of both sides knows very well which part of the property should be belonged to the male side
and which part to the female. Although a woman is easily to remember and write down all of the terms
as a judge asked her to fill an dowry inventory, it is difficult to her to find a witness to verify all of those
terms was really belonged to her. Nevertheless, the judge is just to declare his adjudication according to
the so-called verified evidence (ke chayan de zhengju).
We can learn from a divorce dispute which was happened in 1990 in Li village. The plaintiff of this
case is named Shi Yuncai whom was 38 years old in that year. Her own parents home is situated in the
Dongzhuang village of Dongzhuang township. Her husband, now was the defendant, is named Feng
Jingshan whom is a villager of Li village. The plaintiff sent a request to the local court to ask for a
permission of divorce with her husband. Details about her request are that 1) their divorce could be
permitted; 2) they have two boys and two girls and that of which she will bring up the younger boy and
the younger daughter; 3) family property should be equally divided between them; 4) the contracted land
and trees are asked to be equally divided between them. Many villagers can not understand why the
female side was suddenly proposed to divorce with her husband after their living together for 14 years.
Causes of divorce presented by the plaintiff are included in her own indictment:
The defendant married with me in 1978 through formal registration. We have born four children
after our marriage. After the marriage, our mutual affection is just being general, also the
relationship with my mother-in-law. In the beginning years of our marriage, even I could live
together with the dependant, we afterwards often fall into conflicts just for household chores. It
is therefore led to a deterioration of the relationship with my mother-in-law. The defendant acted
upon whatever his mother said and beat and scolded me at every turn. A rift of our affection of
which had been flagged was emerged between us. I request to divide the above property with
the defendant in equally.
A main reason of this civil case promoted into divorcing is that the existed contradictions between the
wife and her mother-in-law. On the third day of September in 1990, a judge, named Zhao Cunzhi, of local
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Fanzhuang court received the defendant Feng Jingshan. The judge Zhao, according to the procedure of
law, talked about the Article 76 and the Article 77 in the Law of the Civil Legislation to Feng and noticed
Feng that he was asked to write a reply letter and submit it within fifteen days. On fifteenth of October
in 1990, one month and a half month after, the judge Zhao Cunzhi called the defendant Feng Jingshan
and the plaintiff Shi Yuncai to come to the court. The reply letter of the defendant hadnt been submitted
till then, the judge then asked Feng why the letter hadnt be submitted to the court. Feng replied that his
father-in-law had talked over between them, therefore, he felt no necessary to write the letter and submit.
But the judge stressed that Feng himself gave up his own right of defendant.
The judge then talked with both Shi and Feng which is belonged to one part of the court investigation
and testimony. It also can be seen as one part of the court mediation. This mediation was achieved little
success because the wife as a plaintiff still insisted on divorcing with the defendant. Two days after, the
judge Zhao did his second mediation to the Plaintiff Shi. According to the record of local court, mediation
on court had been enacted for three times. A mediation agreement had been finally achieved by the way of
the judge Zhao Cunzhi going to do his persuasion to the families of both sides. Participants doing the work
of mediation are certainly included the family members and the cadres of the village committee on both
sides. Here authority of the formal court does not work singly rather than cooperated with political power
disputes are often realized through the way of zuo gongzuo on both sides. Contradictions between the two
clients are thus at least disappeared in the records of the local court. Both guys express their thankfulness
on the agency of legal authority, i.e. the judge Zhao, whom has been seen as one kind of representative
of formal legal institution of the state. Under the mediation of the authority of the court, an original social
order is though of being recovered which would be embodied in the final mediation of the local court:
Zhao Cunzhi: I have done work on both of you for a long time. I have also gone to your families of
both sides to do work on your old persons. Managers of your villages have also done a lot of work
on both of you. Through the way of mutual understanding on both sides, I will send Yuncai to Li
village on the twentieth-two of this month. I hope you will be kept in mutual love and protection,
mutual tolerant, and mutual understanding. Live better just for thinking about the four children and
your family. It is needed to be mutual tolerant. Congratulate you on your happiness of family. Just
be fine on everything. Would have more you want to say?
Shi Yuncai: Thanks for the regards and help of the court on our family. I was really thought of
never being lived and insisted on divorcing with him. I have recognized my faults of previous
thoughts and deeds through the court had done work on us. I will guarantee that we will talk over if
we meet event in the future and never being quarreled each other. We will live a better life for those
four children.
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of the state in village and informal authority of the old men of both families. Mediations on marriage

Proceedings
Feng Jingshan: Thanks the court for the regards and help on our family by which a family being in
broken has been recovered. Our family could not exist if the court did not done deep and careful
work on it. Both of us will work in concert in the future to make our life better.
The wife in the divorce case had returned her own parents family to live more than four months before
the case was sent to the court. There is a similar custom in Li village or near area that a woman often
returned her own parents home to live when couples of a family were falling into a crisis. According to
Maurice Freedmans (1966, 60) literature research on Chinese lineage, the aim of a wife returning home
is just seeking a support from her own parents family. Based on my own fieldwork, I thus believe that
one kind of symbolic meaning of a returning wife is given condemnation on the males own family, and
in the same time, mediation of the village people will be initiated. One of the families that I visited can be
used as an illustration. A woman returned her own parents family to live because of being annoyed with
her husband. A neighbor of her husband then went to visit the husbands mother and said: Whats matter?
Let your son say something good to his wife and receive her home! It is said that many cases of marriage
crisis in the village have been successfully mediated in this way. On the other hand, to the woman that
she wants her family dispute to be resolved on the court, her returning might be useful to avoid of the
disturbance of her husbands side. It is also convenient in this period to ask a lawyer being in guanxi with
her family by which the final adjudication would be benefit on her own side.
Depending on the whole narration of above case, a process of mediation on a divorce case could be
learned. In the process of mediation, authority of the court as the third party is requested by both of the
plaintiff and defendant. They have certainly different aims according to their different roles. Shi Yuncai,
as a plaintiff, according to her real aim, would not be likely to divorce with the defendant that she might
be just annoyed with her husbands relatives. For example, she has been obviously annoyed with her
mother-in-law and sister-in-law. But a problem is that those kinds of contradictions are being out of the
scale of the state law. The plaintiff has to bring the case to the local court by which a so-called divorce
case can be accepted by the formal legal institute of the state. Three principles followed can be used to
justify her request of divorce: 1) do not recognize her husbands relative as her relatives; 2) a small family
is important which is just composed of husband, wife and their offspring; 3) property of the family is
either shared by the husband and wife when it is bond together or divided in equally between the husband
and wife when it is fallen into broken. The husband as a defendant now tries to maintain the family. He
made a concession to wish his wife coming around to the correct way of thinking. The principles applied
to support his justification are followed: 1) family is the most important; 2) property of the family is
shared by husband and wife as it is combined into together and not easy to divide clearly as it is needed
to be distributed. As a third party between the husband and wife, the judge is requested to do mediation
according to the state law. Principles of the mediation can be roughly classified as: 1) It is important to
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maintain a family; 2) Treatment on a dispute is needed to be reasonable and legally. Here reasonable
(heli) is meant customs and legally (hefa) is meant abiding by articles of law; 3) If the male didnt insist
on divorcing, a better way to resolve a dispute would be to maintain the existed marriage.
To maintain a family steady can be seen as a common principle among those different principles abided
by those three kinds of agent. It is also the basis that mediation can be realized. As a representative of legal
authority, the judge would like to use moral persuasion to realize a principle of a family maintaining is
the most important by which all those three persons can be falling into a common moral imagination.
Panli (divorce by adjudication)
The above mentioned case is successively resolved through court mediation in which principles of the
court are often coincided with ones of custom through which a crisis family can be brought back to life.
But if a divorce case is failed to be mediated, some kind of disagreements and even conflicts between state
law and custom on definition of personal property will be often emerged.
In 1991, the town court received a copy of indictment written by Li Dazhu who is a villager of Li village
is located in Ge Datou village also belonged to the pear area of county Zhao. The clients of the divorce
case didnt register before they cohabited for which just because they hadnt met the legal age of marriage.
Now I will present the original documents of this case on a process of dissolution. At first, I will cite the
indictment of Li Dazhuang, reply of his wife, and dialogues of the judge with both of them.
Pertaining to the divorce case, many questions asked by the judge are based on a principle of making
a fact clear. Both the plaintiff and the defendant are sought to enlarge their own property belongings as
possible as they can which has been demonstrated in their respective replies. The judge Zhang Shunping
talked with the plaintiff Li Dazhu in three times and with the defendant Yao Shenghua in five times. In
addition, the judge himself also went to the village of the plaintiff and of the defendant to take evidence.
He inquired the plaintiffs father Li Zhenzhong once and also inquired the witnesses Yao Haijun in
Yaojiazhuang village. In the following, I will respectively present the questions asked by the judge and
replay of the clients and witnesses. The judge Zhang Shunping talked with Li Dazhu for two times
that one of which was concerned about the background of the plaintiffs first marriage and the other is
concerned about the question of dowry of the female side.
According to the court dialogue we know that many divorce case are easily transformed into a property
dispute. All of those five dialogues between the judge and Yao Shenghua are concerned about the property
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asking for reliving the relationship of illegal cohabiting with his wife Yao Shenghua whose parents family

Proceedings
argument. The judge therefore wanted to investigate more clearly what is the dowry of the female side
and their common property. Furthermore, the judge was more concerning about what is the significant
evidence by which those properties of one of the two clients can be adjudicated.
On both sides of the plaintiff and defendant, they tried to marginalize their own interest on property right.
For the end of the marginalization, the common property of their family can be withheld on the male side,
while the story of a color television which was absent in her dowry can also be invented on the female
side. It may be also impossible to the judge trying to find out the legal facts of the belongings of property
right. Although the judge inquired on witnesses, such as the plaintiffs father, testimony like this is hardly
to weight under the strict legal procedure. It is more difficult to check on how many items of the dowry
are. Finally, the judge had to draw his adjudication according to the facts that could be testified. On the
final decision letter (panjue shu), the judges adjudication is written down:
1. To relieve the marriage relationship between the plaintiff and defendant.
2. Their daughter Li Mei will be brought up by the defendant. The plaintiff is asked to send
the fostering fee 150 yuan to the defendant before October 1 in every year until Li Mei can
independently live.
3. 1300 yuan bank savings will be equally divided between the plaintiff and the defendant. The
plaintiff is asked to send 650 yuan to the defendant in the limited 15 days as soon as the decision
letter has been begun in effective.
4. Other disputes are rejected.
According to the decision letter, the judge drawn his adjudication is based on the several basic principles
in the following: 1) Division of property should be based on the testified facts; 2) There is a principle of
equally division on the basis of testified property; 3) Their children should be fostered by both sides; 4)
The law is used to care little about the un-testified facts.
Three of the adjudicative principles are especially referred to the testified facts (ke chayan de shishi)
which is a concept of jurisprudence. It is also a main characteristic of modern law that the authoritative
judge drawn his adjudication on the evidences and facts provided by the plaintiff and the defendant. There
is obviously a significant inconsistence of idea between the popular society and the state on what is meant
on a legal fact. As coming from rural area, a plaintiff or a defendant often says some property is belonged
to one of them but they can not always provide their own evidence to support their claim. As a result, they
had to accept a final adjudication decided by an authoritative local court. Although some persons wanted
to express their un-satisfactions on the adjudication and tried to appeal to a higher court, i.e. a city court,
they often received a reply of The original adjudication is maintained (weichi yuanpan). On the one
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hand, a city court would like to give sufficient respects on the adjudication of a local court by which a
harmony relationship between them could be maintained, on the other hand, they would like to do weichi
yuanpan just because of a practical difficult on testifying the concrete legal facts. They have to hurry
through their adjudication or maintain the original adjudication which is thought of the best way of saving
either on energy or on time.
Some wrong cases will be unavoidable in the rural area because the testified fact requested by the legal
adjudication is often uneasy to find out in a civil case. For the seeking of more benefit from the testified
facts, a relational network existed in a popular society will be consequently embedded into the operation
of a legal institution. In Li village, I had met a middle man whose name is called Li Ruiyun that he wanted
to sell his own building to appeal to the county court. We have had a dialogue each other:
The author: Why do you try to sell your building?
Ruiyun: Dont you need money to appeal? It is needed to send gift. Money is nothing. It would be
really face losing if the appeal was failed.
The author: Could the appeal be won if the gift was sent?
Ruiyun: Dont you think that they wouldnt help to say something for us after we had sent a gift?
Ruiyun: You feel no confidence if you havent send a gift.
The author: If both sides have sent their own gift, how about you?
Ruiyun: Competing on whose gifts being more and whose relational person being more important.
The above interview has been given me an impressive image. Many likewise responds will be happened
if you have chance to interview with clients of cases especially those of divorce cases. It is obviously
difficult to find out a fact especially a legal fact. To do it is often needed to invest many human labors or
materials that may be not easy to a local court. Many legal cases have been presented and demonstrated
that judges of local courts are not easy to draw their own adjudication independent of clients otherwise
they will be regulated and bounded by the local economics and social relationships (He 1995, 255-61). As
a result, judges would like to drive a light carriage on a familiar road, only could reach their adjudications
in bias. The state law has a whole set of abstract knowledge system in which the meaning of private
property is clearly defined that an evidence is needed as it met a concrete case to verify some property
belonged to him. Once it couldnt be testified, the bias of a judge would be emerged.
Conclusion
Customarily, belongings of a private property is often seen as a clear event at lest in a village community,
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The author: Are there many cases that appeal to the court through the way of sending a gift?

Proceedings
especially on that of dowry which has always been ritually displayed in the community. When a man
prepares his marriage, he is often needed to construct a new house and purchase some new furniture. He
will prepare his wedding after the house has been finished. On the last day of the wedding day, the family
on the female side will send the dowries to the bridegrooms village. Those dowries will be moved from
a tractor into the bridal bedroom which, in generally, will be done by the people of the brides family.
All of these activities could be observed and witnessed by the village people. It is no necessary to write
down a property list that on which whose property is declared. In other words, a written contract of dowry
belongings is obviously unnecessary for the village people.
Once a pair of couples couldnt live together anymore, the dowry as property of a wife must be taken
away and anyone else wouldnt disagree on it. This kind of property right agreed in customary ideas and
functioned in a rural community has never been effective after the same case has been appealed to a local
court where evidence is necessary. There would be no trouble if both sides abided by the custom. Once
the custom, however, has been offended by someone of them, belongings of a property would be often in
confusing. Divorce cases, therefore, are the trouble one from a courts point of view that for them is not
easy to reach a fair adjudication. They had finally avoided the problem of property distribution or insisted
on the administrative procedure of the testified evidence which, in some occasions, can be abused by a
judge as a power resource through which some persons being in a near relation with the judge could be
benefited.
We can clearly see conflicts between the court which is a representative of the state law and the custom
which is functioned in a popular society. As a judge reached his own adjudication, he would like to follow
a principle that the legal fact is asked to present as clearer and simpler as possible. But the property
relationship in a popular society is often various that which couldnt be reduced to a clear legal fact
without confusing. It is also seen as a best example of proverb that Even a clear officer (qingguan)
couldnt resolve household affairs (qingguan nanduan jiawushi).
References
Dong, Jiaqiu, 1995, A Study on History of Marriage in Ancient China. (Zhong Guo Gu Dai Hun Yin Shi
Yan Jiu.) Guangzhou: Guangdong Peoples Publishing.
Fei, Xiaotong, 1981, Institutions of Reproduction. Tianjin: Tianjin Peoples Publishing.
Freedman, Maurice, 1966, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. London: Athlone Press.
He, Weifang, 1995, A social justice through the judicaturea perspective on the present situation of
the Chinese judges. (tongguo sifa shixian shehui zhengyi) In Yong Xia, ed., Towards the Age of
RightsA Study of Civil Rights Development in China(zouxiang quanli de shidai). pp. 209-84.
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Beijing: The University Press of Chinese Politics and Law.

Leach, E. R, 1954, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London:
The Athlone Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 1926, Father, Mother, and Child Man Nos. 103, pp. 159-161.
Tai, Yen-hui, 1978, Divorce in traditional Chinese Law, in In David C. Buxbaum, ed., Chinese Family
Law and Social Change in Historical and Comparative Perspective. pp. 75-108, Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press.
Tao, Xisheng, 1934, Marriage and Lineage. (Hun Yin Yu Jia Zu). Shanghai: Commerical Press.
Tao, Yi, and Ming, Xin, 1994, A Institutional History of Chinese Marriage and Family. (Zhong Guo Hun
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Yin Jia Ting Zhi Du Shi). Beijing: The East Publisher.
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Difficult Dialogues: Perpetrators, Victims, Power, and the Legacies

of Mass Violence
Henry C. Theriault
Worcester State University
Introduction
The foundation of my previous work on perpetrator-victim relations in the long-term aftermath of
genocide has been the assertion that any process addressing a case of mass violence that focuses on
improved contemporary relations between the two parties is doomed to fail if it does not address (1)
the actual impact on the victim group, in material, social, familial, and other dimensions and (2) the
sharp power imbalance between perpetrator group and victim survivor group that results from the broad
destructiveness of genocide for the victim group and the economic, political, demographic, social, identity,
and other benefits for the perpetrator group.1 This is not to say that tensions will not be reduced, but they
will be reduced in ways that extend and even intensify the harms to the victim group and the benefits to
the perpetrator group.
My approach has been to examine typical conflict resolution models based on perpetrator-victim dialogue
as they have been applied to particular cases, especially the 1915 Armenian Genocide,2 and to show
why these do not resolve the legacy of the case of mass violence, when resolution is defined in a way
that takes account of the needs and rights of the victims in a fair way. Based on this, I have argued that
reparations are necessary to resolve the legacy of mass violence in a proper manner.
My critique of the usual approaches to perpetrator-victim dialogue raises the question of what features

Theriault, Henry C., From Unfair to Shared Burden: The Armenian Genocides Outstanding Damage and the Complexities of Repair, The Armenian Review (forthcoming).
2 The Armenian Genocide should be understood as part of a broader Ottoman Turkish Genocide of Greeks, Assyrians, and
Armenians from 1914 into the 1920s. The focus of my work on dialogue and reparations has been on the Armenian aspect of this overarching genocidal process, so I refer here to the Armenian Genocide specifically.
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dialogue must have to be a productive part of a resolution of the legacy of a case of mass violence, but
I have not taken up this issue in previous work. The question is perhaps crucial, as dialogue might be a
necessary if not sufficient element of any resolution, because any resolution imposed without genuine
perpetrator group participation and acceptance is bound to be unstable.
Conflict Resolutions Failure to Resolve
I will begin by explaining the general argument I have used to challenge standard conflict resolution
models as they have been applied to past mass violence and oppression.3 These models typically focus on
changing attitudes among both perpetrators and victims in order to eliminate or minimize the tensions that
authors employing the model hold result from these attitudes. Though this is not necessarily stated, the
attitudes are considered conceptual or discursive (linguistic) in the sense not merely that they are expressed
in mental processes or words but that this is their essential nature. Such models thus hold that, despite the
material reality of past violence or oppression, subsequent attitudes and expressions are separable from
the prior violence or oppression and can be treated in isolation. On this view, the reason there are tensions
between former victims and perpetrators is not because of the material process of violence and oppression,
but because both groups maintain and express attitudes that negatively characterize the other group.
cause tensions. Sometimes the model calls for beginning with changes to the expressions to try to impact
underlying attitudes, sometimes with the attitudes as the apparent root causes. Either way, the process is
supposed to lead to a reduction or elimination of tensions and a reconciliation of former perpetrators and
victims.
My critique is this. Changes at the discursive or conceptual level leave intact what is on the material level.
But genocide, slavery, mass rape, and other mass violence or oppression are quite material. That is not to
say that they do not have conceptual or discursive elements that are essential to the processes of violence
or oppression. Certainly they do, as ideological frameworks, propagandistic manipulation, and so forth
play significant roles in many if not all cases. But the effects of discourse and concept are real deaths,
rapes, torture, expropriations of labor and property, and destruction of familial and community relations.
It is through the operation of concrete force and power that attitudes and statements have the real effects
they do. They do not emerge ex nihilo (out of nothing), but themselves are produced through concrete
social and political forces and interactions. And, these material impacts themselves structure the long-term
subsequent relationship of perpetrator and victim groups.
3 Theriault, op. cit.
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The solution offered by such models is to change those attitudes and expressions so that they no longer

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An exclusive focus only on the conceptual and discursive level does not alter significantly the material
level. In other words, changing attitudes and eliciting positive statements by each group about the other
does not alter the effects of the violence or oppression, such as the impoverishment of the victims and
enrichment of the perpetrators; the demographic, political, and identity frailty of victims and the security
of perpetrators; the level of trauma suffered by victim group members even of later generations; etc. It
does not alter the relationship of domination that is the outcome of mass violence or long-term oppression.
For instance, it is common to view the end of the direct killing phase of genocide as the end or suspension
of the perpetrator-victim group relationship, as a cutoff that ends the material impact of perpetrators on
victims. But what genocide does, quite the contrary, is put into effect a hyper-domination relation. If most
genocide takes place in a context in which the perpetrator group had a pre-existing dominance over the
victim group, the genocide is not a rupture that breaks the domination relation but rather its maximization
or totalization. And, if nothing is done to address that extreme dominance relation, it remains intact far
into the future. In fact, over time, the dominance increases, as the power of the perpetrator group over the
victims becomes the basis for yet further increases in power, with the resulting greater power imbalance
serving as the basis for another increase, and so on perpetually if no balancing forces are applied or come
into play.4
What is more, conceptual and discursive adjustments do not alter the underlying commitments of
perpetrator group members. Even if self-perceived attitudes might change, if a perpetrator group is not
willing to offer meaningful reparations to the victim group, then this betrays a willingness to benefit
from mass violence or oppression and, in essence, anything ranging from at the very least a culpable
if thoughtless complicity in the violence or oppression to tacit agreement with the view that the victim
group is in fact a fit target of violence or oppression. While members of the perpetrator group might
espouse a view opposed to violence against or oppression of members of the victim group and genuinely
feel that they are opposed to it, this feeling can coexist with a mental framework in which such a feeling
is sufficient to resolve the case of mass violence or oppression, so the perpetrator group has no further
obligation to the victims. It can coexist with a normalized, implicitly-held sense of hierarchy in which the
neutral position is one in which the perpetrator group dominates the victim group, even though to most
perpetrator group members, even progressives, this dominance relation appears to be an equal relationship.
Either or both frameworks in turn can cause perpetrator group members to reject justice claims by victim
group members for reparations and even to condemn victim group members as self-interested, unfair, or
4 These forces, it should be pointed out, might not be intended to address the past violence or oppression; but could be, for
instance, an economic crisis in the perpetrator society, a crisis that is quite independent of any relationship with the victims
or history of violence or oppression, yet which decreases the relative power of the perpetrator group vis--vis the victim
group.
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aggressive when they advocate for such things5 thus creating an ethical hierarchy or dominance relation
of some or most members of the perpetrator group over some or many members of the victim group that
parallels the concrete dominance relation that was produced or exacerbated by the original mass violence
or oppression. In all of this, the positive attitude on the surface masks a deeper commitment to hierarchy
over victims, a commitment of which perpetrators themselves might not be aware.
I have pointed out the two things that this approach misses. First, material impacts persist through time
and actually become in time causal forces themselves, unless or until they are mitigated directly. Thus,
the impoverishment of victims is not only a result of, say, slavery, but even long after slavery has ended
persists and causes further problems for the victims, keeping them in a lower political position, say,
than the progeny of the master group. Second, the result of any mass violence or oppression is a deep
dominance relation differential power and status that persists even if a situation of formal equality is
established in the aftermath.
A typical conflict resolution model should never be applied to a case of asymmetrical violence or
oppression. A conflict resolution model assumes a mutual conflict that is driven more or less equally by
both sides, which are locked in a more or less balanced antagonism. When this kind of model is applied to
It should be noted that both insights are based on intellectual lineages in the humanities. Various rejections
of idealism or a privilege of the mental over the material have emerged in the history of philosophy,
particularly Western philosophy, culminating perhaps in Marxs critique of what he viewed as Hegels
one-sided privileging of the abstract over the concrete.6 While Marxs understanding of oppression
is embedded in economic and sociological work, it was a philosophical insight into the relationship of
the mental and material that grounded this work. Similarly, theorizations of power differentials hidden
within apparently egalitarian or neutral structures reach high points with J. S. Mill,7 Franz Fanon,8 and
Michel Foucault.9 Mill identified the potential for domination within democratic structures, while Fanon
presciently analyzed colonial domination to identify ways in which it would persist in the post-colonial era
5 Ibid.
6 See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, in The Marx-Engels Reader,
2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 107-108, 110-25; and Marx, The German
Ideology, trans. and ed. P. Ryazanskaya, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1978), p. 175.
7 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978).
8 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1991).
9 Michel Foucault, Right of Death and Power over Life, in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 135-59.
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a situation of power asymmetry, it actually obscures the real structure of the (dominance) relationship.

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and Foucault revolutionized the concept of power as a structuring framework rather than an institutional
or individual possession. Also from a philosophical perspective, Marilyn Frye developed a definition
of and analysis of oppression that extends Foucaults critique of hidden power structures and adds key
insights into the way in which structural power functions in apparently innocuous direct interactions
and relations between members of the dominant and dominated group.10 Finally, Edward Said analyzed
the role of misrepresentations of orientals in modern imperialism and charted out the ways in which
misrepresentations reinforced and supported imperialism as well as reflecting an imperial order in the
colonial and post-colonial eras.11
Of a number of responses to arguments for reparations in cases of mass violence or oppression, one
is particularly relevant here. The objection is often made that even advocacy, let alone attainment, of
reparations will actually be counter-productive and foster increased rather than decreased tensions
between the victim and perpetrator groups. Particularly in cases of long-past violence or oppression
(say, Native American genocides or slavery, respectively, in the United States), later generations in the
perpetrator group many of whose own historical origins mean that their families were not even in the
United States when the violence or oppression was perpetrated feel that any imposition of responsibility
on them is unfair. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in full this feature of the objection
or respond to the complex issues it raises, suffice it to say that responsibility is different from blame.
The latter depends on actually having participated in violence or oppression, while the former can derive
from a much less direct connection to past events, including benefiting materially, socially, politically, etc.,
from that violence (for instance, financial benefits from an economy whose wealth is traced in part to slave
labor in the past, use of land depopulated through genocide, etc.), denial that the past harms were done
despite presentation of adequate evidence, or even voluntary celebration of the identity of the perpetrator
group.12 In this sense, responsibility does not mean responsibility for the actual long-past harm in the
sense of blame, but rather responsibility to address the impacts of that past harm in the present and future.

Marilyn Frye, Oppression, in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press,
1983), pp. 1-16, and Frye, Sexism, in The Politics of Reality, pp. 17-40.

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

See Karen Kovach, Genocide and the Moral Agency of Ethnic Groups, in Genocides Aftermath: Responsibility and
Repair, ed. Claudia Card and Armen T. Marsoobian (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 50-70; Armen T. Marsoobian,
Acknowledging Intergenerational Moral Responsibility in the Aftermath of Genocide, Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, no. 2 (2009): pp. 211-20; and Theriault et al., Resolution With Justice: Reparations for the Armenian Genocide
The Report of the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group, draft, September 2012, p. 50, pp. 55-56, pp. 65-75.
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Justice and Peace

Despite the strength of arguments for responsibility, the potential backlash by perpetrator group members
is treated as a neutral factor, rather than something for which members of the perpetrator group have
moral responsibility. As a result, the usual response in political as well as academic circles is to determine
what will minimize the tension, rather than to assign responsibility for it. This generally leads to the view
that justice and reconciliation (peace) are in tension and any increase in justice for instance, by
compensating the victim group for expropriated property results in an increased tension, so the only
way to achieve a reduction in tensions toward reconciliation is to set aside entirely or in part the dictates
of justice. For a recent case of mass violence or recently ended form of oppression (say, Apartheid),
this could mean setting aside prosecution of key perpetrators; for a long-past case of mass violence or
oppression, this could mean blocking reparations.
In this context, it is essential to define the term justice. There are many available concepts of justice
discussed in reference to mass violence and oppression. Because this paper concerns long-past cases of
mass violence and oppression, criminal justice is not a necessary component. In many cases genocide
of Native North Americans, United States slavery, the Tasmanian Genocide, the Herero Genocide,
cannot be punished. Even where some major perpetrators might be living, as in the case of the Comfort
Women system, Holocaust, Cambodia Genocide, East Timor Genocide, Guatemala Genocide, Jim Crow
discrimination in the United States, United States war crimes in Vietnam, Apartheid in South Africa, etc.
criminal prosecutions in themselves are inadequate for addressing the harms done to individual victims
and the victim groups more broadly. Thus, criminal prosecutions might be part of an overall justice
process, but will not be sufficient to meet the requirements of justice.
Similarly, the concept healing in the sense of removing the pain of past violence or past or present
oppression is not possible even across multiple generations, because the effects of the harms continue
permanently, but this does not mean that the psychological and material situations of victim groups cannot
be improved. This does not occur naturally with the mere passage of time, which on the contrary tends
to exacerbate the effects of mass violence or oppression (genocide victim groups lose their identity, fade
demographically, etc.; denied economic reparations, formerly enslaved groups become poorer over time;
and so on).
For past mass violence and oppression, three elements appear necessary. First, the resolution must respect
the rights of the victims. For instance, victims who were forced from land or lost land through illegitimate
actions by the perpetrators (passage of unfair laws, fraud that was allowed by the government, etc.) should
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the Armenian Genocide, etc. the major perpetrators most responsible are no longer living and thus

Proceedings
have their land restored to them. This works symbolically as well. For instance, a recent court ruling in
Argentina has recognized what has been labeled a right to truth for members of victim groups.13 Second,
the resolution should be fair, in the sense that perpetrators should not be allowed to benefit from past mass
violence or oppression. A member of the perpetrator group in possession of a business expropriated from a
member of the victim group should be required to restore that business to the member of the victim group
or, if that person is no longer living, a family member or common institution of the victim group. This also
works symbolically: the correct history should be disseminated by the perpetrator group to ensure that the
truth will be recognized and the harm done to the victim group understood as in the case of the Comfort
Women, Japanese school textbooks should include a description of this atrocity that is historically accurate
and makes clear its ethical and legal unacceptability.
Third, the needs of the victims arising out of their victimization must be addressed. The harms were
done by the perpetrator group and the perpetrator group has a responsibility for addressing what victim
group members need that they would not need if they had not been victimized. For instance, elderly
Comfort Women experiencing physical suffering from the brutality, enforced drug addiction, harmful
medical treatment, and so forth often need extensive medical care. The Japanese government should
be responsible for meeting the needs of victims that arise directly from their victimizations. This applies
psychologically (symbolically) as well. In the same example, many Comfort Women have faced denial
by the Japanese government and those supporting it of the facts of what was done to them, have been
characterized as voluntary prostitutes by deniers, have been stigmatized in their own societies, and so
forth. For vindication, the Japanese government should officially recognize and apologize for the full
range of harms done to the Comfort Women. It should make clear that Japan and not the Comfort Women
was responsible for what happened and that what happened was categorically wrong. Indeed, Japan bears
responsibility for educating its own citizens as well as those in other countries about mass sexual violence
and supporting a change in attitudes toward women and girls who are victimized by it.
Kibibi Tyehimba has argued that any resolution that sets aside the reparative process called for by the
dictates of justice actually leaves intact the prejudicial attitudes that the resolution is supposed to address,
simply hiding them from view. As soon as victim group members advocate for their rights, the same
attitudes and forces that resulted in harms in the past will be triggered in the perpetrator population.14
Indeed, I would extend this point to assert that setting aside justice concerns because of fear of a backlash

Turkey Slams Argentine Court Ruling on Genocide, Asbarez, 4 April 2011, http://asbarez.com/94660/94660/ (accessed
October 15, 2012).

Kibibi Tyehimba, Reparations as Justice (remarks presented at the Armenians and the Left symposium, City University of New York Graduate Center, April 2006).
308
from the perpetrator group actually reinforces the power of the perpetrator group over the victim group
and extends the original harm. After all, it turns a refusal to accept responsibility by perpetrator group
members into a veto over those advocating for victim group rights and needs.
This suggests a deeper problem with the very concept of resolution that is often employed in discussions
of past violence or oppression. The goal of conflict resolution strategies is self-evidently the reduction of
conflict, especially where that conflict is manifested as physical violence, discrimination, etc. Most conflict
resolution approaches assume that a reduction in rhetorically-expressed animosity or concrete behaviors
and actions harming the other group is the goal of the conflict resolution process. They typically focus on
rhetoric and attitudes. But changed rhetoric and attitudes can obscure persistence of the same harms of
past violence or oppression and the domination/subjugation produced or exacerbated by it. These surface
changes can act as a cover, in fact, for increasing domination and harm. This is true of perpetrator rhetoric,
for instance, that expressed regret over the past while the perpetrator groups court system rejects any and
all claims for compensation for past injuries. It is also true in the reverse sense for victim group members.
After a long period of struggle against denial of the truth of what their group experienced (Armenian
Genocide denial and denial of the Comfort Women atrocity are obvious examples), an accommodation
with members of the perpetrator group that can be labeled a resolution might be embraced by weary
group intransigence. In such a context, the expectations of victim group members have already been
reduced due to the force and manipulation inherent in the hierarchy in which they engage the perpetrator
group. At the very least, when the situation of domination by the perpetrator group has been normalized
and victim group members have come to expect denigration, denial, ill-treatment, lack of basic rights,
and so on, a reduction in any of that might appear to be positive progress and to warrant the satisfaction,
contentment, or something similar on the part of victim group members. In sum, the subjective feeling
that the relationship with perpetrator group members has improved does not indicate that the resolution of
past violence or oppression is accomplished by what has produced the subjective feeling. That subjective
feeling might coexist with preserved or heightened domination of and loss by the victim group. The
resolution in this case will guarantee power of the perpetrator group and the ineffectiveness of the victim
group.
A resolution must not simply result in lowered tensions but must transform the context of those tensions
as well. For instance, it should mitigate the power imbalance of the perpetrator and victim groups by
requiring that the perpetrator group give up material advantages derived from the past violence or
oppression. The subjective satisfaction of victim group members might, of course, reflect genuine strides
toward a resolution, but all positive changes in the subjective experience of victim-perpetrator relations
should be tested against the context in which they occur. If domination and injustice are still persistent
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victim group members or might be accepted as the best that can be hoped for in the face of perpetrator

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despite the subjective view that relations are positive, it is the material reality that determines when an
actual resolution has been achieved.
One approach to prevent the minimizing of justice in favor of a reduction of tensions between the victim
and perpetrator groups has been to impose a minimum threshold on any resolution process between
victims and perpetrators, such that justice requirements cannot be lowered below a certain level even if
not doing so will preserve some level of tension between the victims and perpetrators. Amy Gutman and
Dennis Thompson, for instance, have applied this approach to truth commissions that can include such
things as the offering of prosecutorial amnesty.15 The problem, however, is that this line of argument still
accepts that the requirements of justice and of improvement in the perpetrator-victim relationship are in
tension. Is this necessarily the case? And, if it is, is any stable and just resolution of a past case of mass
violence or oppression possible?
The answers to these questions might be seen to depend on whether the rehabilitation of perpetrator
groups is possible. If it is, then it would appear that some process might at once allow justice to be given
to the victim group while tensions would not be increased but instead reduced, as perpetrator group
members exorcise from their political, military, cultural, social, and/or religious institutions, practices, and
structures the attitudes, behaviors, hierarchies, and so forth put into place through mass violence against
or oppression of the victim group or embedded features that drove the past mass violence or oppression
and the entrenchment of which was reinforced by the fact that there was no accountability for that mass
violence or oppression.
It is unlikely that an externally-imposed resolution will contribute to the rehabilitation of the perpetrator
group. As Hegel explained, the imposition of an external order on a given society is bound to fail; only
an order that develops from the society itself will properly fit it.16 Thus, not only is an externally-imposed
resolution of a case of mass violence or oppression likely to provoke a backlash from the perpetrator
group, but such a resolution might not actually fit the perpetrator group correctly. That is, it might not
address the issues in the perpetrator group that need to be addressed. Only a process of internal change
that is accepted by the perpetrator group can move the perpetrator group away from prejudice against and
dominational tendencies toward the victim group.
Jermaine McCalpin has emphasized this point in his contribution to the Armenian Genocide Reparations

Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson, The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions, in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton: Princeton, 2000), pp. 22-44.

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford, 1967), pp. 178-79.
310
Study Groups forthcoming report.17 According to him, the way to achieve this kind of perpetrator
group transformation is through a truth and reparations commission. He explains the importance of
participation of members of the perpetrator group on the commission, which should consist of perpetrator
group members, victim group members, and third-party members to ensure balance. Given the fact that
any resolution of the Armenian Genocide must take place in the context of an aggressive, well-funded
official governmental denial campaign, McCalpin argues that, unlike the previous Turkish-Armenian
Reconciliation Commission, this new commission should take as its beginning point that the Armenian
Genocide occurred and have as its charge determining what the appropriate response by the perpetrator
group today should be.
While this is a legitimate stipulation for the commission and thus a necessary condition that must be met
if it is to have the salutary effects it is intended to, the question remains open as to how the perpetrator
group will be moved to engage in such a process. It would seem that, if the process is entirely voluntary
and the perpetrator group enters into it, it will already have been rehabilitated to the point where it accepts
responsibility for the past and is committed to discharging its responsibility, while if it has not already
been rehabilitated, it will not enter into a truth and reparation process to begin with. It would seem that
In previous work, I have argued that the giving of reparations will demonstrate that a perpetrator group
has undergone a transformation. Reparations are the result of a transformation, but I did not theorize the
method of transformation.
The problem is not solved by a perpetrator group-victim group dialogue approach that is supposed to
foster an evolution of thinking by participants. Such a dialogue process is in essence a negotiation between
unequal parties. Unless the power imbalance is countered, any negotiative process will tend to preserve
that power imbalance. In the dialogue process, victim group members are in the position of attempting
to change the status quo, which is the normalization of the results of mass violence and oppression. A
just result typically requires dramatic changes. The perpetrator group is in the position of accepting or
rejecting all requests or demands of the victim group. Thus, the very process of dialogue in the post-mass
violence or post-oppression context gives an advantage to the perpetrator group, an advantage reinforced
by the dominant position they are in generally. Even if a perpetrator group makes some concessions to the
victim group that moves the situation a few steps closer to a fair outcome for the victims, it still controls
how far toward such an outcome the process is allowed to move. In practice, the process never moves

Theriault, Resolution With Justice, pp. 77-89.
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we are back to the problem of the mutual exclusiveness of justice and the reduction of tensions.

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very far. Indeed, the imbalance of power between the two groups can allow the perpetrator group to use
the dialogue process to extend its advantages and benefits, so that a dialogue process that is supposed to
produce a better situation in effect extends the original harm by perpetrators to the victim group.18 Thus,
for a dialogue process to succeed, it would seem to have to start with a rehabilitated perpetrator group, but
the point of a dialogue process is that it is supposed to bring about perpetrator (as well as victim) group
transformation starting from a state of entrenched opposition between the groups.
The Path Forward
The putative opposition between justice and stable resolution discussed above can be regarded as turning
on the external-internal dichotomy. In a context in which the post-mass violence or post-oppression
situation is taken as the natural or neutral status quo at least from the perpetrator perspective, any
change in that status quo requires external force or coercion. But, a stable outcome is only possible if the
perpetrator group members in general voluntarily accept the outcome, and this is typically possible only if
the perpetrator group has a full role in the deliberation or process leading to that outcome; since the postviolence or post-oppression status quo is taken as neutral, however, the perpetrator group is unlikely to (in
practice, virtually never does) accept substantive change to the status quo under such circumstances. It is
not just that the process cannot be externally-driven if it is to succeed, but any internal process will tend
toward a very different outcome from any external process. Thus, an internal process is highly unlikely to
produce and in practice would seem never to produce a just outcome. Is there any way forward?
Despite Hegels view that only an internally-driven, organically-developed process can transform a given
society, his predecessor Rousseau recognized the challenge of a purely immanent construction of ethical,
political, and legal structures and attitudes. For Rousseau, the process of ethical, political, and legal
development could not come out of nothing: there needed to be some kind of originary force to begin it.
Rousseau developed the notion of an external law-giver who would lay down the basic social contract
to form a political unit.19 Martin Thom suggests the possibility that Rousseau did not have in mind a
particular individual as the law-giver, but used the concept as a sort of short-hand for social groups.20
Either way, the essence of the concept is that an external originary force is required to organize a society
because the internal tools are not sufficient.
This notion can be extended and applied to the question of perpetrator-victim group relations and

Theriault, From Unfair to Shared Burden.

Thom, Martin, Republics, Nations and Tribes (New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 69-72.
20 Ibid., p. 70.
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resolutions. Various forms of external pressure have been attempted to effect change in perpetrator-victim
relations for long-past mass violence or oppression. These include the passage by other governments
(usually at the national level, but sometimes from international organizations or of sub-national governing
bodies) of resolutions calling for recognition and atonement by the perpetrator government. Typically
outside pressure has been viewed as a hindrance for intergroup conciliation, because of the backlash that
often comes from the perpetrator group.21
In addition to the problem of what conciliation should mean in such a context, as discussed above, there
is another issue. The backlash concern treats all perpetrator group members alike and ignores the tensions
and complexities within it. The result is a situation in which any proposed resolution must satisfy the most
extreme members of the perpetrator group to achieve a genuine reduction or elimination of perpetratorvictim tensions. Dialogue processes taking this as their goal therefore often focus on these most extreme
members of the perpetrator group and ignore other more moderate and even highly progressive members.
The extreme members are in effect given veto power over any attempt at progress in intergroup relations.
They are the least likely to change their views and so the effort to help them transition to more positive
attitudes is usually futile. Yet, by their refusal to overcome their prejudices and dominating position, they
stop progress between the perpetrator and victim groups. An excellent example of this is the Turkish-
While outside pressure might trigger extreme elements of the perpetrator group and alienate more
moderate members who are not willing to confront their historical responsibilities directly, not challenging
such people does not fix the problem but merely hides it from view while the attitudes and resistance of
such perpetrator group members continue to prevent progress. What is more, for those who are resistant
but at some level committed to progress, this kind of pressure can trigger critical re-evaluation of societal
attitudes, practices, and institutions and thus progress. Perhaps more importantly, external pressure of
this sort can provide support to those within the perpetrator group who are pushing for transformative
rehabilitation away from the violence or oppression of the past, toward an improved situation for the
victim group and better relations with the perpetrator group. It is important to recognize that perpetrator
groups are not monolithic, but members exhibit an array of viewpoints and ethical commitments. Those
pushing for positive change are typically active as resistance during the historical mass violence or

Taner Akam, Is There Any Solution Other Than a Dialogue? in Dialogue Across an International Divide: Essays Towards a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue (Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 2001), pp. 13-14; and David Phillips, Unsilencing the
Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 27-36.

For a comprehensive, though apologetic, history of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission that confirms this
point, see Phillips.
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Armenian Reconciliation Commission.22

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oppression, as righteous gentiles who saved Jews from the Holocaust, abolitionist white Americans
who fought against United States slavery, and so on. And, they exist just as much in the long aftermath of
violence or oppression.
Rehabilitation of the perpetrator group does not require altering each person within the group, but on the
contrary reworking the power dynamics within the group so that those committed to responsible relations
with the victim group can lead the society toward them. While some within a society in this kind of
transition will resist such changes, this should not be generalized to all members of that society. External
pressure is not opposed by the perpetrator group in general, but rather only a segment, while the pressure
actually supports another segment. The apparent opposition between justice and reduction of tensions
thus turns out to be a misunderstanding of the situation based on essentialization of the perpetrator
group, that is, viewing the perpetrator group as a homogenous identity group in which the attitudes and
behaviors of all members line up in parallel, rather than as a complex of individuals and subgroups with
varying attitudes, agendas, and ethical and political commitments. Even more than just being consistent
with the change progressives in a perpetrator group pursue, external pressure is a support for the internal
transformation they seek. What begins as external becomes internal.
The inverse is true for victim groups in typical dialogue or truth commission processes. Given the
assumption that pursuit of justice by victims group members hinders elimination or reduction of tensions
with the perpetrator group, those organizing a dialogue or truth commission process typically exclude or
marginalize those in the victim community who pursue justice claims, that is, those who are perceived as
more extreme than others in the victim group. This is an imposition of power over the victim group, to the
point of determining who its legitimate spokespeople are, and reflects an overarching tendency of at least
some progressive as well as denialist members of the perpetrator group to assert control over the discourse
on the past violence or oppression in what might be characterized as a normalized imperialist attitude.23
Balancing the power of the perpetrator group over the victim group in a dialogue or truth commission
process starts with giving up this control and inviting various voices from the victim group in without
interfering in the internal dynamics of the victim group except to mitigate the effects of prior interference
practiced during long-term oppression. As suggested above, it also includes breaking the power of
reactionaries as well as resistant moderates to allow other representatives of the perpetrator group their
proper role. Internal pressure can also be mounted by those committed to rehabilitation by pushing or
compelling resistant members of the perpetrator group to comply with the requirements of the process.

Theriault, From Unfair to Shared Burden.
314
For instance, progressive white South Africans could have worked to push Afrikaner ex-President Botha
to appear before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission instead of allowing him to
ignore the subpoena.24 External moral pressure is very helpful in such circumstances, among other reasons
because it can affect members of the perpetrator group who are not ideologically committed to domination
of the victim group. Yet, the process is internally-driven to the extent that the perpetrator group polices
itself and progressives prevent extremists from the perpetrator group from exercising power over victims.
Another means of balancing perpetrator power is to challenge the tendency prevalent among progressive
members of perpetrator groups to equate extremist positions within the perpetrator group for instance,
denying that a genocide occurred, that enslavement was cruel, etc., or rationalizing the violence or
oppression by appeal to historical relativism (everyone did similar things in that age) with strong
positions in the victim group. Thus, Armenian nationalists advocating reparations for the Armenian
Genocide are equated with Turkish ultra-nationalists denying that the genocide occurred or considering
it justified. This equation is possible only through the prism of differential power. In reality, in this case,
while Armenian nationalism is far from perfect, they are generally a response to centuries of pre-Genocide
oppression and the experience of largely accomplished annihilation. They should be understood as
attempts to advocate for and defend a victim group the future viability of which a past genocide has made
nationalism; that is, Armenian political activists and advocates should not be demonized or punished
because of the genocidal nature of some extremist Turkish nationalism.25
This plays out in other ways as well. There has been a tendency in recent years to misuse the term trauma
to apply to any kind of psychological bad feeling resulting from an external force or event. This has even
been extended to attribution of trauma to perpetrators of violence or oppression based on their experience
of victimizing others. While it might be true that perpetrators or oppressors suffer in some sense, this is not
to be equated or even related to what victims suffer due to unjust harm done to them, and the term trauma
in a technical sense does not apply to what perpetrators experience.26 Care has to be taken to ensure that
the term trauma is only applied to actual cases of trauma in a clinical sense.

Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, Nation Seeks Truth from Aging Symbol South Africa: P. W. Botha Has Answers about Apartheid-era Atrocities, but He Doesnt Want to Give Them, The Baltimore Sun, 8 June 1998, http://articles.baltimoresun.
com/1998-06-08/news/1998159011_1_apartheid-botha-truth-commission (accessed October 15, 2012).

Theriault, Reparative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide, in The Armenian Genocide and International Law, ed. Antranig Dakessian (forthcoming).

Theriault, Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship, Genocide Studies
and Prevention 7, no. 1 (2012): pp. 131-32.
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uncertain. Concerns about Turkish ultra-nationalism should not be automatically applied to Armenian

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The granting of material and symbolic reparations can also be built into the dialogue or truth commission
process. With each reparative step, the legitimacy of victim claims and needs becomes more and more
established for members of the perpetrator group. This supports increasing progress in group relations.
Conclusion
This paper has argued that progress in perpetrator-victim group relations depends on structuring a
dialogue or truth commission process in such a way that the deep disparity in power is balanced. This in
turn depends on an inclusive approach to both the perpetrator and victim groups, bringing into the process
participants typically marginalized in it. The question, Who should be listened to? is a crucial one in
this context. Especially important one is external support for those in the perpetrator group who advocate
rehabilitation. This ensures that the process is an internal one from the perpetrator group perspective. In
this way, the dictates of justice do not have to be externally enforced, but in fact become consistent with
the hoped-for conciliation.
References
Akam, Taner. Is There Any Solution Other Than a Dialogue? In Dialogue Across an International
Divide: Essays Towards a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue. Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 2001.
Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1991.
Foucault, Michel. Right of Death and Power over Life. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction.
Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Frye, Marilyn. Oppression. In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA:
Crossing Press, 1983.
__________. Sexism. In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: Crossing
Press, 1983.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. New York: Oxford, 1967.
Kovach, Kovach. Genocide and the Moral Agency of Ethnic Groups. In Genocides Aftermath:
Responsibility and Repair. Edited by Claudia Card and Armen T. Marsoobian. Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2007.
Lewthwaite, Gilbert A. Nation Seeks Truth from Aging Symbol South Africa: P. W. Botha Has
Answers about Apartheid-era Atrocities, but He Doesnt Want to Give Them. The Baltimore Sun, 8
June 1998, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-06-08/news/1998159011_1_apartheid-botha-truthcommission (accessed October 15, 2012).
Marsoobian, Armen T. Acknowledging Intergenerational Moral Responsibility in the Aftermath of
Genocide. Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, no. 2, 2009, 211-20.
316
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan. In The
Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1978.
Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. Translated and edited by S. Ryazanskaya. In The Marx-Engels
Reader. 2nd ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by Elizabeth Rapaport. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978.
Phillips, David. Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation. New
York: Berghahn, 2005.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Theriault, Henry C. Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide
Scholarship. Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, no. 1, 2012, 123-44.
__________. From Unfair to Shared Burden: The Armenian Genocides Outstanding Damage and the
Complexities of Repair. The Armenian Review. Forthcoming.
__________. Reparative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide. In The Armenian
Genocide and International Law. Edited by Antranik Dakessian. Forthcoming.
Theriault, Henry C., Alfred de Zayas, Jermaine O. McCalpin, and Ara Papian. Resolution With Justice:
Reparations for the Armenian Genocide The Report of the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study
Thom, Martin. Republics, Nations and Tribes. New York: Verso, 1995.
Turkey Slams Argentine Court Ruling on Genocide. Asbarez. 4 April 2011. http://asbarez.
com/94660/94660/ (accessed October 15, 2012).
Tyehimba, Kibibi. Reparations as Justice. Remarks presented at the Armenians and the Left
symposium, City University of New York Graduate Center, April 2006.
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Group, draft, September 2012.
The 2nd
Proceedings

Healing Practices in the Humanities
1. Healing Words: Philosophy in the Treatment of Mental Illness

/ Peter B. Raabe (University of the Fraser Valley)
2. Instances of Philosophical Counseling and Byzantine Philosophy

/ Shlomit C. Schuster (Center Sophon)
3. H
ealing Practices in the Humanities
/ Kayama Rika (Rikkyo University)
4. H
ealing Practices in the Humanities: A search in Progress
/ Jeanette Fourie (Lyndi Fourie Foundation)
Healing Words: Philosophy in the Treatment of Mental Illness
Peter B. Raabe
University of the Fraser Valley
Why do I teach philosophy to students who will become professional psychiatrists, psychoanalysts,
psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, and social workers?
My counselling practice has advanced far beyond dealing with simple issues such as helping someone
decide which one of two job-offers to accept. Im dealing with clients who have been patients of
have had a significant impact on their lives.
When I tell others about how I treat these so-called mentally ill people with philosophy Im always
met with disbelief. The assumption is that either, Im lying and Im probably applying a more medical
methodologyone that is more psychological, or more scientific than philosophy. Or it is assumed that
the so-called mentally ill person wasnt mentally ill at allthey must have been misdiagnosed.
The first time Samantha came into my office she looked like she had been crying. Sam told me she was in
her early 40s and still single. She began her story by saying she lacked meaning in her life. She wanted
to know what the meaning of life is. Thats why she had come to me, knowing that philosophers talk
about that kind of stuff. She told me she had lost several close friends to cancer over the past year or
so. She said she had been working at a dead-end job then found herself a better job, only to have to deal
with dishonest employees who were stealing from the company. After finding and quitting several more
minimum wage jobs she decided to open a small business with a friend. But the friend fell in love and
abandoned her by leaving the country with her new boyfriend, leaving Sam with enormous bills to pay
off all by herself. She said she had been able to deal with all of this and keep smiling until her favourite
aunt, whom she had been very close to, died unexpectedly. Sam said that her deceased uncle had been
abusive to her aunt, and had sexually molested Samantha when she was a child. She said when her poor
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psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, people who have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses that

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aunt died she was no longer able to be happy. She was struggling with taking a course at university but
couldnt see the point of it any longer. Her medical doctor diagnosed her as clinically depressed and put
her on anti-depressant medication. But the drugs didnt help and Sam tried to commit suicide not long
before she came to see me. I asked her what had prevented her from killing herself. She said she felt her
death would be too hard on the few people who still cared for her. She had voluntarily admitted herself
into a psychiatric ward, and was put on more medications. The clinical psychiatrist assigned to her case
pronounced her too stressed out to get anywhere and simply gave up trying to help her other than by
giving her prescription drugs.
Is it true that philosophy can help someone who has been diagnosed as mentally ill? The answer to this
question depends on how mental illness is defined. Before it can be decided which treatment modality
is best in dealing with mental illness its necessary to establish what is actually meant by the term mental
illness. But even before that can be established its necessary to first of all determine what exactly is
meant when there is talk of the mind.
1. Mind and Brain
It is not possible to go into a detailed discussion of the various theories that have been put forward on how
to define the mind and the brain in this short essay. Suffice it to say that generally, in the mental healthcare
literature there is great confusion as to whether the mind and the brain are two things or one, and whether
they are in fact even different things. In most of the mental healthcare literature the two terms are used as
though they were synonymous. For example, throughout his book Philosophy of Pharmacology professor
of psychiatry Dan J. Stein uses the term brain-mind to indicate that they are not separate entities, and
without ever defining exactly what he means by mind.1 But in his book The Mind and its Discontents
Grant Gillett gives a very effective definition of what the mind is all about. He writes,
A mental life is a narrative construct or product of the integrating activity of a concept-using
subject as a person in relation to others. Thus, acting and relating are the foundations of the
psyche rather than merely receiving, assembling, and connecting representations.2
What Gillett means is that the words mental or mind dont refer to any concrete objects, such as
neurons or ganglia in the brain. Instead they refer to the persons narrative non-material elements such
as beliefs, values, and assumptions that we have as individuals and which we share with others. These
1 Stein, Dan J. Philosophy of Pharmacology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
2 Gillett, Grant. The Mind and its Discontents (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 138.
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propositional mental elements define each person as a unique individual among others. The brain is
universal to all living creatures, but each creature does its own thinking and therefore has a unique mind of
its own. The brain is the container; the mind is the content. It is much easier to change your mind than to
change your brain! Whenever there is talk of a mental illness what is actually being referred to is problems
in the content that is the mind.
In philosophical counselling we dont deal with the so-called medical model of psychopathology: the
physical or chemical lesions interfering with the information processing function of biological systems.3
Our work involves the semiotic being the person for whom meaning mattersand the thoughts which
generate the emotional domain of that human being. The persons beliefs, values, and assumptions are the
fertile mental ground from which feelings emerge, and within which problems sometimes develop. For
example, a person might believe that his wife is being unfaithful. He has based this belief on the fact that
she has been absent from home on a number of evenings. (The truth is that she has been secretly spending
money from the household budget to attend a weight-loss group, but is reluctant to tell her husband about
it). When he asks her where she has been in the evenings, she is evasive and makes up a story he knows
is not true. The husband now has the justified but false belief that his wife is cheating on him. This can
create feelings in him of sadness, hopelessness, low self-esteem and so on. His situation has created what
False or troublesome beliefs which are not resolved can become so powerful that the suffering individual
may in time stop enjoying living a normal life. This then can lead to the diagnosis of any number of socalled mental illnesses, such as depression.
The second time we met Samantha was worried about the stigma of having been a mental patient. She
said psychiatry and the pill approach to her problem had not been helpful. She knew that meaning and
happiness cant be found in a pill. But she admitted that it had helped her to feel better just having a
couple of weeks rest in that psychiatric hospital bed. She felt frustrated at having to work at a dead
end job and not being able to get past the feeling of being overwhelmed by sadness and emptiness. She
also said she was surprised by the fact that Ia philosopherwas talking with her about her ordinary
everyday problems. She had been expecting me to bring up grander philosophical issues. I told her that
personal problems are always connected with the grander philosophical issues. But its difficult, if not
impossible, to focus on a theoretical discussion of the grander issues when personal problems are causing
pain. She said that, given all the bad stuff that has happened in her life, she decided that maybe the best
approach would be to just accept things, to just give in. We talked about a lot of negative things that had
3 Nature and Narrative: an introduction to the new philosophy of psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003,
p. 120.
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psychology refers to as cognitive dissonance a troubling conflict of beliefs, values, and assumptions.

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already happened to her in the past, and I tried to have her see that much of it was what others had done
to her, and was really no fault of her own. She agreed that for most of her life she had been defined by
others, and that she was expected to be the person whose happiness was often sacrificed for the benefit of
others. In philosophy this is called a utilitarian approachwhere its acceptable to sacrifice the happiness
of one person for the benefit of others. But philosophers know that the theory of utilitarianism only seems
reasonable when youre not the one being sacrificed.
The following week she phoned me, crying, to tell me she wouldnt be coming to our scheduled session
the next day. She said she was scared of talking about bad things. I assured her we didnt have to talk
about anything she didnt want to. Philosophical counselling doesnt require us to walk down any dark
emotional paths we would rather avoid. She said that while part of her feels that theres nothing good
about her, deep down in her heart she believes shes actually a decent person. I told her that she definitely
seemed like a good person to me, but that events and other people in her life have led her to doubt herself.
Then she told me she had decided to reduce her medications, and wondered if this might be whats causing
her to feel so sad. I told her that when people reduce their anti-depressant medications the withdrawal
symptoms can bring on all sorts of strange emotions, and its likely that some of what shes feeling are just
the drugs not wanting to let go of her. She eventually calmed down and agreed to come to the next days
session.
Our discussion the next day was about trust. She had been abused by her uncle as a child; in her early
teens she had been grabbed off the street and sexually molested by a stranger; in high school a teacher
had made inappropriate advances to her and two other girls. Later her boyfriend of many years became
drunk, belligerent, and violent with her. The therapist she had trusted suddenly moved away to a foreign
country without first telling her. Her friend and her favourite aunt died, thereby also abandoning her. She
said she used to be a very giving person, but couldnt be that way any more because so many people had
taken advantage of her. Her father demanded she share the burden of caring for the family. Her mother
had come to depend on her to be the care taker of her younger siblings, as well as being the strong one
she could lean on for emotional support. And while she had been doing her best her mother had expected
better of her. I couldnt resist asking her, what it means to do better than your best? Of course there is
no answer to this question. Samantha had grown weary of the heavy burden she was carrying. She had
collapsed under the weight, and was now guilt ridden for no longer being able to continue. Sadness and
hopelessness seemed to be the only emotions she could find in herself in response to the misery that had
been her difficult life thus far.
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2. Mental Illness: Cause and Effect

A mental illness is not a biological problem with the physical brain. It is a problem with a persons mental
narrative: a mistaken belief, a misguided assumption, or confused perception, etc. The mental illness that
is referred to as depression is the result of problems in reasoning: such as, for example, a mans justified
but mistaken belief that his wife is being unfaithful. The cause of the depression is not at all a so-called
chemical imbalance in the physical brain. That would be a mistaken causal assumption. But it would also
be a mistaken causal assumption to say that the mans depression causes him to have feelings of sadness,
hopelessness, and low self-esteem.
Depression doesnt cause anything. The word depression is a diagnostic label that always only refers
to a collection of symptoms, never a cause. Below are two diagrams to illustrate the difference between
a cause and a collection of symptoms which lead to a diagnosis. The first one shows how the effect
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influenza is often mistakenly cited as being the cause of the various symptoms.
Influenza does not cause a headache, fever, and coughing. A virus causes those symptoms. The symptoms
in combination are labelled influenza or the flu. Medication can be given to alleviate the symptoms, the
headache, fever, and coughing. But in order to heal the body when a harmful virus attacks, medication
must be given which fights the virus itself and not just the symptoms. The second illustration shows how
the effect depression is often mistakenly cited as being the cause of the various symptoms.
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Depression does not cause sadness, hopelessness, or low self-esteem. Life problems, such as the husbands
belief that his wife is cheating on him, cause those symptoms which are then labelled depression.
Biologic psychiatry makes two critical errors in defining mental illness. First, it takes a realist attitude to
mental illness. It assumes that the mind and mental functions are reducible to the operations of the brain.
It reduces mental illnesses to disordered molecular or cellular structures in the brain. Realist biological
models of mental function and mental illness locate the pathological qualities of psychological conditions
in the material properties of brains, not in the symbolic systems or propositional content which constitutes
the mind.4
The second mistake is that biological psychiatry reifies mental illness by defining symptom-based
diagnoses as quasi-disease entities. But a symptom, or even a cluster of symptoms, is not an objective
natural entity. That would be like saying that a belief (such as that ones wife is cheating) is a material
object.
The ontology of mental illnesses then is founded on two misconceptions: that the mind is the same as
the brain, and that the diagnosis of a mental illness is identical to the discovery of an organic disease.
Neither of these perspectives is justified. In North America a mental illness is entered into diagnostic
manuals and into professional practice, not by empirical biomedical research, but by a majority vote of the
editorial committee which compiles and publishes the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Illness (DSM).5
What is the ontological status of a mental illness such as depression when that mental illness is simply a
label applied to a collection of symptoms? The answer is, it has no material existence in reality at all, no
ontological status whatsoever. The classification of mental illnesses is the result of what has been called
insidious reification which refers to the conceptual creation of disease entities and treating them as
though they actually have a substantive existence.6 The various symptoms in combination sadness,
hopelessness, and low self-esteem are reified and discussed as if this distress were a unified illness or
disease known as depression.
4 Horowitz, p. 143, 3.
5 For a detailed discussion of how a collection of symptoms are given the status of a mental illness, see Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification. Mario Maj et al. editors. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
6 See a discussion of this issue in the book, Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry by Tim Thornton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 180-181.
326
Medication can be prescribed to alleviate these symptoms, but these pharmaceuticals dont eliminate
the cause of depression: the individuals various life problems that have become difficult to deal with. In
order to actually heal the mind when serious distress arises that is, in order to alleviate the suffering
and distress something must be done to help the sufferer think through and resolve the problematic life
issues that are the real cause.
The words mental and illness make a peculiar combination. Its odd to speak of mental illness as
some sort of existing entity because the term mental illness refers simply to problematic or confused
thinking. No one would think to use the term thought illness or belief illness. The word illness is
totally inappropriate when its associated with thoughts or beliefs. And yet thats exactly what mental
illness refers to: problematic thoughts and beliefs. Thats why philosophy is so very helpful in dealing
with mental illnesses: because philosophy is very good at dealing with problematic thoughts and beliefs.
But what about so-called more serious mental illnesses? Surely philosophy isnt up to the task of helping
someone with a serious mental illness, is it?
In the next few sessions Samantha and I discussed whether she was at fault for the many terrible things
that had happened to her in her life. We worked at changing the depression she was experiencing into
much from her.
In our fifth session Sam mentioned how silly she felt for having asked in our first session if we could talk
about the meaning of life. I told her people often start their conversations with me like that, and that its
a legitimate question in philosophy. But we both knew that there were more important personal issues to
deal with first in Sams life. So she asked me if suicide is ever justified. This led to a long discussion about
why people commit suicide. What we found is that there are many reasons. Sam felt in her case it seemed
like she had been afraid of losing herself. She had felt like she was being shredded. Other people had
taken pieces of her; they had defined her in many different ways without allowing her to be herself; and
they had left her feeling empty and undeserving of herself. She found it difficult to put into wordswhat
it feels like to lose yourself. But I told her I understood what she was saying: her attempted suicide was
not her desire to end her life, but her attempt to hang onto the little bit of herself that was still left. For her,
suicide was a way to save her own life. This discovery by the two of us put her attempted suicide into a
totally different light, one that allowed her to finally stop feeling guilty for trying to be herself.
We also discussed her feelings of guilt for spending money on buying some music CDs. She said she
felt guilty for not having used the money to care for others. I mentioned that the famous philosopher
Immanuel Kant argued that its not only imperative to care for others but its also necessary to care for
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something more like justified anger at those individuals who had treated her so badly or expected too

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oneself. We agreed that it just makes logical sense: if you dont look after yourself, how can you care for
others? Samanthas questions about her own religious beliefs surrounding a womans caring role in the
Christian family took us well into those deeper philosophical issues she had wondered about earlier: the
definition of evil, the nature of sin, and even the nature of God. We also discussed whether its ever right
to stick to your own values when they conflict with those of the rest of the family.
3. Why I Teach Philosophy to Therapists and Counselors
The idea that philosophy can be helpful to people in a very practical sense is not a new concept. For
example, more than two thousand years ago the pre-Socratic philosopher Epicurus characterized
philosophy as therapy of the soul or mind. He maintained that the arguments made by philosophers are
just meaningless if they dont relieve any real human suffering.7 In 45 BC writing about how people
should learn to deal with their own mental distress, Cicero wrote in his Tusulanae Disputationes
There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul (mind). It is philosophy, whose aid need not be
sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside of ourselves. We must endeavour with all our resources
and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.8
Then around the beginning of the Christian Era Seneca wrote in his letter to Lucilius,
Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity? Counsel. One person is facing death;
another is vexed by poverty... All mankind are stretching out their hands to you on every side.
Lives have been ruined, lives that are on the way to ruin are appealing for some help; it is to you
(philosophers) that they look for hope and assistance.9
In her book titled The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum examines three major schools of philosophy
in the early Greek times. She finds that the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Skeptics were all concerned
with the practice of compassionate medical philosophy10 that is, philosophy applied to the
alleviation of human mental suffering.
7 Text 124. Porphyry To Marcella. 31 (221U). In The Epicurus Reader. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson trans. (Cambridge: Hackett, 1994.)
8 Quoted in Martha C. Nussbaum. The Therapy of Desire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. 1994, p. 14.
9 Quoted in Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

Ibid., Nussbaum, p. 40.
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The early psychoanalysts also saw the value of philosophy, although not in its academic form. In his 1942
introductory address at the Conference for Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland, Carl Jung told his audience,
I can hardly draw a veil over the fact that we psychotherapists ought really to be philosophers or
philosophic doctorsor rather we already are so, though we are unwilling to admit it because of
the glaring contrast between our work and what passes for philosophy in the universities.11
Freud12 references Plato when describing dream work.13 Psychotherapist Albert Ellis, the originator
of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in the early 1950s, employs the sort of critical
and creative thinking strategies found in informal logic courses that are now part of any college or
university philosophy departments undergraduate curriculum.14 Ellis points out that much of the
field of psychotherapy always has been and still is admittedly philosophic and that his own approach
stems directly from philosophic positionsparticularly the outlooks of Epictetus and the ancient
stoics, and of the phenomenalists, existentialists, and pragmatists.15 Psychoanalysts such as Rollo May
were routinely using philosophical techniques and ideas as a part of the counselling process as early
as 1953.16 May appeals to Descartes, Mill, Kafka, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre as he describes
his therapeutic method as one in which the client comes to a consciousness of self-identity. Erich
individuals, and sick societies. In another work he appeals to Aquinas and Spinoza to reinforce his
perspective on human struggles and human desire.18 R. D. Laing references Sartre, Heidegger19 and
Kierkegaard20 as he explains how human sorrow is the result of the creation of a false self rather than
living authentically.
Other contemporary psychiatrists have also argued more recently that continental phenomenology is

Jung, Carl G. (1957) Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life. In Essays on Contemporary Events. R. F. C. Hull,
trans. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. 1989 ed., p. 45.

Freud, Sigmund. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. p. 153.

This information is adapted from the essay Philosophical Counselling: An Almost Alternative Paradigm by Sara Waller in Philosophy in the Contemporary World. Vol 10, No. 2.

Ellis, Albert. Handbook of Rational Emotive Therapy. Albert Ellis and R. Grier eds. New York: Springer, 1977.

Ellis, Albert. Philosophy and Rational-Emotive Therapy. Counseling and Values. Donald Biggs et al, eds. Washington: American Personnel and Guidance Association, 1976, p. 49, 50.

May, Rollo. Mans Search for Himself. New York: Dell Publishing, 1953.

Fromm, Erich. Beyond the Chains of Illusion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.

Fromm, Erich To Have or to Be. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

Laing, R.D. Self and Others. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990.

Laing, R.D. The Divided Self. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990.
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Fromm17 uses Marx and Hegel as a springboard to an understanding of the human condition, sick

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essential to psychiatry and ought to be part of any training curriculum.21 What does all this philosophy do
for the suffering individual?
In counselling one of the functions of the philosophical counsellor is giving suffering individuals the
thinking or reasoning tools they may not already possess that will help them alleviate their distress. This
is where the process of intentional teaching comes in which goes beyond the immediate problem solving
effort. Albert Einstein once wisely said that you cant solve a problem by using the same thinking that got
you into the problem in the first place. Healing or therapy results when the distressed individual has been
shown new approaches to resolving mental distress, and been taught new reasoning skillsand learned
how to use themto resolve his or her own problems without having to depend on a clinical therapist
or medical doctor. Today there are a growing number of philosophers willing to work with individuals
outside of the traditional academic setting. And there are a growing number of students, even at the
University of the Fraser Valley, who are working towards becoming therapists and counsellors, who are
studying philosophy and putting it to use in helping others.
Philosophy as counselling or therapy is based on four foundational premises:
First, the mind is not the same as the brain. The mind is the contents of the brain, and those contents are
propositional; they consist of beliefs, values, and assumptions. The mind is not a solid object; it consists
of narrative constructs or products of the integrating activity of a concept-using subject as a person in
relation to others. 22
Second, mental problems are not the same as organic brain problems: changing ones mind is not the same
as changing ones brain.
Third, a persons beliefs, values, and assumptions can cause mental distress, which in turn can cause a
diagnosis of so-called mental illnesses.
And fourth, good philosophical discussions can alleviate and prevent much of this distress. So-called
mental illnesses and emotional disorders are the result of lifes conflicts and complications, and the
associated beliefs, values, and assumptions, etc. Good philosophical discussions in therapy are different
from hypothetical academic discussions. Philosophical counselling deals directly with personal life

Parnas, Josef and Dan Zahavi. The Role of Phenomenology in Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification. In Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification. Mario Maj et al, eds. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, p. 138162.

Gillet, Grant (2009). The Mind and its Discontent. New York: Oxford University Press.
330
problems. Some problems may require changes in the persons life circumstances. Others require an
examination, and perhaps an alteration of, the beliefs, values, and assumptions which have led to those
problems.
Philosophy can also be helpful to individuals who are not suffering from any specific diagnosable mental
disorders, and yet are miserable. For example, one client explained to me that he had everything he
could wanta house, money, a good job, and so onbut he said he was depressed. He felt like his life
was empty and meaningless. Over the course of just a few sessions we discovered that the many years
he had spent in the financial world left him feeling like he had accomplished nothing of value with his
life. In fact he had been so engrossed in his goal of personal enrichment that he had not even considered
getting married. Now he was feeling well-off but lonely, accomplished but unfulfilled, secure but selfish.
We decided together that the treatment for his so-called depression should be for him to volunteer at a
local charity serving meals to the poor, and generally being helpful to the homeless and the destitute. This
worked out very well because his acts of kindness for others eventually led to two good outcomes: his life
felt much more meaningful to him, and he discovered a soul mate in one of the women volunteers.
During another session, Samantha told me something very surprising. I have had clients tell me about all
a diagnosis from her therapist that I had never encountered before. This expert had told her she believed
Sam was suffering from demon possession. That was her professional diagnosis: Demon Possession.
Sam explained how this bizarre diagnosis had caused her a lot of distress and worry. It had also made it
impossible for her to discuss the meaning of life, or anything else for that matter, with this therapist. She
had not gone back to this therapist after that. But then she asked me hesitantly if I thought that, perhaps,
this diagnosis might be accurate. Could her suffering be due to some demon inside her?
This led us once again into discussion of the nature of realitya metaphysical question: could reality
logically contain evil demons that can invade a human body? Could some mental illnesses be caused by
Satanic spirits? I told Sam that in philosophical counselling we never make diagnoses and certainly not the
diagnosis of demon possession because there is no logic to it, except in a religious way. Its not possible to
make metaphysical sense of a material world inhabited by non-material entities that could interfere with
the lives of material human beings.
But what exactly is this mysterious thing called philosophy that challenges religious conceptions of
reality? Simply put, philosophy is examining the reasons weand othershave for the values we hold as
good and the beliefs we hold to be true. Such an examination can free us from blindly following tradition,
slavishly obeying authority figures, or acting only on our feelings. When philosophy is defined in this way
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sorts of diagnoses with which various therapists and clinicians had labelled them. But Sam had received

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it leaves no doubt that it is perfectly suited as treatment for the more common so-called mental disorders
such as depression and mood swings. However philosophy has also been demonstrated to alleviate the
suffering of those who have been diagnosed with so-called serious or clinical mental disorders that were
once considered organic brain diseases such as clinical depression, schizophrenia, paranoia, and more.
Treatment outcome studies have shown that therapies based on philosophical discussions, in clinical
psychology called talk therapies, are the most effective in not only resolving seriously troubling issues,
but in long-term effect and benefit.23 Again, a mental disorder is not an organic problem of the material
brain; it is instead a problem within a persons mental narrative, within the minds propositional content
which are beliefs, values, and assumptions. So it is no wonder that talk therapies have been found to be as
effective, and in some cases more effective, than medicationsand without the horrible side effects.24 And
these talk therapies are all just philosophy under a different, psychologically-sounding name.
But philosophical counselling is not time travel. If the family the person grew up in was dysfunctional,
if there was emotional mistreatment of family members, or if there was physical abuse, its not possible
to go back and fix that past with counselling. I tell my clients Im willing to help them achieve any
goal that is morally permissible, reasonable, and possible. Of course its reasonable to want the past to
be different; but its not possible. So how can counselling help when the past is painful? Again, the past
cant be changed; it is what it was. But a persons beliefs about the people and the events of the past
can be examined and changed if necessary. And a persons beliefs about who they are, and their level of
responsibility for past events, can be scrutinized and changed if necessary to be more in tune with who
they actually are, and wish to be, in the present.
Ive had many clients who felt that as children they were somehow responsible for their own mistreatment.
We examine this belief about themselves and their beliefs about others to see if they are all justified. What
we often find, of course, is that children mistakenly blame themselves for the terrible wrongdoing of their
parents and other adults. This belief can remain with them well into adulthood in the form of guilt, shame,
regret, low self-esteem, and so on. A philosophical examination of the past can bring release from this
undeserved suffering.

For a discussion of CBT as the best treatment for depression, social phobia (SP), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD),
panic disorder (PD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), see Pathological Anxiety: Emotional Processing in
Etiology and Treatment edited by Barbara Olasov Rothbaum. New York: Guilford Press, 2006, p. 123, 132, 143, 160,
204, 208, 254; See also Gerald Coreys Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 5th ed. Pacific Grove:
Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1996, p.170.

Frank, Jerome D. and Julia B. Frank. Persuasion and Healing 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1993,
p. 219.
332
Sam said her mother and father felt that a family is the only thing that brings meaning. She said they were
very disappointed in her for not yet being married at her age and not having the children they had been
looking forward to. She explained again how everyone in her family always expected so much from her.
She was seen as the strong and capable one, the one who took care of things and looked out for all the
others. But when her doctor put her on anti-depressants it sent the message to everyone that she was no
longer the super woman they had been looking up to. Sadly, her admission of her vulnerability did not get
her the support she was hoping for. Instead there was disappointment for her weakness from her parents,
and silent condemnation from her siblings. This led to our discussing who defines who we are. Are we
autonomous beings who define ourselves; are we socially constructed; or are we a combination of both?
She pointed out that she believed that, in order to be a good person, she had to be available to help others
at all times. But I reminded her that in a previous discussion we had come to agree with philosophers who
said that to be a good person, to be a moral person, its enough that we try not to cause harm to others in
what we say and do. There is no requirement to constantly benefit others with the things we say or do.
That can only be expected of saints and super heroes. She said she was very tired of trying to be a super
hero.
In several sessions that followed Samantha mentioned that she had never had any real desire to be married.
and why. She felt marriage would demand even more of her than had already been demanded of her in
the past. She mentioned again how she had felt abandoned by friends and loved ones, and at the same
time drained by family members who expected her to give more than she was physically, emotionally,
and spiritually able. She now decided to give up trying to live up to all the expectations of others, and
wondered what was reasonable to expect of herself. In the next few sessions, spanning a number of weeks,
Sam came to stop worrying about falling apart as she called it, and having to go back into the hospital
psychiatric ward. She said she was feeling much more in control of her own life because she had come to
accept the fact that she had the right to make decisions about her own life, to live her life as she saw fit. Yes,
its good to be there for others, she said, but its also essential to look after myself. In philosophy this
perspectivethat each persons life is what they make of itis called existentialism.
I believe I may be the first philosopher to teach a university course in philosophy specifically designed
to improve the professional skills of future mental healthcare workers: students on the road to
becoming therapists, counsellors, and social workers. But this doesnt mean that Im the only person,
as a philosopher, to see a problem in how mental illnesses have become almost exclusively defined as
medical or biological disorders of the material brain. There are an increasing number of psychotherapists
and counsellors who disagree with the biomedical model of mental illness, and who recognize that
philosophy ought to be acknowledged as having a rightful place in the practice of mental healthcare. They
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She wondered if this was normal. This led to a discussion about what is considered normal in our society

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acknowledge that philosophy can be an effective treatment or therapy for non-biological mental illnesses.
Professionals in the many fields of mental healthcare have themselves often commented in their writings
on how much a part of therapy philosophy already is and ought to be. For example:
Philosophy is unavoidable, because we always operate from within a context of beliefs,
presuppositions, and background understandings.... I believe that Freud... was quite wrong when
he claimed in his Weltanschauung lecture that philosophy has no direct influence on the great
mass of mankind; it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is
scarcely intelligible to anyone else. 25
All practitionersin the field of psychotherapy are already dealing with philosophical questions
all the time; indeed, no one in our field in practice or theory, can possibly avoid it. The real issue is
whether a given practitioner is doing so consciously and explicitly or only implicitly (i.e., without
being aware of it).26
It is not necessary of course, nor indeed desirable, that every psychiatrist should become a
philosopher. But if philosophy is to make a substantial contribution to the subject, all psychiatrists
should have some exposure to philosophical thinking in their training, backed up with the
opportunity for more detailed study for those with special aptitudes and interests. 27
Psychotherapies use symbolic systems to heal the minds of sufferers and so are rooted in
philosophical and religious systems of healing. 28
...Philosophy does have tools which, in principle at least, can help psychiatry to achieve better
understanding of[its own conceptual]problems. 29
In the treatment for mental health problems, What is needed is philosophy as well as science. 30
There is also an entire book dedicated to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, and social

Hersch, Edwin L.From Philosophy to Psychotherapy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2003, p. 345.

Ibid., p. 267. Italics in the original.

Fulford, K. W. M., Mind and Madness: New Directions in Philosophy of Psychiatry. In Philosophy, Psychology, and
Psychiatry. Griffiths, Phillips A. editor:Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994,p. 19.

Horwitz, Allan V. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 182.

Fulford, K. W. M. Ibid., p. 15.

Ibid., p. 24.
334
workers titled Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice.31 Its aim is to improve the quality of judgements and
decisions made by mental health care workers. Its author draws extensively on one of the oldest fields in
philosophy: informal logic, more commonly referred to as critical thinking.
Philosophy as it is applied to therapy and counselling is based on three foundational premises: mental
problems are not the same as brain problems; a persons beliefs, values, and assumptions can cause socalled mental problems; and good philosophical discussions can alleviate and prevent many of these
problems. But some people argue that psychotherapy is the best method to use when trying to help those
afflicted with mental illnesses. Interestingly, when you look at the description of some of the foremost
approaches to psychotherapy you find that they are all already solidly based on philosophy. In the book
Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy Gerald Corey, a professor of counselling and
licensed psychologist, describes them this way:
Psychoanalysis is said to have touched on philosophy, psychology, sociology, art, and
literature... 32 Freud and Jung were both thoroughly educated in philosophy.
Existential therapy can best be described as a philosophical approach that influences a
Person-centered therapy is a humanistic approach that grew out of the philosophical background
of the existential tradition. 34
Gestalt therapy is phenomenological as it focuses on the clients perception of reality. The
approach is existential in that it is grounded on the here and now and emphasizes that each person
is responsible for his or her own destiny. 35
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has always been characterized by being highly rational,
persuasive, interpretative, directive, and philosophical.36

Gamberill, Eileen. 2nd ed. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

Meissner, William W. The Future Role of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic-Oriented Therapy. In The Challenge to
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Stephan De Schill and Serge Lebovici eds. Londaon: Jessica Kingsley Publishers,
1999, p. 110.

Corey, Gerald. Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 5th ed. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing,
1996, p. 170. Italics in the original.

Ibid., p. 199.

Ibid., p. 224. Italics in the original.

Ibid., p. 318.
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counsellors therapeutic practice. 33

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Modern day Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is said to combine humanistic,
philosophical, and behavioural therapy.37 As well as being heavily influenced by the ancient
philosophy of Stoicism, it owes a philosophical debt to a number of other sources that have
influenced its development such as the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza,
Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Popper, and Bertrand Russell.38
Reality therapy (RT) is concerned with teaching people more effective ways to deal with the
world. The reality therapist functions as a teacher and a model. 39
Classical behaviour therapy today goes beyond mere Pavlovian behavioural conditioning and
deals with emotions and meaning.40
Even a particularly psychological approach like the Adlerian therapy includes identifying and
exploring mistaken goals and faulty assumptions ...it pays attention to the individual way in
which people perceive their world... how the individual believes life to be. 41
These are all, undeniably, an application of philosophical discussion and inquiry. Each of these methods
is deeply indebted to philosophy. None of them resemble anything like a biomedical or pharmaceutical
approach to brain disorders, yet all of these talk therapies are said to be quite successful in treating
individuals suffering from diagnosed mental illnesses. The reason for the successes of talk therapies lies in
the fact that they employ philosophical discussions in the treatment of the so-called mental illnesses with
which individuals suffering from mental distress have been diagnosed.
4. Conclusion
In her final visit Samantha told me how it upset her when one of her long-time friends told her that she
would probably continue to suffer from the mental illness of depression for the rest of her life. Sam said
that she was convinced her friend was just wrong, and that others are wrong when they say depression is
a disease that cant be cured. She pointed out that she had stopped feeling depressed several sessions ago,
and that over the last four months philosophical counselling had led her to see herself in a very different

Ibid., p. 317.

Dryden, Windy. Reasons and Therapeutic Change. London: Whurr, 1991, p. 4.

Ibid., pp. 264, 273.

Ibid., p. 285.

Ibid., p. 139, p. 135. Italics in the original.
336
light. She said she no longer considered herself a victim of the cruelty of others, or as abandoned by
people who had died, or as a superwoman who must live up to the high expectations of family members.
She had made the decision to continue her education, and aim for the university degree she had always
wanted.
Why do I teach philosophy to students who will become professional psychoanalysts, psychotherapists,
clinical psychologists, counsellors, social workers? Because the therapeutic and counselling theories
students are taught in their university psychology and counselling courses focus almost exclusively on
the methodology: the process of applying this or that approach to a diagnosed collection of symptoms.
Students learn the procedural how of various methods; they learn what to say, without ever learning
the meaningful why of the philosophy behind those methods. They learn how to go through the motions
of asking questions without understanding why some questions are better than others, without knowing
how to recognize the reasoning problems within the painful narratives presented by their patients and
clients, and without knowing what issues to focus on in order to form the best questions or resolve ethical
dilemmas.
Philosophy in a therapeutic or counselling relationship involves helping the patient or client examine the
them to free themselves from blindly following tradition, slavishly obeying the dictates of authority
figures, or acting only on their feelings. But in order to help the patient or client conduct a beneficial
examination of his or her beliefs, values, and assumptions the therapist or counsellor must first become
thoroughly familiar with all the subtle nuances of the practice of a legitimately philosophical inquiry. This
is what I teach my students.
I teach them that in my private philosophical counseling practice I apply all the different areas of
philosophy to my clients problems, many of which had previously been diagnosed as mental illnesses:
critical thinking: a young woman who is so shy she doesnt know how to live a normal life. This
involves examining the reasons why she has such low self-esteem.
the philosophy of human nature: the man who wonders how he can make a significant life decision
where the most profitable choice goes against what he considers to be his true, altruistic, nature.
metaphysics: the man who feels that the characters in the books he reads and the stories he writes
have more reality than he can find in the people around him. It leads him to doubt his own physical
existence.
epistemology: the young woman who is consulting a psychic who claims that her current life
problems will be alleviated is she comes to know who she was in a previous lifetime. This also raises
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reasons he or she has for the values they hold as good, and the beliefs they hold as true. This will enable

Proceedings
a number of a metaphysical questions.
ethical theories and applied ethics: various individuals who are trying to decide whether to, and how
to, be honest with a teacher, an employer, or a lover.
philosophy of religion: the highly intellectual man whose passionate belief in God has led to him
being diagnosed with schizoid-affective disorder.
social and political philosophy: the man who is trying to decide whether to accept a high-paying job
in a military weapons manufacturing company. This is also a moral issue.
feminist philosophy: the young woman who believes she will be a failure in love and life because she
believes she is ugly.
the meaning of life: the wealthy retired man who, after a long life of running a very successful
business, feels his life has been mostly empty of value.
There is the growing number of professionals in the field of mental healthcare who have come to recognize
and accept the fact that the mind is not the same as the brain, and that many so-called diagnosable mental
illnesses are not biological brain malfunctions, and therefore dont require drug treatment. Interestingly the
Royal College of Psychiatrists in London recently added to its curriculum for higher specialist training a
substantial section on philosophy, covering relevant areas of conceptual analysis, value theory, philosophy
of science, philosophy of mind, and phenomenology. 42 They have come to recognize and acknowledge
the value of philosophy in treating so-called mental illnesses.
So much of what is done to patients today is still, unfortunately, based on the mistaken assumption that
mental problems are somehow caused by the biological mechanisms or chemistry of the brain. What is
often ignored is that mental health problems have to do with the non-material mind: the persons beliefs,
values, and assumptions. They are often complex life problems that are not at all that simple to fix with
only the help of family members or friends. But they are the sort of problems that are indeed fixable
with the help of someone trained in philosophy. The reason why I teach philosophy to students who are
studying to become professional psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, and
social workers is to help them improve their ability to create healing philosophical words that will permit
them to alleviate all sorts of human distress that is mistakenly diagnosed as mental illness.
Samantha stayed in touch with me by phone and by e-mails for another year after our philosophical
counselling sessions had ended. And Im pleased to report that her messages in that year acknowledged
the healing power of the philosophical discussions we had shared together.

Fulford, Bill et al. Ibid., p. 2.
338
References
APA (American Psychiatric Association) (2000). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
4th edn, text rev. Washington, DC: APA.
Averill, James R. and Thomas A. More (2000). Happiness. In Michael Lewis and Jeannette HavilandJones (eds.), Handbook of Emotions. New York: Guilford Press.
Ben-Zeev, Aaron (1996). Typical Emotions. In William ODonohue and Richard Kitchener, (eds.),
Philosophy of Psychology. London: Sage Publications.
Bergo, Bettina. Psychoanalytic Models: Freuds Debt to Philosophy and His Copernican Revolution. In
Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Philosophy of Psychiatry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Campbell, Neil (2005). A Brief Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Orchard Park: Broadview Press.
Corey, Gerald (1996). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 5th edn. Pacific Grove:
Brooks/Cole Publishing.
Frank, Jerome D. and Julia B. Frank (1993) Persuasion and Healing 3rd edn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Fulford, K.W.M., Tim Thornton, and George Graham (2006). Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and
Psychiatry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hansen, Jennifer. Affectivity: Depression and Mania. In Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Philosophy of
Psychiatry. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hersch, Edwin L.(2003). From Philosophy to Psychotherapy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Horowitz, Allan V. (2002). Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jung, Carl G. (1957) Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life. In Essays on Contemporary Events. R.
F. C. Hull, trans. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. 1989 edition.
Kirsch, Irving, et al. (2008) Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data
Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/
info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045)
Maj, Mario et al. (eds.) (2002). Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification. West Sussex: John Wiley &
Sons.
Sartre, J-P. (1948). The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. New York: Philosophical Library.
Simon, Laurence. (2003) Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and the Politics of Human
Relationships. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.
Stein, Dan J. (2008). Philosophy of Psychopharmacology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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Gillet, Grant (2009). The Mind and its Discontent. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Instances of Philosophical Counseling and Byzantine Philosophy
Shlomit C. Schuster
Center Sophon
Introduction
Philosophy has a long tradition in helping people reflect on the questions and difficulties of life.
Sometimes it has been used to cure, but mostly philosophers comprehend what is the truth, wisdom, and
virtue in the life of the individual and the society, or they consider existence in a metaphysical sense. In
this lecture, I present two instances of Philosophical Counseling or Philosophical Practice. I will start with
the modern approach and then show how the ancient Byzantine approach can enrich modern practitioners.
Philosophical Practice and Philosophical Psychoanalysis
The modern approach I present is the practice of the German philosopher Dr. Gerd Achenbach
(Achenbach 1984; Achenbach and Macho1985; Schuster 1991, 219-223; Schuster 1995, 51-55; Schuster
1999). Achenbachs original conception of philosophical counseling is essentially different from how
some philosophers these days use the term philosophical counseling for a type of philosophical therapy
with fixed therapeutic goals.
In 1981 Achenbach was the first one who institutionalized philosophical practice as a modern day
counseling practice. Some of his clients -- or visitors in Achenbachs terminologyhad already tried
everything that todays society offers as an antidote for mental suffering and existential questions.
Finally people arrived for help at the office of a sympathetically listening skeptic. Achenbachs aim
is to offer the public an alternative to psychotherapy, but not an alternative therapy. His practice also
includes philosophical psychoanalysis: an understanding of peoples past that leads to a philosophical
understanding of the self. He explicitly states that philosophical practice is no therapy at all (Achenbach
1984). Clinical diagnoses and treatment, along the lines of the medical paradigm of therapy, are absent in
340
Achenbachs approach, yet philosophical counseling can have therapeutic results. Nevertheless, the aim
for sessions with a philosopher is to philosophize without holding a therapeutic intention.
Achenbach resists turning his praxis idea into a method, and prefers to keep the style of conversation
indeterminate and open-ended. The empty set of knowledge presented in this approach has been
compared by Achenbach to Nicholas Cusas idea of Learned Ignorance. This 15 th century
philosopher-theologian had been influenced by the concept of the Via Negativa in theology. The
concept of the Negative or Apophatic way has been most boldly expressed by the 5th century PseudoDionysius, in a small treatise called The Mystical Theology (Dionysius the Areopagite 1993). Apophatic
thought is also presented in the writings of other Byzantine philosophers and theologians such as
Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory the Theologian, Saint John Chrysostom, and Saint Maximus the
Confessor, and many others (Lossky 1991).

An exemplary apophatic description of God is taken from the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom:
God ineffable, beyond comprehension, invisible, beyond understanding, existing forever and
always the same. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew finds the apophatic way present in NeoPlatonism, and Scholasticism, and he writes in fact all religions adoptto one degree or another a
its transcendence of all formulations and definitions it rather identifies with personal encounter and a
loving relationship with God in the communication of prayer (Bartholomew 2008). In a similar sense
in Achenbachs approach the personal encounter and friendly relationship with the client stands central;
theorizing about the interaction in psychological or other terms cannot comprehend that event.

Nevertheless Achenbach gives some subtle suggestions, some road signs, that can help other
philosophers aiming to follow suit. Of these road signs, four basic ones are the following:

1. A sincere communication between the philosophical practitioner and the visitor, based on a
beyond-method method.
2. The importance of dialogue, as that which enlivens and flows from being.
3. Auslegena looking for explanationsin which the practitioner becomes united with the
problem, not by imparting his own understanding of it, but by giving the visitor a fresh impulse
to explain him or herself.
4. The innovative component of dialogue, the element of wonder in philosophical practice, which
does not allow for fixed viewpoints, standard attitudes, or permanent solutions.
Achenbachs approach has proven to be a beneficial and a secure philosophical way of aiding persons in
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fundamental negative approach to God. Typical of the Byzantine Orthodox negative theology is that in

Proceedings
thinking through the difficulties of daily life. Though some other philosophical practitioners may find it
desirable to develop and practice philosophical counseling after their own taste, I find that Achenbachs
ideas contain all that is needed for practicing philosophy in a responsible and professional way.

Philosophical psychoanalysis in the context of philosophical practice can be compared to philosophical
autobiographical narratives. These often demonstrate how one can understand the personal life outside
of the formally institutionalized ways of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In The Philosophers
Autobiography:
A Qualitative Study I demonstrate by analyzing in dept the autobiographies of Saint Augustine, Rousseau,
and Sartre that they came to self-understandings that were informed and transformed by their own
philosophical understandings. But not only these, but many other philosophers worldwide and throughout
the ages practiced self-reflection and self-transformation through different forms of autobiographical
writing. I listed about 200 references to philosophers with such autobiographical lives (Schuster 2003).
Some prominent among these are Plato, Aurelius, Abelard, Dante, John Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, and
Russell.
Studying these different lives shows how relatively of little importance Freudian or Jungian and other
medical psychoanalytic understandings are in the understanding of the lives of these great thinkers. There
are indeed multiple alternatives to a deep understanding of the self.
Byzantine Philosophy
To consider ancient practices of philosophy helpful for modern philosophical counseling maybe
questionable for some, yet when reading ancient texts persons are often surprised by how little the
human condition has changed. A current book by the title Facing the World: Orthodox Thoughts on
Global Perspectives (Archbishop Anastatasios 2003) shows how relevant Byzantine philosophy is for
contemporary issues such as human rights, globalization, environment, and dialogue for the understanding
of different religions.
Byzantine philosophy dates from Late Antiquity unto the Middle Ages, and it questions deeply our
ordinary daily lives, as well our modern day preoccupation with healing and personal happiness and wellbeing. At the other hand in its quest for the philosophical-spiritual realm it conveys great opportunities for
the healing of body, mind, and soul.
Byzantine philosophy blends Judaic, Christian, and Hellenistic ideas with a focus on knowing and
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following the way of life that has been exemplified by Christ.1 At the beginning of Christs public
appearance as teacher and healer, he read a passage from the Bible book Isaiah (61: 1), in which the
presence or anointing of the Spirit of the Lord is associated with encouraging those in need, healing the
broken hearted and the downtrodden, freeing those that are captivated, and making the blind to see. This
verse was then acknowledged as the future realization of Christs life from then on. The practitioners of
Byzantine philosophy accordingly focused on how it could be possible for them to acquire and remain
in this Spirit of the Lord. They found the way to such spiritual state of blessedness by obedience to the
Gospel commandments, and through practicing virtues, asceticism, and noetic, or philosophical prayer
(Metropolitan Hierotheos 2003; Igumen Chariton 1997). Spiritual readings and spiritual writings in words
or symbols (such as icon paintings) are as well considered mental prayer and may transform the life and
well-being of those participating in these activities.
The Byzantine sages strove for philosophical enlightenment. This striving for the best possible
understanding of all things is similar to philosophical counseling in having a philosophical conceptual
aim. Those that attained in lesser or greater extent the lofty aim of enlightenment, obtained additionally
therapeutic benefits for themselves and others.2 Unlike the many kinds of enlightenment known
from various other religious traditions, the Byzantines did not search for visions or spiritual gifts and
of Christ were the philosophy par excellence for them and were considered in many aspects similar
to ancient Greek philosophy. However, some scholars find that there are differences among the early
Christian theologians in regard to accepting philosophy as theology: some rejected philosophy, others
accepted it partly, and others embraced it all. (Viglas 2005, 1 (3), 5-9). But in general, for the Byzantines
philosophy was not the servant of theology, it was theology.
The sources that instruct in the Byzantine way of life are plenteous. Some of the classical texts in this
domain are The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (collections of sayings going back to the first centuries
of Christianity), The Institutions and The Conferences of John Cassian (4-5th century), The Evergetinos
(a Greek collection of spiritual concerns for which answers were assembled from records about saints
and sages up to the 11th century), and The Philokalia (Byzantine writings collected and edited in the
18th century with the subtitle: writings in which is explained how the mind is purified, illuminated, and
perfected through practical and contemplative ethical philosophy).
1 For Byzantine philosophy, see: Cavarnos 2003; Viglas 2006, p. 3, pp. 73-105; Tatakis 2007.
2 For sources on healing, see Larchet, 2002 and Father Kees, 2009-2011.
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revelations; their striving was essentially for being good and humble servants of Christ. The teachings

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It is possible to say that the 20th century saw a Byzantine revival (Louth 2008, 188-202), which is still
engulfing more and more people on a global scale. In the context of this talk I can only give directions for
further inquiries in this special branch of philosophy. The practical application of Byzantine studies for
workgroups or in individual dialogues on the virtuous life and other topics has proven to be rewarding
from a philosophical, therapeutic, and spiritual viewpoint. How philosophical counselors can introduce
and benefit from these old, yet ever new understandings I will exemplify in the continuation of this paper.
Some examples of Byzantine thought for daily life and for philosophical counseling sessions
When a philosophical counselor listens to the problems of the client, questions can be asked that help the
client to rethink and see the problem from a different perspective. It can also so be suggested that a client
reflects on philosophical or spiritual texts such as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (see an exemplary
selective reading further on in this paper). Also a particular topic can be discussed that seems helpful for
the client, and the topic is found in a Byzantine source. For example one can discuss the very different
conceptualization of death then and now. In our global society there seems to be very little time and
reason to think about death, and to come to terms with this issue many people go into therapy or read
psychological based information on the subject. Mourning about death, or being affected through it, in one
form or another, is soon considered pathological.
In the Byzantine area reflection on the subject dead was considered particularly beneficent for daily life.
Not only did the fear of eternal judgment caused persons to repent by daily remembering death, it had also
an effect on the legal system and on behavior in warfare. Since death was seen as a journey to a world of
no return, it was considered that persons had to be given a change to prepare themselves for the life in the
world to come, and this was a reason to spare the lives of criminals and soldiers on the battle field. Though
there was plenty of bloodshed in the many wars fought under the Byzantine Emperors, there was also a
respect for life that was exceptional for that age. The lives of persons were spared to give them a change
to repent. This reluctance to take a person, life, even when legally and morally permissible, is exceptional
in the history of mankind and surely merits further study. For it was not until well into the second half of
the twentieth century that such sentiments were forcefully expressed and received broad support. (Dennis
2001). In general Byzantines believed in an after life and death was a transitional matter. The only reason
for fear was if one was not prepared. Death was not the end of life but a change of life. As life itself was a
journey, so death was a journey. If you had packed the necessary provisions and if your documents were
in order, then you had nothing to fear and you would arrive safely at your new destination (Dennis 2001).
In the Evergetinos (Bishop Chrysostomos et al. 1988) Saint Ephraim the Syrian (306-373) explains the
Byzantine view on death as follows:
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For brothers and sisters, the period of time which we have at our disposal for repentance is our life
on earth. Indeed, happy and blissful is he who has never once fallen into the nets of the Enemy. If,
however, someone who was entangled in the nets of the Enemy has been able to break those nets
and escape from the captivity of the Devil, he too should consider himself blessed; for, though we
live in the flesh, in this way we are saved from the onslaught of the enemy of our souls, just as a
fish escapes from the nets of the fisherman. Because, as we know, if a fish is caught and succeeds
in breaking the net and dashing to the depths, he is saved as long as he is in water; but when he is
dragged up in the net by the fisherman to dry land, then he can no longer help himself. The exact
same thing happens to us: that is, as long as we live in the present life, we have received from God
the authority and power to break the bonds of the evil intentions of the enemy by ourselves and to
cast aside, through repentance, the burden of our sins, being most assuredly brought to salvation
and inheriting the Kingdom of God. However, if the fearful command of death falls upon us and
the soul leaves the body, and the body is placed deep in the tomb, then we are no longer able to
help ourselves, just as the fish, when it is taken out of water, after being caught by the fisherman
and safely placed in his fishing basket, cannot in any way be saved.
Father Ephraims saying on death may give persons a new perspective on death and life. And even for
those who do not believe in the existence of God there is good common sense in the idea that one has to
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live life now as good as possible.

Byzantine readings
There are various sources of for the sayings of the desert fathers. A good introduction to the different
texts is Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Harmless 2004).
The wisdom of the desert fathers is mostly expressed in short stories or in aphorisms. This category in
Byzantine philosophy is called patristic thought and is outlined by its narrative style such as in wisdom
literature. I selected the following exemplary sayings (Orthodoxwiki.org and Ward 1975) for reading
together with a client or for the client to read alone and contemplate on at home.3
3 Quotations are all cited from the copyright free site Orthodoxwiki.org with exception of those quotes marked as (Ward
1975).
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Abba Anthony
When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful
thoughts, he said to God, Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall
I do in my affliction? How can I be saved? A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony
saw a man like himself sitting at his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting
a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard
the angel saying to him, Do this and you will be saved. At these words, Anthony was filled with joy and
courage. He did this, and he was saved (Ward 1975).
Some brothers came to find Abba Anthony to tell him about the visions they were having, and to find out
from him if they were true or if they came from the demons. They had a donkey, which died on the way.
When they reached the place where the old man was, he said to them before they could ask him anything,
How was it that the little donkey died on the way here? They said, How do you know about that,
Father? And he told them, The demons showed me what happened. So they said, That was what we
came to question you about, for fear we were being deceived, for we have visions which often turn out to
be true. Thus the old man convinced them, by the example of the donkey that their visions came from the
demons (Ward 1975).
Abba Anthony said, I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, What
can get through from such snares? Then I heard a voice saying to me, Humility (Ward 1975).
Abba Abraham
Abba Abraham told of a man of Scetis who was a scribe and did not eat bread. A brother came to beg him
to copy a book. The old man whose spirit was engaged in contemplation, wrote, omitting some phrases
and with no punctuation. The brother, taking the book and wishing to punctuate it, noticed that words
were missing. So he said to the old man, Abba, there are some phrases missing. The old man said to him,
Go, and practice first that which is written, then come back and I will write the rest.
Abba Ammonas
Abba Ammonas was asked, What is the narrow and hard way? (Mt. 7.14) He replied, The narrow
and hard way is this, to control your thoughts, and to strip yourself of your own will, for the sake of God.
This is also the meaning of the sentence, Lo, we have left everything and followed you (Mt. 19.27).
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Abba Arsenius
It was said of him that he had a hollow in his chest channeled out by the tears which fell from his eyes all
his life while he sat at his manual work. When Abba Poemen learned that he was dead, he said weeping,
Truly you are blessed, Abba Arsenius, for you wept for yourself in this world! He who does not weep
for himself here below will weep eternally hereafter; so it is impossible not to weep, either voluntarily or
when compelled through suffering (i.e. the latter suffering in hell).
Abba Bessarion
Abba Doulas, the disciple of Abba Bessarion said, One day when we were walking beside the sea I was
thirsty and I said to Abba Bessarion, Father, I am very thirsty. He said a prayer and said to me, Drink
some of the sea water. The water proved sweet when I drank some. I even poured some into a leather
bottle for fear of being thirsty later on. Seeing this, the old man asked me why I was taking some. I said
to him, Forgive me, it is for fear of being thirsty later on. Then the old man said, God is here, God is
everywhere.
If the soul is vigilant and withdraws from all distraction and abandons its own will, then the spirit of God
invades it and it can conceive because it is free to do so.
Abba Daniel
Abba Daniel said, At Babylon the daughter of an important person was possessed by a devil. A monk
for whom her father had a great affection said to him, No-one can heal your daughter except some
anchorites whom I know; but if you ask them to do so, they will not agree because of their humility. Let
us therefore do this: when they come to the market, look as though you want to buy their goods and when
they come to receive the price, we will ask them to say a prayer and I believe she will be healed. When
they came to the market they found a disciple of the old men setting there selling their goods and they led
him away with the baskets, so that he should receive the price of them. But when the monk reached the
house, the woman possessed with the devil came and slapped him. But he only turned the other cheek,
according to the Lords Command (Matt. 5:39). The devil, tortured by this, cried out, What violence! The
commandment of Jesus drives me out. Immediately the woman was cleansed. When the old men came,
they told them what had happened and they glorified God saying, This is how the pride of the devil is
brought low, through the humility of the commandment of Christ(Ward 1975).
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Abba Cronius

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Abba Dioscorus
A brother questioned Abba Poemen in this way, My thoughts trouble me, making me put my sins aside,
and concern myself with my brothers faults. The old man told him the following story about Abba
Dioscorus (the monk), In his cell he wept over himself, while his disciple was sitting in another cell.
When the latter came to see the old man he asked him, Father, why are you weeping? I am weeping
over my sins, the old man answered him. Then his disciple said, You do not have any sins, Father. The
old man replied, Truly, my child, if I were allowed to see my sins, three or four men would not be enough
to weep for them.
Abba Elias
Abba Elias, the minister, said, What can sin do where there is penitence? And of what use is love where
there is pride?
Abba Evagrius
Abba Evagrius said, Take away temptations and no one will be saved.
Abba Hilarion
From Palestine, Abba Hilarion went to the mountain to Abba Anthony. Abba Anthony said to him, You
are a welcome torch which awakens the day. Abba Hilarion said, Peace to you, pillar of light, giving
light to the world.
Abba Hyperechius
It is better to eat meat and drink wine than to eat the flesh of ones brethren through slander.
Abba Isaiah
(Abba Isaiah) said to those who were making a good beginning by putting themselves under the direction
of the holy Fathers, As with purple dye, the first coloring is never lost. And, Just as young shoots are
easily trained back and bent, so it is with beginners who live in submission.
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Abba Isidore
Abba Isidore went one day to see Abba Theophilus, pope of Alexandria and when he returned to Scetis the
brethren asked him, What is going on in the city? But he said to them, Truly, brothers, I did not see the
face of anyone there, except that of the archbishop. Hearing this they were very anxious and said to him,
Has there been a disaster there, then, Abba? He said Not at all, but the thought of looking at anyone
did not get the better of me. At these words they were filled with admiration, and strengthened in their
intention of guarding the eyes from all distraction.
Abba Isidore the priest
(Abba Isidore the priest) said, If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride, but if you think highly
of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat. It is better for a man to eat meat than to be inflated
with pride and to glorify himself.
Abba John of the Cells
whom noble and powerful people came. Now one day she happened to be near the church and she wanted
to go in. The sub-deacon, who was standing at the doors, would not allow her to enter saying, You are
not worthy to enter the house of God, for you are impure. The Bishop heard the noise of their argument
and came out. Then the courtesan said to him, He will not let me enter the church. So the Bishop said
to her, You are not allowed to enter it, for you are not pure. She was filled with compunction and said
to him, Henceforth I will not commit fornication anymore. The bishop said to her, If you bring your
wealth here, I shall know that you will not commit fornication anymore. She brought her wealth and the
bishop burnt it all in the fire. Then she went into the church, weeping and saying, If this has happened to
me below, what would I not have suffered above? So she was converted and became a vessel of election.
Abba John the Dwarf
Abba John the Dwarf said, There was a spiritual old man who lived a secluded life. He was held in high
estimation in the city and enjoyed a great reputation. He was told that a certain old man, at the point of
death, was calling for him, to embrace him before he fell asleep. He thought to himself, if I go by day, men
will run after me, giving me great honor, and I shall not be at peace in all that. So I will go in the evening
in the darkness and I shall escape everyones notice. But lo, two angels were sent by God with lamps to
give him light. Then the whole city came out to see his glory. The more he wished to flee from glory, the
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Abba John of the Cells told us this story: There was in Egypt a very rich and beautiful courtesan, to

Proceedings
more he was glorified. In this was accomplished that which is written: He who humbles himself will be
exalted(Luke 14:11).
Abba John the Persian
It was said of Abba John the Persian that when some evildoers came to him, he took a basin and wanted to
wash their feet. But they were filled with confusion, and began to do penance.
Abba Lucius
Some of the monks who are called Euchites went to Enaton to see Abba Lucius. The Old man asked
them, What is your manual work? They said, We do not touch manual work but as the Apostle says,
we pray without ceasing. The old man asked them if they did not eat and they replied they did. So he
said to them When you are eating, who prays for you then? Again he asked them if they did not sleep
and they replied they did. And he said to them, When you are asleep, who prays for you then? They
could not find any answer to give him. He said to them, Forgive me, but you do not act as you speak.
I will show you how, while doing my manual work, I pray without interruption. I sit down with God,
soaking my reeds and plaiting my ropes, and I say God, have mercy on me, according to your great
goodness and according to the multitude of your mercies, save me from my sins. So he asked them if
this were not prayer and they replied it was. Then he said to them, So when I have spend the whole day
working and praying, making thirteen pieces of money more or less, I put two pieces of money outside
the door and I pay for my food with the rest of the money. He who takes the two pieces of money prays
for me when I am eating and when I am sleeping; so, by the grace of God, I fulfill the precept to pray
without ceasing.
Abba Macarius
One day Abba Macarius the Great came to Abba Anthonys dwelling on the mountain. When he knocked
on the door, Anthony came out to him and said to him, Who are you? He replied, I am Macarius. Then
Anthony went inside and shut the door leaving him there. Later, seeing his patience, he opened the door
and received Macarius with joy, saying to him, I have wanted to see you for a long time, having heard
about you. He rendered him all the duties of hospitality and made him rest for he was very tired. When
evening came, Abba Anthony soaked some palm-leaves for himself, and Abba Macarius said to him, Allow
me to soak some for myself. He replied: Do so. Having made a large bundle, he soaked them. Then
sitting down in the evening they spoke of the salvation of the soul, while they plaited the leaves. The rope
which Macarius was making hung down through the window in the cave. Going in early, blessed Anthony
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saw the length of Abba Macarius rope and said, Great power comes out of these hands (Ward 1975).
Abba Macarius was asked, How should one pray? The old man said, There is no need at all to make
long discourses; it is enough to stretch out ones hands and say, Lord, as you will, and as you know, have
mercy. And if the conflict grows fiercer say, Lord, help! He knows very well what we need and he
shows us his mercy (Ward 1975).
Abba Matoes
A brother went to Abba Matoes and said to him, How is it that the monks of Scetis did more than the
Scriptures required in loving their enemies more than themselves? Abba Matoes said to him, As for me I
have not yet managed to love those who love me as I love myself.
Abba Moses
It happened that Abba Moses was struggling with the temptation of fornication. Unable to stay any longer
in the cell, he went and told Abba Isidore. The old man exhorted him to return to his cell. But he refused,
saying, Abba, I cannot. Then Abba Isidore took Moses out onto the terrace and said to him, Look
an attack. Then Abba Isidore said to him, Look towards the east. He turned and saw an innumerable
multitude of holy angels shining with glory. Abba Isidore said, See, these are sent by the Lord to the
saints to bring them help, while those in the west fight against them. Those who are with us are more in
number than they are. Then Abba Moses gave thanks to God plucked up courage and returned to his cell
(Ward 1975).
Abba Pambo
The same Abba Theophilus, the archbishop, came to Scetis one day. The brethren who were assembled
said to Abba Pambo, Say something to the Archbishop, so that he may be edified. The old man said to
them, If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech.
Abba Pimen
A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others, he is babbling ceaselessly. But there
may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent, that is, he says nothing that is
not profitable.
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towards the west. He looked and saw hordes of demons flying about and making a noise before launching

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Amma Theodora
Amma Theodora said, Let us strive to enter by the narrow gate, Just as the trees, if they have not stood
before the winters storms cannot bear fruit, so it is with us; this present age is a storm and it is only
through many trials and temptations that we can obtain an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven.
She also said that neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true
humility can do that. There was an anchorite who was able to banish the demons; and he asked them, What
makes you go away? Is it fasting? They replied, We do not eat or drink. Is it vigils? They replied,
We do not sleep. Is it separation from the world? We live in the deserts. What power sends you away
then? They said, Nothing can overcome us, but only humility. Do you see how humility is victorious
over the demons?
Abba Theodore
It was said about (Abba Theodore) that, though he was made a deacon at Scetis he refused to exercise
the office and fled to many places from it. Each time the old men brought him back to Scetis, saying, Do
not leave your diaconate. Abba Theodore said to them, Let me pray God that he may tell me for certain
whether I ought to take my part in the liturgy. Then he prayed God in this manner, If it is your will that
I should stand in this place then make me certain of it. Then appeared to him a column of fire, reaching
from earth to heaven, and a voice said to him, If you can become like this pillar, go be a deacon. On
hearing this he decided never to accept the office. When he went to church the brethren bowed before him
saying, If you do not wish to be a deacon, at least hold the chalice. But he refused, saying, If you do not
leave me alone, I shall leave this place. So they left him in peace.
Abba Tithoes
The way of humility is this: self-control, prayer, and thinking yourself inferior to all creatures.
Abba Zacharias
One day Abba Moses said to brother Zacharias, Tell me what I ought to do? At these words the latter
threw himself on the ground at the old mans feet and said, Are you asking me, Father? The old man said
to him Believe me, Zacharias, my son, I have seen the Holy Spirit descending upon you and since then I
am constrained to ask you. Then Zacharias drew his hood off his head put it under his feet and trampled
on it, saying, The man who does not let himself be treated thus, cannot become a monk.
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Abba Zeno
Abba Zeno said, If a man wants God to hear his prayer quickly, then before he prays for anything else,
even his own soul, when he stands and stretches out his hands towards God, he must pray with all his
heart for his enemies. Through this action God will hear everything that he asks.
Conclusion
Philosophical counselors may encourage persons to transcend or change their difficult private, social,
or political situations, through practicing the philosophical understandings they together arrive at in
philosophical counseling sessions.
Though Byzantine philosophy may not be interesting for everybody, for the philosophical counselors, and
clients that it does appeal to, it can be a rich source of inspiration, philosophical enlightenment, and even
healing. When persons want to transform their lives, they often need a living example of transformation.
From various Byzantine texts, and personal contacts with practitioners of the Byzantine way, a modern
philosophical counselor can learn to a great extent how to achieve a virtuous and ascetic life in which
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354
Healing Practices in the Humanities
Kayama Rika
Rikkyo University
Seeing from my viewpoint as a psychiatrist, Japanese society has been troubled by various symptoms.
I think they might not simply be Japanese cultural phenomena; rather, they might be indicators of a
pandemic of psychological problems that the global society will have to face in the near future. So I will
introduce some of them which became serious social problem in recent years in Japan.
to tentative statistics recently released by the National Police Agency.

2. Bullying in the schoolyard or in the hallways between classes is a common occurrence in many
countries. But in Japan, ijime, bullying at school, is a much more serious social problem. In
Japan, this bullying behavior sometimes escalates to the point where the victim commits suicide.
3. Hikikomori, or severe social withdrawal, in Japans young people has been a prominent public
mental health concern since around 2000. On the other hand, more recent, concern is a syndrome
dubbed modern-type depression. This catchy name has quickly and widely spread to the public
via Japans mass media and internet-related media, yet there is no consensus guideline for its
diagnosis and treatment, which has led to confusion when dealing with the disorder in clinical
practice.
4. Recently, young people in Japan have begun to use new electronic media technologies, including
cell phones and the Internet, with increasing frequency. But anonymous communication among
adolescents often involves cyber-bullying, which can lead to mental health problems in victims.
5. It appears new type of ultranationalist groups in Japan. The groups are openly anti-foreign in
their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations. They are
considered to be the Net far right (so called Neto-uyo), because they are loosely organized
via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations. At other times, they are a virtual
community that maintains its own Web sites to announce the times and places of protests, swap
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information and post video recordings of their demonstrations. Most of their members appear to
be young men. Kunio Suzuki, one of the members of well-known far-right group says the group
is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his
group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States.
It seems they are young men and women who feel disenfranchised and disappointed in the society and their
leaders. They have got damaged. They always feel strong anxiety but they cant face it directly, so they are
looking for someone to project their inner world.
Now, many young voters have embraced a largely unknown new party led by a brash young leader who
promises a drastic overhaul of the government. That party, the Japan Restoration Association, was formally
inaugurated in September 2012, by its leader, the mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto. This 43-year-old
man former television commentator and a lawyer came out of nowhere four years ago to electrify Osaka
and his ability to do what few national leaders have seemed able to: push through painful changes. Mr.
Hashimoto battled labor unions to slash deficit-ridden budgets and impose performance requirements on
schoolteachers.
Now, he is taking his antiestablishment insurgency to the national stage, naming about 350 candidates,
most of them political neophytes trained at Mr. Hashimotos own political cram school, to run in
parliamentary elections expected as soon as November. His charisma has made the group a feared force in
Japanese politics, seemingly overnight.
In the interview by the newspaper the following, he emphasized the necessity for competition.
Question: We first want to ask you about your vision for Japanese society that you want to realize as
a politician. Will you pursue economic growth at any cost, or would you be satisfied with a lifestyle
that matches the current state of the nation? Which are you seeking?
Hashimoto: The level of lifestyle of the Japanese right now from a global perspective is a luxurious
one equivalent to a five-star hotel ranking. Clean water flows when one turns on the faucet and the
level of education and medicine is high. There is unemployment insurance and pension and as a last
gap, there is also public welfare. To enjoy all that requires a great deal of cost. The decision must
first be made on whether we can maintain that level or not. While there is no need to seek a level
for Japan that goes beyond the current one, I want to at least maintain that current level (Hashimoto:
Give politicians carte blanche on policies, The Asahi Shimbun, February 13, 2012).
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At the same time, He insisted that people needed to have the strength which can stand the pressure of the
competition.
Q: You are a strong person, but not everyone in society is strong. What would you say to such
people?
A: I would ask them: Are you willing to allow the level of lifestyle in Japan to fall? Would you be
happy with a level similar to Southeast Asia? If people want to maintain Japan at the current
level, then people will have to make the effort.
And it is most characteristic that he told a form of carte blanche by electors is required to the politician.
Q: While you have called for a politics that can decide, would that not lead to self-righteousness
among leaders?
A: Although we would allow discussions to be made fully, in the end a decision will have to be
made. The more you recognize and allow a wide variety of value systems, the greater the need
people selected by the voters should be given the authority to decide. I believe that is the role of
elections.
Although lawyers can only do what is written in the contract of engagement, this is not the
case with politicians. It will not be possible to include everything in a campaign manifesto that
is presented to the voters. Politicians would be unable to act if their range of discretion was
narrowed through a long list of specific policy measures. In elections, candidates should set out
the general direction in their appeals to the public. It would be a form of carte blanche.
I think there is a serious pathology which should be treated in the Japanese society.
What went through our minds as we enthusiastically awaited for the appearance of Hashimoto was a quiet
public will that entreated him to do somethingto do anything he could to liberate us from the anxiety
and fear. While I use the term quiet because of the formless nature of this something we wanted, I have
also explained that it was not a calm or casual request rather it required urgent action without delay.
Hashimoto was greeted with enthusiasm because he clarified directions such as the following:
Approach everything you come up against by making it simple and easy to understand.
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for a method of making a decision. That is what I mean by a democracy that can decide. The

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Set forth clear opposing schemes consisting of such things as new and old, as well as ally and
enemy.
Whittle down your choices into two and give a clear positive or negative response to both.
However, I have noted that when considered from a psychopathological perspective, all these directions are
somewhat unsound defence mechanisms for avoiding anxiety or conflict, and that by their very nature they
do not lead to solutions.
One characteristic of particular concern is that many of these directions are similar to a number of the
primitive defence mechanisms that can be considered even more psychological in nature than the emotional
defence mechanisms described by Freud. In Chapter three, I have explained how the binary choice between
black or white is similar to the emotional mechanism of splitting.
The concept of splitting has been attributed to the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, a contemporary of
Freuds, and studies have suggested that it then caught Freuds attention, and finally being clearly defined
by Freuds daughter, Anna Freud.
American psychoanalyst Otto F. Kernberg used the concept of splitting to explain the pathology of
borderline personality disorder. According to Kernberg, many of the inner aspects of those with borderline
personalities consist of bad parts and unpleasant parts. These parts of their personality sometimes cause
them to attack and destroy both themselves and others, which they know brings ruin both on themselves
and others.
Because of this, the defence mechanisms that they take as a last resort to protect both themselves and others
are classified as splitting. By creating, separating and protecting completely good things in their internal
and external worlds, they strive to prevent themselves from being tainted by their bad and unpleasant parts.
This behavior is similar to someone whose room is mostly dirty, creating a completely clean corner and
calling it their sanctuary and keeping only this part of their room spotless. However, the more they
maintain their sanctuary, the more noticeable the surrounding grime becomes and their irritation with it
grows stronger.
The frightening aspect of this process is that in some cases, these values of good parts/good people and bad
parts/bad people that they have defined in their minds suddenly reverse places. Returning to the example of
the room, what they had been maintaining as their sanctuary suddenly becomes something alarming; they
feel contaminated by what they now feel is All a big lie! It is because of this lie that I cannot breathe! and
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then launch an all-out assault against this part. In this instant, though, they are besieged with severe regret
over what they have done, lamenting that I destroyed such an important thing. Why did I do that? thus
allowing their innate unpleasant parts to increase rapidly with sentiments such as I really am despicable!
People with borderline personalities whose values are always determined on the basis of whether they
are accepted by those dear to them are constantly beset by feelings of emptiness resulting from their
fundamental lack of understanding of who these really are. Such people feel that their lives are great when
many people like them and they are popular, during which times they have a sense of being useful to
others; however, the moment they are alone, a sense of emptiness plagues them and they feel that I might
as well be dead. Some even experience suicidal ideation.
Although splittingi.e. between these extreme dichotomies or choices between two thingsis a
pathological emotional mechanism, it also has certain benefits. It allows people to feel that they need not
face their anxieties or emotional problems and that they need not give them any more attention than they
already have.
Naturally, a number of other phenomena come into existence through the mechanism of splitting,
from modern Japanese politics to the simplified yardstick of to sell or not to selli.e. market
fundamentalismthat forms the foundations of our modern economic world.
So, what exactly is the nature of the anxiety and conflict in society that market fundamentalism strives to
avoid through the mechanism of splitting? Is this not a situation in which, according respect to the minority,
meaningful products for humanity can also be found among those that do not sell and a products good
quality does not mean it will sell well; in fact, even bad products sometimes become bestsellers?
In other words, as long as market fundamentalism persists, uncertain elements and market complexities
that cannot be explained using simple logic can all be dealt with as exceptions. This approach makes it
acceptable to avert ones eyes from the elements of humanity that are complex or difficult to understand.
Since the second half of the 20th century, human beings have been looking away from these complex
and incomprehensible aspects by mobilizing a variety of forces to visualise and systematise splitting-like
emotional attitudes in creating market fundamentalism. They have thus created a world in which one does
not have to predict circumstances that favour minorities nor even acknowledge the possibility that such
unforeseen circumstances may occur.
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However, splitting is not a phenomenon we see only in individuals mental disorders.

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In a sense, people living in this world find it extremely comfortable, a world with no troubling thoughts,
where one need not worry about things.
As long as people continue to choose between only yes and no in the choices presented to them, wait for
someone to check their answers with a sense of anxiety and are happy or sad depending on whether they
got it right or wrong, only then such people survive without feeling doubt, shame or pain because they are
never rationally aware that they are being ruled by bipartite thoughts. Their psychological worlds, though,
are completely devoid of profundity, like a single stick that consists solely of a black end and a white end
that one spins to make a decision.
When the stick is spun around, will the result each time be black or white? People with borderline
personality disorders are convinced that these colours genuinely represent their own feelings and will,
which they believe might reverse at any given moment. In addition, it is not so much for the individual
concerned who is worried but those around him or her who are constantly affected by that person. More
specifically, people with these disorders also seem unable to store the types of conflicts in their minds
which are the subjects of traditional psychoanalysis. That said, people with these disorders have slight
worries of their own because their personality does not always make them happy. They are constantly
in a state of anxiety over whether they will make the wrong choice next time, as a result of which they
sometimes expend all of their energy worrying and exhaust themselves. Furthermore, as they constantly
experience unreasoning irritation and anger in their daily lives and as long as they avoid confronting the
fundamental sources of conflict, they cannot understand why they are irritated. In an unending cycle, they
seek even greater sources of stimulus, desiring more extreme choices or applaud those involved in a harsh
battle over right or wrong in place of them and further exhaust themselves.
In recent years, in addition to a vague sense of anxiety or feelings of depression the reason for which they
cannot explain, 90% of first-time patients visiting consultation rooms report feeling very irritated or as
if they are about to lose their temper. That is, this feeling of depression does not develop into a deep and
complex depression but quickly becomes feelings and behaviours that defy explanation such as irritation, a
vague sadness or annoyance.
In her book Why Psychoanalysis? (New York, Columbia University Press, 2003), French psychoanalyst
lisabeth Roudinesco states the following:
Patients reject psychotherapy that takes a long time and demand that psychotherapists should cure
them of their irritation and sadness very quickly. When the psychotherapist cautions them that this
process will take time and that they need to discover their innermost self, a self that is completely
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unknown to them, they frown in displeasure and say that they do not have time for such things and
that the psychotherapist must have some kind of device or medicinesomething more scientific
that will help them get better more quickly. They believe that a form of therapy that works quickly
and gives visible and easy-to-understand results is more scientific. This provides another example
of such patients using the emotional defence mechanisms highlighted in Chapter One.
However, looking back through history, we see examples in which this type of efficient and rational thought
patternone that fits well with contemporary societys behaviours such as not thinking about what cannot
be seen, impatience with processes and preferring simple bipartite choiceshas brought about terrible
mistakes. I refer here to tragedies brought about by despotism. Japan, too, has committed such mistakes.
Conclusion
To this point, I have attempted to explain the types of psychological conditions that have been imposed
upon those people living in Japan since the economic bubble burst. These psychological conditions are in
general by no means completely healthy from the psychiatric perspective, and it is unclear whether they
cause or result from psychological abnormalities. However, I have clarified the following phenomena that
The popularization of short sentence-type social media and the unquestioning belief of information
derived through these
Launching an all-out attack on enemies whom someone has identified
Forced bipartite choice to either completely agree or disagree with opinions on divisive types of
issues
Expectations of a leader who makes everything simple and clear, hoping to rely on that leader to
resolve all issues
In discussing all these phenomena, I found that people experiencing strong anxiety and conflict do not
attempt to confront their feelings and causes in order to gain insights into them, but they resort to desperate
measures in an attempt to maintain their emotional stability. Psychiatrists apply a variety of terms to this
behaviour, including rationalization, denial, manic defence, projective identification and splitting.
These psychological defence mechanisms were explained by such psychoanalysts as Sigmund Freud, Anna
Freud and Melanie Klein.
A problematic characteristic of these psychological defence mechanisms is that the people who use them
do not realise that they are doing so. They are also convinced that they are only opposing someone elses
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currently exist in Japan:

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unfair actions. During the course of clinical practice, we carefully explain to patients that they are not
getting angry because of someone elses unfair actions but because they are avoiding confronting their
own problems by projecting problems within themselves on enemies in their immediate surroundings.
Furthermore, the only solution to their problems is to strengthen and to resolve them and to help face their
inner selves. This solution is what I mean by gaining insights.
Of course, this process takes considerable time and effort and requires both the patient and the practitioner
to experience certain pains. However, failure to complete this process will not solve the issues; no
matter how many times they lash out at those they feel have wronged them, their action will provide only
momentary relief.
At the personal level, this type of incident may result in simply severing connections with the person at
whom they have lashed out. However, things are different when it comes to society and other countries.
Looking back through history, we find in all cases of war a type of logic based on psychological defence
mechanisms, such as turning attention away from domestic anxieties or attacking another country to deny a
decline in ones own national strength.
In her book, Even so, Japan Chose to go to War (Asahi Shuppansha, 2009), Japanese historian Yoko Kato
states that when Japan entered the Pacific Wari.e. when it mounted a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour
its national strength, both military and economic, was that of a country that could not fight a protracted
war in any real sense. She introduces someone who calmly reacts to these circumstances, believed that if
Japan could not fight a protracted war, it should have acknowledged from the outset that it could not enter
this war. Hironori Mizuno, a military critic despite his experience as a navy captain, advocated pacifism at
the end of the Taisho period/early Showa period, an era of pervasive militarism.
However, with his extremely decent opinions, Mizuno chose to criticise the war and ignore contemporary
military authorities. He stated that Japan has lost its capability to engage in an unaided war. However,
much it expands its navy armaments during times of peace, in the end it amounts to little more than a house
built of cards. To quote Kato:
[] [C]itizens do not take discussions of this kind seriously. The discussion soon moves on to other
subjects. We cannot fight a protracted war; therefore, do we use a geographical pincer movement
on the Soviet Union, or do we make a pre-emptive strike? In other words, it becomes a two-way
choice.
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Why do military authorities and citizens fail to take discussions of this type seriously and move on to
other subjects? Why did they frame this foolish choice in which, although the country could not endure
a protracted war, events proceeded in a war-like direction with a final decision to initiate a pre-emptive
strike, regardless of the facts? It would seem that behind this course of action was a psychological defence
mechanism in which Japan ignored its anxieties, fears and trepidation, and convinced itself that it was those
fiendish Americans and British who were in the wrong and that Japan was completely in the right and had
limitless power (Remark 2).
At the individual level, this defence mechanism may simply mean an end to relations with the person
attacked, but it can lead to tragedies such as the Pacific War at the national level. Similar decisions were
driven by this same mechanism that may have been made throughout history; however, we are not talking
here about events that occurred a thousand years ago or on the other side of the world. The Pacific War
occurred a mere several decades ago in Japan, within the lifetime of those now experiencing the economic
crisis.
Human beings mobilise psychological defence mechanisms unconsciously and without understanding this
process, and so they continue to vehemently deny that they are doing so. Because they fail to realise what
tragedies.
To repeat, this is human nature. Although Freud first identified the Oedipus Complex in Greek drama, it
is the source of a range of behaviours and symptoms that constitute the unchanging essence of humanity
across all of recorded history. At the subconscious level that is our core, people do not change so easily.
Some might argue that although this mechanism might have driven the decision to begin the Pacific
War, we would not make such an ill-considered decision in the 21st century. This line of reasoning is
unpersuasive because it ignores the operation of the subconscious defence mechanism. After all, we must
remember that projecting ones latent anxieties and fears onto the outside world and attempting to attack
and destroy them in that context results in only momentary feelings of wellbeing.
With this behaviours characteristics in mind, how should we attempt to resolve these issues? In presentday society, when a person states their opinion, others expect them to present concrete proposals or
counterproposals when refuting anothers opinion. Although this expectation might at first glance appear to
be constructive, as we have said, it is also in some ways a pathological response.
Thus, by merely stating that the behaviours and events that currently occur in society result from
psychological defence mechanisms and that we must be aware of this process, which strikes me as
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they are doing, they sometimes make terrible mistakes and irrational decisions, thus causing disastrous

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somewhat irresponsible unless one further offers concrete proposals to resolve this problem. Therefore, I
propose the following strategies:
(1) Knowing history
As stated above, human beings do not change easily, even over the course of centuries. They repeat the
same mistakes time and again. In Katos aforementioned book, she states the following:
I ardently wish to be able to draw upon a wide range of case studies from among the information I
have obtained, find the most appropriate one and select instances from history and use them.
Furthermore, drawing upon the ideas of historian Ernest May, she appeals to administrators to want to
know about history. I also think that understanding history is desirable. Members of the general public
may be caught up in work and their daily lives and they lack time to reflect upon history; despite this
situationor perhaps precisely because of itsocietys leaders need to examine history and learn from it.
(2) Exercising ones imagination
The fact that we live in a world in which vast sums of money travel around the globe in an instant, in
activities such as online trading, does not mean that we need to make every decision instantly. In this paper,
I have highlighted the dangers of becoming excessively drawn into the world of finance or the Internet and
making instantaneous judgments and decisions.
Furthermore, a simple pair of opposing options is not appropriate for resolving every issue; instead, such
a limited either/or choice forces us to declare a position with which we agree only in part, when the best
option may actually be neither of those presented.
By underpinning peoples statements and behaviours, we find a number of hidden reasons, backgrounds
and internal motives that make them say or do things. Even an email that simply says Okay might
represent involved irresolution or a complex sequence of events leading to that decision. We need to
develop greater empathy for what people are thinking and we need to use our imagination both for
that empathy and for resolving problems. The assumption that a persons verbal statements or physical
behaviours represent the sum total of that person can lead to serious misunderstandings, which, in the
societal or national context, develop into senseless wars and tragedies.
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(3) Writing things down

We must now ask by what means we should develop empathy for others thoughts and feelings and
consider them during the appropriately deliberative process of making judgments.
While there is no method for achieving this goal, I feel that diligently writing things down would be useful.
Furthermore, rather than simply reporting things objectively, it is important to participate while observing
and creating what in anthropological terms is called an ethnographic account.
In his book, Clinical Writing: An Ethnography for Psychiatric Nurses (Igaku Shoin, 2008), Kazumasa
Matsuzawa recommends that rather than recording objective data on a medical card like a doctor, the ward
nurses use such ethnographic accounts to create records while maintaining deep involvement with patients.
He advises the following:
As stated, in providing care to patients, we nurses daily experience a range of sympathetic and
emotional types of fatigue. Sometimes the exhaustion is overwhelming and we feel crushed by the
burden; sometimes we just stand there wordlessly; sometimes we become angry; and, at other times
Matsuzawa continues with an even so and asserts, I believe that new issues remain as they were in
how we locate, evaluate and treat the significance of these feelings in nurses subjective domain for specific
nursing activities.
Because of this situation, we need to describe all aspects of these events and explain the complex elements
and contexts that constitute them through detailed ethnographic investigations and reconstructions.
I believe that recording ones own feelingincluding negative oneswhile recognizing and accepting
them allows one to reflect upon them and reconstruct reality from that basis.
This method, I feel, is valideven essentialnot only for those in the nursing profession but also in our
daily lives.
Records such as 140-character long Twitter messages or photographs posted on Facebook as a record of the
days events are not valid substitutes. We need to take sufficient time in our lives to think about things. And
above all else, we also need a bit of courage to honestly confront the feelings that arise from this process.
The key to the entire process is our decision to exhibit this bit of courage. Although that alone may seem an
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we can do nothing and are at our wits end; at still other times we feel a bit of joy in our hearts.

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extremely small choice, I believe it will result in important improvements.

In psychoanalysis, there is the theory of projective identification.It is a term first used byMelanie
Klein to describe a process whereby parts of the ego are thought of as forced into another person who is
then expected to become identified with whatever has been projected. Japanese young people with strong
anxiety choose friends, themselves, and foreigners as obvious target. That is, projective identification is
one of bad way of healing that they found by themselves.
Next, I would like to point out another curious phenomenon in Japan.
It is the booming of New Age science. Especially there are many books by native Japanese authors on
questions of spiritual energy, spiritual awakening and life after death. The various Japanese terms for
spiritual and spirituality have become more and more popular, although it is difficult to discern what
they actually mean. However, every year many incidents and troubles occur related to fake or evil spiritual
counsellors.
If they are not fake and evil, there are still serious problems. People sometimes depend on their counsellor
deeply, so they cannot decide anything by themselves. I think it also one of the ways of healing which is
not suitable.
Then what is the better solution for these serious social symptoms? I think it is no way to heal the people
without facing their inner anxiety or fear for the own society and the features.
In psychoanalysis, insight is a process whereby one grasps a previously misunderstood aspect of ones own
mental dynamics. It refers to a specific moment, observable during the treatment, when the patient becomes
aware of an inner conflict, an instinctual impulse, a defence, or the like, that was previously repressed or
disavowed and that, when it emerges into consciousness, elicits surprise and a sense of discovery.
This will be a hard way and it takes long time to get insight for every young people in Japan and other
countries, however it is the last chance toachieve not the current diversion or comfort but the true healing.
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Healing Practices in the Humanities: A Search in Progress
Jeanette Fourie
Lyndi Fourie Foundation
This South African journey from Physiotherapy lecturer at University of Cape Town to a Quantum
Energy Coach has been initially excruciating and now an exciting adventure. It started with the death of
our daughter Lyndi in Dec 1993 at the hands of the Azanian Peoples Liberation Army. The multiple roads
to find healing for myself and for the men who were directly responsible for her death, now includes
a passion for healing for all ex-combatants in SA who still suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Eighteen years since South Africa embarked on a democratic government with Nelson Mandela at the
helm, and the apartheid autocracy at an end, we are experiencing growing poverty, crime, corruption and
political uncertainty.
This paper will cover my personal journey with regard to helpful modalities of healing experienced by
myself and then extrapolate the possibilities of using these in; communities, workplaces, national and
universal settings.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-1998) started the process of conciliation in South
Africa, where in spite of many positive results; it has left a trail of unhappy people in the wake of having
their wounds reopened without repair, in itself a further trauma. Psychological assistance was offered to
survivors, however, it is not honoured by African Traditional beliefs, nor by many who consider therapy
to indicate that one suffers from mental instability, and so went largely unused. Political perpetrators were
not offered any therapeutic assistance, even after receiving amnesty.
I appeared at the Commission of enquiry which dealt with our daughters death and found it helpful, in
that I could hear the young men who attacked and witness their recounting of the chants of delight that
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evening en route to the Heidelberg Tavern. They were saving their people and South Africa from ongoing
oppression and their supporters cheered and laughed. It was difficult to hear their joy in the context of our
daughters death. I took the opportunity to tell them who Lyndi was and that she could have been their
friend, working for change in SA. Now she is dead!
This paper will cover the theory of trauma, healing courses which I have attended and trained in to find
help for those suffering from (PTSD) and the resultant addictions, and abuse to which their families
are subject. The most recent Healing of Beliefs through Quantum Energy Coaching is a remarkable,
uncomplicated, and fast way of transforming the lives of individuals, their families and I trust also their
communities, our nations and the world.
Rabbi Twerski a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and medical
director of the Gateway Rehabilitation Centre in Pittsburgh USA is quoted in the South African Sunday
Independent Newspaper of 4 September 2005 as saying
After half a century in psychiatric practice, I know without a doubt that the source of addiction
is spiritual deficiency. Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings are
spiritual by nature and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery. A patient of Twerskis helped
him to understand that the cure to addiction was not to be found in the medical or psychiatric realm
because the source of addiction does not lie there. It goes without saying that Twerski strongly
urges people suffering from addiction problems to join Alcoholics Anonymous or a recovery
programme based on the Twelve Steps. These are spiritual growth programmes that nurture the
development of self-esteem and self-forgiveness, which are the essential ingredients of happiness
he states. It is about overcoming strong emotions like anger and resentment that destroy the
spiritual nature of human beings and drive millions of people towards addiction.
What is Twerski referring to by the spiritual nature of human beings? If Twerski is correct what is it that
we need to direct our energy towards in order to facilitate healing from addiction?
The American Heritage Dictionary (1975) defines spiritual as: 1. Of, relating to, consisting of or having
the nature of spirit; not tangible or material. 2. Of, concerned with, or affecting the soul. 3. Of, from, or
pertaining to God; deific. 4. Of or belonging to a church or religion; ecclesiastical; sacred. 5. Pertaining to
or having the nature of spirits; supernatural [] 9. The emotional nature in man as distinguished from his
mind and intellect.
Soul is defined as: 1. The animating and vital principle in man credited with the faculties of thought,
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action, and emotion and conceived as forming an immaterial entity distinguished from but temporally
coexistent with his body. 2. Theology. The spiritual nature of man considered in relation to God, regarded
as immortal, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state. 3.
The disembodied spirit of a dead human being; a ghost; shade.
Wikipedia has a broader and more recent and embracing approach to defining spirituality: Spirituality
is belief in an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality1; an inner path enabling a person to discover the
essence of his/her being; or the deepest values and meanings by which people live. 2 Spiritual practices,
including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop an individuals inner life.
Spiritual experiences can include being connected to a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self;
joining with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos; or with the divine
realm.3 Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life.4 It can encompass
belief in immaterial realities or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world.
Considering Twerskis statement that addiction is the deficiency of spirituality, Is it likely that the
disconnection of the human from self, others and the Divine, or centre of the Universe is the challenge we
face? And how do we facilitate connection with self, other and transcendence or connection with a greater
I discovered personally how this happens as an adult, when hurt and pain are a constant part of ones daily
life. Mine was the experience of abuse as a woman and the death of Lyndi. Imagine how much more
serious this hurt and pain of abuse and violence is as a child. I have formulated a law of humanness in an
attempt to understand this process; and then added the experience of others in relation to the role of trauma
and violence.
A Law of humanness
I know for my own self, that when I have been hurt, I hurt back. At times in the most unconscious
(unplanned) way - I call this the law of humanness - it tends to perpetuate hurt, which can get way out
1 Ewert Cousins, preface to Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, Modern Esoteric Spirituality, Crossroad Publishing,
1992.
2 Philip Sheldrake, A Brief History of Spirituality, Wiley-Blackwell 2007, pp. 1-2.
3 Margaret A. Burkhardt and Mary Gail Nagai-Jacobson Spirituality: Living our Connectedness, Delmar Cengage Learning,
2001, p. xiii.
4 Kees Waaijman, Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods. Leuven: Peeters, 2002, p. 1.
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of hand. Richard Holloway5 says it like this: We seem to have a wired-in instinct for retributive justice,
for getting even with those who cause us hurt. If we are too weak to take straightforward revenge, we
sometimes find surreptitious ways of getting back at our tormentors. Like doing and saying unspeakable
things behind the backs of those who dominate and bully us, or rationalise the taking of pens or more
from the workplace where relationships are less than collaborative and the boss too wealthy anyway! This
understanding has led me to believe that evil is exercising our potential to hurt ourselves and others.
James Gilligan6, a psychiatrist who worked for over two decades in the Massachusetts prison system
with the most violent prisoners and the criminally insane, found that shame and then guilt are the deadly
emotions which cause violence (See Hawkins, Map of Consciousness, p.10). Shame works to deaden
the feelings of being human, and it is the breeding ground of rage. Unfortunately the retributive justice
practiced in most prison systems causes more shame and humiliation. Shame a boy in his home, shame
a group in its neighborhood and you are likely to get responses you dont like. Shame a petty criminal
in prison, and you may get a serial murderer after his term has been served. Gilligans perspective is not
aimed at having us pardon those who have broken the law; he believes that understanding the causes of
this epidemic of violence is the first step towards preventing it for future generations.
Richard Rhodes7 recounts research done by Lonnie Athens who experienced the trauma of a home where
his father beat and demeaned his mother and siblings. As an adult Athens did research in prisons to find
out: Why they kill? This is the result of that research which nearly cost him his life when a prisoner
attacked him:
Four stages of violentization
Prevention
1. Brutalization seeing others suffer violence.
Stop physical punishment of children
Personal horrification (father on mother is the
as acceptable behaviour
worst - because of the confusion with loving)

2. Belligerence A response to powerlessness
Mobilise support rather than isolating
picked up at home, school or in neighbourhood
and rejecting the child
3. Violent Performance exultant, proud to be
Provide alternative means of dealing
5 Holloway R. On Forgiveness - How can We Forgive the Unforgiveable? Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate Books, 2002.
6 Gilligan J. Violence - Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York, USA: G. P. Putnams Sons, 1996.
7 Rhodes Richard. Why They Kill The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, Vintage Publishers, USA. 2000.
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seen as a celebrity by peers gang support
with inner and outer conflict
4. Enjoys the sense of success as a dangerous
Difficult to remediate because - -
celebrity, becomes a decision / choice to act
empathy is seriously diminished
Malevolently.
Athens suggests that this is not an inevitable process, it happens over time. He expresses gratitude to a
neighbour who picked up on his personal trauma at home (Stage 2) and mentored him through school and
encouraged his university participation. However, unfortunately the struggles with self-esteem persisted
throughout his adult life.
This work supports the notion of restorative justice rather than punitive justice for youth who are in
trouble at home, school and with the law.
Violence is also given recognition and acceptance in society via the justice system. The English political
theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first modern thinker to argue for the creation of a more
rational and therefore a more economical order of violence backed by popular consent rather than
violence to a common sovereign authority (the state) which claims a monopoly on the use of violence.8
Realpolitik refers to the idea that the essence of politics consists of a ceaseless struggle for power,
material goods, and the control of the means of violence.9

This suggests that civilised society depends on the state to avenge our murderous hurt, and to consider
those who take it into their own hands to be either sick or savage. War would be further evidence of our
right to take revenge - the law of humanness plus the structural violence of the state, despite horrendous
carnage and the perpetuation of hate and violence on both sides. This has been witnessed recently in
USAs response to the Twin Towers attack, the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict, Ireland and many African
States: Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Sudan
Quantum Physics: a new understanding and its implications
I grew up in a strict Christian home, where the prophetess Ellen White in the mid 1800s was inspired
8 Jacoby Susan. Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, Harper and Row, USA, 1984.
9 Steger MB. Peacebuilding and Nonviolence: Gandhis Perspective on Power. Christie D, Wagner RV, DuNann Winter D,
Editors. Peace Conflict and Violence, Peace Psychology for the 21st Century.New Jersey, USA: Prentice Hall Inc., 2001.
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divine right. Through a social contract individuals transfer their natural right to exercise power through

Proceedings
with a health message for the Seventh Day Adventist Church. The principles which she espoused were
indicators for healthful living they were counter to the popular life style. These principles have now been
scientifically demonstrated over the years to be both valid and valuable. White wrote many times about
the importance of the mind-body-spirit connection. However, as a physiotherapist with conventional
anatomy and physiology training this was not apparent. I have searched for evidence of this connection
and now resonate with the explanation of quantum physics and energy healing.
Dawson10 explores the background in order to explain Matrix Reimprinting, an energy healing technique
using tapping on the face and upper body, which is known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). I will
use his work to summarise the concept.
A basic understanding of the science of the Matrix or Field was brought to light in the 1940s by the father
of quantum theory, Max Planck. Until then Newtonian physics had taught us that matter is solid and
energy is a separate entity, furthermore, it was thought that space was a vacuum. Quantum energy theory
has discovered that:
The world is not solid. It is actually composed of electromagnetic energy, which in turn is
composed of various atomic and subatomic particles. Our solid world is in fact an illusion
underlying it is a vibrational reality. It is fact that the particles that we are comprised of vibrate
so fast makes us appear solid. An analogy we like to use is the electrical fan: when it stops,
you can see the gaps in between the blades, but when it spins, it appears to be one solid object.
Similarly, as the atoms which make up our physiology vibrate, we appear to be a single entity,
but really we are energy in motion.
We are linked by a web. Part of the previous scientific paradigm included the presupposition
that up to 90 percent of our cosmos was comprised of empty space. In The Divine Matrix,
Gregg Braden11 points out the flaw in this logic: If it is really vacant, then theres a big question
that must be answered: How can the waves of energy that transmit everything from our cellphone calls to the reflected bright light bringing this pages words to your eyes travel from
one place to another? Just as water carries ripples away from the place where a stone is tossed
into a pond, something must exist that conveys the vibrations of life from one point to another.
Quantum physics has taught us that what once was believed to be empty space contains the
great net that connects everything in our universe: the Matrix (Divine).
10 Dawson

Karl and Allenby Sasha. Matrix Reimprinting using EFT. Rewrite your Past,Transform you Future. Hay House.
2010, p. 4.
11 Braden Gregg. The Divine Matrix. Hay House. 2007, p. 26.
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We send our thoughts out and they are attracted back. Our understanding of this
unified energy field has also brought with it the knowledge that we are creators of our own
realities, because what we focus on sends ripples into the Matrix that reflect back to us in our
experiences. The film and book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and works by Esther and Jerry
Hicks such as Ask and It is Given have awakened countless people to the understanding that
we get what we focus upon in life. Many of us have now learned that the universe responds to
consciousness and our thoughts become our reality. Our beliefs, fears, hopes and dreams are
all reflected back to us by the Matrix in the world that surrounds us. This Law of Attraction
is vibrational. We attract experiences of a vibrational frequency that is similar to our own.
Whatever we are putting out comes back to us in a life experience that matches our own signal.
To some people, the idea that we create our own reality in this way has seemed offensive.
This is because it may be seen as putting blame on those who have created a reality which
is less than desirable. However, as we will explore later, much of what we attract is related
to our earlier life experiences and we can change our point of attraction by directly working
with these experiences. So we are not to blame for the reality we have created, but rather
empowered to do something about this reality with this knowledge and understanding.
We can change how we experience life. As well as the unified energy field that connects all
but also our behaviours, our customs and our habits. These fields are different from the Matrix,
because they are local to us. But at the same time they are sub-fields that are part of the Matrix
(Divine). This explains how we are all interconnected to each other and to the Matrix (authors
addition). Dawson suggests that these local fields may be the same as the subconscious mind.
In relation to this, we would like to offer a unique view on why the Law of Attraction hasnt appeared to
work for some people. All the life experiences that we have had create pictures/beliefs in our local field. If
they are positive and supportive, they help us to attract more of what we want. But if they are negative and
destructive, we attract more of the same. Simply wishing for different experiences when we have these
destructive pictures/beliefs in our field will not change our point of attraction.
Changing behavioural fields. As well as shaping form, fields also shape sociological patterns, customs,
behaviour and habits of mind. They impose rhythmic patterns on the nervous system which affect the
sensory and motor regions of the brain, impacting behaviours.12 Every species, including humans, has
some sort of inherent instinctive behaviour. We learn this through morphic resonance with the members
12 Sheldrake Rupert. The Presence of the Past, Inner Traditions. Bear and company. 2000, p. 198.
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beings, there are also local fields around our own body which shape not only our physical form

Proceedings
of our species who have gone before us. Learned behaviour is different, and becomes established through
resonance with ourselves. Our morphic fields become habituated when we repeat certain patterns and
behaviour. Learned behaviour and the fields that accompany it are in fact an important part of our
socialization process. There would be no structure in our life without these fields. Every form of behaviour
from the simple act of brushing our teeth to the more complex one of communicating with members of
the opposite sex has its own field which has been created by our life experiences and is reinforced by selfresonance.
Many of these behavioural fields may be supportive and nurturing. If, for example, your life is structured
and organized then you have probably formed positive behavioural fields around functioning. If your life
lacks structure then your behavioural fields may be more chaotic. And if you have very obsessive qualities
about being ordered or are even expressing a condition such as obsessive compulsive disorder, your
behavioural fields around being organized have become too strong.
So how do we change our behaviour? We have all heard the saying You cant teach an old dog new
tricks. This refers to the challenging nature of changing a behavioural field. Say there is something you
want to change about yourself and you believe this time you really can do it. You may tell everyone you
are going to do it. You set a date, and put all your energetic resources into changing. You have a good first
day. You feel confident and may even talk about your success. This goes on for a few days or even weeks.
You might even think you have conquered your bad habit. If its eating chocolate, you might think its OK
to have just a little bit now and then. If its exercising regularly, for example you might think its OK to
skip it once or twice, isnt it? Or it may be that someone has upset you, so you justify slipping back into
old ways just for a while, to get over it. Its a temporary blip anyway. Youll be back on track tomorrow.
Then, bang, youll be straight back into the old pattern and back to square one. Sound familiar?
What is really happening here? The more you repeat something, the stronger its field becomes. So if
you have a long-standing way of behaving, its resonance has great strength, and thus a great influence over
you. When you decide with energy into this decision and actively make the change, you start to tune into
a new field, an opposing field if you like. Consider this in relation to Sheldrakes remark: A field brings
about material effects while the system is tuned into it. But if the tuning is changed then other fields come
into play: the original field disappears. By tuning into this new field you feel completely different. The
new field has its own resonance and you may feel confident, sure and able to because of this resonance.
However, if you decide, too soon, that you have cracked it and you believe, too early, that this new field
is totally stable, you may slip back into your old ways with all the confidence that you have from the
resonance of the new field. The trouble is that as soon as you do slip back you tune into the old field that
old field that resonates so strongly with you.
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It is very challenging to change behaviour with willpower alone, because willpower comes from the
conscious mind, and the conscious mind does not override the subconscious, or the fields, In fact, we
believe that the subconscious mind and the fields may be one and the same thing. So whats the solution?
With Matrix Reimprinting a unique Field Clearing Technique helps to tune into and stabilise new fields.
Quantum Energy Coaching puts new beliefs into the subconscious/local field which move the old negative
images of self out of the field and result in new attractor patterns, but one will still needs to take action for
life to truly transform.
Trauma and the Freeze Response. We frequently talk about the flight-or-fight response; the freeze
response is mentioned rarely and understood less. In fact it is often inaccurately seen as a sign of
weakness. One feels shamed that I didnt fight back, I should have run away, I didnt move, I just let it
happen. Yet the freeze response is a biological state which is designed to aid our survival. Wild animals
when surviving a chase by predators, demonstrate the freeze by dropping to the ground and then tremble
or shake, with deep breathing and perspiring. After doing so it will get up, shake itself off and apparently
be none the worse for its ordeal. By doing this it seems that it has released all unconscious memory of the
attack. We are different: we dont discharge the freeze response. In fact, if we shake after a traumatic event
we are often encouraged to calm down, some take a drink to calm their nerves. Because of this, we store
(TRE) which release the chronic tension in all the muscles concerned with tremor, which are mainly
located in the pelvis and lower back area. Chronic contracted muscles here are one of the major causes of
low back pain. These exercises can actually lead to relief from chronic pain.
The understanding of the quantum connection as in mind-body-spirit has been explored by Bruce
Lipton14. As a cell biologist whilst working at Stanford, he was cloning stem cells several decades before
this field came to the forefront of science. From his work he made some significant discoveries. He has
shown that genetics (DNA) does not control biology in the way it has been supposed. Environmental
signals are primarily responsible for selecting the genes expressed by an organism. Most people
believe that the conscious mind controls our physiology, but in fact, almost all of it is controlled by the
subconscious mind, which has data processing power perhaps a million times greater than the conscious
mind, and is in charge as much as 99 percent of all our activity.
Apparently the human energy field both permeates the entire body and radiates to the outside, meters
13 Berceli David. Trauma Release Exercises: A Revolutionary New Method for Stress/Trauma Release. BookSurge
Publishers. 2005.
14 Lipton Bruce. Biology of Belief Unleashing the Power of Consciousness. Hay House Inc. 2005.
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the trauma, instead. David Berceli13 has developed an exercise routine called Trauma Release Exercise

Proceedings
beyond the bodys surface. According to Lipton every cell has an antenna tuned into signals broadcast by
the mind as well as the environment. Perceived danger causes physical bracing and psychological bracing
so that our belief systems include patterns of protective behaviour. This can result in a state of chronic
stress which holds the body in the freeze response and reduces the immune response.
Lipton shares a radically new understanding which has emerged at the cutting edge of cell science. It
is now recognized that the environment, and more specifically, our perception (interpretation) of the
environment, directly controls the activity of our genes. Environment controls gene activity through a
process known as epigenetic control. This new perspective of human biology does not view the body
as just a mechanical device, but rather incorporates the role of the mind and spirit. This breakthrough in
biology is fundamental in all healing for it recognizes that when we change our perceptions or beliefs we
send totally different messages to our cells and reprogram their expression. This explains how people can
have spontaneous remissions or recover from injuries deemed to be permanent disabilities.
It also answers my question, at least more satisfactorily than any previous explanation of the mind, body
and spirit connection.
David Hawkins15 describes a map of consciousness which has been formulated through kinesiological
testing of many thousands of people. As we look at the Map of Consciousness, it becomes clear that the
calibrated levels correlate with specific processes of consciousness emotions, perceptions, or attitudes,
worldviews and spiritual beliefs.
The critical response point in the scale of consciousness calibrates at level 200, which is the level
associated with integrity and courage. All attitudes, thoughts feelings, associations, entities, or historical
figures below that level of calibration make a person go weak when tested with kinesiology. Those that
calibrate higher than 200 go strong. This is the balance point between weak and strong attractors, between
negative and positive influence.
At levels below 200, the primary impetus is personal survival, although at the very bottom of the scale
the zone of hopelessness and depression even this motive is lacking. The higher levels of Fear and
Anger are characterized by egocentric impulses arising from this drive for personal survival. At the level
of Pride, the survival motive may expand to comprehend the survival of others as well. As one crosses
the demarcation between negative and positive influence into Courage, the well-being of others becomes
15 Hawkins DR. Power vs Force The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior. Hay House, USA. 2002.
376
increasingly important. By the 500 level, the happiness of others emerges as the essential motivating force.
The high 500s are characterized by interest in spiritual awareness for both oneself and others, and by the
600s, the good of mankind and the search for enlightenment are the primary goals. From 700 to 1,000, life
is dedicated to the salvation of all of humanity.
Reflection on this map can bring about a profound expansion of ones empathy for life in its variety of
expressions. If we examine ostensibly less virtuous emotional attitudes, we realize theyre neither good
nor bad; moralistic judgments are merely a function of the viewpoint from which they proceed. The
empathy derived from contemplating this Map of Consciousness will hopefully make the path to Joy a
shorter one. The key to Joy is unconditional kindness to all life, including ones own, which we refer to
as compassion. Without compassion, little if any significance is ever accomplished in human endeavour.
We may generalize to the greater social context from individual therapies, wherein the patient cant be
truly cured or fundamentally healed until he invokes the power of compassion, both for himself and
others. At that point, the healed may become a healer, a wounded healer.
God View
Life View
Level
Log
Emotion
Process
Self
Is
Enlightened
700-1000
Ineffable
Pure Consciousness
All-Being
Perfect
Peace
600
Bliss
Illumination
One
Complete
Joy
540
Serenity
Transfiguration
Loving
Benign
Love
500
Reverence
Revelation
Wise
Meaningful
Reason
400
Understanding
Abstraction
Merciful
Harmonious
Acceptance
350
Forgiveness
Transcendence
Inspiring
Hopeful
Willingness
310
Optimism
Intention
Enabling
Satisfactory
Neutrality
250
Trust
Release
Permitting
Feasible
Courage
200
Affirmation
Empowerment
Indifferent
Demanding
Pride
175
Scorn
Inflation
Vengeful
Antagonistic
Anger
150
Hate
Aggression
Denying
Disappointing
Desire
125
Craving
Enslavement
Punitive
Frightening
Fear
100
Anxiety
Withdrawal
Disdainful
Tragic
Grief
75
Regret
Despondency
Condemning
Hopeless
Apathy
50
Despair
Abdication
Vindictive
Evil
Guilt
30
Blame
Destruction
Despising
Miserable
Shame
20
Humiliation
Elimination
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A Map of Consciousness

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From 200 down increased use of force. From 200 up increased use of authentic power.
My personal journey into the healing arts, started with Physiotherapy as an eighteen year old, I practiced
my profession with fulfilment and the enjoyment of facilitating healing for clients and then, learning for
students at the University of Cape Town. After Lyndis death, I discovered the richness of forgiveness and
conciliation and spent time on a doctoral degree studying the process that I had experienced. In 2004 I did
a course in Capacitar. The facilitator was also the originator and a most inspirational person by the name
of Patricia Cane. Cane had been a nun, and has subsequently devoted her life to popular education in the
healing Arts through Capacitar. This introduction prepared me for the cutting edge Energy work to follow.
I have listed conventional Psychiatric and Clinical Psychology, as well as Spiral Dynamics to present an
inclusive picture of possible modalities. However, I concur with Twerski that for PTSD and specifically
addictions the Energy work is more powerful. In particular TRE and QEC to which considerable space
has been devoted in this paper.

CONVENTIONAL MEDICAL, PSYCHIATRIC AND CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERTISE

Addiction is a treatable condition. The first phase of treatment is withdrawal from the problem substance/
activity. There are both physical and psychological effects that occur when substance-taking stops,
including such physical signs as nausea and vomiting, chills and sweats, muscle cramps and aches,
sleeplessness, shifts in heart rate, even fever. Emotional effects include depression, anxiety, irritability,
and mood swings. Withdrawal symptoms typically last for three to five days. While they are rarely lifethreatening, medical supervision is usually provided in residential treatment programs, and medications
may be given to ameliorate the acute discomfort of withdrawal.
Behavioral therapy and counseling are important elements of treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy
is often used to help patients identify, avoid, and cope with situations in which they are most likely to
abuse drugs or activities. The technique of motivational interviewing is often employed to remind people
of their values, as a way of avoiding use. Family therapy may be provided to help the patient maintain a
supportive environment and improve family functioning. Rehabilitation programs are often needed to help
patients regain necessary job and other skills.
www.psychologytoday.com/basics/addiction/treatment
THERAPEUTIC SPIRAL MODEL
Safety and Containment with Action Methods
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The Therapeutic Spiral Model (TSM) was developed to address the limitations of both talk and action
therapies (Hudgins, 2002, 2000).TSM provides helping professionals with rapid, safe, effective action
techniques for treating trauma. This model maximizes the effectiveness of psychodrama while helping
the clinician stabilize the client in a safe structure built on prescriptive roles for containment, restoration
and observation.
More about this model on
http://www.therapeuticspiral.org
CAPACITAR
Capacitar is a Spanish word meaning to empower, to encourage, to bring one another to life. The belief is
that through nurturing, listening, and responding to the deeper wisdom of body and spirit, people can heal,
empower, and transform themselves, their families, their communities, and their societies.
Capacitar enables people to do this by sharing simple practices of healing, team building, and selfwisdom. Capacitar has programmes in 15 States in the USA and many other countries including Central
and South America, Eastern and Southern Africa, Indonesia and East Timor.
I did this training in 2004 and 2005. It introduced me to the philosophy and practice of Eastern healing.
This healing model is embraced as the gardener, who tends to the needs of the garden by ensuring the
correct amounts of water, earth, air and fire/light/energy, as opposed to the Western medical model which
sees the healer as a mechanic who fixes what is broken.
Capacitar consists of mind-body-spirit practices, including EFT (emotional freedom technique) Thai Chi,
Head Holds, Visualisations, Acupressure for emotional healing, Breathing. And Meditation.
www.capacitar.org
THE JOURNEY PROCESS
Brandon Bays, the originator of The Journey, has been involved with healing practices for many years
and suggests that; for those who are out of touch with their emotions, as most people are who suffer
the disconnection of trauma, particularly participants who have used substances to dull their pain, fear,
irritability and anger. This process is a very healing one - The Facilitator can take an individual and/or
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development working in a way that all are empowered to act out of their own source of strength and

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groups through the Journey Process. The purpose is to uncover the emotions that have trapped one in a
modus operandi which no longer serves ones best interests. To discover the source of who one was meant
to be before the trauma and damage was suffered. To forgive the perpetrators of that damage who come
to ones consciousness during the process. Brandon Bays pioneered this Journey process as the key to
healing. In just six-and-a-half weeks her football-size uterine tumour disappeared in 1992. This process
has since helped thousands all over the world to access healing and forgiveness.
www.brandonbays.com
TWELVE STEP PROGRAMME
This well-known method of dealing with addiction, referred to by Twerski, suggests dependence on a
Greater Power as used in Alcoholics Anonymous and many other Support Groups. The benefits are well
recognised and advantaged by the weekly support of an AA meeting which encourages continued sobriety.
In so far as the trust aspect is concerned, the relationship between addiction and spirituality is brought to
light in the Twerskis quote above.
Dawkins suggests that there can be no recovery until the subject experiences an essential change of
personality. This the basic change first manifested by AA founder Bill W. a profound transformation
in his total belief system, followed by a sudden leap in consciousness. Such a major metamorphosis in
attitude was first formally studied by the American psychiatrist Harry Tiebout, who treated a hopeless
alcoholic who was the first woman in AA. She underwent a profound change of personality to a degree
unaccountable through any known therapeutic method. In the first of a series of papers on this observation,
Tiebout documented that she was transformed from an angry, self-pitying, intolerant, and egocentric
creature to a kind, gentle, forgiving and loving person. This example is important because it clearly
demonstrates how key this element of transformation is in the recovery from any progressive or hopeless
disease. Quantum Energy Coaching goes right to the centre of this problem in putting new beliefs about
the self into the Subconscious field, which can result in profound transformation.
NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION
Originated by Marshall Rosenberg, a doctor of psychology in the USA, He suggests that most of us have
been educated from birth to compete, judge, demand, and diagnose to think and communicate in terms
of what is right and wrong with people. At best, communicating and thinking this way can create
misunderstanding and frustration. And still worse, it can lead to anger, depression, and even emotional or
physical violence. His academy of nonviolent communication supports a process of communication which
embraces:
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1. The concrete actions we observe (without evaluation) that affect our well-being
2. How we feel in relation to what we observe
3. The needs, values, desires, etc. that create our feeling
4. The concrete actions we request in order to enrich our lives
Consciousness and compassion are at the heart of this process, otherwise it is just another way of
manipulation, with smooth talk, in order to get what one wants.
www.CNVC.org / e-mail: cnvc@CNVC.org
BE FREE PROGRAMME
A Life Style programme which deals with the whole person in an ancient yet revolutionary way. The
acronym NEWSTART is used to remember the components of ensuring that nutrition, exercise, the use
of water inside and out, sunshine, temperance, air, rest and trust in self and the Divine are all brought to
consciousness and assistance given to change of life style where needed.
This programme offers hydrotherapy, massage, exercise, the use of water and sunshine, charcoal poultices
Sceletium and Graffonia are used in this revolutionary way of assisting the whole process of withdrawal
without the usual awful symptoms. Instead of replacing one addiction with another, as often happens in
rehabilitation. Nutrition is addressed through a complete plant based diet. Spirituality is addressed, once
the forebrain is functioning normally again, and the road to self is discovered in this new paradigm. The
programme has demonstrated success with chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus
and substance addictions.
www.befree.co.za
MATRIX REIMPRINTING
Matrix (We are interconnected through a universal energy field called The Field, The Divine, The Matrix).
Matrix Reimprinting is grounded in popular psychotherapeutic theory about trauma. At the moment
the trauma occurs, if we cant fight or take flight, we feel isolated and realize there is no way out, we
simply freeze. Our chemical responses protect us biochemically from being emotionally and physically
overwhelmed, and as our consciousness freezes, part of us splits off energetically. At this point an ECHO
(Energetically Consciousness Holograms) is created, which is held in the Matrix, in our personal field
(subconscious). Similar events will trigger a similar response and so we suffer stress, anxiety, phobias, and
so on, which affect our interactions in everyday life and eventually take their toll on our physiology and
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applied to the abdomen and linseed to detoxify the system internally. South African herbs including

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cause disease.
Matrix Reimprinting can release the energy of the trauma and bring about permanent healing through
changing the pictures in the field. So if you have negative life pictures that are holding you in the past, you
can change them for positive ones by creating new positive pictures to replace the traumatic
www.matrixreimprinting.com
TRAUMA RELEASE EXERCISES
Stress/Trauma is part of everyday life in the 21st century. The issue is that we have not found a successful
way to manage it. Not until the ground-breaking work of Dr David Berceli Ph.D. who, studying animals
in the wild, realized that we have inhibited the one safety valve we need to discharge stress after it
happens: the tremoring mechanism.
Berceli devised a simple to learn exercise designed to invoke these natural organic tremors in muscles
associated with curling up when we are in danger, the flexor muscles.
By tremoring we are able to release, for the first time, the toxic build-up of stored chemicals, which make
us stressed and eventually ill. The stored stress/trauma in the body is released relatively quickly, over
several weeks, by doing the short exercise routine. This restores the body to its natural state of balance
and deep relaxation. Professions involved in witnessing or dealing with shocking or stressful situations
can benefit from using this exercise as a self-maintenance practice. When combined with psychological
interventions, PTSD is curable.
www.traumaprevention.com
QUANTUM ENERGY COACHING
I am privileged to have learned this skill from the founder of this school of coaching. Dr Melanie Salmon
is a Medical doctor and Gestalt Practitioner who has trained for several years in holistic energy medicine
modalities along with Lawrence, her husband. Salmon acknowledges (verbally) that she became frustrated
with conventional Medical management of clients with depression and addiction challenges, she searched
for a more effective methodology and put together a process based on her findings of Heart-Math Institute,
Psych-K, Kinesiology and Quantum Physics.
QEC is based on the Gestalt principle of Holism. This means considering everything with equal
importance: the individual and the context of field that s/he is part of.
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QEC is based on the fact that we have a natural innate ability to heal ourselves. Through our limiting
beliefs, we create blockages, mentally and physically, which interfere with healing and a spontaneous joy
(level 600 on the map of consciousness). If we remove the blocks, the body heals itself.
Through a process of respectful enquiry, we learn which thoughts, attitudes and beliefs stand in the way
of our clients health and happiness. The limiting beliefs are most often out of our awareness. The art of
Gestalt enquiry is to bring them into awareness. We then have the option of whether or not to adopt a
different set of beliefs, which we can programme into the subconscious mind, replacing the old ones. The
process includes a technique called cardiac coherence which ensures a resonant frequency with the brain,
an optimal state for new learning.
QEC teaches how to support these powerful processes so that there may be assimilation and integration.
The ultimate aim is to empower people to begin their own healing journey.
The aim of QEC is to be freed up mentally and physically to enjoy our lives.
www.onevisionafrica.com
Conclusion
This paper is in agreement with Twerskis strong conviction: I know without a doubt that the source of
addiction is spiritual deficiency. Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings
are spiritual by nature and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery. In a search for healing
modalities for South African Ex-combatants struggling with PTSD, I link spirituality with what Quantum
Physics identifies as the Matrix (Divine), the energy that connects all beings in the Universe. Our personal
energy fields both conscious and subconscious interact with the Universal energy through beliefs e.g.
Unconditional Love, which through QEC can be programmed into the subconscious if the person is
willing and has access to the skills. Authentic new beliefs are positive, present tense and in the first person.
For example, I am loved unconditionally and I love unconditionally. For many who have been abused as
children and then again through state oppression or war trauma has displaced the personal energy field
or spiritual connection with others and with the Divine (Matrix) which results in the low levels of shame,
guilt and anger demonstrated on the Map of Consciousness.
Imagine what the effect of Quantum Energy Coaching for young and older prisoners could be in society.
We (The Lyndi Fourie Foundation) are working on facilitating QEC for the Warders of the prison where
Mandela was held captive for many years, Pollsmoor Prison in the Western Cape of South Africa. Our
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E-mail: admin@onevisionafrica.com

Proceedings
vision is also to deal with the aftermath of the trauma of war during the apartheid freedom struggle,
bringing healing from PTSD to all ex-soldiers and their families.
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The 2nd
Proceedings
Session 4
Parallel Session 2
Call for Papers Session
Parallel 2-1. The Humanities, Narratives, Memory, and Healing
Parallel 2-2. Language, Gender, and Senses
Parallel 2-3. Diseases, Pathology, and Social Healing
The 2nd
Proceedings

The Humanities, Narratives, Memory, and Healing
1. The Humanities and Medicine: Narratives of Illness and Suffering

/ John Clammer (United Nations University)
2. Understanding of the Motherland and Narrative Representation

of Healing Shown in the Novels of Korean-Japanese writer YangJi Lee
/ Jung-Hwa Yun (Ewha Womans University)
3. No One Has Ever Died of the Humanities: Healing and

Transcendence in the Contemporary World
/ Elizabeth S. Gunn (Morgan State University)
4. The Role of Memory for Healing in Gloria Naylors The Women of

Brewster Place
/ Myung-joo Kim (Chungnam National University)
The Humanities and Medicine: Narratives of Illness and Suffering
John Clammer
United Nations University
From many perspectives suffering is a paradigm of the human experience. This was certainly true for
the Buddha, who saw suffering as the foundational quality of human experience (and who of course also
offered a method for overcoming it), and in most medical sociology, which is predicated on the fact of
suffering and could hardly exist without it. As we will see and discuss in the subsequent chapter, trauma
(surely an extreme form of psychic and emotional suffering) is a common by-product of war, revolution
and criminal violence. Hinted at there, but here to be considered in detail, is the relationship between
development and suffering. While underdevelopment and its manifold deprivations can certainly be
described as both a form of violence and of suffering (Scheper-Hughes 1993), a case can certainly also be
made that so is development. The erosion of cultures, displacement of peoples, forced landlessness and
urbanization, the economic and social impacts of globalization, all force upon people experiences that
they have not chosen and certainly do not necessarily better their lot. Yet despite the ubiquity of suffering,
it has attracted little attention from the social sciences remarkably little and perhaps scandalously little.
To speak of poverty is to name an abstract category, an economic status, but does little to reveal the
experience of deprivation that the category label conceals; to speak of untouchability is but to name
exclusion and denigration and its immense psychic effects that the status entails. Anthropology has been
particularly remiss in this respect. For all its vaunted self-advertised expertise in ethnography, in practice
concern for such disciplinary preoccupations as kinship, ritual, oral tradition or local level political
organization, have led to a resounding silence on the question of the inequalities and everyday suffering
that frequently pervade the societies that anthropologists mostly elect to study (for a notable exception see
Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997).
Earlier studies of, if not of suffering per se, at least of the structures of inequality that frequently give rise
to them, have been largely swept under the anthropological carpet. Significantly studies of suffering in
society shows that such suffering is frequently generated by the cultures of those very societies as much
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a social status in a hierarchical system of castes, but it does little to illuminate the daily humiliations of

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as by objective forces of war, revolution or economic restructuring. Many of these studies have come
primarily from theologians, especially those associated with liberation theology (Chopp 1986, Gutierrez
1983), while empirical ones have come mainly from those who have followed the endemic violence
of societies such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Argentina (for a range of examples see Feitlowitz
1998, Grandin 2000), postcolonial theorists and students of the violence of modernity such as Enrique
Dussel (Dussel 1995) and Zygmunt Bauman in his later writings (Bauman 2004). Implicit in many of
these studies, although rarely stated as such, is the question of the violence of development. Certainly
colonialism, the process of modernity and their latest manifestation as globalization, are all of them
complicit in containing or advancing by another name the concept and practice of development (Sachs
1995). The links between modernity, violence (especially structural violence) and development are clear.
The question then becomes how to place the suffering that they generate and/or which are generated by
the existential qualities of being human, at centre place in social analysis, so that its causes can be more
fully understood with a view to its alleviation, and by what methodology such suffering might be grasped
and understood.
Development theory has a tendency not to dialogue with other sectors of social theory, and yet in empirical
development studies issues of health are one of the central concerns. Medical sociology and medical
anthropology while focused on cultural constructions of illness, patterns of medical care and the cultural
management of illness through ritual and other mechanisms, in fact have at their centres the problem
of human suffering even if they do not explicitly identify it as such. The interesting methodological
possibility then arises of linking the discourses of development sociology and the sociology of medicine
by way of the analysis of the causes and management of suffering. The question then is, can medical
models illuminate the problem of suffering in development contexts? The answer is certainly a qualified
yes, and what follows is an exploration of this potentially creative interface and its implications for
development discourse and practice.
Suffering and Development
The problem of suffering has always been central to humanity and its cultures. A great deal of what
passes for religion is actually a wrestling with the problem of suffering, whether expressed in the idiom of
Buddhism (suffering as arising from attachment and desire), or, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, defined
primarily as the problem of evil. Although perhaps posed primarily as a theological or metaphysical
question, in practice it is the cultural negotiation of suffering that actually preoccupies most actual people
cultural explanations of suffering (as with Azande witchcraft), the diminution of such suffering by way
of magic, ritual, healing techniques and medicines, the identification of specialists in the relief of suffering
(doctors, shamans, witchdoctors, mediums), and techniques of prevention and protection. Such an
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approach applies particularly, although not exclusively, to illness, but may in some cases also be applied
to more structural forms of suffering such as war, natural disasters, the social, cultural and economic
displacements of modernization and development (forced migration because of dam construction, loss of
traditional livelihoods as a result of the expansion of agribusiness and plantation agriculture, loss of land
for airport or road construction), or through the violence of colonialism and the new economic activities
(slavery, mining, plantation labour) that it enforces on subject peoples (for a classic instance see Taussig
1980). It is also the case that cultures themselves are a major source of suffering for their own members
by way of patterns of social exclusion, torture and other methods of punishment, warfare, socially
sanctioned forms of violence, neglect and educational, psychological and other performative stresses and
expectations. Social theory is itself often complicit in this. Its recent preoccupation with the Other and
with the politics of difference, extended not only to humans but to nature as well, rather than with seeking
a philosophy of interrelationship and mutual dependency, has if anything intensified the tendency to see
cultures as separating rather than as including, even as critical theory and postmodern deconstructionism
have proved very efficient at critique, but very weak indeed at any positive form of reconstruction. The
interplay of structural violence and individual suffering then becomes a key interface. Exploring this
interplay in the context of development then becomes our objective.
Suffering, as the Buddha clearly saw, is part of the human condition, and not just a peripheral part at
that for much of our species. As David Morris suggests Unlike robots or rabbits, humans possess a
tendency towards repeated and often protracted illnesses that seem finally less a flaw in our design than a
mysterious signature (Morris 1998, 1). And even as the search for perfect health is a universal and ancient
impulse, so too is the search for the perfect society, as evidenced by the perennial attraction of utopias
throughout history. If the perfect society cannot be found, at least we seek the good society the best that
the imperfections and limitations of human thinking and conduct can conjure. Whatever the criticisms
that have been made (often quite rightly) of the concept of development, what can certainly be said in
and the achievement of higher and potentially reachable levels of social justice. But just as illness has
been attacked by the mechanical and science based intervention of biomedical medicine (with its many
victories, but with the corresponding marginalization of traditional medical systems and their accumulated
wisdom), so the problems of underdevelopment have been attacked with all the resources of a scientific
economics and all the managerial paraphernalia of policy science, planning and forecasting. Both depend
on a mechanistic model and the assumption that there are objective problems to be solved by the
application of scientific reasoning. Neither has taken seriously the necessary convergence between on the
one hand biology and culture and on the other between culture and development. The result has been not
only the very incomplete treatment of illness by biomedicine and even the generation of what Ivan Illich
has called Iatrogenesis medically induced diseases - the existence of which led him to the conclusion
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its favour is that it does (or should) represent the impulse towards the alleviation of unnecessary suffering

Proceedings
that The medical establishment has become a major threat to health (Illich 1990,11). Its more radical
critics would say that the same thing is true of development. Both certainly operate in an environment of
very incomplete knowledge, strongly political agendas often driving their allegedly scientific objectives,
little awareness of the long term outcomes of their well-intentioned interventions and little insight into the
deep subjectivity of the subjects of their activities patients or those being developed.
Yet for all their limitations, hidden often behind their hubris and lack of acknowledgement of the very
failures from which as much can be learnt as from the successes, is a common concern with human
suffering, whether expressed in illness or in the deprivations and exclusions of poverty. And they are in
any case connected poverty and its attendant chronic or acute malnutrition is at the basis of many if not
most of the sicknesses experienced in the Third World. While culture shapes and provides (however
imperfect) models for suffering, the afflictions that provide so much of the signature of being human
are common to all of us. While politics is the cause of much suffering, suffering itself lies beyond politics
it is a universal language and as such the basis for a new form of philosophical anthropology not the
seeking for an essence of human nature, but a critique of the nature and sources of that suffering, a
critique that points to such remedies as are within our power. This modesty is necessary as a clear lesson to
be derived both from the limitations of biomedicine and of development: while both have very honourable
intentions, both may be working with the wrong model that still controls thinking, education and practice
in the respective fields: a biomedical one in the case of medicine and a still (despite disclaimers) largely
economistic one in development. While both have shown remarkable successes in addressing certain
(especially acute) crises, neither provide a clear model of health or of the good society. Both tend to
operate with the false philosophical view that there are discrete, concrete problems to be solved
rather than with a view of the embeddedness of their particular fields in the complex and indeterminate
context of culture and in relation to deep change the slow and fundamental shifts rather than the
easily discernable and measurable social trends- in which global society is now and has always been
situated. Much as we desire one, there is no cure, no ultimate fix: rather there must be a new model
of understanding suffering as a key interface between the existential condition of being human our
species being to use Marxs term and the cultural negotiation of that suffering. While the issue certainly
and ultimately touches upon theological questions, here it will be understood as a matter of sociology, but
of a deep sociology that goes beyond the empiricist and mechanistic premises of so much conventional
sociology (Clammer 2008).
Any adequate (especially culturally adequate) conception of development must accordingly encompass
the economic, political and natural conditions that define its parameters, and also the experience of those
faced with the actual life-conditions of underdevelopment and the often wrenching transformations that
accompany change, perhaps to a better state, or perhaps just to a different one. This, as we have seen in
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chapter four, is a somewhat different notion from the recent anthropological rediscovery of indigenous
knowledge (e.g. Sillitoe 1998; Sillitoe, Bicker and Pottier 2002). In that approach the ethnoscience of
developing societies is seen as being functionally recoverable and applicable to the development process,
in particular in such areas as agriculture and healing. It says however little or nothing about the experience
of development or of the destruction, transformation or re-negotiation of that traditional knowledge
under the impact of development or its larger frameworks such as globalization or colonialism. Again an
analogy with medicine greatly helps to clarify this. David Morris discusses the case of the critic Anatole
Broyard who, prior to his death from prostate cancer in 1990 kept a diary reflecting on his own illness and
his relationship to the medical system that was attempting to treat him. In that diary Broyard emphasizes
the power of narratives to make sense of experience, including in his case a not statistically uncommon,
but personally devastating experience. As Morris summarizes it: He emphasizes that narrative contains
or releases therapeutic powers. A sick person, he contends, can make a story out of illness as a way
of trying to detoxify it. In seeking to detoxify his own illness, Broyard experiments with inventing
mininarratives and exploring the resources of metaphor: I saw my illness as a visit to a disturbed
country I imagined it as a love affair with a demented woman who demanded things I had never
done before (Morris 1998, 45). Such narratives of course do not need to be written: the oral history of
development and maldevelopment is undoubtedly richer than the sparse written record. What is significant
about them is that they allow the victims of even apparently intolerable situations to find, if not meaning,
certainly humour, a sense of self-worth and a meeting with reality (change, struggle, deprivation) on their
own terms rather than being the victim of determinism. As Morris summarizes the case The patient, he
insists, has to start by treating his own illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as
a narrative, a story. Stories are anti-bodies against illness and pain. The storyteller according to Arthur
W. Frank (another cancer patient who turned his experience into narrative) is the new figure of the
postmodern patient: no longer a victim of disease, not the object of medicine, but a person struggling to
Narrative, Development, Empowerment

Narrative, then, is a form of empowerment, available alike to the very poor and to the very rich. And
its necessity may be increasing as with the advent of the risk society with its unknown, diffused,
untraceable dangers and problems, the sense of lack of control over the environment by the average
individual increases. The disempowering consequences of development as much as of medicine then need
to be confronted. And again we can see the parallels between development and mechanistic biomedicine:
Postmodern illness, because of its complicated links to the culturally constructed environment,
ultimately demands that we rethink the sources of medical knowledge. Laboratory tests and scientific
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recover and to reshape the voice that illness so often takes from us (Morris 1998, 48).

Proceedings
studies cannot reveal everything that doctors need to know. The social, cultural and personal
dimensions of illness must be understood through other means, and one neglected but useful source
is narrative. Narrative, we might say, constitutes a mode of understanding appropriate for situations
too variable and too untidy for laboratory analysis. Further, storytellers thrive at the margins of
power, casting a skeptical eye on contemporary culture, and their somewhat independent status
permits them to offer impassioned critiques, visionary alternatives, and an outsiders objectivity.
Narrative may also require readers to confront self-consciously the ways in which their culture
has taught them to think about illness, to imagine ways in which they might experience a healthier
relation to the earth. The United Nations reports that fourteen million children die annually from
causes related to environmental degradation. For the children, if not for ourselves, we need to hear
from voices silenced or over-whelmed by the prevailing biomedical discourse of science, policy
analysis, and cost containment. We need a knowledge that comes with narrative (Morris 1998, 89).
As with medicine, so with development. Morris here however seems to be speaking mainly of the writer,
the outsider. Here though I prefer to speak, as with the case of Anatole Broyard, of the voice of the
individual: the average and actual person caught up in the process of forced change and of the personal
opportunities, energies and restructuring of subjectivities that it so often entails.
An obvious parallel between development and medicine is that both involve a sense of violence being
done to the self medically through illness and the sense that ones body has been invaded; development
through forced, unchosen and uncontrollable changes that come not primarily from the natural world
(although with the human manipulation and modification of the environment, even that is becoming
increasingly part of culture), but from artificial, that is to say humanly engineered interventions
dams, agribusinesses, urbanization, industrialization, new economic forms that are the source of
migration, land loss, famine, new illnesses, cultural loss. Furthermore, decades of development have
not had an appreciable linear effect on disease eradication. Not only have new diseases (AIDS, SARS,
Avian Flu for example) emerged, but older diseases such as malaria, asthma and rabies have made startling
comebacks, in the case of malaria almost certainly as a result of climate change as well as resistance to
the overuse of pesticides. Development has proved to be like one of those games in which no sooner is
one peg knocked into its hole than another one pops up. In fact a general law of all policy science would
seem to be that the application of any given policy will have unforeseen consequences not anticipated in
the original plan and which will give rise to the need for yet further policies. Much development then,
like much biomedicine, is devoted to the eradication of symptoms, not necessarily of the real underlying
disease or its ultimate causal factors, which reside as much in the complex relationships between illness/
development and culture as they do in the biological or socio-economic environments. The main point
is that, although life expectancy has increased, a high-tech, energy dependent, consumer lifestyle has not
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brought the developed world a period of unprecedented health. Historian Roy Porter rightly warns against
the facile and long standing prejudice that equates civilization with the spread of disease (Porter 1993).
The serious question is not about the health value of civilization but about what kind of civilized society
we want. Along with their benefits, unfortunately, affluence, technological development, and biomedical
progress in Western nations have accompanied the rise of new or intensified illnesses. By-products of
development have in fact left industrial nations vulnerable to a growing list of maladies that bodes ill for
future generations (Morris 1998, 104). There are additionally two major consequences of this pattern
of development its immense negative impact on the environment (which in turn has disease generating
implications) and its unequal impact on the so-called developing or underdeveloped nations which may
well be the victims of global processes (global warming being just the most obvious) of which they are in
no way the authors.
There are some major consequences of this: the aforementioned principle that all policies contain
unexpected outcomes; the recognition of the principles of ignorance (we are doing our best, but in an
environment of very incomplete and constantly evolving knowledge) and of caution (when we are not
sure, as is usually the case, of the outcome of our actions/policies, proceed with great slowness and care);
that there are no solutions but two other things: temporary fixes that will dissolve in the ever dynamic
environment in which cultures exist and indeed is a major characteristic of cultures as such, and shifts of
perception. This latter point is important: even as the construction of a meaningful narrative of suffering
confers meaning on illness to a patient and may indeed and often does lead to healing, even paradoxically
in terminal cases (Levine 1987), so too the experience of the violence of development can and does lead
to the transformation of that experience through parallel means. An equally important consequence is
the recognition of imperfection, of what Ian Craib has called the importance of disappointment (Craib
1994). Even as we have learnt that perfectionist utopias all too readily lead to totalitarianism despite
their imaginative possibilities and stimulation (Jacoby 2005), so too in development the grasp of the fact
apparent (Kaplan 2002). The objective problems exist, but they can be managed, if only to an imperfect
degree, both by the techniques of development and by the subjective relationships to the processes of
development expressed through articulated or unarticulated narrative forms. There are no conclusions,
only temporary closures. But the process of development itself, as experienced in particular by those
being developed requires listening as much as prescribing, even as it does in the context of biomedicine.
It also requires attention to that profoundly neglected dimension of culture the emotions. Loss, grief,
excitement, powerlessness, empowerment, fear, apprehension a whole geography of the emotions
shaped by the particular culture and its specific vocabulary of feelings attend the experience of change and
the reshaping of society around oneself (for example Clammer 2000). The external processes of so-called
social change and the inner processes of the reshaping of subjectivities, go hand-in-hand and are in fact
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both that there are no final solutions and that development is in fact an art rather than a science becomes

Proceedings
interpenetrating and dialectical experiences. As the old basic needs approach to development insisted
two decades ago, it is the quality of experience that makes any development process a success, not its
delivery of material goods which are only a means to enhancing that quality of life, not in themselves the
goal.
Medical Models and Development
Development requires a critical holism the perception of the (often hidden) linkages of things and
events and the awareness that the artificially separated dimensions of development economics, gender,
sociology, environment and so forth in fact constitute a single interactive system often obscured by
ideology, bad methodology or the arbitrary nature of academic disciplinary boundaries, and a constant
vision of what development is ultimately for: presumably the alleviation of human suffering and the
establishment of the conditions for the best possible quality of life for the greatest number, that quality
of life including the enhancing of sustainable relationships with the larger biosphere on which all life
depends. Within that understanding of development growth is secondary to other considerations and
preeminently to social justice, a term encompassing not only equitable distribution of resources and
rewards, gender and age equality, political access and representation, the meeting of basic human needs
including psychic and emotional ones and freedom from torture, trafficking, forced labour and similar
unsought impositions, but also a sense of fairness, autonomy and creativity. While the former factors can
to a large extent be measured, the latter are, while equally important, more subjective and are expressed,
amongst other means, in the narratives and autobiographical accounts of life experiences that peoples of
all cultures constantly generate and tell or perform.
Medical sociology has begun to recognize something very similar that illness is not just an objective
condition, but also a relationship to the world that must be made sense of in some way by the patient, and
also by the medical practitioner whose therapeutic interventions are likely to be much less successful if the
story in which the patients experience is embedded is not acknowledged and to some extent empathized
with. Anthropologists working with traditional health systems which do centrally acknowledge those
stories, and modern biomedical systems which mostly do not, yet which are rapidly encroaching on and
eroding the traditional modes, have clearly identified the critical role that the narrative of suffering and
the supposed causes of that suffering play, both in the ontological environment of the indigenes and in the
success of biomedical or alternative therapies (Samson 2004). Development theorists however have not
drawn on the vocabulary of medical sociology and medical sociologists have not for the most part related
their work to the development context. So clearly a potentially very valuable interface exists here waiting
to be explored. Probably the only point of contact has been with the elaboration of the notion of social
suffering explored by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock and their collaborators (Kleinman,
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Das and Lock 1997) in which a number of instances of collective suffering including the Holocaust,
political widowhood in South Africa, torture, the Chinese cultural revolution, and the relationships
between religions and suffering are explored. It is significant that two of the three editors of the collection
are medical anthropologists and Kleinman in particular has devoted an entire book (Kleinman 1988) to
the analysis of illness narratives, a study to which we will shortly return.
In the introduction to their collection, Kleinman and his co-editors define social suffering as that
assemblage of human problems that have their origins and consequences in the devastating injuries
that social forces can inflict on human experience (ix) and point out that this suffering is a shared and
therefore social experience and that while this can occur anywhere in practice it falls disproportunately on
the poor and powerless. The issues that they list, including political violence, social breakdown, uprooting
and forced migration, infectious diseases, mental health problems, have their roots in the political
economy of globalization and underdevelopment and sometimes in the bureaucratic or well intentioned
policies designed to alleviate the suffering that they in the end intensify. The representation and experience
of suffering all too often become professional problems to be dealt with bureaucratically by experts
or agencies and in a phrase resonant to students of development studies Existential processes of pain,
death, and mourning are metamorphosed by these historically shaped rationalities and technologies,
which, again all too regularly, are inattentive to how the transformations they induce contribute to the
suffering they seek to remedy (x). Whether the result of violent or routine suppression, social suffering
ruins the collective and intersubjective connections of experience and gravely damages subjectivity (x).
The outcome of this is that a fresh methodology is required to address these issues of suffering: The
authors discuss why a language of dismay, disappointment, bereavement, and alarm that sounds not at
all like the usual terminology of policy and programs may offer a more valid means for describing what
is at stake in human experiences of political catastrophe and social structural violence, for professionals
discourses and localized social realities so often ends up prolonging personal and collective tragedy
(xi). This is important for the exploration of the linkages between culture and development, as not only
are cultural representations of suffering involved, but experiences of suffering are often used for current
political purposes, to fuel hatred for example as we have seen so graphically in the Balkans, giving rise to
yet another cycle of suffering.
It is also important to overcome the impoverishment of theory that stems from its failure to acknowledge
suffering and the fact that much of this suffering is a societal and cultural failure and is indeed caused
by certain forms of culture. It is also often the case that theory itself divorces the humanistic analysis of
meanings, feelings and subjectivities from the hard world of social policy, yet the whole thrust of the
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as much as for victims/perpetrators, and may also make better sense of how the clash among globalizing

Proceedings
argument here (and that of Kleinman and collaborators) is that this is an entirely unwarranted separation
and is itself the cause of further suffering. Poverty lies at the base of a huge amount of social suffering
and as Oscar Lewis demonstrated decades ago (without the need to commit oneself to his controversial
culture of poverty thesis), poverty is also an experience, one demanding endless survival strategies,
adaptations and daily confrontation with the starkness of an existence without safety nets or fallback
positions. To confront both the structural and existential dimensions of poverty it is necessary to grasp
the full dimensions of the problem and of the experience. And to do so is to render easier the expansion
of the moral community, which in a globalized environment is to move a little closer to the ideal of a
genuinely global or cosmopolitan sense of citizenship and solidarity (in the context of conflict situations
see the deeply sensitive analysis in Lederach 2005). And since the ultimate end of both academic research
and social policy should be the relief of suffering through understanding and action, a holistic grasp of
its fullest dimensions is a prerequisite for its alleviation and response at the deepest human level. Integral
development requires holism: the relating to one another or the synthesis of the various disparate levels
at which social science and policy discourse operates. The key to this is culture: the mechanisms through
which subjectivities are formed and expressed and the narratives which give shape to life experiences,
including, perhaps especially, extreme ones, the ones that exist within the realm of suffering.
It is for this reason that Kleinmans attention to the interpretation of the illness experience is particularly
significant (Kleinman 1988) and I will discuss his insights here with a view to relating them to the broader
question of social suffering, the very problem that development is charged with resolving. This is
important I think because it suggests a whole new model of approaching development, a truly humanistic
one rooted in culture and with a convivial, equitable and sustainable culture as its final outcome. At the
beginning of the book Kleinman relates how through two experiences with quite different patients of
greatly differing ages, he came upon the central theme of his study that it is possible (for the doctor,
usually fixated on the disease) to hear from the patient about the actual experience of illness and that
listening and witnessing can help to order that experience in ways that can have great therapeutic value
(Kleinman 1988, xii). This, he realized pointed to a holistic model that connects body, self and society
and that this complex set of relationships is inevitably mediated by culture even as it points to universal
qualities of the human condition: The study of the process by which meaning is created in illness
brings us into the everyday reality of individuals like ourselves, who must deal with the exigent life
circumstances created by suffering, disability, difficult loss, and the threat of deathIllness narratives
edify us about how life problems are created, controlled, made meaningful. They also tell us about the
way cultural values and social relationships shape how we perceive and monitor our bodies, label and
categorize bodily symptoms, interpret complaints in the particular context of our life situation (Kleinman
1988: xii). We can at once see the resonances of this statement with development as it is the narratives of
the subjects of development that take central place and as the development practitioner is recast in the role
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of interpreter rather than as the agent of intervention in the lives of others that s/he may not and probably
does not fully or even partially understand. But on the other hand, contact with development realities
and the experience of real social suffering, can shock the practitioner and the planner out of their own
culturally mediated and common-sense view of the world into a deeper grasp of the extent and structure
of the problems that stand revealed to them not as statistics, but experientially, as truly human life as it is
lived by a scandalous majority of the worlds population.
Furthermore, chronic illness, like trauma, displacement and the manifold dislocations of development,
becomes embodied in a particular life trajectory, environed in a concrete life world (ibid., 31), to
be endowed with both personal and interpersonal meanings, particularly when the ties that bind the
individual (emotional and affective ones as much as purely social) are severed or damaged. Sociologists
who have belatedly discovered both the body and the emotions as key elements of culture and social
behavior will recognize that the affective relationship to events, personal and collective, is a vital aspect
of the relationship to and management of, change. The parallels again between the medical field and
development are close and for the development practitioner as for the doctor: The role of the health
professional is not so much to ferret out the innermost secretsas it is to assist the chronically ill and
those around them to come to terms with that is, accept, master or change those personal significances
that can be shown to be operating in their lives and in their care. I take this to constitute the essence
of what is now called empowering patients (ibid. 43). Here we see a powerful corrective to the over
domination of the objective, structural or technical aspects of development. The process of change,
especially when that change involves displacement, cultural loss and the cutting of emotional bonds to
places, kin, work, familiar nature, deeply involves the emotions and subjectivities of those effected, their
self concepts and senses of personal worth and competency. These are questions that involve the ethics of
development every bit as much as the technologies of development.
by change rather than by the stasis and immobility of a traditional and conservative lifestyle, is the
possibility of human transformation and of positive social and cultural changes that lead to greater
empowerment and freedom. Knowledge of the forces that are creating change can dramatically increase
the strategic possibilities of the relatively powerless by understanding and thus to some extent controlling
the mechanisms of exploitation that abound in most societies. To borrow a phrase from Habermas,
this is the point at which the life worlds of the developee/patient intersect with the social system and a
negotiation of meaning and strategic possibilities begins in which as far as possible the subject seeks the
possibility of the decolonization of the personal life world by the forces that have made unacceptable
incursions into it whether this is done by personal resistance, political means or by cultural ones, including
recourse to myth, religion, fantasy and the freedoms of the imagination (Clammer 2008b), all mechanisms
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But to stress only the violence of development would be a mistake. Also involved and indeed stimulated

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against demoralization. The practical need then for the most part is not to represent those undergoing
development, but to give them voice and to hear those voices when they speak. As a patient of Kleinman,
so appositely puts it: We have powerful techniques but no wisdom. When the techniques fail, we are left
shipwrecked (Kleinman 1988, 142).
Healers and developers then have much in common: both are concerned with listening as well as doing,
encouragers of the recounting of narratives of suffering and displacement to emerge, empowerers rather
than simply technicians, and operating in a deeply and inevitably cultural context, one in which culture
is not merely a added extra to the technical interventions of the developmentalist, but is the very medium
in which the whole discourse is embedded and expressed. As with the chronically ill, in development
there may be no cures, but rather in seeking a methodology for addressing often intractable and
permanent conditions The essence of that methodology is captured by the words empathetic listening,
translation, and interpretation, which I take to be the craft of the clinician who treats illness, not just
disease (Kleinman 1988, 228). The necessity of ethnography, in clinical practice and in development, is
thus paramount. Rather than the practice in many development agencies of having a token anthropologist
to perhaps review the cultural impact of technical, infrastructure or economic policies that are going
to be implemented anyway, the deep understanding and appreciation of culture becomes a prerequisite
for any satisfactory development intervention on the one hand, and the maintaining and advancing of
the integrity of the culture in question should be an absolutely central part of any development policy
on the other. The necessity of discovering the models that the developee/patient are employing is vital if
the developer/physician is to know what they want from the situation, a knowledge necessary to be able
to help at all with the empowerment of the subjects of the development process, or what Kleinman calls
the remoralization the instilling or rekindling of hope of those subject to wrenching changes that
force them to redefine their own place in the world of meanings and social networks on which they have
previously relied as their primary maps.
Seen from this perspective, development itself becomes a meaning-centered activity in which care not
control and empowerment not management are the central methodological elements (a perspective that
has major implications for development education and the teaching of development studies). None of this
is exclude the political and structural dimensions of development, but rather to infuse them with a spirit of
cultural sensitivity and compassion that is so sadly lacking in so many mainstream development models
and has rightly led to the attacks on the very concept of development itself led by Wolfgang Sachs and
others. In fact such an approach to development requires not only a grasp of those political and structural
factors as well as the cultural and moral ones the latter which the very field of development ethics
has emerged to fill (Goulet 1995) but also of history. As the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre has wisely
said In successfully identifying and understanding what someone else is doing we always move towards
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placing a particular episode in the context of a set of narrative histories, histories both of the individuals
concerned and of the settings in which they act and suffer (MacIntyre 1981, 197). By so often cutting
itself off not only from the study of culture, but also from history, postcolonial studies and theories of
modernity and postmodernity, development studies has done itself a grave disservice, one not only of
intellectual concern, but even more so because of its damaging effects on practice and policy in the real
world.
Suffering and Methodology in Development Studies
One of the main thrusts of this volume has been that the existential issues that actually engage people
on an everyday basis are actually what development is all about, and that culture, often treated as an
abstract category with little real or concrete content or as an essentialized notion of some kind of collective
identity, is in fact a shorthand for the strategic means by which people attempt to manage the tensions and
problems (including illness). This has some fundamental methodological implications. As Kleinman and
Kleinman phrase it
Humanizing the level at which interventions are organized means focusing planning and evaluation
on the interpersonal space of suffering, the local, ethnographic context of action. This requires not
only engagement with what is at stake for participants in those local worlds, but bringing those local
participants (not merely national experts) into the process of developing and assessing programs.
Such policy-making from the ground up can only succeed, however, if these local worlds are more
effectively projected into national and international discourses on human problems. (This may
represent the necessary complement to the globalization of local images.
Perhaps it should be called the global representation of local contexts.) To do so requires a
reformulation of the indexes and instruments of policy. Those analytic tools need to authorize deeper
into the local). And those methodologies of policy must engage the existential side of social life.
How to reframe the language of policies and programs so that large-scale social forces are made to
relate to biography and local history will require interdisciplinary engagements that bring alternative
perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, and the health sciences to bear on human
problems. The goal is to reconstruct the object of inquiry and the purpose of practice (Kleinman and
Kleinman 1997, 18-19).
That is indeed the goal. But to reach it requires a new blend of the detailed and ethnographic analysis of
culture and its existential dimensions, a grasp of the structural qualities of globalization, and an awareness
of the social justice aspects of social change.
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depictions of the local (including how the global e.g., displacement, markets, technology enters

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In illustrating this necessary triangulation the Kleinmans analysis of the methodological characteristics of
a humane approach to contemporary world problems continues as follows:

Ultimately, we will have to engage the more ominous aspects of globalization, such as the
commercialization of suffering, the commodification of experiences of atrocity and abuse, and the
pornographic uses of degradation. Violence in the media, and its relation to violence in the streets and
in homes, is already a subject that has attracted serious attention from communities and from scholars.
Regarding the even more fundamental cultural question of how social experience is being transformed
in untoward ways, the first issue would seem to be to develop historical, ethnographic, and narrative
studies that provide a more powerful understanding of the cultural processes through which the
global regime of disordered capitalism alters the connections between collective experience and
subjectivity, so that moral sensibility, for example, diminishes or becomes something frighteningly
different: promiscuous, gratuitous, unhinged from responsibility and action. There is a terrible legacy
here that needs to be contemplated. The transformation of epochs is as much about changes in social
experiences as shifts in social structures and cultural representations; indeed, the three sites of social
transformation are inseparable. Out of their triangulation, subjectivity too transmutes (Kleinman and
Kleinman 1997, 19).
This viewpoint relates not only to the understanding of past and present development contexts, but also
to potential future ones, especially where suffering is likely to be involved and which can be anticipated:
Well-intentioned intervention after the fact is no substitute for strong action to prevent atrocities from
arisingPerhaps it is time to admit that atrocity in the past does not discourage but in fact invites
atrocity in the future. From the scandalous carnage of World War 1 to the innumerable murders of the
Leninist and Stalinist regimes, the countless victims of the Holocaust (condensed into a single abstract
figure, six million) to the bloody outrages in Bosnia and Rwanda, our age of atrocity slips into and out of
consciousness with the casual appeal of a transient news item. We fail to decipher the clues that would
rouse us to an alarmed vision (Langer 1997, 54, 59).
Widening the Moral Community
Suffering, while individually felt in the pain of each discrete individual, is also then a social phenomenon
it has its roots all too often in the unnecessary infliction of that pain by social, cultural, economic
and political mechanisms that could well be otherwise. Mourning can be for individual loss, but also
for collective trauma ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the disappearances of the years of military
dictatorship in Argentina, inter-communal atrocities in Rwanda, vicious civil war in Sierra Leone, the
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deep violence of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, the experience of hunger in the Ethiopian famine or
the post-cyclone devastation in Burma made immeasurably worse by the incompetence and intransigence
of the desperately corrupt military regime there. The recognition of this collective dimension has some
fundamental moral, political and methodological implications. The key to these is the recognition that
we are all complicit in one way or another by our silences and our ignoring or turning away from these
glaring problems and the obscene poverty of a vast mass of the human family, by allowing the activities
of our democratically elected governments and their actual secrecies, corruption and quiet violations of
human rights in far off places in the interests of business or national security, through our consumption
habits which allow us to benefit, perhaps unconsciously in the objectively negative and destructive
dimensions of globalization and neo-imperialism, through the ways in which the media romanticizes
poverty and commodifies other peoples experience of starvation, abuse or atrocity. Methodologically we
have to grasp the extent to which our scientific and managerial approaches to development diminish
the full dimensions of the experience of suffering, and to allow back into analysis a significantly cultural
(including religious) dimension. As Vera Schwartz puts it The Jewish view of suffering insists that pain
can teach us something in proportion to our willingness to question the limits of human knowledge itself.
Simply put, suffering both humbles us and clarifies our minds (Schwartz 1997, 127). Suffering is perhaps
the primary challenge to human knowledge, yet an epistemology of pain hardly exists (and interestingly
the sketches for such a project that do, exist mainly in the realms of literature and art, not in the analyses
of the social sciences for example Sebald 2003).
The rather recently discovered field of the sociology of the body for example, has yet to fully assimilate
the fact that suffering is, often quite literally, inscribed on the body - through torture, illness, malnutrition,
disfigurements caused by constant hard labor and that such disfigurement is itself a cause of social
stigma, loss of confidence and withdrawal. Anthropology too is complicit here: despite the critiquing of
the moral and other consequences of cultural relativism, especially from the view point of the formerly
perhaps particularly in anthropology, to confuse structural violence with cultural difference. Many are
the ethnographies in which poverty and inequality are conflated with otherness (Farmer 1997, 277).
The notion of culture then is very loaded. Arguments for multiculturalism or the rights and dignities of
particular communities, tribes or races, or even, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, of religions (Sen
2007), can easily become arguments for exclusion, stigmatizing or persecution, of special privileges for
some and the denial of those same resources or rights to others. It is not a neutral term and is embedded
in one dimension in the particular life worlds and experiences of specific communities, their historical
experiences, local ecologies and social arrangements, and in another in the larger politics of an unevenly
globalized world, very much including its cultural politics which contains inevitably ideas and prejudices
about ethnicity, gender, religion, class and the other classical dimensions of social inequality together with
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colonized this rethinking has not yet eroded a tendency, registered in many of the social sciences but

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the agency of actors individuals on the one hand negotiating their identities in a shifting socio-economic
environment, and states and multinational actors (including, very centrally, business) with their own
agendas of power and profit on the other. The problem of suffering focuses these issues like perhaps no
other, and for this reason must be located at the core of debates about globalization and about the nature (and
responsibilities) of culture.
So do too they raise questions about professional involvement in development. In much the same way
that Ivan Illich has argued that the medical profession has become a major threat to health, so it might
be argued that a culturally ill-informed development practice is a threat not only to health, but also to
lifestyles, memories, rootedness and a strong sense of the self. Speaking of medically induced diseases
Illich proposes that My argument is that the layman and not the physician has the potential perspective
and effective power to stop the current iatrogenic epidemic (Illich 1990, 12) and to reverse the counterproductivity of so much development when measured against the ideals of human happiness (c.f.
McKibben 2007). As he continues: A professional and physician based health-care system that has grown
beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical damage that outweighs its
potential benefits; it cannot but enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render society
unhealthy; and it tends to mystify and to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and to
shape his or her environment. The medical and paramedical monopoly over hygienic methodology and
technology is a glaring example of the political use of scientific achievement to strengthen industrial rather
that personal growth (Illich 1990, 16). Even as the proportion of doctors, clinical tools and hospital beds
has not significantly effected the emergence of disease patterns morbidity is redefined but not reduced,
so too the vast development and aid budgets at the disposal of development experts has not significantly
reduced the incidence of poverty or produced notable progress in the achievement of the laudable UN
Millenium Goals. Large systems and their staffing with experts in fact can and does easily produce what
Illich terms social iatrogenesis:

I will speak of social iatrogenesis, a term designating all impairments to health that are precisely
due to those socio-economic transformations which have made attractive, possible, or necessary by
the institutional shape health care has taken. Social iatrogenesis designates a category of aetiology
that encompasses many forms. It obtains when medical bureaucracy creates ill health by generating
increasing stress, by multiplying disabling dependence, by generating new painful needs, by
lowering the levels of tolerance for discomfort or pain, by reducing the leeway that people are
wont to concede to an individual when he suffers, and by abolishing even the right to self-care.
Social iatrogenesis is at work when health care is turned into a standardized item, a staple; when
all suffering is hospitalized and when homes become inhospitable to birth, sickness and death;
when the language in which people could experience their bodies is turned into a bureaucratic
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gobbledegook; or when suffering, mourning, and healing outside the patient role are labelled a
form of deviance (Illich1990, 49).
As with medicine, so also with development that is not rooted in culture and genuine human needs.
As Illich rightly notes, many of the factors that influence human life and satisfaction are beyond the
intervention of experts anyway. Supplementary to his notion of social iatrogenesis, he also proposes the
concept of cultural iatrogenesis: It sets in when the medical enterprise saps the will of people to suffer
their reality. It is a symptom of such iatrogenesis that the term suffering has become almost useless
for designating a realistic human response because it evokes superstition, sado-masochism, or the rich
mans condescension to the lot of the poor. Professionally organized medicine has come to function as
a domineering moral enterprise that advertises industrial expansion as a war against all suffering. It has
thereby undermined the ability of individuals to face their reality, to express their own values, and to
accept inevitable and often irremediable pain and impairment, decline and death (Illich 1990, 133) the
importance of disappointment mentioned above. This is not to paint a gloomy picture of human life as
nasty, brutish and short: it is to indicate that the barriers against it being nice, humane and long are often
generated not by factors beyond human and social control, but by the very interventions that those same
humans and societies, often in the name of progress, development, growth or science, impose on each
other.
It is what Illich calls the specific counter productivity of too much or inappropriate institutional
intervention that in his view brings about these effects and results not in the alleviation of poverty, but
rather its modernization. The persons most hurt by counterproductive institutionalization are usually not
the poorest in monetary terms. The typical victims of the depersonalization of values are the powerless
in a milieu made for the industrially enriched. Among the powerless may be people who are relatively
reduces them to modernized poverty. Policies meant to remedy the new sense of privation will not only
be futile but will aggravate the damage. By promising more staples rather than protecting autonomy, they
will intensify disabling dependence (Illich 1990, 220-1). Illich, unlike Kleinman and his collaborators,
specifically includes development agencies, welfare, aid, and international relief efforts amongst these
counterproductive institutions. While this may be a difficult position to defend in contexts of humanitarian
emergencies, in broader structural terms we see here a convergence between the arguments against over
institutionalized medicine and over institutionalized top-down development. The recovery of health and
the recovery of ecological sanity and just development are parallel and interlinked processes. Given that
a huge amount of suffering is man-made, the tools to counter this are at hand, but they do not reside by
any means exclusively in technical and managerial methods, but in culture, values, spirituality, resistance,
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affluent within their society or who are inmates of benevolent total institutions. Disabling dependence

Proceedings
imagination and the ability to draw on experience in order to design a more desirable, rational, attractive
and ecologically supportable future. If many of our current problems are the side effects of strategies that
were designed to alleviate these very problems, then it is to this dysfunctionality of our planning processes
that critical attention must be directed. And of course as we have suggested, culture is implicate in this
too not only as a source of solutions, but often as the source of the pain. But if it is our civilization that
has brought us to this impasse, then it is our civilization that must change. This is where the role of the
cultural critic takes a central place and not a subservient role to that of the economist. If what lies after
development is the good life, then that life must be defined in cultural terms, but in full awareness of
the fact that culture is not necessarily neutral in the generation of human suffering. The goal then becomes
to nurture a culture that is genuinely humane, enriching and ecological and which builds and sustains the
human relationships and economic patterns that contribute to the creation of the communities in which the
best flowering of the human spirit can flourish without injustice and in full realization of our position as
but one species in an intricate and marvelous total biosphere.
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Kaplan, Allan (2002) Development Practitioners and Social Process: Artists of the Invisible. London:
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Kleinman, Arthur (1988) The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition. New York:
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Kleinman, Arthur and Joan Kleinman (1997) The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images: Cultural
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Langer, Lawrence (1997) The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity. In Kleinman,
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Levine, Stephen (1987) Healing into Life and Death. New York: Doubleday.
MacIntyre, Alastair (1981) After Virtue. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press.
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Sachs, Wolfgang, ed. (1995) The Development Dictionary. London: Zed Books.

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Understanding of the Motherland and Narrative Representation

of Healing Shown in the Novels of Korean-Japanese writer
Yang-Ji Lee
Jung-Hwa Yun
1. Motherland: The Unhealed Wound

Just like the other employees, I was one of those people who had arrived with no place else to go.
Sometimes I was nothing more than a Josenjing (Yang-Ji Lee, Nabi Taryeong, 26-27).
I am afraid of Japan, and I am also afraid of Korea. Then where is the place where I can play the
gayageum and sing without any worries? On the one hand, I wish to be closer to Korea and wish to
be able to use better Korean, but on the other hand, that queer pride as a Korean-Japanese raises its
head, and trying to imitate, to be closer to, and to be good at seems to force me into a dead end,
so I am always at a disadvantage. I am angry by the fact that I had nothing to begin with (emphasis
by the author) (Yang-Ji Lee, Nabi Taryeong, 67).
Brother, doesnt the term urimal (literally our language) sound a bit offensive?
I agree. I received the feeling that I was unable to describe the prefix showing that something is
owned by us(me, our) in my own words (Yang-Ji Lee, Oppa, 140-105).
Yang-Ji Lee (1955-1992)1 is a female Korean-Japanese writer. Korean-Japanese is a word bestowed to
1 Yang-Ji Lees family became naturalized Japanese citizens in 1964 when she was 9 years old. At the time, Lee assumed
the alias Tanaka Yoshie (). Later, her parents went through a bitter 10-year divorce, and Lee described the events
during the painful decade in her first novel Nabi Taryeong. Lee, deeply shocked by her parents divorce, attempted suicide
during her second year in high school, and later left home to work as a maid at an inn in Kyoto (). With the help of
the owner of the inn, Lee returned to high school as a senior. She entered the sociology department of Waseda University,
but quit college after only 6 months. Later, she learned traditional Korean ballet and the gayageum (Korean harp) from
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To me, the word itself is already foreign.

Proceedings
such people at birth to describe them, but it is a designation that has yet to be confirmed. This designation
has the implication that such people are outsiders or minorities that have not been able to settle down in
their host country. Lee is a subaltern existing on the outside of the outside, and one who possesses a name
located on the conditions of the outside.2 Another prefix that follows Lee is the discriminative designation
as a female. As seen in Lees Haenyeo, to narrate the life of a female Korean-Japanese is to look at the life
of someone at the lowest level of Japanese society. The pain from being a Korean-Japanese, having an
unhappy family, and being a woman, as well as the pain from being a human3 can be seen in her works.
Among the dichotomous factors of Japanese/Korean-Japanese, male/female, and family/non-family, Lee
is always associated with negative factors, and this is represented in her works as the cause of her pain. At
the origin of her pain is the fact that she has settled down in Japan as a diaspora.
Lees pain is caused by the fact that she is a diaspora. The origin of the pain that she consistently presents
in all her works is the fact that she is a Korean-Japanese who is living in a host country instead of her
motherland. As Lee has said, I wanted to bury Yu-Hee in order to obtain freedom of the mind,4 regarding
her novel Yu-Hee, the existence of the motherland acts as a fundamental pain to her who lives in the host
country. And that is because she is alienated from her school, society, and family members for the fact that
she was not born in the motherland and was not raised in the motherland, and that she had experienced a
higher degree of alienation and exclusion in her motherland which she had visited out of longing. To the
diaspora living in a host country, the motherland is a wound that can never be stitched up.
Lee recreated such experiences as an outsider in her first novel Nabi Taryeong into a narrative, and the
Japanese, the people of her host country, viewed her work as a sentimental fantasy about her longing
Seong-Ja Ji, a renowned Korean singer in Tokyo for 6 years. In 1980, Lee arrived in Seoul, where she began learning
pansori and the gayageom from Gwi-Hui Park, a Human Cultural Asset designated by the Korean government, and the
Salpuri dance from Sook-Ja Kim. In 1981, Lee learned to write in Korean at the Overseas Koreans Education Center at
Seoul National University. In 1982, she was accepted by Seoul National University, but distressed by her eldest brothers
accident, she took a leave of absence. In December of the same year, her second elder brother fell ill from an unidentified
disease, after which he fell into a vegetative state for over a year before passing away. Lees experience in learning Korean
and her sorrow from the loss of her brother are projected in Nabi Taryeong, Gak and Oppa. Lee published her first work,
Nabi Taryeong, under her Korean name in the November edition of Gunsang. In 1983, Nabi Taryeong was nominated
for the Akutagawa Prize. It is said that the Japanese literary circle was shocked by the fact that a writer who had not even
written in literary coterie magazines or submitted pieces for contests had been nominated for such a prestigious award.
Yang-Ji Lee, translation by Dong-Han Shin, Dong-Han Shin, Commentary - self-awareness of National Consciousness,
Haenyeo (Moeumsa, 1984): 234.
2 A name contains a persons identity as well as the cultural aspects of the group or ethical group the person belongs to.
Hye-Wook Jung, Translation and Gender of Separated Female Writers, Modern English Literature 6.1(2006): 256.
3 Dong-Han Shin, above paper, 238.
4 Yang-Ji Lee, , Complete Works of Yang-Ji Lee (Kodansha, 1993): 64.
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to learn her mother language and the frustration from it. Lees works continued to receive attention and
were nominated for major awards,5 and she eventually received the Akutagawa () Prize for Yu-Hee,
which was her fourth work nominated for the award.6 She is the second Korean-Japanese writer to win the
award, after Hoi-Sung Lee.
When taking a look at the genealogy of her works,7 Yang-Ji Lee prefers the use of the speaker who is
discovered in which the majority observe her and are able to discover her identity, over the speaker
who confesses. This is her way of expressing that she is a minority who has always endured the violent
prejudice of the majority. But she overcomes the violence prejudice that regards her as an object through
efforts to objectify herself through her works. Yang-Ji Lee discovers her identity by reviewing and
pondering about her status as an other created through the views of the majority. As a result, in her final
work Dol ui Sori, she uses the first person narrative I. After consistently experimenting through many
works, she confronts her wounds through the narrative I. Such observation and gazing are actions for
confirming and reconstructing her identity and are consistent in all her texts. In a commentary on Lees
collection of short stories, Rae-ui, Kawamura Minato () refers to this self discovery as an action
developed in response to discrimination from the Japanese.8 As she endured the tyranny and near-violent
6 Therefore, it is unjust to omit the process of how she won the Akutagawa Prize and simply focus on the fact that she
had won the prize. Yang-Ji Lee had continuously concentrated on the key point of her story, her trauma caused by her
motherland and mother language, but the Akutagawa Prize acknowledges her at her completely matured state at her fourth
novel, Yu-Hee, and this can be seen as applying a different standard from that applied to Korean writers that demands a
different level of truthfulness. This can be seen as positioning Lee for her in the subordinate category of Korean-Japanese
and woman instead of as a writer who possesses her own identity.
7 Nabi Taryeong (82), Haenyeo (83), Gak (84), and Yu-Hee (85) were all nominated for the Akutagawa Prize, but Lee
won the 100th Akutagawa Prize with her fourth novel Yu-Hee. Nabi Taryeong (82) is a narrative about her frustration
after attempting to visit Korea, while Haenyeo (83) is a story about a Japanese girl who investigates the suicide of
her elder step-sister. Gak (84) is about the conflicts that arise during the life of a student who has come to Korea, the
motherland, to study, and in Yu-Hee (85), Lee achieves deep reflection on identity issues. Han-Chang Lee, Introduction
to Korean-Japanese Literature Studies (JNC, 2011): 207.
8 Lee said, the self awareness as a Korean living in Japan allows most to go through the process of discovering their
identities as Koreans through the perspectives of the Japanese, who are a third party. In other words, what guarantees
Korean-Japanese their ethnic identity is paradoxically the prejudice of the Japanese full of discrimination and prejudice.
(Omission) In the end, Korean-Japanese are positioned in the middle of the world of two mirrors of Japan of Korea and
they incoherently search for their real faces, sometimes in Japan and sometimes in Korea.
Yang-Ji Lee, translation by Hyo-Ja Kim, Kawamura Minato (), Study on Writers-the Mirror Within the Mirror,
411
Session 4
5 Lee is a Korean-Japanese writer introduced to Korea thanks to her winning the Akutagawa Prize. Works by KoreanJapanese writers were not translated quickly unless they had received a prize. In the late 80s, the works of 1st and 2nd
generation Korean-Japanese writers such as Yang-Ji Lee, who was the 2nd Korean-Japanese to win the Akutagawa Prize,
as well as Suk-Bum Kim, Dal-Soo Kim, Hak-Young Kim, and Hee-Sung Lee were getting translated. Since the 90s,
all the works of Korean-Japanese writers who won the Akutagawa Prize in 1997 and 2000 (Sagisawa Megumu, Suk-Il
Yang, and Miri Yu and Wol Hyun), were translated into Korean. Sang-In Yoon et al., 60 Years of Japanese Literature
Translations (So-myeong Publishing, 2008): 57-63.

Proceedings
prejudice of the majority, Lee realized that she was different because she was a Korean-Japanese, and
that this difference led to the discrimination that made her life painful. And through exposure to such
prejudice, Lee develops the desire to learn about the space of her origin which decides her difference, her
motherland.
And through such desire, Lee decides to directly acquire this sensation of the motherland from the
motherland.9 To Lee, her desire to visit Korea was a response similar to the homing instinct of animals
like seasonal birds and salmon which make them risk their lives.10 As she had written in Oppa which she
had written in Japan before she had come to Korea, to Lee, the motherland was the land of opportunity
in which she could find new hope, the source of her ideals, and the soil for her to develop the strength to
look at life and humanity.11 She also writes, Koreanlistening to the pronunciation and accent makes
me feel something warm spreading inside my chest.12 Lee had great expectations toward her motherland
to the extent of being excessive, and for that reason, her disappointment after experiencing her motherland
must have been more intense, that it must have been a feeling of betrayal.
What is the motherland to a Korean-Japanese living in Japan? It is a secret that they wanted to keep
secret for as long as possible. Having the expectation that she would be able to forget the experience of
pain which she would have refused if she could by experiencing her motherland was what started greater
pain. What Lee wanted was to see for herself the motherland that was wrongly represented to her by the
majority. But the motherland is an imaginary space that does not actually exist. The emotion she feels
after experiencing the motherland for herself is pain. This is because as seen in Nabi Taryeong and Gak,
Koreans in Korea did not regard her as a Korean. The friendly title of Korean resident in Japan was an
empty reference, and the historical trauma called Japan was engraved in the bodies of Koreans as an
uncomfortable sensation. The Japanese accent and pronunciation used by Korean-Japanese triggers the
trauma of colonization inside the minds of Koreans.
The Korean-Japanese protagonists in Yang-Ji Lees novels, because they conjure memories of terror in
Rae-ui (Samshingak,1986): 224
9 According to Bong-Mo Hwang, all of Lees novels except Haenyeo and Oppa were written in Korea. Lee published
all of her works through a magazine called Gunsang, and this was probably because of her relationship with Amano (
), the editor of the magazine. Bong-Mo Hwang. Study on Yang-Ji Lee, Korean-Japanese Literature and Diaspora
1 (JNC, 2008): 169
10 Chan-Boo Park, Memory and Narration: The Politics of Trauma. American and British Language and Literature 95
(American and British Language and Literature Society, 2010. 6): 101
11 Myung-Hyun Yoon, Literature of Yang-Ji Lee and the Motherland, Journal of Japanese Studies 53(2002): 470.
12 Yang-Ji Lee, Oppa, The Complete Works of Yang-Ji Lee, (Kodansha, 1993): 104.
412
Koreans, once again become monsters and others. The wish that they brought with them when they
arrived in Korea was not to become a monster, but to become a compatriot. But to Koreans, anything
Japanese arises memories of the violence of Imperial Japan. To Koreans, the memory of being a colony
of Japan is a trauma, and the sensation they feel from the Japanese language is probably negative. And
because of this memory which never goes away, instead of being welcomed and embraced as a Korean
living in Japan, Lee is regarded as an incarnation of Japan as a negative other. As recreated in Gak, the
imaginary space of motherland (my country) is ruled by the past memory of colonialism, and here,
Korean-Japanese are met with the despair that they are non-residents, creatures who drift around in their
deformed nakedness, wherever they go.13 Exclusion from the motherland arises the memory of anxiety
from being separated from ones mother,14 and such memory of exclusion and refusal become a trauma to
Korean-Japanese. Whether in the host country or her motherland, she is an outsider.
2. Recreated memories of wounds and pain
I am chased here and there. Mad Japanese people with bamboo spears and blades are chasing after
me. I run, but eventually my back is stabbed, my chest is stabbed, and I struggle as I am covered in
blood. (Yang-Ji Lee, Haenyeo: 252)
It bestows history to the individual body called me, and engraves my existence right now. (Yang-Ji
Lee, Gak: 330)
To Korean-Japanese, the motherland is a wound. This is because the moment they talk of their motherland,
they are excluded from their host country. The memory or pain acts as a trauma.15 The memories of
extreme trauma are expressed even in everyday life through vivid physical sensations identical to those
13 Yang-Ji Lee, translation by Dong-Han Shin, Nabi Taryeong, Nabi Taryeong, (Samshingak, 1989): 69.
(Yang-Ji Lee, Nabi Taryeong, Complete Works of Yang-Ji Lee, Kodansha, 1993, p. 54.
14 In the absence of the affection and acceptance, in other words, when a person experiences mental trauma, he comes to
harbor anger and animosity towards the object, and when such emotions are not processed properly, they leave trauma.
Hak-Soo Byun, Literary Therapy, (Hakjisa, 2007): 18.
15 In the case of persistent memory, the problem lies in the wound... The wound is transformed in a manner that the
conscious cannot understand and manifests as a symptom Jin-Kyung Lee, The Problem With Group Memory and
History, Territory of Cultural Politics, (Greenbee, 2007): 254-264.
16 In the case of extreme trauma, vestiges of the emotions and physical sensations felt at the time of the event remain in
the nerves inside the brain burst out during everyday life at even the slightest stimulation. They come back, sometimes
as flashbacks in which the past seems to reoccur in the present, sometimes as nightmares, and sometimes as the same
physical sensations felt at the time of the event. Joon-Ki Kim. Psychology of Healing in the Movies, (Sigma Books,
413
Session 4
felt at the time of the incident,16 and such symptoms repeatedly occur. Such sudden and repetitive

Proceedings
recollection of memories place Korean-Japanese at a position that is more painful than death. Even today,
the originating memory of pain of Korean-Japanese repeatedly brings out the memory of the massacre of
Koreans in Japan after the great earthquake. The memory of genocide17 strongly influences the sensations
felt by her in Lees work.
In Yang-Ji Lees Haenyeo, readers can witness the wounds of Korean-Japanese caused by painful
memories.18 Haenyeo is the story of Geiko(), a Japanese girl, uncovering the truth about the death of
her Korean-Japanese step-sister, her. Chapters 1, 3, 5, and 7 are narrated by the her, while chapters 2, 4,
6, and 8 are narrated by Geiko to reveal the tragic life of her Korean-Japanese stepsister.
The her or she in the novel is a Korean-Japanese who is the child of a mistress, and a subaltern who
is afraid of her classmates finding out that she is a Korean-Japanese. At school she is sexually harassed,
while at home she suffers from her stepfathers beatings and sexual assault of her stepbrothers. In
response, she resorts to binge eating and throwing up afterwards. Despite all this, she endures the violent
situation for the sake of her mother, who refers to the disguised peace as daily life.
Haenyeo starts on a day of her who is simply referred to as sister. And that day is the day the word Josen
is introduced to the students during social studies class.19 To her, her motherland Josen is the cause of
a feverish pain for which she does not know the reason. Geiko meets with Morimoto Ichiro ()
and Kayo () whose names are written in her sisters notebook to investigate her sisters death and
finds out about her dark past. Little by little, Geiko begins to understand her sister, but to her, she is still
an ambiguous object.
Chapter 7 is narrated by her since no one has seen final moments before death. That night, she
remembers how her mother died from uterine cancer and the foul smell at the time. The smell of the past
has an effect in the present. It is the recreation of trauma through the physical senses. Through the trauma,
she experiences the rupture of her world. On the night of her death, she meets a child named Osanai
Toshio ( in Japanese) by chance, and upon hearing the childs name she laughs like mad.
She laughs because she thinks the childs name is Osanai Toshiyori (-precocious child).
2009): 23.
17 Jung-Hwa Yoon, Method of Recreation of Genocide Memory and Identity of Korean-Japanese, Modern Novel Studies
46 (2011)
18 For a summary of the history of trauma studies, refer to Dong-Wook Seo. Change and the Other, (Moonji Publishing,
2000)/ Bong-Eun Kim, Healing and Ethics Compressed Within Trauma Literature, English and English Literature, 57
(2011):109, footnote 3.
19 Yang-Ji Lee (1989), Haenyeo, aforementioned book: 26.
414
Her laugh is one of self-ridicule that she herself is like a child who is getting old in the absence of a rite
of passage ceremony and an act of mocking God. She is terrorized by the fear that the foul stench she so
remembers of her mother may be the same for her at her end. In order to cleanse herself of this unfortunate
stench of survival she enters the bathtub. She submerges her head under the water, as if being chased by
the moan that like a spell chanted in her childhood days tells her to enter the water. She hears the sounds
of waves crashing on the rocks of Jeju Island, and feels a calmness that she has never felt before in her
life.20 Water is a space of primal origin. She returns to her country in the primal space of water. Through
death she has finally returned to her motherland.21
Geiko, who has had a nacherleben of her sisters memory, comes to understand her sisters life. It is the
day of her coming-of-age ceremony, but Geiko cannot enjoy the ceremony.22 And that is because she had
found out that her sister had decided to have her uterus and ovaries taken out on the day of her coming of
age ceremony.
Just like her deceased sister, Geiko cannot go through with her coming-of-age ceremony. The two women
who knew the painful truth share the identity as a precocious child, while one is dead and one survives.
3. Narrative recreation of the effort to heal and to think in the other persons shoes.
I was surprised. It was as even the smallest clot of resentment inside my chest had been smashed
into two. I was as if a dull numbness was spreading throughout my body through my veins.
...(omitted)... The numbness gradually disappeared. But a sense of danger that could crack at the
smallest impact continuously stabbed my heart. It felt as if Yu-Hee was near. When I closed my
eyes, it felt as if Yu-Hee was looking at me from nearby, just like any other day(Yang-Ji Lee, Yu-
In 1975, Yang-Ji Lee discovered her homeland while learning the gayageum and traditional Korean
ballet, and felt the sound and movement caressing her wounds. Lee believed that these sensations of her
20 Trauma preserves the image, physical sensation, taste, smell, sound, and thoughts at the time of the event. Although
time has passed, they are frozen inside the nervous system. Joon-Ki Kim, aforementioned book: 61.
21 Even good memories, memories of the glorious times, or memories of success can pin down life if they are not
erased...When the present is dragged into the past, the creation of new life and change is discontinued. And that is death
because death is ceasing to become something new, ceasing to create. Jin-Kyung Lee (2007): 249-250.
22 Geiko did not dress for the ceremony. She sat on a bench near the brook, feeling an unidentifiable pain. Yang-Ji Lee
(1989), Haenyeo: 73-75. excerpt.
415
Session 4
Hee: 83.).

Proceedings
motherland23 would heal the diaspora of wounds24 within her. The sound of the gayageum would have
been the sound of the motherland that liberated me, who was an other from the pain.25 Trauma has a
tendency to be repetitive, and this and the text in writing are mutually connected. Repetitive passages in
multiple works by a writer who expresses her own experience in writing is a problem. We can identify
the identity of the trauma by investigating the repeated passages and modifications. In Haenyeo, Gak,
Nabi Taryeong, and Yu-Hee, Lee recreates how she healed her wounds from the motherland through the
process of understanding the motherland. This narrative recreation of healing is achieved through the
speakers choice and the adjustment of distance between the speaker and the listener. Through the work
as a medium, the reader witnesses the process of Lee, a Korean-Japanese woman, overcome her trauma.
Lees trauma is triggered by her fear of being murdered and the noise of the motherland, and manifests in
the form of painful headaches. The headache that Yu-Hee complains about in Yu-Hee is the symptom of
the wound. And what triggers the symptom is the mother tongue. Lees comment that she wished to find
the cane of language26 expresses her desire to find a language that she can communicate in and depend
on, as well as her dependency toward her mother tongue as something that supports her.27
Healing begins by one looking straight at her wounds. But looking at ones wounds without denying them
is a difficult task. Lee, at first, denies her wounds that make her so miserable, although she already knows
where they come from. But she realizes that denial does not guarantee healing. Lee extends a gesture of
reconciliation and forgiveness to her motherland which had given her the wounds. Lees action was an
action to seek understanding. Instinctively, she tries to understand her motherland by learning its sounds
and movements. She moves on from trying to learn her motherland through sound and movement to
narrating by objectifying herself through the voice of an other in her novel. Such technique of switching
23 The way female artists do art is by communicating through the actions of the body, not its image. The impact of
reflection and the point of emphasis can differ depending on the scope and method of communication. Ji-Eon Lee, The
Aesthetics of the Body and Female Artists, Korean Female Philosophy (15, 2011).
24 The point that Korean-Japanese writer Yang-Ji Lee uses the technique of internalizing the position of the other by
reversing the position of herself and the other in her works is based on Jung-Hwa Yoon, Diaspora Writing of KoreanJapanese Writers (Hye-an Publishing, 2012): 267-268, 235-244.
25 It was an opportunity to open my eyes and be enchanted by the wide world of dancing, which has been passed down
through motions and movements that transcend words. Yang-Ji Lee, , The Complete
Works of Yang-Ji Lee (Kodansha, 1996: 659.//She entered the ballet department of Ehwa Womans University. As
her research topic, she selected the beauty of repetitiveness as a result of the convergence of shamanism and Buddhism
exhibited in Buddhist ceremonial dancing. In 1991, she began writing Dol ui Sori. In 1992, she died in Japan where she
had temporarily returned. Bong-Mo Hwang, Theory on Yang-Ji Lee - The Korean-Japanese Who Wrote in Korea,
Japanese Language Education 32 (Korea Japanese Language Education Society, 2005):166.
26 Yang-Ji Lee, Words of the writer,-In search of the cane of language, Dol ui Sori (Samshingak, 1992).
27 Metaphor expresses through words what cannot be expressed through words. Ha-Soo Byun (2007), aforementioned
book: 121.
416
the perspective is a narrative recreation of her efforts to understand her motherland by thinking in the
others position.
Why did Lee adopt the narrative technique of switching the perspective of the majority and the minority?
Lee wrote because she wanted to make us who belong to the majority to understand her. The switching
of speakers was a subconscious selection for self-healing. The confessions of a first-person speaker are
nothing more than sharing experience. There is the danger of communication with the other being
omitted. Therefore, by narrating the process of the majority listening to her story and understanding her,
Lees desire to be understood can be healed as she writes.
In Lees works, the boundary between the majority and minority is dismantled.28 Through such
dismantling of the boundary between the other and the agent, we position our pasts in the present and
share the process of reminiscence and regret which allow us to begin reflective thinking. Regret allows
us to go beyond sympathy and to understand the pain. Such thinking in the others shoes allows us to
understand that we can become an other anytime.29
Work
Nabi Taryeong
(82 Gunsang November)
Speaker
Speaking about
Aiko (naturalized Korean-Japanese)
Family (Korean-Japanese)
Haenyeo
(83 Gunsang April)
Korean-Japanese her/ Japanese Geiko

(step-sister)
Elder sister (Korean-Japanese)
Tamiko (naturalized Korean-Japanese)
Elder brother Hideo/elder sister
Me, Sun-i
Me, Sun-i (Korean-Japanese)
Omniscient speaker
Shoko
Galsaekui Ohu
(85 Gunsang November)
Omniscient speaker
Gyungja (Korean-Japanese)
Cheongsaek ui Baram
(86 Gunsang December)
Tomohiro (male)
Omniscient speaker
Takako (abused child)
Korean elder sister me
Yu-Hee (Korean-Japanese)
Korean-Japanese male me
Korean-Japanese male me
Oppa
(83 Gunsang December),
Gak
(84 Gunsang August, 85 Kodansha)
Geurimja Jeojjok
(85 Gunsang May)
Yui Chosang(86 Gunsang May)

Yu-Hee(88 Gunsang November)
Dol ui Sori Chapter 1
(92 Gunsang August)
29 Depending on which group is the standard, I can become part of the majority or a part of the minority. When I am a
part of the majority, I become a part of us, and when I am a part of the minority, I become a minority, an other who
is distinguished and identified by another us. No one is safe from becoming an other. Sun-Hee Kim, Philosophy
Consoles Me, (Yedam, 2012): 205.
417
Session 4
28 The following table shows the speakers in Lees works and their objects. The table was made with reference of JungHwa Yoon, Method of Recreation of Genocide Memory and Identity of Korean-Japanese, Modern Novel Studies 46
(Modern Novel Society, 2011). pp. 236-247.

Proceedings
In Yu-Hee, I continue to feel pity for Yu-Hee (), right from my first encounter.30 Yu-Hee, who
gives the impression of a young child, boy, or girl, comes to me as a face of the other person. My
sympathetic emotion towards the other person is that of the group. In Yu-Hee, I begin to understand
Yu-Hee because I have seen the face of Yu-Hee. According to Levinas, the face of the other person
orders me to act in an ethical manner and I cannot avoid that order. The other person manifests himself
through a face deprived of everything.31 The face of the other suddenly comes into my life. The moment I
hear the painful voice of the other, I have no choice but to listen to the ethical plea of the other. In other
words, Yu-Hee, who is the other showed her face by talking to me. Because I have heard her voice,
I share her pain. Upon seeing the face of Yu-Hee, the other, I cannot look the other way, and I feel
responsible as a member of the us that has given her pain. It was strong sense of unity of Koreans as us
established by school relations and regionalism32 that has been making Yu-Hee more lonely.
One point of note here is that the moment I meet the other person, I feel the emotions of pity and danger
at the same time. Sympathy and cautiousness are emotions that occur simultaneously. The group feels the
ethical obligation to sympathize with the other person, but at the same time by instinct they are cautious.
The reason the other person arouses these two emotions at the same time is because his identity is unclear.
We are uncomfortable when we see something that it ambiguous. The other person always makes the
group uncomfortable with his ambiguity and inscrutability.
The moment she found herself as the other person in Korea, she discovered the dual emotions of
Koreans toward Korean-Japanese in Korea and came to realize that her vague expectations toward her
motherland was an illusion. Lee understands the emotions of the group that she saw during her life in
Korea and recreates this in a narrative manner in Yu-Hee. And this is why Yu-Hee is narrated by me, a
Korean observer, instead of Yu-Hee.
30 Maybe it was a sense of pity, I was already attracted to Yu-Hee, feeling something for her. The Korean word was more
awkward than I had thought. Maybe it was from her shyness toward strangers that she cannot say her mind. I decide that
is the case. Yu-Hees actions were stiff and awkward that she gave the impression as someone who was very shy. (first
meeting with Yu-Hee), Yu-Hee, 25. /The whites of her eyes had a bluish tone, like those of a newborn baby, making her
pupils look even darker... Her voice also had a unique quality. She spoke in a relaxed tone, but her breath seemed to get
in the way, maybe choppy, it made me feel unsure and that something was unstable. Yang-Ji Lee, Yu-Hee, Yu-Hee
(Samshin-gak, 1989): 30.
31 Dong-Wook Seo, Philosophy Practice (Banbi, 2011): 128.
Emmanuel Levinas, translation by Young-An Gang, Le temps et lautre (Munye Publishing,1999).
Emmanuel Levinas, translation by Dong-Wook Seo, Lexistence lexistant (Mineumsa, 2003).
32 I know that my aunt who was sitting next to us was smiling as she listened to my conversation with Yu-Hee. My
aunt seems to like Yu-Hee very much. Just like E University that I attended, S University is famous for its solidarity
between seniors and juniors. Maybe Yu-Hee reminds my aunt of her dead husband, I thought as I glanced at her satisfied
expression. Yang-Ji Lee (1989), Yu-Hee : 35.
418
However, in Yu-Hee, I at first did not understand Yu-Hee. I self-reflect by reminiscing about her in
the room in Seoul where she has left. By being next to my aunt talking to her daughter on the phone,
I experience a situation where I am an other who is not family. The moment I synchronize myself
with Yu-Hee as an other, I experience the collapse of the prejudice and distance within myself. I
am an outsider to my aunt and her family. By overlapping my situation as an other outside the family
with that of Yu-Hees, I realize Yu-Hees wounds. And when the wounds are shared, a bond of tears is
established between the two. This is because an ethical view between people is opened when I anguish
over the injustice experienced by another person.33 In Yu-Hee, I realize my position as an other as a
Korean-Japanese through empathetic reasoning. In Lees works we are able to see a narrative process of
learning the ethical attitude to accept trauma and confirm solidarity.34
4. Writing as an exorcism for Yang-Ji Lee
The relationship between language and myself applies to the relationship between my notebook and
myself who used the notebook. Above all, I think it presents the question about how I exist. Becoming
desperate and dutiful about language allows yourself to become one with your writing. And just like that
relationship between language and myself, writing makes me feel purified and tempered through the
process of identifying and being identified, and sometimes taking out and being taken out. (Yang-Ji Lee,
Dol ui Sori :1 7.)
But why did aunt and me-us come to understand Yu-Hee only after she had returned to Japan, when
Yu-Hee was not in Korea? According to Freuds theory on the fort-da game,35 just as our mothers
absence reminds us of her existence, absence is an incident that allows us to realize the existence of the
absent person. But unsolved and repetitive absence remains as a terror and a trauma. It is possible to
overcome the trauma from the absence of the motherland, a passive situation, through writing, an active
The reason children ask to play the fort-da game is because through playing the game they know and
believe that their mothers exist after their absence.
33 Emmanuel Levinas (2003): 94.
34 experience is my domain and understanding is yours. Understanding as entering your domain is based on the premise
that experience is a method and that it is a condition for mutual dependency. Hak-Soo Byun, From Discourse on
Perception to Discourse on Culture, Humanities and Analytics, Seung-Sub Yeom et al. (Keimyung University Press,
2002): 184.
35 Sigmund Freud. translation by Chan-Boo Park. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Complete Works of Freud) (Yeollin
Chaekdeul, 1998): 16.
419
Session 4
action. That is because writing is an active act of healing that seeks to organize and understand oneself.

Proceedings
The existence of a Korean-Japanese through her absence is something that the writer must overcome
on her own. The memory of exclusion given to the writer in the space that she lives is overcome in the
process of writing about her experiences in Korea. According to Jacques Lacan, writing is a processing of
reality using symbolism as a medium. And the active nature of this processing actualizes the ambiguity
of anxiety, allowing the writer to heal her wounds by objectifying herself and thinking deeply about the
symptoms and their causes. And all this can be attained only through the result of active action.36
Understanding of the other is achieved through reminiscing within myself. The other is a materialized
body. The body of the other exposes its nakedness, and I have no choice but to be cautious of the
nakedness of the other. The voice of the other bounces off, and the agent cannot truly welcome the
other. The emotion of regret and realization that I feel after Yu-Hee has gone back to Japan is a
representation of coming to welcome the other as a true person from an object that feels different. Regret
is a noble emotion. To regret is to repent of ones wrong-doings and to request a moment of change.
The ultimate desire of Korean-Japanese who continuously float outside the margins will be to receive a
respectful invitation from those living in the motherland, and the invitation must come from the truth. True
penance and regret is the first step of truly welcoming the other. This is because welcoming is the result
of actions to understand.37
Humans as a whole wish to move on from me to us by making their lives into stories. 38 Yang-Ji
Lee began with Nabi Taryeong, which was a description of her own experience, but did not stop at simply
writing her own story. She expanded her work into a narrative about the Korean-Japanese as a group to
heal the wounds and resentment of Korean-Japanese. Lee becomes a shaman and psychic who heals the
wounds of Korean-Japanese and allows them to seek new lives. For Lee, writing is an act of exorcism that
allows to heal her own sorrow as well as to erase the pain of many others.39
36 The saying that a person can put a bandage on himself, actually contains a very important meaning. It is because it is
ones own effort to heal himself is the most important thing in healing a wound. Such effort is called self-soothing or
auto-regulation. Joon-Ki Kim (2011), aforementioned book: 56.
37 Hak-Soo Byun, Literary Healing Through the Utilization of the Healing Effects of Memory Retrospection, Emotional
Learning Disorder Studies 23.3 (Korea Society for the Emotional Behavioral Disorders, 2007,9)
38 Taek-Gwang Lee, Narrating is a Desire to Transcend, The Obscene Fantasy of Korean Culture(Jamo Publishing,
2012): 63.
39 Literary action such as reading and writing can change these pathological factors into healthy factors. Hak-Soo Byun
(2007), aforementioned book: 18.
The events we have experienced in the past remain in our memories as a story or body memory. To heal is to reorganize
and thread these memories. We call this threading, context. Dark and unclear stories, thoughts that come out without
any correlation, hate and love, such things gain context and materialize through stories. Hak-Soo Byun (2007),
aforementioned book: 23.
420
Lee does not leave it at the fact that Korean and Koreans misunderstand Korean-Japanese. She
experiences catharsis by allowing Koreans and Korean-Japanese to think in the others shoes and to
understand each others pain. This catharsis is completed within the imaginary territory of her writing.40
The voice of Yu-Hee in the realm of reminiscence and silence instead of in the vocal world creates a new
realm of understanding.
Speaking does not have any power in the absence of an audience. Even an insane woman can speak to
herself. We do not call it liberation when we voice of abnormal memories of our past. Simply giving an
opportunity to speak does not liberate the speaker from their past. What is needed is the effort to objectify
oneself as an other, instead of setting forth oneself as an agent that speaks. And what makes this possible
of the action of writing novels. Through writing, Yang-Ji Lee achieves true communication by bestowing
autonomy to a passive agent and shifting her desire to speak for herself. Minority-Korean-Japanese who
are agents that cannot speak, defined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, are repositioned as new agents in
the contemporary timeline of writing. The other, instead of not speaking, opens the ears of the majority
by adapting the narrative strategy of speaking differently.41 In addition, by exclusively possessing the
voice of the majority, the other amplifies her voice. Lee requests many people of the majority who
wrongly believe that they are agents instead of others to think in the other persons shoes.
To think about others42 is an action that has both positive and negative meanings. It possesses the danger
of reification, but it also allows to take an objective look at oneselfs position as an other. Therefore, this
method of thinking provides an opportunity to heal by destroying denial through denial and moving on to
the positive act of healing. However, not all writing guarantees healing. Healing can be done only when
one understands me and tries to understand the position of the person who has made me into an other,
and focus on my identity and desire.
experiments up to Yu-Hee. In this novel, Lee returns to her position. Dol ui Sori is about me, a Korean-
40 Lee fights against history which seeks to fix her as a minority by creating and shifting from Japanese man, Japanese
girl to motherland women. Fuji Takeshi. Introspection on Mixed Race or Mixed Blood from the Perspective of the
Humanities: Unfamiliar Return: Yu-Hee disturbing History, Humanities Studies vol. 52 (Yeungnam University
Institute of the Humanities, 2007): 36.
41 Gyoung-Youn Kim, Can the Minority Speak-Refugees Writing Their Own History and Rupture of National History,
Humanities Studies vol. 64 (Yeungnam University Institute of the Humanities, 2012): 306.
42 To me, it had meaning as an important junction, beyond being a writing technique. The older sister and lady in YuHee... And even Yu-Hee are alter egos of myself. I have finally come to understand, at least a little bit, the feelings and
positions of Koreans, and have realized that understanding is the way to objectify and distinguish myself as a KoreanJapanese. Yang-Ji Lee, The Meaning of the Motherland and Japan to Me, Dol ui Sori (Samshingak, 1993): 211.
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Lees final and unfinished work Dol ui Sori is a narrative of her healing her own wounds through her

Proceedings
Japanese male who has come to speak his own voice, writing poems. While unfortunately she passed
away before finishing the novel, she had attempted to write it directly in Korean.
5. Narrative healing and realization of Korean-Japanese writer Yang-Ji Lee
I am living in this air-. I think that is so whether I am in Korea or Japan.
Air contains the voices of people, wind and fine dust. It also has morning, night, and breathing.
Smell is mysterious. It has no weight, no form. But it yields a response. It tells us that the breadth
of life is endless. I see the color of smell. I hear the sound of smell. I cover myself with it and them
ruminate and spit it out in words. ...March 15, 1984 Yang-Ji Lee43
Yang-Ji Lee acknowledges her wounds and the cause of her wounds through her experience in Korea
and writing. She comes to the acknowledgement that it does not matter where she is, whether in her
motherland or her host country, as long as her sensations and wounds can be healed through writing. She
has come to the realization that her life is one of a nomad. This is the conclusion Lee has reached after
continuously reflecting on her wounds and the pondering they cause since her early works.
Lee acquired the acknowledgement that her wounds, especially the trauma that she believes cannot
be healed44 must be dealt with through relationships with the other. Lee is able to reproduce with
truthfulness the communication between the other and the group by objectifying her identity as one of
the other and a minority. In reality, minorities are agents that cannot speak, so Lee expresses the desire of
the other to be understood in her work through the words of the group. The other expresses her desire
to be understood through imagination in a fictional space.
The healing of her trauma is completed inside the novel, which is the space of writing. Inside the
fictional space, Korean-Japanese people who have existed with ambiguous designations, are recreated
as something more than just objects. They are recreated as objects that have voices. Not only that, Lee
creates a group that listens to the voice of the other. Lees novels end with actions by the group out of
remorse, and she proves the process of healing through her works. The minority and the majority establish
43 Yang-Ji Lee, collection of short stories Haenyeo, Prologue.
44 If you cannot listen to what they are saying, their words are not words. They are nothing but empty cries.
Therefore, victims are not agents, they are objects. And because of this they leave a surplus that cannot be won other by
the reproduction or political representation by an agent...But the surplus of wounds occurs through interaction with the
agent, and the object itself is not the wound. Hye-Wook Jung, Materiality of Trauma and Chang-Rae Lees Gesture
Life, Modern English Literature, (Modern English Society of Korea, 2007): 135.
422
a bond for sharing and healing each others pain through dialogue45.
Yang-Ji Lee stands multiple layers on the exterior, but does not stop at confessing misfortune. Lee is not
a writer who neglected her wounds. She looked into them, and studied her motherland that was the cause
of her wounds, and tried to sublimate the wounds that she received from her motherland into art. YangJi Lee is a key example of a writer who has managed to heal through writing the painful memories of her
motherland.
References
1. Primary Material
Yang-Ji Lee. translation by Hyo-Ja Kim. Rae-Ui. Samshin-gak, 1986.
______. translation by Yoo-Dong Kim. Yu-Hee. Samshin-gak, 1989.
______. translation by Dong-Han Shin. Nabi Taryeong. Samshin-gak, 1989.
______.Dol ui Sori. Samshin-gak, 1993.
______. The Meaning of the Motherland and Japan to Me, Dol ui Sori. Samshingak, 1993.
______. , The Complete Works of Yang-Ji Lee. Kodansha, 1996.
______. Words of the writer,-In search of the cane of language, Dol ui Sori. Samshingak, 1992.
______. , The Complete Works of Yang-Ji Lee. Kodansha, 1993.
2. Theses and Books
Gyoung-Youn Kim, Can the Minority Speak-Refugees Writing Their Own History and Rupture of
National History, Humanities Studies 64, 2012.
Young-Min Kim, Understanding is Hope. Forest of Criticism and Community of Companions,
Hangyeore Publishing, 2011.
Joon-Ki Kim. Psychology of Healing in the Movies. Sigma Books, 2009.
Chun-Mi Kim. Yang-Ji Lees Novels and Cultural Memory. Journal of Japanese Studie 50, 2002.
Hwan-Ki Kim. Study of Yang-Ji Lees Yu-Hee. Japanese & Japanese Literature Studies 41, 2002.
45 Wilhelm Dilthey said that the value of nacherleben is not less than the value of direct experience. Even understanding
is a process of nacherleben that is occurred through rediscovery (nacherleben) ones own self at a higher level (layer)
of mental connectivity with others. Young-Min Kim, Understanding is Hope. Forest of Criticism and Community of
Companions, (Hangyeore Publishing, 2011): 46.
423
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Sun-Hee Kim, Philosophy Consoles Me. Yedam, 2012.

Proceedings
______. Yang-Ji Lees Works and Traditional Melody. Japanese & Japanese Literature Studies 45,
2003.
______. Study on Yang-Ji Lees Works - Searching for the Subconscious and Ego of the Current
Generation. Japanese & Japanese Literature Studies 43, 2002.
Hee-Sook Kim. Modern Significance of Korean-Japanese Literature Seen Through Yang-Ji Lees YuHee. Korean Literature Review and Studies 23, 2007.
Emmanuel Levinas, translation by Young-An Gang, Le temps et lautre (Munye Publishing, 1999)
________, translation by Dong-Wook Seo, Lexistence a lexistant (Mineumsa, 2003)
Chan-Boo Park. Trauma and Psychoanalysis. Review and Theory 15.1. 2010.
______. Memory and Narration: The Politics of Trauma. American and British Language and
Literature 95. 2010.
______. Criticism of Moder Psychoanalysis. Seoul: Mineumsa, 1996.
______. Lacan: Recreation and Its Dissatisfactions Seoul: Moonji Publishing, 2006.
______. Symbols, Agents, Desires: Psychoanalysis and the Problem with Texts Seoul: Changbi Publishers,
2007.
Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle Seoul: Yeollin Chaekdeul, 1998.
Chan-Boo Park. Memory and Narration: The Politics of Trauma. American and British Language and
Literature 95. 2010.
Hak-Soo Byun. Literary Healing Hakji-sa, 2007.
______. From Discourse on Perception to Discourse on Culture, Humanities and Analytics, 2002.
______. Literary Healing Through the Utilization of the Healing Effects of Memory Retrospection,
Emotional Learning Disorder Studies 23.3, 2007.
Dong-Wook Seo. Philosophy Practice Banbi, 2011.
Dong-Wook Seo. Change and the Other Moonji Publishing, 2000.
Bong-Eun Kim, Healing and Ethics Compressed Within Trauma Literature, English and English
Literature 57, 2011.
Susan Sontag. Translation by Jae-Won Lee. Pain of the Other Ihoo, 2004.
Myung-Hee Song and Duk-Joon Jung. Study on Korean-Japanese Novels - With Focus on the Novels of
Hak-Young Kim and Yang-Ji Lee. Korean Language and Literature 62, 2007.
Won-Sub Shim. Self-Searching of Yang-Ji Lee - In Regards to Accepting Oneself as One Is, Modern
Korean Literature and Japanese Literature Kookhak, 2001.
______. Yang-Ji Lee after Yu-Hee: Novel-Writing as Asceticism. Japanese Studies 19, 2001.
Myung-Hyun Yoon, Literature of Yang-Ji Lee and the Motherland, Journal of Japanese Studies 53,
2002.
Sang-In Yoon et al., 60 Years of Japanese Literature Translations So-myeong Publishing, 2008.
Jung-Hwa Yoon, Method of Recreation of Genocide Memory and Identity of Korean-Japanese,
424
Modern Novel Studies 46, 2011.

______. Diaspora Writing of Korean-Japanese Writers Hye-an, 2012.
Ji-Eon Lee, The Aesthetics of the Body and Female Artists, Korean Female Philosophy 15, 2011.
Jin-Kyung Lee, The Problem With Group Memory and History, Territory of Cultural Politics.
Greenbee, 2007.
Han-Chang Lee, Introduction to Korean-Japanese Literature Studies JNC, 2011.
Hye-Wook Jung, Translation and Gender of Separated Female Writers, Modern English Literature 6.1,
2006.
Sigmund Freud. translation by Chan-Boo Park. Beyond the Pleasure Principle Yeollin Chaekdeul, 1998.
Fuji Takeshi. Introspection on Mixed Race or Mixed Blood from the Perspective of the Humanities:
Unfamiliar Return: Yu-Hee disturbing <History>. Humanities Studies 52, 2007.
Session 4
Bong-Mo Hwang. Study on Yang-Ji Lee, Korean-Japanese Literature and Diaspora 1. JNC, 2008.
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No One Has Ever Died of the Humanities:

Healing and Transcendence in the Contemporary World
Elizabeth S. Gunn
Morgan State University
This is not a conventional piece of liberal arts writing. It is academic that is, scholarly in its seeking
finding connections among a range of texts: philosophical, historical, critical, psycholinguistic, and
spiritual.1 However it does not offer a critical or literary analysis of anything. I do not claim to have written
a definitive essay on any aspect of these fields of study. Nor do I claim to have written anything definitive
about the authors or about the specific texts under review here. Rather, I am hoping to trace meaningful
and healing links among them. Yet this is not a prescriptive piece, but more of a contemplative, mindful
reading of the place of the humanities as a healing instrument in our contemporary world. As a matter of
course, I believe and will argue that specific texts written by Victor E. Frankl, Michel Foucault, and Pema
Chdrn speak to the healing nature of the humanities in the present-day global context. It is through
humanistic thought in its broadest and most inclusive definition that I read Mans Search for Meaning
(Frankl), Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), and Practicing Peace in Times of War (Chdrn). Before
situating these texts in their contemporary humanistic context, it is critical to note that I speak from a
position of western privilege.
I am from the United States of America, and thus can only speak critically from this location. I wish to
defer to colleagues, and indeed to entire populations, wherever and whenever appropriate and necessary.
Mine is one opinion among thousands, millions. It is important to add, however, that being charged with
unearned privilege, I believe one must use it toward the better. To do so, one must discover what better
1 The word spiritual fell out of common usage during the year 400AD. It has seen a resurgence in the Twentieth- and
Twenty-First Centuries. It is often thought of now as oppositional to the material rather than to the religious. I do not argue that spirituality and transcendence are synonyms, rather that they are colleagues the latter is not dependent on the
former for the healing that I find in the texts under study here (Kurtz, 26). Chgyam Trungpa dedicates an entire volume,
Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, to the idea that spirituality is often understood in the west as accruable. Trungpa
reads language as ego driven I versus solid object in which we fall into the illusion of separateness.
426
means to others. Then one must become an ally. I adhere to Jonathon Glovers words in Humanity: A
Moral History of the Twentieth Century: Some atrocities are not past but present. Those of us who are
lucky in living elsewhere should not be inhibited from thinking about them. Journalists risk their lives
to let us know the terrible things that are being done while we live in relative security. Victims painfully
narrate their experiences so that we may understand. Often they do this in the belief that, if the world
hears, there will be an outcry and something will be done. Those of us who think about these episodes
[Bosnia, Rwanda] at a distance will sometimes get things wrong. And of course, understanding is not
enough to stop the horrors. But the alternative, the passive response, helps them keep going (5). In other
words, my race and nationality predispose me to cultural incompetence I teach at a Historically Black
University in Baltimore, Maryland, where my gracious students are quick to remind me of this every day
and taking advantage of ones privilege happens so subtly, that I would be remiss not to offer this in the
way of an introduction. Therefore, I am grateful for the opportunity to include my opinion among many
voices working toward healing through the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century. I am grateful for the
opportunity to speak and more importantly, to listen.
If we take a broad view of the Humanities in the contemporary world, some might say we are not
doing so well. In a 2010 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Frank Donoghue reminds us that
the Academy is not synonymous with the Humanities. Whereas the Academy is thriving in the areas
of corporate sponsored sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the humanities are not.
Donoghues article titled, Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century? reviews the jaw-dropping
attrition rate of our field from the mid 1800s until today: between 1915 and 1995, the total number of
faculty jobs in the humanities declined by 41 percent, while the total number of faculty jobs in the social
sciences increase by 222 percent (3). The United States passed a federal act into law in 1980 which
stipulated that federally financed research done by faculty members that results in patents belongs
not to the professors but to the universities that employ them, meaning, that universities have become
corporate donations []. The shift in the material base of the university leaves the humanities out in the
cold (4-5). If, as Donoghue argues, the Humanities survive the Twenty-First Century, they will do so with
an exodus from the Academy into literary circles, philosophical publications, and the like. I believe this
has already begun to happen, and our task is to be good stewards of our fieldor fields (in the spirit of
pluralism). While studying the Humanities will not necessarily make one moral2 nor should it I believe
2 In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chdrn offers the practice of bodhisattva training
which include meditation practice, tonglen, and six paramitas which are the six activities of the servants of peace. She
writes, the paramitas are also called transcendent actions because they are based on going beyond the conventional notions of virtue and nonvirtue. They train us in stepping beyond the limitations of dualistic views altogether and develop
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investment opportunities for big business. The Bayh Dole Act also inaugurated the era of earmarked

Proceedings
the strength lies in leading one toward ethics and awe. This is my aim in contributing to the conversation
set forth by the 2nd Annual World Humanities Forum.
No one ever died of the Humanities, so they say. However, the Humanities, as concerned with the human
condition, have long tried to reveal and understand fears, desires, motivations, solitude and agony in
human depths.3 More specifically, in the Modern and Post-Modern eras, the Humanities have sought to
understand what happens when nation-states decide what is good and evil, why certain bodies live and
other bodies die. Societal extractions of the other have been a theme of study throughout the history
of the Humanities, and may be studied retroactively, presently, and through futurity. The Humanities
are intrinsically relevant to understanding the human condition in all of its innumerable manifestations
because, transculturally, the other continues to be the receptacle of violence and suffering. The
Humanities work to reveal and promote agency to those people, histories, and cultures that have been
sublimated.
Modernism has argued that all that is solid melts into air, though rarely has the ephemeral been
associated with the practice of systematic patience engendered by narratives of loving kindness as
voiced in exploratory branches of psychoanalytic texts and in western philosophical texts concerned with
contemporary eastern thought. The Modern (modernism, modernity, and modernization), as a normative,
western text, may be loosely defined as a process of systematic self-consciousness of its own becoming.
Prevalent in theories on the Modern are basic assumptions that it is inescapable and that no system lays
beyond its reach. Therefore, privileged notions of modernism are tautologies, only resisted by revealing
them as such. Modernist theories of resistance have challenged the monolithic tautology, though others
have responded by asking if alternative modernisms are still caught up in old spaces of asking and/or
declaring agency? How to move past narratives of hegemony and revolution? If paternalistic modern
a flexible mind. One of the main challenges of this camp would be to avoid becoming moralistic. With people coming
from all nations, there would be many conflicting opinions about what was ethical and what was unethical, about what
was helpful and what was not. Very soon wed probably need to request the most tamed and awakened people there to
lead a course on flexibility and humor! (126).
3 In Sigmund Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents, he writes, One mayhope to be freed from a part of ones own
sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses. This type of defense against suffering is no longer brought to bear on
the sensory apparatus; it seeks to master the internal sources of our needs. The extreme form of this is brought about by
killing off the instincts, as is prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the East []. If he succeeds, then the subject has, it is
true, given up all other activities as well he has sacrificed his life; and, by another path, he has once more only achieved
the happiness and quietness (29). I quote Freuds theory psychoanalytic theory on the inverse of the pleasure principle,
that is the avoidance of suffering principle, in its close relationship to what Frankl, Foucault, and Chdrn provoke.
What they provoke is a narrative on humanity. Whereas for Chdrn practicing peace in times of war starts by embracing
groundlessness, for Freud it is about gaining pleasure and avoiding suffering. For Freud, suffering might be the delay of
the pleasure principle, the deference of desire, or the avoidance of death.
428
narratives have been the guiding thought throughout the last five hundred western years, and its solidity
ephemeral, that is always turning back in on itself for reification, then how to speak beyond the text of
modern subjectivity? Victor Frankl, Michele Foucault, and Pema Chdrn interact with subjectivity
beyond the modern through Transcendence. Through this practice in each his or her own way, these
authors engage with subjectivity not as something enraptured in a modernist struggle; rather, these
authors speak to a level of intuitive knowledge that transcends time and space. It is a way to side step
the beleaguered modern: through its narratives on liberation, intuition, patience, and desire, ecstasy and
enlightenment.
Modernity is belayed by thick, cumbersome, instructive notions of progress and war. The ability to reveal
the hegemonic and dominant structures at work behind a regulatory system are at once empowering and
dismantling. In Foucaults, Society Must Be Defended, the author moves from the fatalist conscription of a
subjugated people, that is of an underprivileged majority, into a revelatory space in which he finds a power
outside the relational (250).
Humanistic thinkers such as Victor Frankl, Michele Foucault, and Pema Chdrn, among others, interact
with subjectivity beyond the modern through Transcendence. In The Will to Meaning: Foundations
and Applications of Logotherapy, Frankl speaks from psychoanalytic tradition of the Symbolic though
wrestled free from Freudian and Lacanian determinism. In Foucaults, Society Must Be Defended,
the author moves from the fatalist conscription of a subjugated people, which is of an underprivileged
majority, into a revelatory space in which he finds a power outside the relational. Similarly, contemporary
western appropriations of Buddhism as elucidated by Chdrn in Practicing Peace in the Time of War,
transcend time with a narrative of loving kindness. Loving kindness, intuition, or noble knowing seeks to
4
Judith Butlers revisions of Lvi-Strauss, Freud, and Lacan reveal that any cultural or psycho-sexual narrative of originality and/or sexual binaries is false. Queer Theory has done much to uncover the dangerous pretenses of origins. Elizabeth
Wright summarizes the Lacanian mirror stage as such: The child looks in the mirror and is delighted by several qualities
of its own image simultaneously [] it now gains a sense of wholeness, an ideal completeness, and this is all without
effort. This gratifying experience of a mirror-image is a metaphorical parallel of an unbroken union between inner and
outer, a perfect control that assures immediate satisfaction of desire. Lacan calls this pre-linguistic, pre-oedipal stage the
realm of the Imaginary. He takes the infant to be modeling himself on the mother [] but this model is an illusion,
since the mother is assumed, like the mirror-image [] to respond to every impulse []. First, the child imagines itself
to be the desire of the mother in a sense that it is all the mother desires []. The child wants to become all that would
satisfy the mothers lack, in psychoanalytical terms becoming the phallus for the mother, all that would complete her
desire. The mother herself has suffered deprivation, by division from her own mother, and by denial of her own father,
and can thus be drawn into a collusion with the child that it will assuage the lingering pain of those separations []. The
absence of a gap for the child between a concept and its application is a proof of the concepts inadequacy; the ego-concept has never been tested in use. The gap appears with the initiation of the child into the order of language, what Lacan
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understand thought as language not pre-discursive,4 but rather that through which through suffering and

Proceedings
meaning may be calmly examined. Through this practice in each his or her own way, these authors engage
with subjectivity and the other at the level of intuitive knowledge that transcends time and space.
Thinkers have been talking about healing for millennia. It might seem a bit more critical now in the epoch
of the aforementioned stem fields. What role do the Humanities play? Perhaps we are the only ones who
can say no one has ever died of what we do. In fact, the Humanities often offer a way to transcend through
liberation, intuition, patience, and desire, awe, ecstasy, wonderment, and enlightenment.
Table 1: From Whence Transcendence May Come5
Michel Foucault
Victor Frankl
Pema Chdron
Defend Society From:
Society Finds Logos or Spirit

Meaning In:
Society Transcends Through:
Art, Choice, Change, and

Transcendence
Finding the Invisible

Awareness
Pausing
Staying with Groundlessness
Colonization and Effacement
I will begin with psychoanalytic literary analysis contribution on desire as that, which is transformative
and transcendent, that which touches the ecstatic. In The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications
of Logotherapy, Frankl speaks from a psychoanalytic tradition of the Symbolic though wrestled free from
Freudian and Lacanian determinism. Frankls psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity centers logos, that
is on meaning as spirit, without any religious connotation (18). Here transcendence is the engendered
desire to find meaning in suffering. For Frankl, the modern subject is not stolen away through a death
drive or a pleasure principle; rather, for Frankl, logotherapy as transcendence provides the subject a
catalyst from fear that meaning and purpose might be imposed upon ourselves and toward the tension
aroused by transcendence, spirit, or meaning-fulfillment.
calls the Symbolic Order. The structures of language are marked with societal imperatives the Fathers rules, laws
and definitions, among which are those of child and mother (100-1). In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that the Law
does not make the divide (binaries); rather, the divide or sex/gender system makes and maintains the Law. Moreover, no
pre-linguistic, pre-discursive moment exists before the Law. In other words, what is outside Lacans Symbolic, supposedly outside of the Law of the Father, is what also constitutes it but cannot be touched because it is outside the realm of
language. Butler follows this thread by revealing how the Symbolic and the Real are conflated in psychoanalysis and this
conflation maintains dominant narratives of sex, gender, sexuality, and kinship: by instituting the Symbolic as invariably
phantasmatic, the invariably wanders into an inevitably, generating a description of sexuality in terms that promote
cultural stasis as a result (71). In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, she continues to explain that the
performance of any notion of origin is not something necessary performed by the individual, but a ritualized, almost invisible expectation reiterated and reiterated by hegemony.
5 This is a very brief sketch of my mindful reading of these authors.
430
Victor Frankl wrestles with the historiography of psychology, and argues for a way beyond what could
be called the social and the modern. He does so through what he calls the noetic phenomena, or the
noological dimension in contradistinction to the biological and psychological ones (17). Frankl terms
this the spiritual condition, and he is quick to term this in the anthropological rather than the theological
sense. For Frankl, logos means spirit, without any primary religious connotations (18). In keeping with
modernism, Frankls theory at first is about consciousness or awareness which he extrapolates to societal
systems. He is adamant about moving beyond the modern through what he terms the capacity of selftranscendence (18). For Fankl, the moment of transcendence rests with choice.
What if we think of modernity as pathology? Then, according to Frankl, we cannot break from the
tautology of the modern as long as we confine ourselves to the psychological dimension (28). Indeed,
pathology is ambiguous in that, in a given case, we still have to search for the logos of pathos, for the
meaning of suffering (28). For Frankl, the pleasure principle is self defeating [in that] the more one aims
at pleasure, the more his aim is missed. In other words, the very pursuit of happiness is what thwarts it
(33). Therefore, the purpose is creativity, not pleasure. In other words, pleasure is the effect of meaning
fulfillment. Only if ones original concern with meaning fulfillment is frustrated is one either content
with power or intent on pleasure (35). In terms of modernity, therefore, society geared toward pleasure
fulfillment through acquisition of power is doomed. According to Frankl, the collective obsessive fear
that meaning and purpose might be imposed upon ourselves has resulted in an idiosyncrasy against
ideals and values (47). For Frankl, tension is not anything to avow unconditionally. A sound amount of
tension, such as that tension which is aroused by a meaning to fulfill, is inherent in being human and is
indispensable for mental well-being (48). According to Frankl, the collective consciousness brings forth
the imagined community (as in Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities) through symbolic, through
the language of responsibility. For Frankl, freedom threatens to degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless
Frankl writes, according to one definition, meanings and values are nothing but reaction formations
and defense mechanisms. As for myself, I would not be willing to live for the sake of my reaction
formations, even less to die for the sake of my defense mechanisms (54). For Frankl, meaning, logos,
is characteristic constituent of human existence that it transcends itself, it reaches for something other
than itself (55). Therefore, the modern reaches beyond the confines of argument of old and new. It resists
universality for specificity in that meaning may be created systemically and resisted systemically and
individually. Underlying his theory rooted in a psychoanalytic, modernist tradition, Frankl does account
for the social, all the while believing in transcendence.
Modernity is routinely defined in terms of the western industrial revolution, what is termed scientific
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it is lived in terms of reasonableness (49).

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discovery and progress, and the new middle classes associated with mass production and capitalism.
It is the cult of reason, and the ideal of freedom within the framework of an abstract humanismthe
orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success (Calinescu 41). This occurs roughly
from the very late 1700s to the mid 1800s. The other side of modernity, modernism, is often considered
hostile to all that modernity encompasses. Modernism is in its most general definition an aesthetic
movement or movements associated with the avant-gardes. Of course, the avant-gardes in part maintain or
stem from the romantic notion of anti-bourgeois attitudes (42). In Western terms for example, Dadaism6
and surrealism,7 among other artistic expressions, constitute modernism. In short, modernism is a move
toward a purity of a system, namely language.8
Foucaults lectures at the College of France center on the way in which the subject becomes a subject,
or the ways in which they are subjugated by power. He holds that power relations are perhaps best
understood as forces established through real war or through peace which in turn is another manifestation
of war. He traces the domination of others through power by arguing that power circulates as evidenced
by redistributions of power and the processes of subjugation from the Roman Empire to the 18th century
in England and France. History reflected laws which reflected the sovereign power of the king. Citing 16th
and 17th century England and French historiographies, Foucault reads the interjection of discourses on
race as the jostling of monarchical sovereignty and supposed natural rights.
Thus emerges the discourse of race struggle in which one race will claim its natural, biological heritage to
create discourse that moves from the desire to defend a kingdom against the common enemy to one that
seeks to defend the society itself against the other race, the subrace (61). Empires and kingdoms give
way to societies and nation states as the nobility wrestles with the monarchy to recuperate diminishing
power. Foucault continues with the English history of the Normans and Saxons, the Levellers and the
Diggers, to suggest that the ensuing war and struggle for right (the struggle not to be dominated) was the
first to introduce a binary societal schema with national phenomena such as language, country of origin,
ancestral customs, the density of common past, the existence of archaic right, and the rediscovery of old
laws (110).
6
Dadaism is traditionally defined as a sort of anti-art movement begun in Zurich in 1916. Though Dadaism by its definition rejects definitions, its purpose was to create a non art, or at least an absence of meaning. Dada deliberately defies
reason, and the viewer attributes meaning.
7
Surrealism is traditionally associated with Andr Bretons 1924 The Surrealist Manifesto in which he describes the tenants of surrealism as a combination of the conscious and unconscious in defiance of conventional reason. Of course, the
surrealist movement is often associated with Freud in that dream imagery was brought forth onto the canvas or page.
8 I take the majority of this information on modernity and modernism from Matei Calinescus Five Faces of Modernity:
Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernsim. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.
432
Foucault spends some time on Boulainvilliers, whose task it is to present Louis XIVs successor with a
sort of annotated version of a general study of the situation of the economy, institutions, and customs of
France (127). The report was compiled by nobility, a group to which Boulainvilliers pertains. Thus, as
the nobility struggles to regain from the king its dwindling power, the nobility is charged with creating a
state of affairs; subsequently, the prince is bound to the compilation of knowledge of the nobility. They
are locked in circular power relation which, according to Foucault, eventually shifts in that someone
other than the king begins to create historiography. Historical knowledge is no longer the reification of
monarchical sovereignty, rather, the subject who speaks in history is therefore displaced, but the subject
of history is also displaced in the sense that the very object of the narrative is modifiedthe modification
of the first, earlier or deeper element now allows rights, institutions, the monarchy, and even the land itself
to be defined in relation to this new subject (133-4). The new subject is society, that is, the nation.
The nation begins to speak, but it is already a plurality of groups and voices. Thus, this is no longer
the glorious history of the power; it is the history of the lower depths, its wickedness, and its betrayals
(135). Power moves from that of telling the history of divine/mythological/monarchical wars to that of
negotiating the institution of rights: history gave us the idea that we are at war; and we wage war
through history (172). It is the history of the struggle for knowledge in that knowledge is power. It is the
history of revolution. Society, that is the collective potential for enlightenment, must be defended.
Similarly, contemporary western appropriations of traditional eastern thought, namely of Buddhism as
elucidated by Chdrn, transcend time with a narrative of loving kindness. Loving kindness, intuition, or
noble knowing may be achieved by seeking to understand thought as language not pre-discursive, but
rather that through which suffering and meaning may be calmly examined. In Taking The Leap: Freeing
Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, Chdrn centers her discourse on shenpa, the concept that tries to
force the solid from that which is ephemeral. Shenpa may be broadly defined as attachment, that which
we hold onto emotionally, interpersonally, socially, nationally and internationally. In other words, it is how
home from work and were tired and we just want some peace; but at home all hell is breaking loose for
one reason or another, and so we start yelling at people. What is our motivation? We want some happiness
and ease and peace, but what we do is get everyone else worked up too.9 This is a familiar scenario in our
9 According to Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, we are threatened with suffering from three directions:
from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as
warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful
to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere (26).
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something, anything person, place, or thing hooks us. This happens at every level: Maybe we come

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homes, in our work places, in our communities, even when were just driving along and someone cuts in
front of us and then what? Well, we dont like it, so we roll down the window and scream at them. War
begins when we harden our hearts, and we harden them easily in minor ways and then in quite serious,
major ways, such as hatred and prejudice whenever we feel uncomfortable (16 Practicing).
Just as Foucault deconstructs the aggressions of the modern, and as Frankl finds meaningful knowledge
through purpose, Chdrn understands monolithic discourses through their process of becoming a
storyline, a normative discourse on history, war, futurity. Chdrn frames shenpa as that which enables
individual or systematic labeling that can lead to prejudice, cruelty, and violence; and in any time or place
when prejudice, cruelty, or violence occur, where its directed be one being toward another or be groups of
beings toward other groups, theres a theme that runs through: This person has a fixed identity, and they
are not like me (66).
Thus a way through the modern, through steely houses of discursive languages and discursive thoughts,
through histories, hegemonies and dominant narratives on power and the relational is Transcendence,
that is to say a kind of ecstasy unbound by time and space. In each case, Foucault, Frankl, and Chdrn
engage with subjectivity not a modern repetition; rather, the subject may find freedom through intuitive
knowledge stored in benevolent contact, awareness of, and conscious contact with the divine.10
In his article Humanities in the Twenty-First Century, Bill Smoot asks, Why study the Humanities?
He answers by reminding us that they do speak to us, and they offer to our imaginations situations
we have yet and may never experience, the better to understand when and if we find ourselves
confronting the choices faced by Odysseus, Antigone, or Hamlet. Or, we find ourselves confronted with
10
Countless traditions growing forth from the first two branches, Theravada and Mahayana, inform contemporary Western
appropriations of Buddhism. Sakyong Mipham grew up in the United States while living a Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
In Turning the Mind Into an Ally, he writes that we spend our lives clinging to an imaginary identity cobbled together
from different thoughts and concepts, trying to keep it happy, and that is why we suffer. This isnt a sin, its an ancient
habit perpetuated by our bewildered minds []. The bewildered mind is weak because it is distracted. Its distracted by
the overriding need to maintain the comfort of me. It is meditating on discursiveness and self-absorption that leads to
suffering, because the bewildered mind cant go beyond itself. When difficulty arises, its unable to cope. When the unexpected occurs, it reacts from the limited perspective of wanting to stay happy in a small place. So if were threatened,
we strike out with anger. If somebody has something we want, we automatically feel jealous. If we see something we
like, we feel desire. We might not even question these responses []. What makes us happy and what makes us sad
come down to volatile outer conditions, circumstances that are constantly changing. This adds up to bewilderment and
suffering for us (18-19). Indeed, I recently worked on an interdisciplinary project in the new field of human terrain:
the federal government is seeking to codify human reactions in combat and conflict zones around the world. Psychologists and sociologists have studied human motivations for centuries. Perhaps a contribution from the Humanities would
be to understand how to pause vis--vis attachment at every level of social interaction.
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a decision on how to respond to what and to whom we encounter when we go home each night.
Underlying our tension is a fear of death or groundlessness: that which is elusively beyond our control.
It is that over which societies are in war/societies war, that over which privileged bodies live, and the
Other dies. In the meantime, we delay, we defer. We find the Other as intentional referent in a system of
signs and symbols whose meaning always implies a decision. The tension is tantamount to understanding
the Humanities and its critical role in the contemporary world. The Humanities may be thought of as a
contextualizing of decisions at every level of the human experience: the death drive; avoidance of the
death drive; searching for ground; losing ground. But the Humanities must reveal the sinister dangers of
binaries. If we believe in freedom as Mr. Victor E. Frankl does, then we might quote him saying: Freedom
threatens to degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness (49). A sound
amount of mindfulness of tension, critical thought, and accountability may lead to Transcendence. At
the deepest level, what is at stake is a paradox: Transcendence is the haunting sense of incompleteness
that stirs the Humanities. By revealing the structures that bind societies to notions of wholeness and
completeness, we are unbinding the Other, and by proxy, ourselves. After all, they say no one has ever
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died of the Humanities. If they slip away, whos to say we wont?
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References
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
Verson: New York, 2006.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.
__________. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York, Routledge, 1993.
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmodernsim. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.
Chdrn, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Shambhala: Boston, 2006.
__________. Taking The Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears. Shambhala, Boston,
2009.
__________. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Shambhala: Boston, 2002.
Donoghue, Frank. Can the Humanities Survive the 21st Century? The Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Chronicle Review. September 5, 2010. 1-6.
Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France 1975-1976. Picador:
New York, 2003.
Frankl, E. Victor. The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy. Meridian: New
York, 1988.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton and Company: New York, NY, 1961.
Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Yale UP: New Haven, 2001.
Kurtz, Ernest, and Katherine Ketchman. The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for
Meaning. New York: Bantam Books, 2002.
Mipham, Sakyong. Turning the Mind Into an Ally. Riverhead Books: New York, 2003.
Smoot, Bill. Humanities in the Twenty-First Century. Edutopia. July 20, 2011. 1-2.
Trungpa, Chgyam. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Shambhala: Boston, 2002.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism. A Reppraisal. New York: Routledge, 1998.
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The Role of Memory for Healing

in Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster Place
Myung-joo Kim
Chungnam National University
Black women writers in the last few decades have provided mechanisms of spiritual healing through
their texts. Slavery, oppression, discrimination, segregation, marginalization, poverty, and violence have
inflicted psychic devastation on black people in general since they landed on their new home, and so
there have been a great need for healing. Toni Morrisons many magnanimous protagonists are often
healers, and likewise Alice Walkers Celie becomes her own healer by writing letters to God. Like her
contemporaries, Gloria Naylor also creates characters who heal heart, soul, and body as well. What is
special about her, is that for healing Naylor, as Marjorie Pryse notes, highlights connection rather than
separation and transforming silence into speech.1 Naylors characters come to the realization that they
are all connected, and that sense of connectedness typically comes at the moment of telling and sharing
their past stories whether they are painful or glorious as articulation is always a powerful way to heal
oneself and others.2
What I am trying to argue here is how such a sense of connectedness is made possible. That sense may
reality, all boundaries collapsing and everything coming within a special order and unity where you
are part of it. Or that sense may be achieved by breathing, the old Eastern traditional way to reach the
ultimate reality. However, for Gloria Naylor, it is through memory, an absent presence, that all people find
themselves interconnected and interdependent and so they finally come to be able to start over again.
1 Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1985), p. 5.
2 Carol P. Christ in her Diving Deep & Surfacing stresses the importance of storytelling for women, in that articulation
helps women awaken to a sense of self and the world.
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come like an epiphany at a certain mystic moment when all of a sudden you transcends any immediate

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It is well known that both individual and collective memories affect the formulation of identity to
a great extent. So we could say I am what I remember; we are what we remember. What I member
constitutes my identity. Sigmund Freud has said that it is rather the rule than the exception for the past
to be preserved in mental life3 perhaps without any loss, which means no memory disappears but only
hidden under consciousness. That statement holds true for collective memory, also. As Carl G. Jung
writes, the whole human history is contained in an individual psyche as expressed in his term collective
unconsciousness. 4 Luce Irigaray goes even further. As a practitioner of the Eastern breathing through
which the body turns into spirit, she realizes that the body as well as the psyche is a container of all
human memory. We ourselves are bodily and psychically a living human history. So we are what we
remember individually and collectively.
Thats why both personal and political amnesia are devastating to a person and a society as well. So trying
to remember the lost memory has become a trendy task now, and it is undeniable that the task is a matter
of overriding importance. On an individual level, amnesia, whether unconsciously intended or externally
caused by some accident, inflicts overwhelming damage on a persons identity. Without memory, s/he is
not what s/he is anymore. On the other hand, political and historical amnesia on a collective level tends to
distort reality for the vantage of the privileged. To reinscribe the lost memory contributes to the correction
and complement of history as a whole. In the same vein are the feminists attempt to empower women
and restore their divinity as well by discovering a goddess tradition or myth, and the blacks attempt to
find their family root or to enact the going-back-to-Africa movement. If my personal memory makes who
I am, it is not so difficult to realize that the collective history and tradition which I belong to also constitute
who I am. For the reason, memory has a healing power restoring back to the wholeness.
Now black experiences are not particular to the black only but they are universal and ubiquitous on
this planet; they epitomize more or less a general human condition. Although slavery was abolished, a
similar institution remains in a form of corporational subjection, blind mammon worship, and all kinds
of relational despotism. Discrimination and segregation are not just racial but also based on region,
educational rank, wealth, and many others. So black healing, which has been practiced to deal with
overwhelming injustice and suffering, could work for all whose everyday life is full of inordinate strain,
competition, and weariness more than any other times.5
3 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1961), p. 20.
4 Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (New York: A Windfall Book, 1964). My statement is inferred from the following
statement of June: [...] if we are to see things in their right perspective, we need to understand the past of man as well as
his present. That is why an understanding of myths and symbols is of essential importance (58).
5 Byung-Chul Han diagnosed modern disease-depression and fatigue-as a symptom of inordinate competitiveness in his
Mudigkeitsgesellschaft.
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Overwhelmed by the horrendous massacre of 9/11 and following wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Judith
Butler in her Precarious Life attempts to discover a way to deal with grief not by going directly to
a revengeful war but by stressing that the world is intricately connected and interdependent. As a
healing antidote to such a destructive violence which is dominant in todays world, she proposes a
sense of interdependency. However, she immediately confesses she does not know how to theorize
interdependency.6 All she can suggest for solution as a materialist and white westerner is Levinas which
evokes a respect for the irreducibility and incomprehensibility of face as a basis of his ethics. Levinass
ethics does not go beyond his emphasis on mutual respect, further enough to stress that individual
existence is never self-sufficient but depends on others, and that an individual is not saved until all are
saved. There is no individual salvation because all individuals constitute the whole macrocosm, while
an individual being remains a whole as a microcosm. It is to realize that my own salvation will not be
completed until all creatures are saved. Such an idea seems unthinkable for those who cannot agree to
the view that there are powers, greater than self, invisible, intangible, and so unprovable except through
feeling in silence. Unless one admits the existence of such a power, there is no way to prove that all
creatures are interconnected and interdependent because there is no visible lines or detectable dynamics
that would connect them all.
In this paper, I argue it is through memory that interdependency could be theorized. Offering memory
as a mechanism of spiritual healing, Naylor succeeds to embody the fact of mutual dependency through
characters experiences. To say briefly, memory serves an important function to enhance the feeling of
interdependency which leads to spiritual healing. Memory as a healing power for Naylor is not supposed
to be selective; it is to encompass all whether it is painful or glorious; for if any part is missing, we as
a person is deficient. Life swirls sometimes against a rugged ravine and other times runs across a flat
meadow peacefully. Whether a raging torrent or a peaceful stream, they all constitute lifes flow. Or like
an ocean, memory ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear (192)7 like the indomitable black
imagination, which transcends the immediate reality and makes a connection of the concrete to the
abstract, or of the individual to the collective. In memory, time and space sometimes shrink or other times
stretch, and so an unexpected connection is made, by which one comes to realize that ones existence is
totally dependent on others. Moreover, memory as remembrance empowers people simply by reviving
their past history, and induces an impetus to start over again by enacting hope and vision because, as
6 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. xiii.
7 All documentation of the quotes from Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Penquin Book, 1982)
will be parenthesized from here.
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girls on Brewster Place. In addition to that, Naylors memory as a healing power activates analogical

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Naylor herself points out in her interview with Tomeido Ashford, healing means starting over again.8
It is true that reviving old trauma is often painful; even so, healing is possible only by going back to the
trauma and see it as it is. The process of remembrance also involves opening eyes unto the positive but
forgotten aspect of the whole self. We are what we remember, again. To regain the forgotten part will
restore the self to its whole entity.
Naylors first novel The Women of Brewster Place is composed of seven short stories with recurrent
characters and unifying themes. Over all, the seven stories deal with mainly eight women who survive
personal devastation and rise again like an ebony phoenix (5). Among the eight, Lorraine may seem
the only failure on surface, but looked closely she herself is a person who recovers firmness in her
nature after talking with Ben although later gruesome violence is inflicted on her. Her insanity at the end
of the section is only forced upon her from outside, whereas her inner integrity is retained and expressed
in her constant self-defence. Also her victimization turns out to provide an outlet to explode the rage
accumulated in peoples consciousness. So, the novel in general enacts a vision to triumph over suffering
and pain.
The novel starts with a question which is posed by Langston Hughss poem. What happens to a dream
deferred? At the end of the novel, the reader finds the black girls dream has not dried up, nor festered; it
may seem to sag at first but it finally does explode. At the end of the novel, we see the colored daughters
of Brewster, spread over the canvas of time, still wake up with their dreams misted on the edge of a yawn
(192). They may be destroyed but not defeated. Here, Hughss another poem may work as an epilogue to
fit into the theme.
Hold onto your dreams
For if dreams die
Life is like a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
8 Tomeido R. Ashford, Gloria Naylor on Black Spirituality: An Interview, MELUS.
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As many critics discern, the novel is about dreams, dying dreams but never defeated dreams. It is
interesting to see that the word dream implies two distinctive meanings at the same time. One of its
meanings is equal to fantasy and illusion which are associated with dreams in sleep, something that
departs from reality and so is not worthy being kept, while the other means hope for the future, this time
something worthwhile. Considering the wish-fulfillment quality of dreams in sleep as Freud asserts,
however, dreams as hope are not so different from an illusion as seen at first glance. Jung also says that
most symbols and stories in individual dreams come out of collective memories. And dream as a hope is
also based on memory as much as dream at night is on daytime or unconsciously accumulated memory. If
the novel centers around dreams, memory is deeply involved with its central theme of dream.
Now how do memories contribute to the healing process of characters in the novel? Before examining the
roles of memory, we need to see what memory is or should be to function as a healing power. Ciel, who
has been a knot at the base of Matties heart (176) all along, says at the end of the novel,
But I kept saying one day when Ive gotten rid of the scars, when Im really well and over all
thats happened so that she can be proud of me, then Ill write and let her know [...] And I stopped
believing that it ever would (177).
Mattie immediately compliments her insight, crying Thank God, you found that out (177). Ciel is a
granddaughter of Eva Turner, and gets married to Eugene, being attracted by his smell which reminds her
of her Southern home town. They have a baby, but when Eugene comes to know another baby is coming
with no job, he urges her to abort the new baby, being impatient about the burden. But even after abortion,
Eugene tries to leave her, and their arguments ends up with Ciels awakening to his arrogance and
selfishness (100) and her decision to live on her own, and most tragically with their toddler baby Serenas
electrocution. Her death utterly bends Ciels soul and body, leaving her in the ranges of a personal hell
pain, a scar never disappears but remains as a part of memory even after being healed. Although Ciels
final realization that she can never get rid of the scar occurs in Matties dream, it holds true in Naylors
framework of ideas. No memory can be or should be eradicated. Any of its portion cannot be done away
with. Just as wholeness is important to ones identity, all-embracing memory is crucial to base a firm
ground of being on which one can start over again to bloom into a rich and full life. So healing is not a
matter of eradicating a certain unpleasant memory, which is impossible, but it means starting over again
by accepting all as they are.
Matties own life history attests to the importance of keeping memory as it is. In a similar way to Ciels,
Mattie was once attracted by Butch who detests getting into a rut, living a life like eating sugarcane. He is
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(102). She severely suffers from the loss which cannot be even mourned. Although Mattie heals her

Proceedings
clever enough to spit out the wedge before it gets strawy; he takes only the sweetest part. So he is unable
to take responsibility and go steady with anybody. In a way, Mattie looks to be influenced by him for a
while. When her mind would reach out behind, she forced herself to think only of the back road to the
house, the feel of summer, the taste of sugarcane, and the smell of wild herbs (25). She forces herself to
forget the bitter part of her memory, being selective recalling the past just like Butch.
Her partiality to the sweet portion of memory entails another form of partiality, this time, in her love
for Basil, her son. When she mistakenly moves out to save her son from rats bite, blundering through
the town with no plan or direction, she comes across Eva Turner, who advises that you cant keep him
runnin away from things that hurt him. Sometimes you just gotta stay there and teach him how to go
through bad and good of whatever comes (31). Mattie does not listen nor understand its meaning until
she completely loses her son who has grown up to be a feeble-minded irresponsible young fugitive. It
costs her a lot to learn the lesson that one can start over again only when accepting the whole, not partial
truth. Truth sets us free. All inclusive memory attests to the fact that the good depends on the bad and vice
versa. The sweet and the bitter come together to form a sugarcane; to make a whole, two contraries are
interdependent.
In addition to the memorys healing capacity as a container of total truth, its transcending power over
time and space makes analogical imagination possible by broadening the vision and making unexpected
connection among dissimilar things. In memory, the past and the present coexist. Any linear chronological
arraignment or duration is not meaningful in memory. As Naylor describes,
Times passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystallize at any
given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and
one hurt can be shattered and sprinkle over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be
damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride
like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the consciousness at ragged,
unexpected intervals (35).
However, it is not just time in memory that shrinks and stretches at will. Space also leaps over boundaries
in memory. Such a transcending function of memory helps making connection. Ben shares his painful
memory with Lorraine after she is denied by her neighbor and even by her lover Theresa. Sharing their
memories, Ben identifies Lorraine with his daughter whom he was not able to protect from sexual
exploitation; her friendship with Ben strengthens her and gives firmness enough to assert herself. She
is ready to start over again although her healing is only momentary. Another identification over time and
space is made between Lorrain and Ciel. It is in Ciels dream that she becomes a person, Lorrain, who
442
was victimized by the town gangsters. Ciel says, And there was a woman who was supposed to be me, I
guess. She didnt exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me (179). Lorrain is identified with Ciel in terms
of severe suffering and pain that they go through.
More importantly, all of Brewster women identify themselves with Lorrain by madly yanking each
stained brick out of the wall, feeling the blood stain is their own blood. In Matties wish-fulfilling dream,
all women project their pain into the wall which has been forgotten as a mere fixture of the town. Now
awakened to their own pain through Lorrains victimization, they explode, attempting to break down the
wall. The wall is the central symbol of the novel, representing the communal memory of discrimination,
abandonment, isolation, segregation, and dispair. Their gesture to tear down the wall is an act of recalling
their forgotten bitter memory and rebelling against what it represents. They all become one by identifying
themselves with the communal memory. Toward the end of the novel, we see a sunny day after a week of
rain, and the novel ends with Ettas hopeful cry, Were gonna a party (189). A new day is dawning, and
people are ready to start over again. Thats healing. Here, memory is a matrix from which a new life is
born.
It is always amazing to see the old throbbing pain is often recalled with detached aloofness, although some
pain newly starts to throb again when recalled, but of course, with less intensity. It is because once pain
is incorporated into memorial space it is put into perspective. One finally acquires a proper perspective to
enable us to make an unexpected connection among separated events and people and find meanings for
all. So remembrance itself involves a healing process. There is something we would never see until we
stop and see. That stop is a moment of remembrance, looking back. Mattie regrets her son has not been
able to heal himself unlike Ciel. She says to Ciel, Guess he aint been as lucky as you yet. Aint run out
of highway to stop and make him think (178). Mattie makes the point that what makes Ciel successful in
self-healing is she has been able to transcend lifes flow and see it from a proper perspective by stopping
Likewise, Kiswanas conflict with her mother is resolved when they together look back their immediate
family history. Mrs. Browne responds to her daughters angry accusation calling her a white mans
nigger whos ashamed of being black (85).
I am alive because of the blood of proud people who never scraped or begged or apologized for
what they were. They lived asking only one thing of this world -to be allowed to be. And I learned
through the blood of these people that black isnt beautiful and it isnt ugly black is! Its not kinky
hair and its not straight hair- it just is (86).
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and looking back.

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She continues to talk about her own brave grandmother who held off six white men with a shotgun when
they tried to drag one of her sons to jail for not knowing his place (86), and ends her moving speech
with thats not being white or red or black thats being a mother (86). She reminds Kiswana of another
tradition of being itself which has been handed down from mothers to mothers, besides her political
activism of keeping the African tradition. The communal memory of mothers sacrifice for survival brings
about their reconciliation. The remembrance heals a rip in the relationship between the mother and her
daughter.
Etta Mae Johnson goes through a similar healing process. Her constant affairs with men is closely related
to her wish of acquiring a material and spiritual security for which she has fought against the hostile world
like a greased cobra (56) and a bantam (59). After all frustration, her final false expectation about a
deceptive preacher is destined to be crushed. At dawn after a night with the preacher, she looks at the wall
for the first time since she came to Brewster. By looking at the wall, she shares the communal memory
of broken spirit (72) with others, and turns into a member of the community from an outsider who has
been reluctant to belong. And then she recalls Mattie who constitutes a main part of her memory. In spite
of her cruel words and behaviors toward Mattie, Etta knows she would find healing love and comfort in
Mattie thanks to the years that they have shared together.
Cora Lee also finds an impetus to move on with hope when she recalls her old school days when she
loved learning, especially Shakespeare. Her cultural memory, which has been forgotten among the debris
of every day juggling, awakens her to the reality that babies would grow up to be adults. Then she begins
to dream, this time, a real dream for the future; her dumb-ass children could be responsible and reliant
contributors to the society.
Besides, food and house are the agencies through which memory is retained and, when recalled, proves
spiritual healing. Evas food and house are symbolic of healing when they are kept in memory.
This novel provides a three-layered healing process. As pointed out, storytelling itself offers healing,
giving an articulation to chaotic experiences. On the writers side, storytelling plays a therapeutic role,
putting her individual and collective memories into proper perspective. Also, the novel itself is about
healing by presenting suffering characters who start over again through memory. Third, healing occurs
on the side of the reader while reading, who identifies and sympathize with the characters. The reading
process requires long duration during which the readers individual and collective memory is in turn
evoked and infiltrated into fictional experiences. So both writing and reading involves healing, and
memory plays an important role in healing by its inclusive, connecting, and remembering function.
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References
Ashford, Tomeiko R. Gloria Naylor on Black Spirituality: An Interview, MELUS 30, no.4 (2005):
73-87.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Christ Carol P. Diving Deep & Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontent. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961.
Han, Byung-Chul. Mudigkeitsgesellschaft. Translated by Tae-Whan Kim. Seoul: Munhak & Jisung Co,
2012.
Irigaray, Luce. Between East and West: from Singularity to Community. Translated by Stephen Pluhacek.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Jung, Carl G. Man and his Symbols. New York: A Windfall Book, 1964.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987.
Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Penguin Book, 1982.
Pryse, Marjorie and Hortense J. Spiller, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
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Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1982.
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The 2nd
Proceedings

Language, Gender, and Senses
1. H
ealing Thought: Therapeutic Philosophy and the Critique of
Metaphysics
/ Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University)
2. T
he Practicing of Feminism as Healing Humanities
/ Ra-Keum Huh (Ewha Womans University)
3. E
motions and Humanities Healing: The Greek Philosophers and
the Stoics Understanding of Emotions
/ Wooryong Park (Sogang University)
4. The Healing Function of Talchum

/ Hyun Shik Ju (Sogang University)
Healing Thought: Therapeutic Philosophy and the Critique of

Metaphysics
Anthony Curtis Adler

Yonsei University
In Book Gamma of his Metaphysics, Aristotle declares that there is a science that studies Being as
Being and those things belonging to Being with respect to [what it is in] itself (to on h to on kai ta tout
huparchonta kath hauto) (1003a). This science, he continues, is different from all the other particular
sciences, since it alone theorizes Being universally (literally: with respect to the whole) as Being. All
the other sciences, in contrast, carve off some smaller portion from the whole, and concentrate on this.
Aristotle wrote the texts of Metaphysics in the 4th century B.C., though they were not compiled under
that name until the first century C.E. Almost two and a half millennium have since past, yet Aristotles
conception of a science of ontology, the theorization of Being as Being, remains a matter of great
controversy. It is a provocation, a stimulus to philosophy that cannot be easily dismissed. Indeed, it has
become controversial as never before. One could even say that, in the twentieth century, the possibility
of a science of Being has become one of the main questions both uniting and dividing the two schools
of philosophy that have become known, respectively, as continental and analytic philosophy. Both
theorize the ultimate nature of reality, challenging the philosophical terminology and conceptualities that
had come into being through the reception of Aristotles thought, culminating in the late middle ages, but
that continued to hold sway over the discourse of philosophers even as they struggled, in the early modern
and beyond, to free themselves from the heavy yoke of scholasticism.
Yet they would conceive of this project of liberation in very different ways. Analytic philosophers
were, from the first, concerned with developing an account of logic, language, propositional truth that
could accommodate the new discoveries in mathematics and the natural sciences. They approached the
problems of philosophy with the ingenuity and brilliance of engineers --- inspired by the possibilities
of the future, compelled by the exigencies of the present, and largely unburdened by the claims of the
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past. For an engineer, the past is the history of failures and successes; one can learn much from it, but it
has no prescriptive force. Even when they extended their interests in other directions, or even abandon
this project altogether, they remain engineers at heart. Whatever the other differences and similarities
between them, continental philosophers differ from analytic philosophers in one absolute sense: there
is something that keeps them from thinking like engineers; from thinking that thinking itself can be a form
of engineering, or at least not just a form of engineering.
What is this? A certain weight of the past, of tradition --- but also the weight of the future. To begin
engineering a solution to a problem, one must feel confident that the problem that one faces is the real
problem, the problem that matters. Real engineers, one imagines, are never troubled by doubts in this
regard: the problem has been given to them, and it is not their place to question it. The most extraordinarily
difficult problems in engineering are difficult because the problem itself is clear; it is the solution that is
unknown. The continental philosopher, in contrast, never has the confidence that he really knows what
the problem is. He believes that problems (such as the question of Being) have been handed down to him,
but that the meaningfulness of these questions their ability to speak to us now is anything but selfevident. He recognizes that he understands these questions from a perspective that has been formed by
the answers that have already been given to him, and that, in order to recover a sense for the question, it
is necessary to return to the past, to understand the question from out of the past, and work towards the
possibility of a future discourse in which a new approach to the question might be possible.
The difference between analytic and continental philosophy, in this way, comes down to
fundamentally different claims about the nature of the specious problems that have haunted philosophers
in the past. For the analytic philosopher, these Scheinprobleme (seeming, false problems) are mere
consequences of the historical failure to formulate the problem in the right way. For the continental
philosopher, these problems, and the solutions that have been given to them, are symptoms of deeper,
hidden, more radical problems, and in this way they have an evidentiary value that must be taken very
seriously. If Immanuel Kant remains such an important figure for both traditions, it is because his critical
philosophy allows both these interpretations. While he proposes a Copernican revolution of philosophy,
arguing that if the questions of philosophy is formulated in the right way if we understand that they
concern appearance for the subject rather than absolute reality , then we can dismiss the traditional
questions of Metaphysics and their dogmatic solutions, he also recognizes that these metaphysical errors
are symptomatic of a contradiction that inhabits human reason and that explains its peculiar fate.
Human reason is both finite and infinite, and hence tends of necessity to overstep the limits that it imposes
on itself.
The example of Kant is instructive. It suggests that, done well, continental and analytic philosophy
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will again approach one another; and that they have perhaps always approached each other, converging in
their insights despite radically different approaches. But it is still worth asking: why is it that philosophy
took such different turns, and that, even now, these approaches seem so far apart. I would propose,
tentatively, that it has something to do with the emergence of engineering as an academic master
paradigm a genuine and legitimate rival to philosophical theorizing as traditionally conceived. This is
no where so clear than in pure mathematics. Euclidean geometry has always been intimately bound up
with the fate of philosophy. Plato conceived of geometry as a preparation for philosophy, and Kant took
his departure from the truth of geometry. Euclidean geometry, traditionally conceived, exemplifies a
theoretical model of truth and knowledge (of epistm): starting out from a set of axioms that present
themselves as self-evident, and following generally valid principles of reasoning, we deduce theorems,
such as Pythagorass law. For the Greeks, geometry was the principle form of mathematical reasoning,
and what we now think of as algebra remained dependent on geometry. But eventually, algebra would
emerge as an independent discipline (this is often ascribed to Al-Khwarizmi), and, during the early modern
era, with Descartes analytic geometry and Leibniz and Newtons calculus, algebraic symbolization
would gain ever greater independence from geometry. The result was that ultimately mathematics, which
had once rested comfortably on a naive and intuitive geometric foundation (despite the conundrums, such
as the problematic status of Euclids fifth axiom the parallel axiom), would now seem to be perched on
a void. The number systems that mathematicians, in their manipulation of abstract symbols, depended
on, such as the real number system (the continuum), began to seem extraordinarily strange, paradoxical,
and fundamentally mysterious when removed from their intuitive geometric basis. It is at this point that
pure foundational mathematics became engineering: one had a clear problem one knew what one
needed. The challenge, clearly recognized by Dedekind and taken over by Frege, the father of Analytic
philosophy, and then Bertrand Russel, was to construct the numbers that working mathematicians need
from elementary structures, and perhaps even on the foundation of logic. It is a testament to the depth
of the connection between engineering and philosophy that would emerge, suggesting a paradigm shift
is perhaps the single greatest achievement of human engineering in the history of mankind, the digital
computer, is a more or less direct result of these mathematical and philosophical investigations. With the
digital computer, thinking itself becomes a problem of engineering.
If we understand in this way the difference of analytic and continental philosophy, it is not hard to see
why Aristotles call to metaphysics as a science of Being would have such vastly different significance for
philosophers whose insights were often quite convergent and who were equally opposed to metaphysics
as traditionally conceived. We must, first of all, avoid drawing the false conclusion from what I have
said. Even though the founding fathers of analytic philosopher were far more intimately involved in the
project of the foundations of mathematics than continental philosophers of equivalent stature, it would
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that is far more radical than those which have been recognized by historians of philosophy, that what

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be a terrible mistake to think that the latter, being as it were wooly headed quasi-poetic creatures,
either have nothing to do with mathematics, or merely appropriate it, as Allan Sokal would have it, to
perverse post-modern ends. Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, was a mathematician by
training, and came to philosophy by way of mathematics. His student Heidegger had considered writing
a dissertation on the Being of Number. Jacques Derridas early introduction and translation of Husserls
treatise on the origin of geometry played a crucial role in the development of deconstruction. The question
of mathematics loomed large from the beginning, and continental philosophers were not blind to the
power of the new mathematical accounts of number. When recently, Alain Badiou, author of a lucid and
rigorous if accessible account of John Conways theory of surreal numbers, claims that mathematics is
ontology, he is not taking a radically new turn, but rather returning to this primal scene of the parting of
the ways.1
The difference, rather, is that for the analytic philosopher the question: what is number? is, or can be,
clear. The difficulty is answering this question --- but the challenge of answering (undertaken by Frege
in an extraordinary text) demands clarity in the question, even if, making the question clear requires
rethinking the very nature of meaning and truth.2 For the continental philosopher, the question,
however clear it might seem, and however pressing the answer might be for upholding the possibility
of mathematical and scientific knowledge, opens onto another question. What is number? what does
it mean for a number to be? What is Being, such that numbers can be? The continental philosopher
becomes awake to the possibility, and indeed becomes disturbed by the possibility, that the questions that
present themselves with such lucidity (at least a potential lucidity) that we could engineer an answer are
themselves not false, not wrong, but in a sense still at the surface of thinking. He wonders if engineering
philosophy only becomes possible because, as a result of the success of metaphysics and the answers it
has given answers that continue to structure how we think , philosophy has lost a sense for its deeper
and more radical questions, and perhaps above all for the question of Being. For Analytic philosophy,
Aristotles definition of ontology and of the questions proper to it seems to be a relic of the past. These
questions are ill-conceived, and can be discarded, since they contribute nothing to answering the questions
that we face. For the continental philosopher, the question of Being as Heidegger will put: the question
of the sense of Being calls us to deconstruct the history of metaphysics, and its solutions, so as to
become again capable of understanding the sense of this question.
At this point, you, in the audience, might be wondering: what on earth is he am I speaking about.
1 This claim is developed at length in his Being and Event, tr. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005).
2 Gottlieb Frege, The Foundations of Arithmatic: A Logico-Mathematical Inquiry into the Concept of Number (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1980).
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What does any of this have to do with healing? I have, granted, taken a circuitous path; and I have done
so deliberately, even though, granted, writing, for me (and this is also why I cannot be an analytical
philosopher) is never quite as deliberate, never quite as much like engineering, as the engineer in me
whose voice and desire is still quite strong despite my affinity to the continental tradition would like.
But I had a clear sense of where I wished to end up, even if the path to that destination was itself, at times,
a revelation.
What I have hoped to show, above all, is that analytic and continental philosophy are both, for want of
a better word, good ways of thinking: different, but good. Done well, they work together, from their
distance, to uphold the dignity of questioning and answering, which is always threatened by the double
danger: questions without real answers and answers without real questions. These dangers are clear
enough when either is done poorly: either one becomes lost in a self-satisfied obscurity that refuses
the clarity of the concept, or discourse degenerates into the petty debating of positions. But there is
also another danger, which is more insidious the more that it presents itself as a solution. The danger of
premature reconciliation: a reconciliation that is forced, that is sought after through the artificial means
of a metadiscourse that seeks to attain something that, as Hegel well recognized, can only happen with
the fullness of time; and perhaps only when both of the opposed sides become irrelevant in the wake
of something else. The name for this and for every such reconciliation is healing and the concept of
healing, as I will suggest, governs over this reconciliation in triple sense. It names the goal (a healthy
philosophical discourse one which is not so bitterly divided); the means (a discourse of healing, of
reconciliation, by more broad-minded philosophers); but, most importantly, it names the hidden source of
unity between continental and analytic philosophy that will allow them to be reconciled, since they
are already, deep in their hearts, reconciled. Bringing these together, we could put it this way: a healing
discourse will heal philosophy of its painful division by demonstrating that both analytic and continental
philosophy have to do with healing. The scapegoat, in this wondrous medicinal ritual, is metaphysics:
this amazing curative power over philosopher, it is because it interacts in a most intriguing way with the
difference between analytic and continental philosophy which I have mentioned. Healing, and
medicine more generally, presents the correlate of engineering: a non-philosophical discourse and practice
that came to serve as a master discourse for philosophy, in so far as it articulated the point at which a parting
of ways, at once constitutive of philosophy and disruptive of philosophy, could take place. The Classical
correlate of the pair engineering/ historical sensibility was medicine/ eros. Philosophy could offer
a cure to desire, or it could expose itself to the danger of desire. Plato was torn between both possibilities.
By the Hellenistic period, philosophy would have resolved itself into either science or a way of life:
purely intellectual eros, or practical healing. Carried over into the philosophical discourse, the rhetoric of
healing amounts to this: a fundamental failure to get at what is really at stake.
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they are both healing thinking from the unhealthy effects of metaphysics. If healing is able to have

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Returning briefly to Aristotles Metaphysics, we find a sense for the complexity of the relation of
philosophy and healing. The second section of Book Gamma begins:
Being is said in many ways, but in relation to some one thing and one nature, and not merely as a
homonym (as a word that sounds the same but has completely difference meanings), but as healthy
[is said] always in relation to health, either guarding it, or producing it, or being a sign of it, or
receptive of it.
The claim, on the surface, is straightforward enough. The word being is used differently, but not in the
way that bank is used differently. In the case of bank, there are two senses that have basically nothing
to with one another and are only accidently related through a common sounding name. Being, in
contrast, is said differently in the same way as health. A medicine is healthy because it produces health.
A certain food is healthy because it guards health. A healthy skin tone is a sign of health. These words
mean health in different, but essentially related ways.
The philosophical implications are immense, and also directly concern the relation of a continental
and analytic approach. Whereas analytic philosophers will seek to dissolve the problems of ontology
by pointing out the confusion between the existential and copulary use of being, Heidegger will
return to Aristotles insight that the unifying sense of being cannot be conceived in terms of the relation
of a genus to a species. But what interests me here is the choice of example. Why did Aristotle choose
health? It is a good example, of course, but I would suggest that something much more is at stake.
Perhaps Aristotle recognized that health, like Being, is one of those terms which touches on almost
everything; which can relate to almost everything. Every natural substance, every form of human activity,
can be healthy or unhealthy. Every aspect of appearance can potentially serve as a sign of health or
unhealth. Health, this is to say, is a perspective from which the totality of human life can be appraised and
considered. Moreover, though, health is the perspective which is most likely to be taken by a certain kind
of person. It is the perspective of the sort of everyday rationality that has raised itself beyond superstition
and yet remains deaf to the higher, deeper, more dangerous claims of philosophy the sort of everyday
rationality for which the goods of the body and of a still body-like soul remain the highest goods; for
which the purpose of life is to keep on living without suffering and pain. It is the rationality that is averse
to risk and danger, unless it takes the form of a risk of the cure, and for which the infinite mind has been
put in the service of guarding finite goods. Treated from the perspective of health, philosophy itself must
appear like a dangerous thing. Is love and friendship healthy? Is politics healthy? Is thinking healthy? Is
life itself... healthy. It is no surprise that, in Platos Symposium, the third to speak about love, following the
pure rhetorician (Phaedrus) and the legal expert (Pausanius), but before the comic poet (Aristophanes),
the tragic poet (Agathon), and the philosopher Socrates, is the medical doctor Eryximachus. His words,
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somewhat banal as they are, are soon superceded.

For Plato, the chief rivals of the philosopher were sophists and poets. This is perhaps because, for Plato
(and Socrates), philosophy had to assert its rights against those who claimed an immediate, intuitive, but
unreasoned access to the truth. Aristotle, we might say, already began to recognize that, with his scientific
reformulation of philosophy, sophists and poets no longer could give us much to fear. A far greater danger,
intimate to scientific philosophy and yet still infinitely far from it, was the physician; the one who would
reduce everything, and even what is highest politics, friendship (love), and the truth to the terms of
health.
It is precisely this danger that we still face, now more than ever, and that threatens to derail both
continental philosophy and analytic philosophy.
The idea that philosophy should be understood as a therapy is often identified above all with the postTractatus Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein took over Frege and Russels
project trying to explain how truthful statements are possible while rigorously circumscribing the
limits of what can be said by showing that the logical structure of propositions resembles the logical
structure of the world. In his later philosophy, however, he would come to realize that it was wrong to
try to articulate a single account of language and the propositional truth. He would come to think of
language as consisting of innumerable different, irreducible language games, each with its own rules.
The standard philosophical conception of language, in which names refer to things, is merely one
very simple language game. It cannot be generalized; and indeed no single theory of the essence of
language is possible. This suggests, in turn, that traditional philosophy has allowed itself to fall into error
by failing to recognize how words are really used in the language games that belong to various forms
of life. Instead of trying to describe these language games, which is the proper method for philosophy,
the essence of language.
Nothing that I have yet said would justify a therapeutic understanding of philosophy. The concept of
language games and forms of life could justify a purely theoretical vision of philosophy, in which
the proper philosophical method does not reject theoretical knowledge as such, but merely its tendency
toward abstraction and reductionism. The therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein involves a further claim: that
the end of philosophy is not to achieve knowledge, but to cure reasoning of the delusions, endemic to
traditional philosophy, that make it impossible to get on with other things, be they the pursuit of properly
scientific knowledge or simply life itself. It is in this way that the 133 of the Philosophical Investigations
is often read:
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philosophers have instead come up with explanatory pictures abstract, misleading, and one-sided for

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It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways.
For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the
philosophical problems should completely disappear.
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want
to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which
bring it itself in question. Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of
examples can be broken off. Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.
There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.3
The literature on Wittgenstein is vast, and there is certainly much debate as to whether his philosophical
method (to the extent that he has a single such method) is principally therapeutic or theoretical. I do
not hope to answer this, or offer more than the most summary reading of Wittgenstein. What I would
suggest, however, is that his therapeutic tendency is intimately related to his engineering approach to
philosophical problems. Philosophy itself is a problem that must be solved. And this problem, the problem
of philosophy, consists in the way in which it keeps on presenting particular problems to the philosopher,
who in each case is duty-bound to solve them. For Wittgenstein, the consummate philosopher-as-engineer,
the only way to move on is to engineer an absolute solution to all philosophical problems. But, in a
certain way, one could say that these problems only exist because philosophy has always been in the
business of engineering solutions that would explain how human language is able to do what it does. To
engineer a perfect solution would be to reverse-engineer the multitude of language games and forms of
life that the philosopher, seeking solutions, has always turned away from.
This, I think, explains both the tremendous seduction of Wittgensteins approach and its limits, or indeed
perhaps its pointlessness. If you think of philosophy as engineering, and yet not simply as engineer
(who is usually just happy to be constructing solutions), but rather from the perspective of a philosophical
engineer who, through an extraordinary insight, has become aware of the Sisyphean nature of his own
task, then the therapeutic solution seems like the only answer. But if you do not think of philosophy as
engineering if you think that the philosopher is not one who is compelled to answer, and thus do away
with, philosophical problems that present themselves with a certain immediate clarity, but rather one who
seeks to put himself in the position in which he can begin to sense philosophical problems in their depth
and above all by getting past the engineering perspective that imposes itself on us then Wittgensteins
3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 44.
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therapeutic approach appears as nothing more than a rather long, and no doubt instructive, Sackgasse (oneway-street) in the history of philosophy. Seen from another perspective, the struggles of past philosophers
and the systems of concepts that they have contrived might appear as anything but vain and unprofitable
errors. Rather: they could seem like extraordinary attempts to grasp hold of elusive, difficult truths by
entering into the proper form of questioning. If metaphysics, nevertheless, must now appear questionable,
it is not because the struggles of philosophers towards conceptual clarity have been pointless, but rather
because metaphysical answers seem to foreclose more radical forms of questioning.
Because, in the manner that I have suggested, the therapeutic method of late Wittgenstein arises out of
the engineering approach to philosophy that he himself carried out with an extreme consequence, I do
not think it, in and of itself, offers either a solution to philosophy as such, or a challenge to philosophy
as such. Rather, it signals a turning point in his philosophy, of meaning only for his philosophy in
which the engineering approach turns back upon its origins, discovering that the questions, to which it
seeks answers, are born of disquiet within philosophical thought itself. Incapable of getting outside the
engineering approach to which he remained profoundly committed, Wittgenstein and this is both the
source of his rigor and his superficiality could not really ever quite get to the point of wondering if
the incessant problems with which philosophy tormented itself were not themselves symptoms of other
questions that we must begin to ask ourselves, but can only begin to do so if we wager ourselves on
concepts that we know to be fallible and provisional.
In Wittgenstein, this is to say, philosophical therapy is justified as the mark of the absolute commitment
to a certain philosophical path. What is much more troubling is when this therapeutic approach is put to
use in order to heal its rifts, and above all, the rifts between analytic and continental. In the name of
healing, the divisions in philosophy, and philosophy itself, will be put to rest. I have already suggested
In the year 1999, right at the end of the century that had seen philosophy become so divided, Harvard
University Press republished an English translation of a short text by Franz Rosenzweig, titled
Understanding the Sick and Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God. Franz Rosenzweig ranks, together
with Levinas and Martin Buber, as one of the great Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, and his
Star of Redemption is a masterwork of the dense, obscure, rich style for which continental philosophy is
known. While Rosenzweig engages in a sustained and far-reaching critique of the Western philosophical
tradition, he does not reject the idea that thinking must find its own language to express itself. Rather,
he opposes a new idiom to the idiom of metaphysics. But this new idiom (which itself involves a kind
of engineering) is put in the service of becoming open to a Jewish thinking, embodied in scripture,
that is prior to the truth of Greek philosophy. Understanding the Sick and Healthy involves the attempt
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how this cure operates, but now I will turn to a recent manifestation of this healing approach.

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to communicate the new thinking of the Star of Redemption in a more accessible, and less recondite
language. What makes this republication so interesting is the author of the new introduction, included
together with the old introduction by Nahum Glatzer: none other than Hilary Putnam, a celebrated analytic
philosopher known for his work in the philosophy of science.
In the introduction, which is reprinted in his 2008 book Jewish Philosophy as a Way of Life: Rosenzweig,
Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein, Hilary Putnam seeks to show the philosophical similarities between
Rosenzweigs little book and the work of late Wittgenstein. As he explains, anticipating the bafflement
of his readers and especially those who are familiar with his own body of work:
To my enormous surprise, I found this work reminding me of the last philosopher in the world I
had expected to compare with Franz Rosenzweig, namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I propose to
explain a part of the illumination I find in Rosenzweig by presenting such a comparison.
Wittgenstein? Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein? Yet, on reflection, the comparison should not be as
startling as it first seemed to me, for both thinkers are influenced by Kierkegaard (if Wittgenstein
was not a theist, he nevertheless had an obvious sympathy with religion), and both share a
profoundly critical attitude toward the traditional philosophical search for a theory of the essence
of things. I cannot imagine Wittgenstein reading through Rosenzweigs The Star of Redemption.
Yet I can very easily imagine him reading and enjoying Rosenzweigs little book (It was
Wittgenstein, after all, who remarked, When Tolstoy just tells a story he impresses me infinitely
more than when he addresses the reader, and in the present book Rosenzweig adopts the manner
of a storyteller.).4
Hilary Putnams introduction does an admirable job of opening up the text, and leading into it, without
preempting the need to let it speak for itself. His treatment of the similarities between Rosenzweig and
Wittgenstein is more suggestive than exhaustive, and he resists giving a simplistic account of these. It is
difficult, however, after reading Rosenzweigs little book, to avoid concluding that the deepest similarity
between them rests on a shared therapeutic or healing concept of the task of thinking. The illusion to
Kierkegaard is decisive. As Putnam writes:
What philosophy represents here is not a technical subject at all, but a temptation to which all who
think of themselves as religious may be subject at one time or another: the temptation to substitute
words, especially words which have no religious content because they have no internal relation to a
4 Hilary Putnam, Introduction in Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of the World, Man,
and God, tr. and int. Nahum Glatzer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 2.
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genuine religious life, for that kind of life. This is the very temptation that Kierkegaard was centrally
concerned with combating. Kierkegaard didnt combat the temptation to substitute abstract talk for
actually living the religious life because he imagined that most nineteenth-century Danish Christians
were about to become metaphysicians obviously not! Rosenzweig did not think that most twentiethcentury German Jews were about to become Hegelians. These existentialist thinkers saw metaphysics
as an exaggerated form of a disease to which we are all subject. It is this disease that the physicians
in Rosenzweigs parable are out to diagnose and cure.5
While this healing project stands at the periphery of Wittgenstein, who is driven to it by the necessity
of his philosophical compulsions, it is central to Rosenzweig, who, in this sense, is able to give a more
radical, but also more abstract or reductive formulation of it. As Putnam puts it, a bit earlier: Although
Wittgenstein says that the roots of philosophical illusion lie deep in our language and deep in us, he never
attempts to provide a detailed account of these roots. For Rosenzweigs purposes, however, it is essential
to do just that. 6
This last point is decisive. It suggests what is really at stake for Putnam, the Atheist --- but ethnically
Jewish philosopher in returning to his Jewish roots. Nothing else than the roots of the healing project,
and the metaphysical disease to which it answers, that he also finds in Wittgenstein. But why is
metaphysics itself a disease? What are these roots that Rosenzweig will discover? The answer appears
in one particular telling passage. Invoking Aristotles famous claim that philosophy begins with wonder,
Rosenzweig describes how the philosopher, wondering as others wonder, becomes impatient: ...he is
unwilling to accept the process of life and the passing of the numbness wonder has brought. Such relief
comes too slowly. He insists on a solution immediately at the very instant of his being overcome and
at the very place wonder struck him. He stands quiet, motionless. He separates his experience of wonder
from the continuous stream of life, isolating it. / This is the way his thought proceeds. He does not permit
consequently the continuity of thought is broken. And there he begins stubbornly to reflect. Of necessity,
he must hook the problem from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thoughts object and
subject from the flow of like and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates, is perpetuated in
the motionless mirror of his mediation: that is in the subject. He has it well hooked; it is securely fastened,
and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive
statuesque, subjugated.7
5 Putnam, Introduction, p. 3.
6 Putnam, Introduction, p. 2.
7 Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, pp. 40-41.
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his wonder, stored as it is, to be released into the flow of life. He steps outside of the continuity of life and

Proceedings
Philosophy is diseased because it stands off from the flow of life. Health is life, the flow of life:
everything fixed and congealed into a determinate form is unhealthy, deathly. What is interesting about
this passage is not only an obvious and unrepentant vitalism from which Putnam makes no attempt to
distant himself. Rather, it is that philosophy here, through a sort of radical lapse of historical sense,
appears purely as the engineering of solutions to feelings of wonders (philosophical questions) that
the philosopher, in his impatience, refuses to release back into the flux of life. The affinity between
Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein is profound, but, for just this reason, Rosenzweigs therapy has nothing
more to say to philosophy, or even ordinary thinking, than Wittgensteins. To generalize to move from a
specific therapy for a specific, singular problem to a panacea for diseased philosophical thought as such
is to turn the specific act of philosophical therapy into what we might best call an ideology of health; the
enforcement of health and healing as an self-evident, everyday perspective that foreclosed philosophy,
politics, and love.
I do not wish to suggest that Rosenzweig himself prescribed to this ideology of health though I do
find his critique of metaphysics in the name of a new, religious thinking, based on grammar and the three
fold relation of God, the world, and man too simplistic. Rosenzweig himself saw the convalescence from
philosophy, which he imagines as a three-week cure in a sanitarium, as the beginning rather than the end.
Thus he writes in the final chapter of his Little Book titled back to work:
It is so difficult to realize that all verification lies ahead, that death is the ultimate verification
of life, that to live means to die. He who withdraws from life may think he has avoided death;
however, he has merely foregone life, and death, instead of being avoided, closes in from all sides
and creeps into ones very heart, a petrified heart. If he is to be restored to life he must recognize
the sovereignty of death... There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however,
has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be
carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the proper time.8
This insight, no doubt, passes far beyond all superficial rhetoric of healing, and suggests that
philosophical therapy is not the absolute panacea of perfect quiescence, but the preparation for a life lived
toward another deeper truth, and for a thinking that is disquieted by a deeper wonder.
Health, for Rosenzweig, is fundamentally a living towards, rather than in flight from, death. Metaphysics
is the flight from death through the false eternity of philosophical constructs. This last thought, I would
8 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, p. 103.
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argue, opens onto a more penetrating philosophical perspective than the ideology of healing. To follow
this out, though, it is necessary to invoke another Jewish thinker about whom Hilary Putnam has
nothing to say in his book on Jewish philosophy: the avowedly Atheist Sigmund Freud. Freud, of course,
is the founder of psychoanalysis, which is at once a body of theoretical knowledge even a science
and therapy. Yet his thought, I would suggest, involves a very different, richer and more challenging,
understanding of what healing is. Healing, for Freud, has nothing to do with achieving perfect
peace: rather, psychoanalysis opens us up to the disquiet at the core of our being by allowing us to live
with this truth. This is what Eric Santner, in his book on Freud and Rosenzweig, understands, applying a
Freudian concept, as the uncanny.9
It is not difficult to imagine why Hilary Putnam might pass over Freud: psychoanalysis represents a
challenge to the concept of science (consisting of propositions, based on evidence, that are falsifiable) that
continues to dominate analytic philosophy. From such a perspective it is not too difficult to accommodate
poetry, religion, or mysticism: none of these really overlap with the domain of Empirical science.
It is possible to say, as Hilary Putnam will: I am still a religious person, and I am still a naturalistic
philosopher... A naturalistic philosopher, but not a reductionist.10 A system of thought like Freudian
psychoanalysis, building an edifice of concepts that lack clear empirical reference and propositions
that cannot be falsified, offers a more disquieting, indeed absolute challenge, to the dominant forms of
naturalism, even if Sigmund Freud, unlike the three philosophers Putnam will speak about, did certainly
consider himself both a naturalist and an ardent atheist.
If we look at one of Freuds early manuscripts, his Project for a Scientific Psychology,11 we find a hint
of how Freuds own scientific premises can lead to a concept of science that will ultimately challenge the
engineering perspective, offering the prospect of a very different critique of metaphysics, and a different
sense for what philosophy might be. In this text, Freud, seeking a biological basis for psychoanalytic
and endogenic stimuli. Exogenic stimuli come from outside the organism, and involve an excitation
of sensory neurones that, conveyed to motor neurones, leads to an immediate ceasing of the original
stimuli. You poke a worm with a stick; it moves away. Endogenic stimuli, such as hunger and sexual
desire, are much more subtle and curious. In this case, the stimulation originates within the organism. The
9 Eric Santner, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2001).
10 Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington:
University of Indiana, 2008), p. 5.
11 Sigmund Freud, The Project of a Scientific Psychology, in The Origins of Psycho-analysis, tr. James Strachey (New
York: Basic Books, 1954), pp. 347-445.
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insight it is here indeed that his reductionist tendencies are greatest distinguishes between exogenic

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organism can no longer get away from the stimulus; there is no longer a space in which it could get away.
Instead, it can only seek to quiet the inner disturbance by transforming the world; but this requires it to
become more powerful, more alive and quick, and hence more subject to the very stimuli that it seeks to
still.
The Project is manifestly reductionist. Yet the structural opposition between the exogenic and endogic,
I would argue, provide a powerful means to discovering the complicity between the engineering
approach of analytic philosophy and a healing approach that undoes philosophy. What I have referred
to as the ideology of healing may be regarded as a special case of what I will call ideology as such:
the projection of endogenic events onto an exogenic space. (A simple, everyday example: we believe that
we love the one whom we love because of who he or she is. Love becomes a positive exogenic stimulus
pursuit as the opposite of flight). The essence of the engineering approach to philosophy consists in
regarding all philosophical problems as if they were exogenic stimuli that must be dealt with by
constructing a solution and thus finding a way out. Wittgensteins genius consists in taking this engineering
approach to its furthest consequence he is not held back by ordinary, more human scruples at which
point it becomes clear that the exogenic problems must be folded back into an endogenic root. But, at
just this point, the therapeutic model of philosophy intervenes: instead of seeking to live in endogenic
truth, it imagines an ultimate way out from the compulsive need to find ways out. At the very moment
when Wittgenstein has exhausted ideology, leading us like Moses to the threshold, the therapeutic
approach seeks to dismiss philosophy, to dismiss thinking: as if thinking and ideology were the same
thing.
Seen from this perspective, we can get a better sense for the proper critique of metaphysics. The problem
with metaphysics is not the abstraction of its concepts, or its tendency to interrupt the flow of ordinary
life and distort common sense. Ordinary language, as Putnam (and Wittgenstein) reminds us, is itself
subject to delusion, but these delusions have nothing to do with the inherent, necessary, and benevolent
abstraction that, as Levi-Strauss has demonstrated, belongs to the ordinary language of even the most
so-called primitive cultures. The source of delusion, rather, is the extroversion of the endogenic; the
projection of all the problems of life out into a world in which we can cope with them by engineering
solutions. The problem with metaphysics, rather, is that by remaining dependent, in the formulation
of its concepts, on metaphors drawn from an exogenetically articulated space, it merely presents, in a
more subtle, sophisticated, sublimated form the cardinal error of ordinary language. This explains why
the linguistic turn, properly conceived, presents such a powerful philosophical antidote to metaphysics.
metaphysics has, from the beginning, involved the attempt to extrovert language into the world and this
gesture remains even when the metaphysical baggage has been discarded, as with the referential theory
of meaning in favor with analytic philosophers. Radically conceived, the linguistic turn involves returning
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language to an endogenic signification precisely what Psychoanalysis (above all Lacan) does when it
tries to understand the signifier in terms of desire.
It is for this reason that pragmatism (to which Putnam also prescribes) and ordinary language philosophy,
seductive as they are for those who have cannot see past the ideology of health, are so dubious, despite
(indeed because of) the overwhelming claims of common sense that they marshal to their side. In place
of the many errors of metaphysics, they give us its cardinal error. Common sense and ordinary language,
and the belief that there are things to do out there in the world, are not the remedy for metaphysics, but
the fountainhead of its mistakes. Of course: there are things to do; everyday life is also important, in some
sense much more important. Health, and healthy living are good, very good. The errors of metaphysics are
merely more subtle, abstract versions of the errors necessary to live; errors that are of the very essence of
healthy life. But everyday life is not living towards and in truth though the life in truth is also not a life
outside the everyday; not a life lived in the caves of mystics or the solipsistic ovens of philosophers.
Rosenzweigs new thinking, as Putnam recognizes, does pass beyond the threshold, getting to the root of
the philosophical disease. Yet I would suggest that religion becomes another way of extroverting the
endogenic. Rosenzweigs God is no longer onto-theological, no longer conceived as the ultimate being.
Instead, he becomes the pure essence of extroversion. The notion of the Other could itself be understood
in this way as a purely, rigorously relational conception of exteriority. Freuds Moses and Monotheism
could be seen as an answer to this. But it is his notion of the death drive, of the drive toward death as the
most radical endogenic tendency of our being, of which provides the most radical answer to the claims
of religion. Yet perhaps the endogenic is merely the perversion of the exogenic. Between endogenic and
exogenic truth no reconciliation is possible. We are left with a decision. To do philosophy, to think is to
decide for a truth, without sufficient justification, and to commit to living in it. Healing, which seeks to
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vacate decisions before they can be made, is the death of philosophy and of any truth.
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The Practicing of Feminism as Healing Humanities
Ra-Keum Huh
Introduction
The Humanities are the act of uncovering human values. Through this act, it tries to realize the existential
value of human beings. The main objective of Humanities Healing could be understood as restoring
self-dignity through self-reflection based on humanities and providing the strength to discover that ray of
hope in the midst of despair. Humanities helps those who feel isolated or hurt to look back on their lives,
to break through the siege of hopelessness and by encouraging an autonomous and confident approach
in daily life, to regain command of their own lives. Therefore, the healing power of the humanities could
be expanded and applied to people of all social classes and all generations who are undergoing hardships
in various circumstances. In todays world, everyone is in dire need of the strength to find ones place in
society. This strength is found when, through self-reflection, one recovers ones sense of self-dignity and
endeavors to enhance the quality of ones own life and lead a life of action. We can find evidence of this
dire need through the numerous news articles detailing the current popularity of religious ascetic practices
such as meditation and healing.
The following excerpt from a news article presents the opinions of experts on the reason for such interest
in healing.
[] Experts see this healing syndrome that has swept over Korean society as the result of the
uncertainty and isolation that people feel in todays hyper-competitive atmosphere where to fall
behind means to become a loser. More and more people are getting hurt by the demands of this
fast-paced society and of human relations but they keep on living without receiving proper healing
because they dont know how. Hwang Sang-min, a psychology professor at Yonsei University, said,
While everyone is aware that their lives are difficult, they are not able to discover any meaning in
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their lives to make it worthwhile. He also saw the conditions for a happy life having changed with
the hyper-competition of this knowledge-based society having shaken up stability and bringing
about frequent changes within families or workplaces. This generation had been living by running
straight ahead without looking back. Now, the concept of quality of life is shifting from living
according to a capitalistic order to living according to ones true desires. Healing is different
from well-being, which is the concept of living well for oneself. Instead of fulfilling ones greed,
healing teaches one to let go of the greed and pursue a restoration of relations. 1
We could attempt to analyze from various angles the recent healing syndrome of people trying to look
after their own hurts but as the article points out, this phenomenon, people seeking relief from the hurt
and fatigue they feel in this competitive society, speaks to the sense of anxiety manifest in our society.
Although Korea is now considered a world economic power, this change took place in only a few decades.
While undergoing this change, Korean society came to be ruled by an optimistic view about economic
development and the belief that money solves all problems. However, the darker side to this change was
the accumulation of anxiety and fatigue from a fight for survival and of the hurt and despair of those who
lagged behind in the competition. The fact that Koreas suicide rate is the highest among OECD member
countries points to the consequences of such a pressurized society. While the welfare budget might have
gotten bigger, life expectancy might have gotten longer due to medical advances and the state of nutrition
might have gotten better, the record-high suicide rate shows how weak our society has become in the
mental foundation of discovering a meaning of life.
The introduction of a multi-cultural lifestyle as Korea moves toward becoming a global society also
provides a backdrop to this phenomenon. People are aware that the life goals and life models that they had
grown up seeing are no longer maintainable in a global society. Yet they are unable to set a new direction
for their lives and this has led to a sense of serious anxiety. For example, Confucius teaching that at 15
is no longer about learning about human nature. It is now about job training and achieving survival and
wealth. In todays world, even if one spent most of ones 20s studying for a test, ones place in society
would not be guaranteed. This is not how the previous generation had lived. The average life cycle, in
which one marries in the 20s and finds ones place in society in the 30s is no longer applicable. Marriage
is now a choice, not the essential step it had been for the majority of adults in the past. The gender roles
of men and women have shifted greatly. Families used to be a source of strength in overcoming lifes
hardships, providing a meaning to life. However, families nowadays no longer play the role they used to
1 Lee Eun-joo, Kim Jung-eun. South Korea is in Healing. Seoul Daily News, Aug 18, 2012, online news version.
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years of age, one should set ones mind on studies is no longer applicable in todays world. Education

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in the past. Ultimately, people are undergoing changes that make it harder for them to find direction in
their lives. At the same time, everyone is seeking meaning for their lives.
However, the recent popularity of healing seems to concentrate on spiritual healing gained through
religious ascetic practices and meditations and this has some limits. Can the pain that one feels when
having failed in a social relationship or falling behind in social competition be healed only by selfexamination? Most of the techniques trending today seem to pursue healing through such a direction of
transcending the context of life. That is, it seems to advocate a self-reflection of how worldly one has
become and to gain peace of mind and mental stability by recovering an unworldly spiritualism. If this
is misconstrued as a the world is how I view it transcendentalism, this form of healing will merely be
preserving the order of reality that is producing so much pain and victims, and it will expose people to
continual relapses.
If so, in which direction should humanities be applied as to bring healing? Humanities, as an act of
exploring the significance of human being, should not stay at asking questions. By asking questions in
humanities, they should go on to discover their own value and to practice the value that they discovered.
As such, humanities healing should include the following: the act of questioning which problems in
the order of todays world bring mental and physical pain to humans and the act of restoring the selfautonomous ability of humans to change the world. I would like to explore the possibility of this answer
in the practice of feminism which has taken place in the past half-century. In order to do so, I will start by
considering a discussion that has recently taken place in humanities with its healing as its main objective.
1. A Humanities Paradigm of Healing
Focusing on the fact that humanities plays an important role in embracing human pain and restoring selfdignity, an application field of philosophical practice called philosophical consultancy is garnering
much attention. In this field, the therapeutical element found in the distinct function of philosophy is
reinforced. Philosophical consultancy is a field where philosophers trained in consultancy help those who
are suffering from a confusion of values, those who are unable to find the key to solving their problems
or those who suddenly feel despair at the meaninglessness of life. In helping these people, the consultant
philosophers show them how to overcome their difficulties on their own.2 Lee Jin-nam introduces
2 Germanys Gerd Achenbach is considered to be a founding figure of the field of philosophical consultancy in which
a philosophical approach is taken in mental and emotional therapy sessions. Actual application of this consultancy in
medical field began in earnest when Gerd Achenbach established a philosophical consulting clinic in 1982 and conducted
clinical therapy sessions through philosophical consultancy. Consultant philosophers try to help people solve issues that
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philosophical consultancy with the following words: The subjects of philosophical consultancy are
people suffering from an illness of the mind. The most effective way to treat them is conversing with
them in counseling. The person who conducts the healing are the subjects themselves. The external role
of the consultant philosopher is to discuss with the subjects any inherent discrepancies in the subjects
view on the human or the world found during the course of counseling and to help them resolve these
discrepancies through philosophical thinking.3
In a recently published article, Lou Marinoff, a major proponent of philosophical consultancy, diagnosed
the many problems that modern humans experience as cultural illness and prescribed humanities as the
way to solve illness that come from cultural factors.4
Overall, the wide range of health issues that bother people living in advanced economies - depression,
the interest in obesity, social anxiety disorders, sexual disorders, nameless disorders that come from the
side effects of taking a cocktail of prescription drugs - are illness that arise from cultural factors and not
from biological causes. These illness are problems that touch upon the core of humanity. To lead fulfilling
lives, these illness must be approached from a humanities perspective and be resolved within the field of
humanities.
However, the specifics of the diagnosis and prescription that the author introduced in his article were a
bit baffling to me. I have no objections to his diagnosis that the amazing advances in modern science
and technology have, rather than promoting human health and happiness, become tools with which large
pharmaceutical corporations and the insurance industry have used to colonialize human bodies. This
speaks to the context of a barren capitalistic life in this time and age when even humanistic values are
being calculated in terms of how much they are worth money-wise. However, we need to take another
look at his argument that implicitly points to the development of a secular humanities as the reason for this
of nature and empirical philosophy replacing theological explanations, freed humans from the dogmatic
and despotic rule of religion, it also led to the age of mechanism and determinism breeding the so-called
paradox of Enlightenment. This is how secular humanities, alongside the myth of modern science that
even humans could be understood in terms of cause and effect, started turning into nihilism and a denial of
anyone can experience, such as the moral dilemmas, workplace conflicts, confusion of values and objectives, confusion
rising from human relations and sense of self-identity and a sudden sense of loss, through philosophical conversations.
An actual philosophical consulting process applies the thoughts of those who provided philosophical wisdom helpful in
examining life regardless of the field they worked in, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein.
3 Humanities Healing for a Happy Life. Report on Humanities Korea Project Phase 1. Kangwon National University.
4 Lou Marinoff. The 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice. Kangwon National University. July 16, 2012.
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colonialization. Mr. Marinoffs argument is that although the humanities of Enlightenment, the philosophy

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human nature. This, in turn, led to a new cultural illness as yet experienced by humankind. The problem
rises with Mr. Marinoffs following opinion on humanities and anti-humanities. Mr. Marinoff seeks the
source of modern mans illness in the spirit of postmodernism that has its roots in secular humanities. He
calls the contemporary era a post-modern, post-Christian, post-humanities, post-intellect age and sees this
as the context for modern mans illness such as nihilism and depression.5
If this is the cultural cause breeding modern mans illness, which direction should humanities healing
take? Should it return to the modern, to Christianity, to traditional humanities? If the spirit of humanities
which can help people escape nihilism and hopelessness is not to found by returning to traditional
Christianity or traditional Humanities, in which direction of humanities could it be found6 As Mr. Marinoff
argues, did secular humanities and a cause-and-effect understanding of humans lead to this post-modern
nihilism?
The problem is not in the secularity found in the modern spirit of mechanism but in its tendency to think
of oneself as being representative of the spirit of humanities. Thus, the more dangerous thing would be
to diagnose the post-modern spirit of humanities, which attempts to deconstructe such representative
understanding of human, as the source of cultural illness. The problem is not in a mechanistic or secular
understanding itself but in trying to establish the absolute truth that applies to everything.
The post-modern spirit of humanities is a critical approach to the problems arising from the uniqueness of
representation that Enlightenment humanities upheld. If we keep in mind the limits of the Enlightenment
humanities with its belief that one single truth was applicable to all metaphysical existence, we could
actually use the post - moden spirits as an exit strategy to heal philosophical illness.
A change in epistemology, the shift from postulating one single truth about the world and thoroughly
investigating the truth to allow for a multiple of truths, took place in the Linguistic Turn of 20th century
philosophy, when truth (or the awareness of truth) was seen to be dependant on language. Since then,
many humanities studies have been conducted in the form of seeking meaning in the humanities from
a linguistic context. The results of such endeavors could be seen as post-humanities. Therefore, posthumanities is not anti-humanities. It is humanities after a shift from a realism- and fundamentalism-based
5 Lou Marinoff (2012), Humanities Therapy: Restoring Well-Being in an Age of Culturally-Induced Illness. Proceedings
XI-ICPP & HT2012 The 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice and the 4th International Conference on
Humanities Theraphy, pp. 27-43.
6 In his paper, Mr. Marinoff expressed hopes in an Asian spirit of humanities but he stops at expressing such hope and does
not present a concrete alternative.
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paradigm of seeking one representative humanities truth to an anti-realism and linguistic paradigm.
A post-modern deconstruction is not based on a nihilistic logic that states that there is no truth. Rather,
it points to the falsity of the belief that there is only one single truth and it is a humanities exploration
developed through the interaction of various competing statements of truth. As such, post-modern
humanities is not the cultural source of modern illness. Rather, it could even be a useful resource in
healing these modern illness which are brought about by a culture upholding one representative truth. A
humanities paradigm accepting the possibility of multiple truths will open doors for humanities resources
which had been excluded and suppressed under the rule of a single, absolute truth. Such a spirit of
humanities is based on the acceptance that all human understanding and human value are influenced by
particular cultural values and as such, no one knowing of truth could claim the privileged rights. With
such a paradigm, different humanities beliefs formed in different contexts are not judged as being wrong
or evaluated as being immature. Instead, their contextual significance is taken into consideration.
Post-modern humanities accept the limits of partial human knowing, unlike traditional humanities
which aim to give the privileged rights to episteme. As such, post-modern humanities lays the stage for a
humanities of communication.
Such humanities of communications are to be accepted as a means for the modern human to find answers
when looking for a new direction of life in face of new social changes. It is inappropriate to regard it as a
nihilistic tendency which produces todays cultural illness.
2. Feminist Humanities for the Socially Weak
Feminist humanities, which led to womens self-awareness as an subject, contributed to the development
of a paradigm of humanities open to the possibility of multiple truths. Feminism starts by criticizing the
differences, presupposing that the differences between women and men are essential. It could be defined
as theoretical and practical activities for the liberation of women.
This is no different from declaring that women are equal to men as human agents. Such declaration also
signifies that women are agents who understand the meaning of life based on their own life experiences.
The source of power behind the practice of feminism lies in women trying to investigate the nature of the
society and culture that they belong to by standing at a distance from it. They then try to investigate how
their society maintained the patriarchal order through viewing history from their own perspective. That is,
it is born through the efforts of asking questions about the significance of the world and answering these
questions by reviewing history and the womens own experiences. As such, the practice of feminism is
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patriarchical power structure which tries to place women and men in hierarchical order according to sex

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inseparable from the exploration efforts of humanities.

Feminist humanities researchers have discovered in their exploration of the history of humanities that in
a humanities tradition that upheld one representative type of humans, a humanistic ideal was established
and only those who fit this ideal were accepted as a human subject in humanities. Those who didnt fit
the profile were considered deficient and lacking and subordinate to the subject. Instead of pursing their
own understanding of humans and the world, they were forced to stay at an inferior position in which they
were to follow the rules and play the roles that were given to them. However, the ability to criticize based
on principles of humanities led to women uncovering that such representative humanity was a particular
ideology based on the experience of men who were in a dominant position in the patriarchical hierarchy.
This, in turn, fostered a sense of subjectivity among women. Now, women could place themselves in the
position of human subject and define for themselves where their pain came from.
The pain that comes from not having ones beliefs and actions respected, the anger that comes from not
being accepted as a being who can think and act for oneself were not restricted to some women only. The
self-contempt, hopelessness, despair and anxiety are commonly found in all those who are placed in a
socially marginal position. Feminist humanities was an effective method used by women to encourage one
another when placed in a socially weak position and to change the age-old culture and systems that kept
women to the sides. As such, feminist humanities could be a model of humanities for all those whose selfdignity have been harmed by socially-construed standards or categories. feminist humanities did not add
to the burden of womens pain by finding the cause of the pain in the women themselves. Nor did it allow
women to stay in a self-deceptive mode by telling them to transcend their surrounding circumstances
in their minds. Instead, feminist humanities chose to uncover in the social context the circumstances of
life that were causing women pain. Thus, women were able to find the power of affirmation to liberate
themselves in this collective effort calling for changes in social order.
In such efforts, the thing that is needed above all is new language. The main task of feminist humanities
was an investigation of language necessary to reevaluate oneself, understand relationships and interpret
the world based on ones own experiences, feelings and thoughts. The language forming the rules of
patriarchal life were not appropriate for revealing the problems that women were wrestling with or for
healing the damaged self-identity of women. Oftentimes, the language would even have a suppressive
function. For example, the word women does not only refer to the biological sex. It is an aggregation
of meanings forming a series of implicated regulations and relationships controlling womens lives
overall, from where women should stay, what they should do or not do, who they should interact with
or not interact with, how they should behave. Unless one knows the implications, one cannot be said to
understand the word women correctly.
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These regulations on how women should live have also taken place in the process of daily living.
Comments such as Women are beautiful or A mothers sacrifice is a noble thing must have brought
life-assuring joy to some women and some mothers in the beginning. However, now they have become
some sort of regulations and virtues that all women are to uphold as a matter of fact. In this context, they
are no longer joy-giving or life-affirming sayings but normative values that women are forced to uphold.
Now, beauty or noble sacrifice are no longer choices that women can make as principal agents. Women
are no longer agents of this value. Rather, these virtues have now become systems that turn women
into the others, objects that can be controlled by the ruling powers. Thus, women feel skepticism and
hopelessness in practicing what must have once brought them joy. Her life is still being praised for its
beauty or sacrifice but her existential agency is being ignored.
In a situation where what women can say and cannot say are defined, to go against that definition is to go
against the rules of the community. Thus, women came to suffer a nameless illness in which they felt
trapped in a room without any exits.
How were women able to find their exit from such illness? feminist humanities tries to provide the exit
through the job of deconstructing the self-identity of women that was formed through these normative
customs. This is the job of analyzing and deconstructing the series of regulations that formed the meaning
of women. Regulations that are thought to be unbreakable and traditions that are considered essential
to our ethnical identity and praised as being good and beautiful are merely the products of particular
historical and political practice. It is important that we have the discernment to see that such traditions
are neither inevitable laws of nature or inherent human ways. Anthropological research conducted by
distancing oneself from ones own culture, using methods such as genealogy research from a feministic
3. A Deconstructive Analysis of Self-Identity

One begins to see the normative order that had been suppressing oneself in a relative point of view when
one deconstructs its meaning. This also allows one to bring up questions that had been considered taboo
until now. One is able to talk about problems that had been giving them pain but were hidden until now
as private shame. The awareness that one was not able to talk about this problem because one had been
oppressed, that the source of the problem lies not in the personal shortcomings of oneself becomes a
source of strength to talk about problems that one had been burying inside until now because one had
not been able to discover the cause. The uncovering of such problems are oftentimes taken as subversive
challenges to society but for those who had been oppressed, they represent a liberating exit. We can
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perspective or studying the orders of other cultures are an effective way of promoting such discernment.

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find a similar situation in the writing of Chung Jin-hong on healing found in the context of religious
communities.
This is no different from discovering the most effective exit to escape the reckless bondage of
idiomatic expressions. I feel that a change in language is no different from a change in the world.
Therefore talking in a new language is meeting with a new exit strategy that didnt exist before, of
revealing ones pain which isnt being recognized by the authorities. In actuality, a new language
is not a coincidence. It is the product of selves who had no other choice but to express themselves
in another language. By experiencing carefreeness coming from not holding back from asking
questions, by sharing ones loneliness by exposing it publicly, by fearlessly confessing that there
are self-oppressive chains within oneself in relations to the religious community which were in
someways self-tormenting, by taking the courage to do so and receiving the consolation that one
could not get from ones superiors from other outsiders, one breathes in a return to self.7
Speaking out about ones pain against social stigma is not only significant for restoring ones self-identity.
By expressing in language ones pain, one begins to let society know that such pain exists. Expressing
ones pain is the act of letting others know of such pain and this holds significance on a social level. It
is an act of transforming a private emotion into a social event. It is an effort to create a new linguistic
community that can express ones pain in a meaningful manner. It is, in a way, an effort to bring about a
social change that can alleviate ones pain.8
In this way, people who are hurt need a language to talk meaningfully about their own experiences and
to think in a different manner. The normative language of the patriarchical world that has ruled the lives
of women was considered sacred as if its meanings held unchanging truths. However, the meanings in a
language are created within the life process of the community that uses the language. They are not given
7 Chung Jin-hong (2012), What I want to think about in regards to the healing phenomenon. Philosophy and Reality.
Issue 94, pp. 84-85. The point of this article is aligned with the thought behind the practice of womens liberation. Mr.
Chung writes about how believers who loyally adhered to religious regulations within the a religious system would
suddenly feel religious skepticism and despair. Here, we can see that this is similar to the existential situation of women
placed in an oppressive situation.
8 By criticizing the falsity of single-truth humanities, feminists were able to develop new humanities approaches. Our
society is a democratic society which upholds equality and universal citizenship in principle. However, one can discover
that it is still ruled by a male-centric social order and thought. feminist humanities uncovers and brings to surface the
surrounding events, everyday life styles and common preconceptions our society holds that make this a gender-divided
society. In the process of revealing how many gender-discriminating acts and systems were rationalized and accepted by
our society in the name of tradition and customs, of uncovering the truth that the language and rules applied to women in
the name of morality and duty were merely practices in a patriarchical and male-centric society, women can experience
healing of their damaged self-identity, coming from seeing oneself as an incapable being, and restoration of their selfdignity.
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truths reflecting unchanging existences. In this sense, the world of meanings in language is not complete
or fixed. As linguistic philosophers put it, it is a life form in that it is always open to change. Changes to
the life environment is followed by changes in everyday life and changes in linguistic meanings.
The meanings in a language are not the minds of the language user or the external substance that the
language refer to. It is created and transformed in the practice of the language community. Based on this
premise, our understanding of self needs to change as well.
Generally, we are used to defining self by linking it to an identity that is maintained unchanged despite
any external changes. However if who I am is not independent from the linguistic context in which it
is spoken, I in a changing linguistic context cannot be approached as the unchanging essence of I.
In particular, it seems impossible to talk about who I am in relation to an unchanging essence in this
modern society where the context of language usage is multi-layered and mixed up. As a simple example,
my identity as a woman and as a humanities scholar is determined in multi-layers in the context of the
patriarchical practice that the members of our society share in and in the context of the democratic practice
that has developed since early modernity. A context of relationship-centered order and a context of
individual-centered order that transcends relationships, my identity already holds an inherent contradiction
because it is created in these two disparate contexts.
As such, feminism does not take the concept of self as an essence based upon the foundations of
identity. Instead, it takes the concept of self as a non-unificative or active process taking place within the
boundaries of history, society and culture. That is, feminism sees the individual self as a work in progress
being processed amidst the contradictions and conflicts that cause the fragmentation of ones subjecthood.
In feminism, the appropriate concept is an existential self. Who I am can only be told through what I
choose in a particular situation. There is no given essence that makes me, me. As such, finding ones lost
Women hold a lot of internalized negative and conflicting concepts about themselves, due to the long
history of women having been peripheral beings. The more areas of life I participate in, the more
complicated the relationships I forge become, the more I experience myself as a complex, conflicting
and fragmented being construed of disparate meanings. The concept of self in feminism is constructed
in this context.9 The modern understanding of humans was that the fragmented, conflicting, ambiguous
9 It seems the situation that we find ourselves in is a situation in which we must ask and question who we are in a scene
where different contexts of life overlap and clash. In such situation, the humanities of before with its premise that all
humans have a core essence that makes the individual and are a unique, unchanging and adjusted unit does little to help.
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self might be a rhetorical expression but it does not hold an accurate understanding of the self.

Proceedings
and fickle nature of self were symptoms of the mental illness or weakness of the person. Feminism, on
the other hand, saw this as positive traits of self which helped one be more considerate of oneself and of
others and which led to one forming relations with others by treating them as equals. These were traits
that a flexible self should possess. A flexible self is open to meeting others and allows change to itself in
relationships with others.
The ideal of a well-adjusted and unified self seems to have come from imagining a subjectivity who forms
his or her perspective in a place that transcends the circumstances of life and views the world and fellow
humans through this perspective. As discussed above, this is a far cry from a self that struggles with the
despair, sense of loss and anxiety that comes from leading ones life in the realities of life. Moreover, the
self is a far more complex materialization of a sub-conscious level to be seen as a well-adjusted beliefs
system. In this sense, the traditional concept of self is not an appropriate concept to be used in humanities
healing.
4. Feminist Method of Conscious-Raising
There are several humanities methods for healing people in pain. The process of distancing oneself
from the shared beliefs, attitudes and emotions that have already become familiar and examining them
autonomously is a thought process that those who are socially isolated must go through to heal the pain
they have. The method for one who asks about the grounds for the rules that oppress oneself to establish
ones place and to explore until finally reaching an answer that one can accept, this is the method of
philosophical analysis. As mentioned above, the process of uncovering how the regulations and concepts
that oppress oneself is used in ones society and finding out on whose experiences they are based on
can be helpful not only to those who are socially isolated and hurt but to those who are suffering from
problems of individual aspects.10
An efficient method of humanities healing could be taken through works of humanities that reflect on
The traditional schema that humans are thinking agents and that the most supreme human act is to contemplate the world
doesnt help, either. Instead, the concept of human as an existence within the process of forming interactive meanings
rising from a mesh of language is more appropriate not only for the socially weak but for the situation that all humans find
themselves in today. In the traditional concept of a self or subjecthood that does not change through time or experience,
the possibility of change over time is denied. Now, subjecthood is understood as itself being a process in change. With
the important role that language and social interactions play in forming the self, ones position in social relations also
becomes an important factor in forming ones subjecthood.
10 Individual aspects and social aspects are not sharply divided but rather, interconnected most of the times.
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human lives but feminism often uses the method of collective dialogue.11 If we look for this model in
ancient times, we can first consider the Socratic dialogue. His philosophical method was not a rational
contemplation of intuitively understanding the principles that penetrated the world. Instead, Socrates
chose the method of holding conversations in everyday language, a method much more useful for sharing
the worries of life.
Moreover, the Socratic dialogue is collective, not a one-on-one dialogue such as those that usually take
place between a therapist and a patient in healing therapies such as modern psychoanalyses. Socratic
dialogues usually start off their themes with abstract concepts so that the entire group can share the theme.
For example, a dialogue is initiated with formal concepts such as justice or love which allows for
anyone to talk about their experiences or thoughts. When bringing up experiences that they believe are
related to the theme, the participants in the conversation express their beliefs and react to others expressing
their beliefs. This is how a collective dialogue is carried out. This process not only reveals the set of beliefs
that the participants each hold but also lets them realize by listening to the beliefs of others that their own
beliefs are only one part of a bigger whole. Participants may come to see the contradictions in the beliefs
that they had once been so sure of. Furthermore, they might discover inherent contradictions in shared
beliefs that are considered common sense. Through this process, by participating in the rearrangement of
the relations between beliefs, humans can, although tentatively, reach a completely new conclusion. The
Socratic dialogue plays the midwife in such intellectual process.
The Socratic dialogue is an example of open exploration through which modern humans suffering from
disorders deriving from conceptual confusion can find answers to questions such as how they should live,
who they are and what they want. The Socratic dialogue is not a monologue in which one person does all
the questioning and answering. The important thing to remember is that this dialogue should be conducted
Despite these advantages, the Socratic dialogue has certain limits as a method of sharing and resolving
actual problems of life because it is a method of argumentation used to distinguish what is right or wrong.
Many problems of life are of a nature that cannot be solved by distinguishing what is right or wrong. In
fact a number of problems do not have anything to do with right or wrong in the first place. If we take into
11 Most of the classics read as humanities traditions were completed in a patriarchical culture and do not cover the problems
that women want to ask. In many cases, they contain prejudices against women. That is why feminist humanities relies
not only on these classics but on various other types of resource materials on womens lives to uncover womens stories
that were not included in the classics and buried in history.
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among those from different backgrounds who share an interest in the same theme.

Proceedings
consideration the fact that our awareness is dependent on the language we use, the sort of problems of life
that could be solved by sorting out what is right or wrong are the simpler problems.
Feminist humanities recognized the limits of a dialogue conducted in the form of a courtroom debate
distinguishing what is right and wrong. Instead, it uses a method of conscious-raising through collective
dialogue. Here, also, participants express their thoughts on the theme. However, the dialogue is centered
on the participants stories of their experiences and cases that they had seen in relation to or in association
with the theme of the dialogue. That is, this is a form of collective conversation in which participants
feel free to express their emotions, moods and feelings regardless of the problem of whats wrong and
whats right. Moreover, this collective dialogue provides a stage for self-narration in which participants
can reveal who they are in front of others. A fragmented, ambiguous and fickle subjecthood is reborn as
a story through the process of self-narration in front of others. In this regard, it becomes a process of selfcreation.
Conclusion
This paper began with the position of understanding the limits of humanities as a means to discover the
answer to the questions, Who am I and How should I live when believing that there is one correct
answer. We can verify that this was not a valid position for everyone just by looking back on the history
of humanities. To be accurate, this was humanities as practiced by those in authoritative positions, subject
who possessed the necessary conditions to represent humanities understanding. As such, it is somewhat
inadequate for shedding light on and exploring problems of life for those who were not accepted as
representative subjectivity of humanities. From the start, the objective of traditional humanities was
never to be a humanities in which those in the peripheries and those in pain can participate and form their
subjecthood. Therefore, one can hardly expect this humanities to give healing and caring for the painful
suffering of the socially vulnerable who are unable to claim representative positions.
This paper emphasizes that humanities healing for the socially weak, those who are most vulnerable and
inevitably hurt, cannot be found in a paradigm seeking one great, representative truth. Instead, it must be
found in a paradigm that allows for a multiple of humanities understanding. Only a paradigm open to the
possibility of multiple understandings can listen attentively to the life stories experienced from various
positions of society and allow these peripheral participants to voice their own words.
A humanities paradigm that allows for multiple subjectivities and multiple understandings uses
conversation as an important method of humanities exploration. Conversation is where different agents
meet because of the undeniable fact that they live in the same community. When we all live in the same
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community, our different positions and meanings cannot exist like isolated islands, existing alongside one
another but never interacting. They are now aware that their life story only tells part of the truth and are
situation-based and limited. When agents meet with such awareness, they meet to go beyond their partial
perspectives and communicate with others. How these partial awareness will collide and clash, how they
will be interconnected and adjusted or compromised is not decided beforehand. No one has the authority
to decide what the final answer is.12
This paper presents such humanities dialogue and healing methods based on the experience of feminism
having applied them to heal the self-identity of women who were in pain. Healing cannot be achieved
merely by the internal and spiritual recovery of the individual. This might be a necessary condition but
not a sufficient condition. An internal and spiritual recovery might restore ones self-esteem and give one
the strength to carry on but as long as the social order that had excluded the individual in the first place
continues to exist unchanged, the individual will return to the same social order as the same loser and
disqualified person.
In the restoration of a damaged self for those who were socially excluded or isolated, as in the case of
feminist humanities, one needs not only to examine oneself but to garner the strength to publicly express
ones pain. Only then could one start cracking at the social and cultural regulations and orders that
excluded and pained one and begin to change them. Humanities healing can only be completed when
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accompanied by social changes.
12 Only by acknowledging the practical circumstances of todays life that is creating a spirit of deconstructive humanities
and which differ greatly from the past, can we acquire an accurate understanding of the illness that these circumstances
are producing. The same goes for dealing with these illness and healing people from them. When the significance of an
illness is wrongly construed, the prescription based upon such inaccurate diagnosis would cause more harm than good.
This is because it would be adding yet another factor of confusion to the formula. Only when we accurately understand
the context in which the illness is being produced, can we look for ways to heal or treat it.
477

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Emotions and Humanities Healing: The Greek Philosophers and

the Stoics Understanding of Emotions
Wooryong Park
Sogang University
I. Preface1
When reviewing the healing of the humanities of modern mans pain and difficulties, one can first
consider the healing of emotions or sentiments. Generally, the modern man experiences anger, a sense
of deprivation, dejection, isolation and despair, which are all emotional states. In order to resolve such
emotional pain, one must start by better understanding such emotions.
Since ancient times, emotions have been regarded as something negative in the West. Academic studies on
emotions have been conducted for a long time in the West, and one of the rhetorics commonly used since
ancient days is emotions are the slaves to reason. 2 This example shows how human emotions have been
regarded since the early stages of history as something inferior and negative compared to reason. In fact,
early interest in emotions occurred as by-results in the process of philosophers discussing reason. In this
process, emotions were considered a threat to reason and with the potential of endangering philosophy
and philosophers.3
Such comparisons became the direct cause of the birth of two philosophical perspectives on emotions.
First, it led to the view that emotions are inferior to reason. That is, there was a thinking that emotions
1 The introduction was written based on the authors work The Intellectual Tradition of Understanding Emotions in the West,
Seoyangsaron 102 (2009), pp. 321-57.
2 One of the most enduring metaphors of reason and emotion has been the metaphor of master and slave, with the wisdom of
reason firmly in control and the dangerous impulses of emotion safely suppressed, channeled, or (ideally) in harmony with
reason. Robert C. Solomon, The Philosophy of emotions, in Handbook of Emotions, Third Edition. Michael Lewis et al eds.
(New York: Guilford Press, 2008), p. 3.
3 Ibid.
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were more primitive, less intelligent and more dangerous than reason and had to be controlled by reason.
Second, and more importantly, humans came to accept the dichotomy of reason-emotion as something
natural in our minds. That is, reason and emotions existed as two distinct systems in nature and were
conflicting and mutually hostile forces found within the human soul.4
Even philosophers who tried to unite reason and emotions and integrate one into another constantly
claimed the two were different and that reason was superior. This tradition begins with Plato. Plato saw
the human soul as comprising of three parts or functions reason, desires and will but considered it ideal
for reason to rule the soul entirely.5 Such attitude since ancient days of dividing the human into reason and
emotions became a predominant or staple concept in the intellectual tradition of the West and continued
into the modern era. One modern philosopher who inherited such tendency was Rene Descartes.
The first scholar to purposefully study emotions as a discipline was the American philosopher and
psychologist William James. In an 1884 edition of Mind, a late 19th century philosophy journal, he
published an article titled, What is an emotion? This article was instrumental in drawing the publics
attention to the subject of emotions. In this article, James defined emotion as the physiological response
that always comes in the aftermath of a feeling.6 This definition indicates that even into the 19th century,
emotions were considered a phenomenon in which the physiological aspect was more dominant.
However, such understanding of emotions presents a considerable problem when keeping modern
humanities healing in mind. If emotions are merely a physiological response and have no cognitive or
reflective elements, there is no possibility of emotional healing within humanities healing. There does
exist in the intellectual traditions of the West, a tradition of viewing emotion not just as a physiological
response but a phenomenon with a cognitive element. This tradition continues from Plato and Aristotle,
continuing through the Stoics, passed on by Spinoza and David Hume and reaching onto Freud in the 19th
This paper aims to present, based on such understanding of emotions, the perspective that emotions have
a cognitive element and that this could be a crucial method in the healing of emotions. First, it will go
4 Ibid.
5 Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 7.
6 Solomon, What Is an Emotion?: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 2nd edn. (New York : Oxford University Press, 2003),
p. 1.
7 The author has anthologized Western traditions that view emotions favorably in the above-mentioned The Intellectual Tradition
of Understanding Emotions in the West, (2009).
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over concepts of emotions by Plato and by Aristotle and verify the contents seeking a cognitive element.
Next, it will compare the methods by the Epicureans and by the Stoics of getting rid of emotional desires.
Finally, it will point to the legacy of the Stoics therapy of emotions as found in religion, philosophy and
psychological treatments.
II. A New Understanding of the Concept of Emotions in Ancient Greece: Plato and Aristotle
1. Plato
A philosophical analysis of emotions was first introduced by Plato (427-347 B.C.) and further developed
by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Platos The Republic is perhaps the first methodical explanation ever given
on the state of human emotions. In The Republic, while discussing the ideal state and the good human life,
Plato divides the human soul into three parts reason, spirit and appetite.8 The reason loves knowledge and
wisdom. The appetite pursues immediate physical pleasures while avoiding pain. The spirit in the middle
is where emotions related self-confidence and self-assurance are located. Plato did not think that these
three parts would achieve wholesome harmony on their own. On the contrary, he considered it natural that
there would be frequent conflict among the parts.9
In his earlier dialogues, Plato seemed to regard all desires and emotions outside reason as arising from the
body. This is particularly marked in Phaedo, where he reflects upon the significance of death and the fate
of the human soul. The dichotomy of soul-body divides the immortal and rational function of the soul and
the ephemeral and irrational function of the human body.10 Plato does not see any positive element in the
desires and passions of the body. This is an attitude indicative of Platos early asceticism and this has led
to Plato being perceived as a philosopher whose objective was to transcend desire and passion as much as
possible.11
However, in The Republic and other dialogues during the middle of his life, Plato sees desire and emotion
as movements of the soul. Platos attitude towards desire and emotions in these writings differ slightly
from that found in his earlier work of Phaedo.12 The area of desire includes fundamental biological desires
8 Plato, Republic, 4.435-441c: 9.580d-583a, Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 7

9 Ibid.
10 Plato, Phaedo 66b-e, Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, p. 7.
11 Plato, Phaedo, 66e67a, in M.C Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge, 1986), pp. 151~152; A. W, Price, Mental Conflict (London, 1995), pp. 36-40.
12 Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 7.
480
and impulses and these mechanically avoid pain and seek immediate pleasure. In this perspective, it is
similar to the instincts of animals. A human driven by animal instincts is pitched to and fro by the impulses
rising from changes to his body and his surroundings. 13
Nevertheless, while emphasizing the difference between the rational and the irrational, Plato did not
consider desire and emotion to be irrational in that he considered them to be completely void of any
cognitive elements.14 Plato saw these as having ways to express themselves and considered it possible to
interpret them as having an evaluative and balanced attitude. Plato saw sexual lust, thirst and hunger as
the strongest human desires but didnt consider such animal instincts were all there was to the function of
human desire.15 Although, Plato does emphasize the differences between the rational side and the irrational
side, he didnt think that the carnal and sensual side of humans was void of any reason in the sense that it
was non-cognitive.16 These desires had their own way of expressing themselves and therefore their actions
could be seen as including attitudes of evaluative statements.
As such, Plato saw that an aspect of cognitive function, as well as the instinctive aspect, affected human
desires. Desires recognize whether the fulfillment of that instinct brings comfort or discomfort, and have
the ability to evaluate the situation based on the predictions of pleasure or pain which would follow that
fulfillment.17 The desire for wealth, in particular, belongs more to the cognitive side.18
Courage is the part of the human soul in which a proactive and self-evaluative cognitive element can be
found as a primary element. The act of courage share a link in physiological change with the act of desire.
Courage is naturally given the position of serving reason.19 Courage can help the efforts of reason, based
on the foundations of acknowledgement, honor and self-esteem, to acquire knowledge and to align the
essence of human existence with the true form of humans place in the universe. In this perspective, Plato
treats the emotional response of courage as something cognitive.20 Courage rising in a soul without order
appraisal, which is closer to an evaluation based on reason rather than on desire.
13 Plato, Republic 4.439b~d; 9.580d~581a, 586a~c., in Knuuttila, Emotions, pp. 7-8.

15 Plato, Republic. 4.437d; 9.580e.

17 Plato, Republic. , 4.442a; 9.583e-584c.

18 Ibid, 9.581a.
19 Ibid, 4.440a-441a.
21 Plato, Republic, 4.441c-e; 9.581a-b; 586c-d.
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rears exaggerated belligerence and bluff.21 However, the emotional response of courage is based on value

Proceedings
W. W. Fortenbaugh argues that after writing The Republic, Plato changed his thoughts on emotions.22
This change occurred when Plato realized through philosophical debates at the Academy, that certain
parts of the moral and political issues dealt with in The Republic had given a flawed analysis of emotional
responses.23 Fortenbaugh states that Platos dividing of the human soul into three parts is especially
problematic when connecting emotions with psychology. Plato himself, to a certain extent, shows signs
of awareness that there were limits to using the three-part model as a foundation to categorize emotions.24
In The Republic(4.443d), Plato implies that there could be more than just three parts. When discussing
the distress that poetry can invoke, as well as emotion such as sorrow, pity and joy, Plato talks about
distinguishing the rational side and the irrational side.25 He refers to the latter as having an intricate and
complex nature.26 Thus, when desire is connected to physical impulses such as hunger, thirst and sexual
lust, which are hard to be accepted as reason, this is expanded into the area of cognitive evaluation as well.
Fortenbaugh points out that Plato began to see emotions as a special dimension of cognitive process.27
Moreover, he claims that Plato attempts to explain the difference between emotional response and rational
reflection as these two being two forms of cognitive activities. That is why Plato clearly differentiates
emotions from physical senses and basic impulses. Thus, cognitive process are divided in calculation and
reflection on one parter and good or painful feelings on the other. According to Fortenbaughs claims, after
The Republic, Platos attitude towards emotions shifted towards focusing on the cognitive aspect once he
accepted the positive side of emotions.28
22 poetics, politics and ethics (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1975, 2008), pp. 9-12, 23-25, 31-33.

24 Ibid., p. 12.
25 Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 5. Recent exemplary writings discussing the human emotions has portrayed in ancient Greek poetry
and tragedies are as follows: D. L. Cairns, The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature
(Oxford: Carendon Press, 1993); B. Willams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, LA., and London, University of California
Press, 1993); M.W. Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
26 Plato, Republic, 10.603d-604b in A. W. Price, Mental Conflict (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 68-9.
27 Knuuttila, Emotions, pp.14~15.
28 Such change of perspective by Plato will be covered more in detail in the next part.
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2. Aristotle
It is clear that Aristotle took from Plato the idea of compositional analysis of emotions. However, the
two philosophers hold different views on emotions.29 Aristotle follows Plato in dividing the human
soul into rational and irrational parts but he does not completely separate the two. He avoids making a
sharp distinction between the rational, or cognitive, elements of emotions and the irrational, or physical,
elements. This is because, Aristotle acknowledged, this being a very complex-dimensioned problem,
that emotions could be both irrational and rational. Also, Aristotle understood the two parts of reason and
emotion inevitably being united as one.
In addition, Aristotle did not see the human being as a completely rational being, acknowledging that there
was an emotional element that could ever be erased or ignored in human nature. That is why Aristotle
thought that while a human completely succumbing to desire fell to the level of an animal, it was also
foolish and irrational to deny ones passion and live as an ascetic, as this was denying human nature.30
Aristotle presents detailed analyses on various emotions in Rhetoric. He differentiates four fundamental
elements constituting emotions - cognition, psychic affect, bodily affect, and behavioral suggestion or
impulse. One marked characteristic of Aristotles approach to emotions is his interest in emotions as
pleasurable or non-pleasurable methods of becoming aware of oneself in various situations.31
Aristotle, in Ethics and Politics, states that humans have a rational and social nature and accordingly
a great human life naturally includes developing rational skills and participating in various forms of
social activities.32 He believed that there existed various emotions related to issues discussed in social
systems, actual life and actual philosophy and that there was value in analysing the functions providing
the cognitive content and motive of emotions.33 A socially learned emotional paradigm plays an important
people to participate in the emotional forms of culture in the direction of fostering habits of feelings and
emotions that contribute to a good life.34
30 Marvin Perry, An Intellectual History of Modern Europe (Boston, 1993), p. 20.

32 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, ed. I. Bywater, OCT(Oxford: Carendon Press, 1988), 1.7-9, 2.1-5.
33 Ibid., 2.6-8.
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role in Aristotles theory of ethical education. That is, the crucial question is how to train and teach young

Proceedings
Aristotle defined emotion as the things on account of which the ones altered differ with respect to their
judgments, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain: such are anger, pity, fear, and all similar emotions
and their contraries.35 In particular, Aristotle shows deep interest in how a human undergoing a particular
experience would, through some process of conscious thinking, reach a pleasurable or non-pleasurable
emotion.
This is why Aristotle avoids treating emotion as an irrational or uncontrollable response to a situation.
We might not be able to justify our emotions at times but just as often as not, we indeed can justify them.
Aristotle develops this perspective in Nicomachean Ethics. In this writing, he perceives virtue (such as
courage or generosity) to be a problem of feeling the right thing. Therefore, a courageous person is not
immune to fear in a dangerous situation but nor does he or she let fear take over him or her. Aristotle
claims that we can create our emotions through education and habit.
According to Aristotles Rhetorics, the characteristics of many emotions show a strong reaction to the
behavior of others. Aristotle found anger interesting because he saw it as a moral force and a natural
response to being attacked, something that was able to be developed and stirred by reason and rhetoric.
Aristotles analysis of anger shows his complex perspective on emotions. The element that he considers
crucial when analyzing anger is the concept of slight. A slight, which can be taken as a sign of scorn, spite
or insolence, is the main factor that makes a person feel anger.
Aristotle thought that the desire for revenge took center in a persons emotions when the person
underwent a process of imagination stimulated by the fact that he or she was slighted. Aristotles concept
of emotions meant that he saw the behavioral element of revenge as being central to the emotion of anger.
As such, Aristotles analysis of anger is complex in that it includes an emphasis on its cognitive element,
a reflection of its concrete social context, its tendency to express itself in action and its cognition of a
physical stimulus.36
Anger is one of the most marked virtues Aristotle talks about in his Nicomachean Ethics. In Nicomachean
Ethics, Aristotle writes in detail about what situation justifies anger and what degree or intensity of anger
is justifiable. He saw forgiveness as a virtue but made it clear that this was so only in certain situations.
He claimed that not feeling anger in a situation where one should feel anger was not a virtue but a vice
instead. Aristotle also talked in length about fear when explaining about courage. Aristotle attempted such
35 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1378e20-1380a4, in Robert C. Solomon, What Is an Emotion? (2nd ed.) (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003). p. 6.
484
a detailed analysis of the essence of emotions because he saw them as being an important part of analysing
ethics.37
According to Aristotle, humans feel pleasure because they can recognize it.38 Joy comes from cognition,
so remembering or expecting something is enough to make one feel pleasure.39 Through such analysis,
Aristotle draws the conclusion and emotions are an essential element to living a good life. Aristotle said
that when humans recognize something, they also recognize the fact that they are having a recognization.40
That is, if pleasure as a joy comes in a cognitive form, it must always occur on a conscious level.41
Aristotles analysis is important in that it analyzed emotions as evaluations.42 If someone smiled in a
friendly manner at you, you would feel a warm feeling towards that person. This, in Aristotles view, is
because you evaluated the smile as a sign of affection. A emotion is an evaluation of a situation from the
perspective of the importance that it takes in our interest. With Aristotles concept of emotions, evaluation,
or appraisal, came to be understood as being crucial in understanding emotions.
Aristotles view of seeing emotions as evaluations was adopted into modern psychology by Magda
Arnold and J. A. Gasson in the 20th century. They claimed that in all emotions, knowledge, evaluation and
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judgment came first.43
37 Ibid.
38 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370a27-8 in Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 29.

39 Ibid., 1370a30-1.
40 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 9.9. 1170a29-32.

42 Keith Oatley, Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 42.
43 M. B. Arnold and J. A. Gasson, Feelings and emotions as dynamic factors in personality integration, in M. B. Arnold and J.
A. Gasson eds., The Human person (New York: Ronald, 1954), p. 215.
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III. Therapy of the Emotions in Ancient Greece: The Epicureans and the Stoics
1. The Epicureans
The Epicureans44 and the Stoics45 both saw human emotions as problematic. They believed that in order to
lead rational lives, we needed to eliminate emotions. The Epicurean school began some 2,300 years before
the Stoics. The founder of the school, Epicurus, considered things that most humans cling to -money,
fame, power, intercourse with the finer specimen of the opposite sex, eternal life- to be totally worthless
in actuality. Epicurus, who inherited and further developed his teachings, thought that we needed to free
ourselves from the tyranny of our emotions to become proper human beings. Intense emotions too easily
turn us into irrational beings. In the opinion of Epicureans, in order to become proper humans, we need
to focus not on futile things like fame or wealth but on worthier things. This is when philosophy becomes
medicine for the soul. The purpose of philosophy is to free oneself from emotions such as greed, lust,
anger and envy. The key is desire (interest, purpose and longing). Emotions occur either when these
desires are met or disappointed.46
Epicurus developed an interesting categorization based on what is essential and necessary. He claimed
it was perfect and good to feel happiness in essential and necessary things such as food, drink and sex.
However, he makes it clear that there is no gain in setting ones mind on inessential and unnecessary
things such as fame or power. Therefore, the most superior way of gaining peace of mind as suggested
by the Epicureans is to avert ones desires from unnatural, unnecessary and worry-inducing problems and
instead, pursue natural urges that dont bring any worries.47
The greatest good for humans according to the Epicureans is to live a life that is completely free of pain
44 The school of Epicureans was founded by Epicurus (341-271 B.C.). Also referred to as The Garden, this school began as
a community of acquaintances who lived outside Athens and shared the same views (Oatley, Emotions, 41). This school is
linked to the belief that sensual pleasure is the only good in life. In fact, Epicurus defined sensual pleasure as such. This is
pleasure, contrary to what some may believe we are doing, does not come from dissipation or seeking fun. It is about freedom
from the pain of the body and the confusion of the mind. To create a pleasurable life is.. the moderate deduction of getting
rid of the opinions that aggravate the soul with great confusion. Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason, 292. Kim Yangsun, Humanism in Ancient Greece and Rome -As Found in Ethics and Education Philosophy, Humanities New Direction
as Seen through Research on the Birth and Ideology of Humanism in the Ancient Ages, Middle Ages and the Renaissance of
Western Civilization(Fire and Cloud, 2003), requoted from p. 23.
45 The school of Stoics was founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 B.C. The next leader of the school was Cleanthes, who was
succeeded by Chrysippus (280-206 B.C.). Chrysippus, along with Panaetius and Posidonius, belonged to the mid-era Stoics.
Some of the later Stoic philosophers include Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. (Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 47).
46 Oatley, Emotions, p. 44.
47 Ibid., p. 46.
486
either mentally or physically. The only way to reach this stage as taught by Epicureans was something
similar to Aristotles virtue of temperance. For Epicureans, it was important to acquire a balanced state
of satisfaction to overcome dissatisfaction in the process of life. Therefore, the only virtue in the eyes
of the Epicureans was a prudent discernment deciding and evaluating the maximization of pleasure and
minimization of pain among various possible pleasures.48
In this context, Epicurianism is a philosophy seeking the healing of pain, and above all, peace of mind.
Compared to the logical reasoning of Plato and Aristotle, it seeks these objectives through more exoteric
and practical methods. Ultimately, the Epicureans purpose is to free the human being from all sources of
pain in the soul.49
2. The Stoics50
The Stoics had an even larger influence than the Epicureans. The Stoic way of thinking crossed from
Greece To Rome and lasted about 600 years. Their Principal Greek philosopher was Chrysippus. Famous
Roman Stoics include Seneca, playwright and millionaire, Epictetus, who had been a slave, as well as
Marcus Aurelius the emperor. Stoics took in and expanded on many teachings of Plato and Aristotle.
However, the Stoic explanation of emotions didnt garner as much attention as that of Aristotle because
they included the discussions on emotions as part of a bigger discussion on ethics.51 Not only did they
think emotions was a complex state that included cognition, impulse and behavior, they believed that the
cognitive process leading to emotions was morally destructive.52 But whereas Aristotle took emotion to be
essential to the good life, the Stoics analyzed emotions as a conceptual error, conducive to misery.53
Two Stoic philosophers in particular, Seneca and Chrysippus, were instrumental in developing a more
advanced cognitive theory of emotions some 2,000 years ago. Emotions, in their view, were judgments on
48 Kim Yang-soon, Humanism in the Ancient Greece and Rome, p. 24.

49 Ibid.
50 Ciceros Methodical Interpretation of the Stoics Therapy of the Emotions which should be included in this chapter
is excluded due to limits of presentation time and paper. The author plans to include this theme when writing a formal
dissertation.
51 Lyons, The Philosophy of Cognition and Emotion, in Hand book of Cognition and Emotion, ed. by Tim Dalgleish and Mick
Power (New York and Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), p. 24.
52 Ibid.
53 Solomon, The Philosophy of Emotions, p. 5.

54 Ibid.
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a humans position in the world.54 For the Stoics, emotion was a cognitively -induced impulse to act or

Proceedings
plan for emergency action, caused by the subject making a judgement or forming a belief about the current
state of affairs and what one should do about it.55 Thus, fear was an impulse to run away or fight ones
way out of trouble, resulting from the subjects negative judgment that he/she was caught in a dangerous
situation and must do something about it, quickly.56
Seneca, a prominent figure among Roman Stoics, interpreted anger from a cognitive aspect as well.57 For
Seneca, the impulse of violence arose from recognizing an injury or a slight. As Aristotle had done so,
even if emotions were meant to be controlled by reason, the stimulus of emotion itself occurred through
reason.58 Seneca was in accordance with Aristotle when writing that anger was an impulse of revenge in
face of a slight and seeing it as a motivation for action.
However, Seneca distinguished the desire of revenge in face of a slight with a sadistic aggression, when
cruel people feel pleasure by giving pain to others.59 Seneca thought that people easily resort to violence
as a response because of their strong pride and that peoples feelings were hurt easily because of this pride.
Seneca also showed interest in the efforts to suppress the impulse of revenge even in the midst of anger.
He believed that such efforts were the most reliable way of preventing anger from turning into violence.60
Like the Epicureans, the Stoics thought that emotions were to be extirpated. Like them, they thought that
the keys to these operations were desires, but at this point two schools differed. Whereas the Epicureans
worked by diverting attention from the illusory and unnecessary, the Stoics thought that to free oneself
from emotions, one must free oneself from most kinds of desires.61
Marcus Aurelius thought passions were not good, but he was not scathing about them. He recognized that
passions revulsion from reason at least seems to bring with it a certain discomfort, and a half-felt sense
55 Lyons, The Philosophy of Cognition and Emotions, p. 24.

56 Ibid.
57 One of the most discussed writing during the cognitive-affective debate of the 1980s was Hans Tochs article on Senecas
perspective on anger and violence, published in a US psychology journal. Toch had been studying anger and its suppression for
a long time and offer this short but concise explanation on Senecas approach to anger as part of the cognitive-affective debate.
(H. Toch, Violent Men, Chicago, 1969: The management of hostile aggression: Seneca as applied social psychologist,
American Philosophy of Emotions 38, pp.1022~1025.
58 Solomon, The Philosophy of Emotions, p. 6.
59 Ibid.
60 Lazarus, The Cognition-Emotion Debate: a bit of history, in Hand book of Cognition and Emotion, ed. by Tim Dalgleish and
Mick Power (New York and Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), p. 6.
61 P. Jones, An Intelligent persons guide to the classics (London: Duckworth, 1999); M.C. Nussbaum, The therapy of desire:
Theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); R. Sorabji, Emotion and peace of
mind: From Stoic agitation to Christian temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
488
of constraint.62 The real trouble came with desires: too much wanting of money because it feels as if we
deserve it, the assertion of power because we know the other person is wrong, the push towards sexual
gratification because it feels compelling. Desires have their own sense of rightness about them.63
The first Roman Stoic philosopher to give a proper explanation of cognitive emotions was Chrysippus. He
saw emotions as having two movements. First, like Charles Darwins snake-escape reflex, is involuntary.
Chrysippus called it a first movement. Darwins reflex had a physical component - jumping backwards
- but no doubt also a mental component - fear. You will have experienced such mental first movements
yourself: perhaps alone in the house, you hear a strange noise. You startle and feel suddenly afraid or on
your guard. second movements are more considered. They are of what one might do about the agitation
of the first movement. Chrysippus argued that the second movements were the real emotions. With them
one can decide what is truly important. For the Stoics, no externals are important. By extirpating wrong
desires, one can extirpate the second movements, in which we consent and translate urges into deliberate
action. 64
In the Stoics view, emotions depended on how we evaluated a situation. when we evaluate them as
deriving from things that are worthless, we can free of envy, anger, disappointment. One should therefore
indifferent to them. If one evaluates them properly, they empty and ephemeral in comparison with matters
that are permanent and worthy. The Stoics thought the ability to reason derives from ones soul, which
they thought tobe divine. An emotion makes a certain desire, a certain course of action, urgent. The issue
is to distinguish the important from the merely urgent, and to give ones assent to those second movements
that are important.
So what is permanent and worthy of desire? The Stoic answer is that only character, in its virtue,
rationality, and kindness.65
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IV. The Influence of Stoics

1. Religion
Although much of the argument about reaching non-attached states of mind is distinctive to the Stoics, the
62 Marcus Aurelius(c. 173), Mediations,(M. Staniforth, trans.), (London: Penguin), 47 in Oatley, Emotions, pp. 47-8.
64 Ibid., p. 48.
65 Ibid., p. 49.
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attitude that a Stoic achieves came close to Buddhism,66 In Buddhism, one realizes that the notion of a self
who is successful, or accomplished, or indeed has any fixity in time, is an illusion. As with Stoicism, there
are practices and exercises to achieve a certain frame of mind. In this frame, its not that emotions dont
happen. It is rather that one observes them and lets them pass, rather than being caught up in their vortices.
The Stoicss idea was that we should cultivate virtue - be good people in the world - and after that,
everything else fits into place. The idea has been assiduously adhered to by the three influential
monotheistic religious practices: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For example, if we love God, all else
follows. Lesser matters can be evaluated as lesser.
There was a wide-spread tendency among early Christians to view that the bad emotions, which the
ancient Stoics strove to extirpate, became sins.67 Evagrius Ponticus nominated eight bad thoughts which
were like Chry- sippus first movements: thoughts of gluttony, fornication, avarice, distress, anger,
depression, vanity, and pride.
Later the Roman Catholic church settled on a number of sins that was more resonant that eight. the
number of deadly sins became seven: gluttony, lust, avarice, envy, anger, sloth, and pride. all are emotions,
or have an emotional quality. The danger and the sin occur, according to church teaching, when one
indulges them with full consent, in what Chrysippus would regard as the second movement of thinking
how to act.68
2. Spinoza
Twelve centuries after the breakup of the Roman Empire lived two great rationalist philosophers: Rene
Descartes and Baruch Spinoza. Both wrote books about emotions. Descartes, in his book Passions of the
Soul, analyzed emotions in a way that would lay foundations for scientific analyses of the brain. Spinoza,
in his book The Ethics,69 analyzed them principally in order that we, his readers, could understand their
meaning and our place in the universe.
66 Ibid., p. 50.
67 Refer to the following work for detailed explanation on this alteration. R. Sorabji, Emotion and peace of mind.: From Stoic
agitation to Christian temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
69 B. Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, the Ethics, and Correspondence (R. H. M. Elwes, Trans.) (New York
Dover, Modern edition 1955).
490
Spinoza recognized in emotions some of the same paradoxes as had the ancient Stoics. He saw people
trying to control their emotions, but in doing so making themselves only more subject to them. His most
striking chapter heading was On human bondage. To escape this bondage, one must understand that
the universe is an expression of the mind of God, so each one of us is part of that expression. Rather than
each of us being a separate speck who might bounce off other specks in the vast universe, we are part of
it, more like wrinkles in a giant cloth. As we realize this, we start to see our mistake in thinking that we
are prime movers in what happens, struggling to control things, and getting frustrated and angry when our
desires are not met.
If we understand the world the way as it is, then we have what Spinoza called active emotions, based on
love for the world as it is, and on love for others. If we struggle against it, we have what Spinoza called
passive emotions, thinking that our desires ought to be fulfilled. We then are caught up in bitterness, envy,
resentment, based on confused ideas.70 Here, for instance, are two of Spinozas definitions. For example,
Spinoza offered the following two definitions:
Definition 7. Hatred is pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause.71
Definition 23. Envy is hatred, in so far as it induces a man to be pained by anothers good fortune, and to
rejoice in anothers evil fortune.72
When Spinoza points to the idea of an external cause of hatred, his intends us to see ourselves caught up
not in asserting our freedom, which he says is a confused idea, but in bondage. He invites us to re-evaluate
the idea. his radical twist on the idea of emotions as evaluations is that by accepting them, we can start to
be of the bondage in which they hold us. For Spinoza, he intriguing idea is that to be free of the control
of emotions over us, we must first accept them. It is an idea that became central to many of the secular
3. Psychiatric treatment
The modern inheritance from the ancient traditions of mental practices that engage with potentially
destructive human emotions is psychotherapy. It is a set of practices started in Vienna by Sigmund Freud
70 Oatley, Emotions, pp. 51-2.
71 Spinoza, The Ethics, p. 176.

72 Ibid., p. 178.
491
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systems of psychotherapy that began with S. Freud.73

Proceedings
at the end of the nineteenth century which, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, has spawned
hundreds, perhaps thousands of variants. Like the ancient Epicureans, Freud based the practices of his
kind of therapy, which he called psychoanalysis, on the idea that some of our desires unconscious. For
Freud, the principal desire is for sex. He thought sex was the source of all creativity.
By contrast, the second problematic desire - for aggression - is destructive. The central notion of
psychoanalytic therapy was that although they are unconscious, these desires nonetheless affect our
behavior pervasively. While they remain unconscious, their effects occur without our being able to do
much about them. They remain outside our power. Freuds answer, then, was excavate in ourselves these
desires, bring them to the surface, and make them conscious. 74 This archeological metaphor was one of
Freuds favorites. Once one had brought ones disowned intentions to consciousness, it would be possible
to take responsibility for them, and in that movement we could be free of their tyranny over us.75
Tim Beck was working as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist when he realized that many of the thoughts
that patients had, (which, according to Freud, were to spoken aloud during therapy so that the therapist
could analyse them by suggesting their unconscious origins), were not really quite unconscious. Rather,
they hovered at a kind of threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. In a therapy session, they
might seem too unimportant, or too embarrassing , to say out loud. Yet it was these thoughts (Chrysippean
first movements) that were the real culprits. From this insight, Beck developed cognitive behavioral
therapy.76
V. Conclusion
Cicero thought that the lifestyle the Epicureans pursued was weak and cowardly. As a result, Cicero did
not find anything positive in the Epicureans therapy of the mind. Cicero did not see the advice to distance
oneself from thinking (avocatio), and to divert ones attention to other matters (revocatio) was bad in
itself, but he thought that the Epicureans advice to think about past and future pleasures was ineffective as
a healing solution for intense pain and even harmful to the soul.77
74 Please refer to the following work for detailed explanation. Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm
Fliess 1887-1902 (M. Bonaparte et al eds.)(New York: Basic Books, 1954).
76 Please refer to the following two works for detailed explanation. A. T. Beck et al, Cognitive Therapy of Depression (New York
: Guilford, 1979); S.D. Hollen et al, Cognitive-behavioral treatment of depression in Handbook of depression I. H. Gotlib et al
eds. (New York: Gilford, 2002), pp. 383-403.
77 Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 74. As mentioned above, Ciceros theory will be dealt in a separate dissertation.
492
In healing the modern persons pain through a humanities approach, philosophy which deals with the
human emotions can be a medicine for soul. A philosophical method of healing difficulties and pain
that the modern person experiences by inheriting the thoughts of Aristotle and of the Stoics of the ancient
times, as well as Spinoza and Hume in the modern times, would have a remarkable advantage as a healing
method.
From the late 20th century unto today, the social order of neo-liberalism has made the majority of the
population suffer under a cold reality of winner-take-all. With the gap between the rich and the poor
reaching extreme limits, many people who are driven to an underclass or temporary worker status suffer
with the sense of deprivation and isolation while struggling to survive. Therefore, what is first needed of
the modern person is to get rid of the futile desire within himself or herself. If a minority of humankind
threw away their greed, this could be a world where the majority of humankind can co-exist.
Also, whether conscious or buried in our subconscious, we need to recognize the true form of the desires
that are lurking within us. Only then would we be able to encounter the opportunity to free ourselves from
the tyranny of emotions or the human bondage. Above all, each one of us should have sympathy78 for
those around us who are suffering and foster a benevolent emotion of healing the pain of others. This is
an urgently needed virtue that will help us attain our own peace of mind and happiness as well as help the
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majority of humankind who are living a hard reality.
78 Please refer to the following work for the concept of sympathy. Wooryong, Park, The Ethical Philosophy of Scottish
Enlightenment: Adam Smiths sympathy and impartial spectator, The 1st World Humanities Forum Presentations (Korea
National Comission for UNESCO, 2011), pp. 244-54.
493

Proceedings
The Healing Function of Talchum
Hyun Shik Ju
Sogang University
1. Introduction
The study of talchum, or mask dance, flowered during the 1970s and 80s and ensuing studies followed the
steps of these standardized researches, usually focusing on a few themes such as the social functionality
or the origin of talchum. Research on social functionality focused on the lower class social resistance
that grew in the late Joseon Period with the development of commercial capitalism and urbanization.1
Meanwhile, research on the origin of talchum approached the topic with hypothetical theories that it
originated from sandahee (makeshift stages made for medieval masked drama), from instrumental music,
or from pungmul (farmers musical instruments).2
These researches, meaningful as pioneer works, failed to address the powerful healing potential talchum
has as drama. Even studies that partially recognize the healing function only focused on how the ruling
class used talchum to maintain the existing class system. These studies explain that the ruling class
allowed their servants to resolve their suppressed emotions and desires through drama, and as a result, the
ruling class was able to maintain the class system. This explanation is wanting because it does not include
the transformation process of individuals and groups that takes place through talchum performance.3
Talchum inherently has powerful potential to heal. This is suggested by the custom handed down in Hahoe
Village, that is, if villagers felt there was an ill omen in the village, then they took it as a sign to perform
Hahoe byeolsingut (Hahoe village ritual to serve the village spirit) and Hahoe talnori (Hahoe village mask
1 Jo Dongil. History and Principle of Talchum. Hongseongsa. 1979.
2 Lee Duhyeon. Korean talchum. Iljisa. 1981. Seo Yeonho. On Site Study of Korean Handed down Performance. Jipmundang.
1997. Jo Dongil. Op.cit. Park Jintae. Study on Korean Mask Play. Saemunsa. 1985. Kim Yeolgyu. Talchum in the Context of
Reality. Finding Classic Literature. Kim Yeolgyu et al. Munhakgwa Jiseongsa. 1976, pp. 383-407.
3 Kim Ukdong. Aesthetic of Talchum. Hyeongamsa. 1994.
494
dance). Describing talchum as a subversive satire of the lower class and an attack on the ruling class, or
saying the opposite, that it was a safeguard mechanism that supported the yangban system by weakening
the hostile public sentiment, attaches too much importance on only one side of the socio-psychological
meaning talchum performance has. This paper starts out from this point of criticism and attempts to
understand talchums healing functionality comprehensively.
This paper is based on the following assumptions from a drama therapy perspective. First, talchum creates
a stage for the suppressed unconscious, so the act of participating in talchum itself is a healing process.
Second, the gwangdae, or performer, plays the role of therapist to the village audience, but because he
reflects and transforms the life experience of the village community as a village member as well, he
himself is a patient. Third, therefore, talchum is the transformative process of the self and community,
recovered to health from illness through care and healing. To illustrate this point, the first part of the body
will explore the overall structure that talchum performance has as a drama therapy process. Afterwards,
the second part will identify the performance form4 of each episode and explore which factors or drama
therapy techniques are actually used in the talchum episodes.
Of course, there are many ways to approach drama therapy. Some examples include cognitive healing,
behavioral healing, or psychoanalytic healing derived from analytic healing or object relations theory.
However, one of the most widely accepted drama therapy theories today is Sue Jennings EPR theory
(Embodiment, Projection, Role), a developmental paradigm that charts the progression of dramatic play
in human life. Another is Robert J. Landys approach to drama therapy through role playing and Phil
Jones approach based on Jenning and Landys approach, but with additions of play, ritual, symbolism and
metaphor.5
However, the purpose of this paper is not to use these various drama therapy theories as tools of analysis
theories will be applied to talchum to find out if the talchum performance has inherent healing aspects,
then what affected part it is healing, and what the gained health is. In other words, by studying the
process of drama therapy and the talchum scenes assumed to be the factors of technique, this paper will
illustrate the meanings illness, healing, health have in the cultural context manifested in talchum
4 The talchum performance scenes in this paper are from the following recording. Lee Duhyeon. Korean Mask Plays. Gyomunsa.
1997.
5 Sue Jennings. trans. Lee Hyeowon. Dramatherapy. Ullyuk. 2003. Robert J. Landy. trans. Lee Hyeowon. Persona and
Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama, Therapy, and Everyday Life. Hakjisa. 2010. Phil Jones. Drama as therapy:
theory, practice, and research 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007.
495
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to mechanically analyze which drama therapy techniques exist in talchum. Rather, the drama therapy

Proceedings
performance. This study will expand the scope of discussion and deepen the meaning of drama therapy
spreading through various routes.6
2. Drama Healing Form Cheongsin-Osin-Songsin and Structural Meaning
Most talchum accompanied gut, or Korean shaman ritual. The chaotic scene of Haeseo talchum
functioned as a driving force behind creating a new order pursued by the gut scenes before and after the
talchum . On the other hand, the gut scenes, which aimed to establish a renewed purpose in life, acted as
a firewall preventing the animal-like excitement of talchums chaotic world view from gushing out and
spreading into an anomie state. For example, the Gangneung danoje gwanno mask dance (mask dance of
Gangneung Dano Festival) or Donghaean byeolsingut talloreum gut of (mask dance shaman ritual of East
Coast) originate from the mask gut performed for burakje (village ritual bidding protection and blessing in
the village) and pungeoje (fishing village ritual bidding abundant fish); they have their roots in seonangje
(village ritual to guardian spirit). Even if a village ritual did not take place, talchums such as Yangju
byeolsandae nori, Bongsan talchum, Goseong ogwangdae, suyeongyaryu, kkokdugaksi noreum, were
preceded by villagers giving offering to the spirits before the performance; and after the performance, the
performers and audience mingled and enjoyed a gut scene of life and death. Therefore, it cannot be denied
that these mask dances were ritualistic performances.
That is why the talchum performance structure is defined in its relationship to gut. The performance
structure of gut is comprised of cheongsin () osin () songsin (). The villagers wish for
the guardian spirit to come, then please the spirit7 with singing, then send the spirit away after the ritual.
Considering that the source of talchum is based on gut and thus placing the structure of talchum outside
the narrow context of the performance itself, it could be said that talchum pertains to the osin scene where
songs, gestures and witty remarks are made to please the spirit. Take the typical village ritual mask dance
Hahoe talnori (Hahoe mask dance) as an example. According to Professor Lee Duhyeon, the Hahoe
mask dance was included in the Hahoe byeolsingut performed ad hoc, once a decade or depending on the
6 Park Miri. Study on Dramatherapy for Disabled Childrens Development: Based on Communication Skill Development.
Gongyeon munhwa yeongu 11thedition. Hankguk gongyeon munhwa hakhoe. 2005. pp. 313-345. Bae Heesuk, Lee Seonhyeong.
Effect of Group Language Therapy using Play has on the Language and Social skills of Children with Language Disability and
Lack of Social Skills. Drama yeongu 34thedition. Hanguk drama hakhoe. 2011. pp. 223-252. Lee Gyeongmi. Phenomenological
Approach to Dramatherapy Focused on the Expansion of experience through Drama and the Role of Therapist. Hanguk
yeongeukak 45thedition. Hanguk yeongeuk hakhoe. 2011. pp. 269-292. Yun Ilsu. Effect of Therapy and Intervention of
Psychodrama. Drama yeongu 37thedition. Hanguk drama hakhoe. 2012. pp. 85-116.
7 The structure of Hahoe byeolsingut was discussed in the following paper. Park Jintae. Study on Hahoe byeolsingut Formation
and Structure. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Korean Literature, Korea University, 1988.
496
oracle. On the second day of Lunar New Year, the selected ritual master, munyo (shaman) and gwangdaes
(performers) gathered at the place of ceremony and prepared the ritual food and prayed for the spirit to
come down to begin the byeolsingut. When the spirit came down, the participants carried the seonangdae
(rod that spirit rides down), the seongjutdae (spirit rod) was upheld, and they played music while parading
to the stage in front of the old spirit house (cheongsin part). Once arriving on stage they erected the
seonangdae and performed the byeolsingut mask dance, fallen monk episode, yangban (ruling class)
and seonbi (scholar) episodes, a total of about ten episodes (osin part). After the performance ended, a
Heotcheongut was held on the streets of the village on the 15th of the Lunar New Year, the last day of the
byeolsin (village ritual for spirit) event, and it ended after a ritual for the spirits was held at midnight. Then
the ritual master and the gwangdaes who had been lodging together since the last day of December were
released home after 15 days (songsin part).8
As such, the talchum performance procedure, comprised of cheongsin osin songsin, is very similar
to the basic form of dramatic therapy process that has a structured form. The drama therapy process
follows the sequence of warm-up focusing main activity end of main activity and deroling
completion. The warm up is the step where the therapist helps the individual or the group to prepare for
drama therapy. This is when the special drama space is created. The focusing step is where the area that
the patient needs to work on, or the process or theme for therapy, is involved more directly. During the
main activity step, multi-layered, complex dramatic media are used by patients to express their suppressed
psychological factors through acting. When the main activity ends, the patients leave their character roles,
and leave the dramatic therapeutic space to face themselves within the external reality. The completion
stage is the decisive step in drama therapy. During the completion stage, patients individually associate
with the awareness and feeling they experienced during therapy. This step provides the space for
individual patients to integrate what was dealt with during therapy.9
to come at the place of ceremony, corresponds to the warm up and focusing steps, and through this,
the drama therapy space is created. The osin step, which is the actual talchum performance, corresponds
to the main activity for drama therapy because during this step the performers and villagers express their
suppressed unconscious form behind the protective layer of the mask. The songin step of byeolsingut
which ends with heotcheongut, pertains to the end of main activity and deroling and completion steps
of drama therapy. The villagers leave behind their roles as ritual master and performer and are charged
with the task of applying the enthusiasm and divinity, and venting of grudges they experienced through
8 Lee Duhyeon (1981). Op. cit., pp. 30-31.

9 Jones. Op. cit., pp. 11-13.
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As a result, the cheongsin step, where the ritual master and gwangdae are selected to pray for the spirit

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talchum and gut, to lifes insight, as they leave the therapeutic space.
Therefore, the talchum procedure itself inherently contains the structural form for natural therapy
as shown by how it is staged with gut and by how it deals with lifes problems and experiences and
dramatizes them.
3. Drama Therapy Techniques in Talchum
3.1 Embodiment: Creating Time and Space for Therapy
Life expressed in talchum is the life of the body. The world reenacted in talchum is made aware in the
body and through the body. The oral sound overflowing with breath, exaggerated gesture, the spatially
close movements through dance medium, masks carved in curves, colorful clothes, and music resonating
through the various instruments, make it possible for the participant to understand the world through
concrete, sensorial subjectivity rather than in an abstract manner. Then, what therapeutic functions
accompany the dramatic bodily expression of talchum?
In the Chimnori (literally translates to acupuncture play) episode in the Songpa sandaenori, the
character Meokjungs nephews lie on stage. They are suspected to suffer from gwangyeok. Gwangyeok
is sudden indigestion accompanied by heaviness in chest, not being able to vomit or relieve oneself.
The character Sinjubu appears and applies acupuncture to the four joints of hands and feet to help chi
flow through their bodies. Then, as soon as he has applied acupuncture, the eight Meokjungs get up at
surprising speed.
One of the key principles of drama therapy that uses the body is to make the patient himself use his
potential body more effectively. In other words, the patient breaks out of the force of habit, and even
if he is not familiar with it, inhabits himself in the new body frame and establishes a new relationship
between the body and self, which leads to the identity change of the patient. That is why during drama
therapy patients practice making new voices and dynamic gestures.10
The scene where the Meokjungs pop up from near-death state after getting acupuncture treatment from
Sinjubu induces a comic effect on the first level. But the comically exaggerated gestures imply that the
feeling for the bodys potential to recover abnormally fast is the most proactive affective element11 that
10 Ibid., pp. 229-230.
11 For more on the bodys active affective component refer to Michelle Maiese, Embodiment, emotion, and cognition. Palgrave
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makes up the actors existence. Awareness of the self is mainly transmitted through the body. The recovery
process of Haeseo Meokjungs is thought to be dormant but it is stronger than any existential sense and by
forming a relationship between the self and body, stages the creation of a new identity.
In the Nojang (literally translates to old esteemed monk) episode of Bongsan talchum, the old monks
gesture is meaningful from the perspective of drama therapy. The Nojang is a respected old monk, but he
is portrayed as being affected by Somu. The Nojang episode, shortly, is the fall of the old monk. There
is no dialogue, but the Nojang gestures his interest in Sojang. For example, he runs to the corner as if
not knowing what to do with his aroused feeling. Afterwards, he opens his fan and looks at Somu from
a distance. Then, he throws away the monks rod yukhwanjang, and runs to the other side corner passing
by Somu, only to look at her again. After repeating this action two or three times, Nojang still fails to buy
Somus heart. Then he dances with his hands and takes off the Buddhist rosaries and puts them around
Somus neck.12
Other than discovering the bodys potential, taking up a different identity and transforming the body
also has therapeutic effect. The patient takes on the identity of another character or object by acting the
role of a character different from the usual self, or expressing kinetic objects like water. By adjusting to
the body of a dramatic persona, the patient gets to change his usual identity into another form.13
The deviating actions by Nojang, unbecoming to a monk, has so far been interpreted as a satire on the
fall of the religious class. But, the transcendental religious space is considered transcendental because it
stems from the cognitive freedom that does not distinguish how secular baseness is a contrasting area.
Could not the fall of Nojang, that was until now seen as fallen Buddhism, be understood to symbolize
the true structural aspect where a transcendental existence has to directly conflict with the inner world
in order for it to become a transcendental existence?14 It embodies an identity element that exists
character, and experience that it had not felt before. The body is the inner source of self and is the zero
degree of objective self. We cannot deny that a therapeutic effect exists when Nojang makes a bodily
transformation into a seducer which brings to the forefront what was unclear to the self before because it
Macmillan. 2011., p. 26.
12 This description follows Lee Duhyeons description. Lee Duhyeon (1981). Op. cit., p.164.
13 Jones. Op. cit., pp. 230-232.
14 For more analysis of the Nojang episode interpreted from this perspective, refer to Yu Minyeong. Koreans Beauty as shown
in Korean Traditional Theater: Focused on the Bongsan talchum and Kkodugaksi noreum. Dosoleomun 1stedition. Department
of Korean Literature, Humanities, Danguk University. 1985, pp. 45-61.
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internally, and through this, provides an area for the monks religious self to explore the base emotions,

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provides direct communication between the unconscious and the conscious.

In the Miyalchum (literally translates to Miyals dance) of Bongsan talchum, an old man is reunited
with Miyal. He tells her of the sufferings he went through after the two were separated in the chaos.
Another therapeutic technique factor can be found here. In particular, there is a scene where the old man
tells Miyal of how he met with the sandaedogam people and refused to give in to their demand for him
to pay tax. Then they stole his hat and attire and he had to go about with a hat made out of dog leather.
Exploring a troubling memory related to the physical body during drama leads to an act of exploring the
social, political forces carved in the physical trauma. The physical body can function as a different system,
so it can function as a social body. Exploring the forces related to bodily memory of the past imbues
to the current body temporal depth where the bodys horizon can be expanded. In other words, the active
exploration of the memory remnant in the body strengthens the bodys potential to create meaning and
allows a person to take interest in a socio-cultural relationship the body does not experience usually. That
is the creation of therapeutic space.15
As the old mans dialogue suggests, he had to wear a hat made out of dog leather because of the
bureaucrats tyranny. The old man who is the subversive class to the social and political power of the
bureaucrats, is limited to wearing certain things. However, due to the trace left on the body, or the dog
leather hat, the old man and Miyal become aware of the socio-political force affecting their body, and
can use that awareness to form a different relationship to their bodies, which has therapeutic effect. The
bodys potential, bodily change, and the remnant memory left on the body are decisive factors that create
a therapeutic time and space during the talchums dramatic activity. Because the performers body cant
be separated from the external environment, that is, the time and place where talchum is performed, the
performers body holds a dual position as an agent and object. Therefore, the renewed relationship with
the body becomes the base for the renewed relationship with the environment.
3.2 Projection: Projecting Inner State
According to Sue Jennings, the projection phase follows the embodiment phase from the perspective
of the childrens dramatic development. During initial infancy, bodily and sensorial actions take up the
biggest part of the child, but as the child grows, he projects his emotions into objects outside of his body
and enjoys more complex experience.16 Therefore, the projection technique used in drama therapy is
different from projection in psychoanalysis, which is a defense mechanism where one blames another
15 Jones. Op. cit., p. 232.
16 Jennings. Op. cit., pp. 70-73.
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person for his unsatisfied needs. Dramatic projection, in its therapeutic meaning, expresses ones internal
conflict through an external object which allows the individual to form a new relationship with himself.17
In Halmimadang (literally translates to Grandmother episode) in Hahoe talnori, an old woman appears
and laments her fortune through the beteulga, or loom song. Her fate is pitiful indeed. The old woman
mournfully sings the beteulga complaining about her hard life as a woman, wearing a small gourd tied to
her bent over back and a white towel on her head. Her gesture of sighing deeply and looking into space
builds on the sorrow. However, when the musician asks her what she did with the ten herrings she bought
yesterday she replies, I cooked one for the old man and ate nine wiping out any negative emotion she
had been expressing until then. People play the role of eating characters throughout their lives, but their
eating purpose differs for each age group. For example, the act of eating during infancy is related to play,
eating during adolescence is related to appearance, and eating during adulthood is related to taste, but
eating during old age is done merely out of necessity.18 However, based on this relationship between
eating and age, the old woman is deviating from the role of her age in regards to eating. In reality, it is
almost impossible for an old person to have enough energy to finish off nine fish at the same time. In
the end, the old woman might be projecting her hardships on the loom song but through the medium of
herring, she comes to terms with the negative conflict she has with herself and adjusts her emotion to
express the vitality of life.
Chwibarimadang (literally translates to Chwibari episode) in Yangju byeolsan daenori is also
noteworthy when it comes to projection. In this stage, the character Chwibari also plays the role of his son
Madangi. He sits a doll on his lap and uses ventriloquism to mimic baby voices. Chwibari goes back and
forth the dialogue between the adult and child which shows the skillfulness of the performance. However,
couldnt Chwibari playing two roles be interpreted as an experience where Chwibari projects his other
side? It is as if a patient uses the doll as a means to express his unconscious matter. To Chwibari, it is a
he laments his position which expresses the suffering he must endure as a father. In summary, Chwibari
projects the joys and sorrows as the head of a family through the doll, the child proxy, and through this,
explores his life.
As seen above, the characters of Halmi episode and Chwibari episode use songs or objects like food
or doll to externalize their inner world. There is no other counterpart role. However, in the end, the old
woman and Chwibari project their thoughts and feelings into the external objects, and end up seeing and
17 Jones. Op.cit., pp. 137-154.

18 Landy. Op. cit., p. 253.
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joy to watch his son Madangi learn to read. However, while he sings to Madangi the Korean alphabet,

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feeling themselves, and create a therapeutic space where they can renew, expand, and transform their
relationship to the self. This is very similar to the small world technique19 in drama therapy where
the patient is given dolls, drawings, sculpture, clay, dialogue, etc. and are told to project their inner
conflict into the objects, releasing their unconsciously suppressed feelings. However, when considering
that talchum is another virtual (as if) world using the medium of mask, we soon realize that the act of
performing talchum in itself is a projected area where the performing agent can explore, expand, build on
and discover the self. In other words, if wearing the tal, or mask in itself, is the process of standing outside
and looking at the self, then it would be worthy to discuss the therapeutic function which forms the basis
of talchum.
3.3 Play and Ritual: Rehearsal as Another Existential Method
Talchum can also be called talnori (literally translates to mask play). As can be deduced from the
individual names Sandaetalnori (sandae mask play), Ogwangdaenoreum (five gwangdae play),
Yaryu (outing), Kkokdugaksinoreum (puppet play), talchum performance takes place in a space where
reality and play meet. What kind of therapeutic functionalities do these play factors have?
One of the plays that often appear in talchum is the sensory-motor play. For example, take the Omjung
and Mokjung episode in Yangju byeolsandae nori. In one scene, Mokjung rips off Omjungs hat and attire
and eats them. Omjung was using his hat to describe sorghum pancake and mungbean pancake, and the
hungry Mokjung thought that the hat was the actual food and ate them. The almost dizzying overturning
play is a stage for vertigo. The food system of everyday life is applied and expanded to costume, and the
stability that food had is suddenly destroyed.
Mimicry, which is the imitation of the gesture and dialogue of others, also appears often. In
Dongnaeyaryu, Yangban Won calls his servant Malttugi saying Hey Malttugi! and makes a gesture of
cocking his ears. Then Yangban Cha and Yangban Mo copy him in calling Malttugi and cocking their ears.
Then the bachelor of the head house also follows the voice and gesture of the three older men, but he adds
comic variation to the voice or gesture, inducing laughter. Even if the mimicry requires the self to become
another person, the person must first realize that he is separate from the other. The act of mimicking occurs
when there is an assumption that the mimicking person and the mimicked are distinguished. Therefore, the
mimicking play of talchum creates a mixed middle area where the self and other are mutually dependent
yet separate from each other.
19 For detailed explanation, refer to Jones. Op. cit., pp. 144-145.
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In talchum appears some games that the yangban class enjoyed such as unja nori (rhyming play), paja
nori (fortunetelling using Chinese characters), and sijo nori (poem making play). A typical example is
found in Bongsan talchum. The character Seobang gives the Chinese characters san () and ryeong ()
as words to rhyme to and Saengwon gives a comic reply. This type of unja nori, paja nori, and sijo nori
pertain to agon, or game played by characters competing to rank the superiority of their skills while
complying with the rule in a limited time and space. That is why when these games are played, the stage
is different from realistic reality and different from the dramatic reality that has existed so far-it creates
another space for reality.
However, the jitguttaeng nori played in Gasan ogwangdae (Gasan five gwangdaes) pertains to alea
because winning the game depends on coincidence regardless of effort. The game is played using cards
or dominos, so an individuals skill has no effect on the game of jitguttaeng, which is a sort of gambling
that requires luck. Because of this alea game factor, the talchum performance stage cannot be planned or
controlled, and it overflows with chaotic energy where only luck works.20
Due to the game factor which is neither serious nor realistic, the talchums fictive stage takes form in the
context of an uncertain world that is informal, unpredictable and open ended. The performers manipulate
their actual experience into an illusion using vertigo, which triggers the instability of sense and shakes
the general category of actor and counterpart; mimicry, which creates a middle area between the self and
other where the self becomes not-not-me; agon, which creates a new status through games played with
antagonistic counterparst; and alea, where luck and coincidence return to stage the feeling of disarray
which cannot be controlled by institution. The awareness of the voluntary, free, and unusual nature of
play that stems from not having an actual purpose provides the performance a motive for heunggyeoum
(enthusiasm) from an emotional perspective.21 In summary, the fun and enthusiastic play transforms the
Talchum performance includes scenes of rituals that form an antipode to play/game form. In the Haeseo
talchum and Sandae nori plays like Bongsan talchum and Yangju byeolsandae nori, after Miyal dies,
it is well known that the shaman performs a jinogwigut (a shamanistic ritual guiding the spirit to the
20 For overall explanation on the play theory of Huizinga and Caillois, refer to Marvin Carlson. Performance: a critical
introduction. Routledge, 1996, pp. 21-22.
21 Heunggyuum is translated as Arousing enthusiasm and having great fun. This definition shows that heung (enthusiasm)
and fun are almost overlapping concepts. This implies a deep relationship between play and Korean heung. Shin
Eungyeong. Pungryu: Source of East Asian Aesthetics. Bogosa, 1999, pp. 122-124.
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fixed lifes experiences into something flexible, making the talchum experience more therapeutic.

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afterworld) to comfort the spirit and guide her to the afterworld. It is the same for Yongnam area talchum.
In particular, in Suyeongyaryu, when the old woman dies, a pallbearer sings the hearse song carrying
the coffin out of the house-as such, the traditional funeral process was reenacted. How to deal with
sudden death that has intervened in life is a very important issue that needs to be dealt by the surviving
community. Reversely speaking, the body serves as a physical basis that acts as a necropolitics and
biopolitics of the survivors. In talchum, rituals such as gut or funeral processes, display Miyals body
publicly and intervene with her body, and through this, control the uncertain feeling that the surviving
people have due to death. Just because the survivors have witnessed her death does not mean that Miyals
sorrow is going to resolved. However, even if there is nothing resolved in reality, the expression of
han (sorrow) emotion caused by Miyals sudden death helps the survivors approach the wishful
experience of reaching the end of existence like rejecting the suppressed.22 As a result, it terminates the
self-consciousness of each of the performing actors and imbues stability called continuity and solidarity in
their community, providing the gwangdae and audience alike an experience of renewing the world. Unlike
play, ritual pursues the feelings of control, but it still pushes the performing actor of talchum to change
into another identity, providing therapeutic effect.
Play and ritual are commonly used techniques in drama therapy. For example, during drama therapy, play/
game is prepared to introduce the patients spontaneity and creativity, and an effective ritual is devised
to give a stable force to the past events that the patient experienced.23 The chaos-like play and cosmoslike ritual form a whirlpool mixed in talchum, allowing the participants to rehearse different methods of
existence. Haeseo talchum performance has therapeutic functions because its fundamental performance
structure is based on the identical twins play and ritual.
3.4 Symbol and Metaphor: Expanding the Concept of Self through Indirect Experience
Usually, symbol and metaphor are thought of as speaking and writing strategies used to effectively
get the message across from the speaker to the audience. However, with the appearance of cognitive
linguists like George Lakeoff, the perception of symbol and metaphor, which had been limited to rhetoric,
changed. According to cognitive theory, rhetoric is not just a method of expression. Lakeoff explains that
the real function of symbol and metaphor is the mental experience of association, trying to approach a
new situation or a hidden meaning based on ones familiar world. As such, expanding ones experience
and boundary is possible through symbolism and metaphor; so when trying to handle an inner problem
22 Experiencing han (deep sorrow) does not only exist as a solidified lump of emotion, but also the moment when that lump is
liquidized. Therefore, han should not be seen as a fixed psychological phenomenon. Op. cit., pp. 259-261.
23 Jones. Op. cit., p.165, p. 253.
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indirectly and not directly, symbolism and metaphor have therapeutic effect.24
In Kkokdugaksi noreum (puppet play), Park Cheomji builds a monastery at a propitious site after the
Pyeongyang Inspector dies, in order to hold the post-death 49th day ritual. However, after the monastery
is built, Park Cheomji destroys the building he built with his own hands. As Kim Wook-dong points out,
if building a new house symbolizes human birth, then destroying a newly built house symbolizes death in
a narrow sense, and the end of universe if translated broadly.25 However, the inevitable death symbolized
through the destroyed monastery is reenacted during the play as well. For example, there is a blood bath
scene in the play where the characters in Kkokdugaksi noreum-Pijori1, Pijori2, Gwipari, Small Park
Cheomji, Pyo Shangwon, Dongbangsak, Mukdaesa etc-are all bitten to death by the monster Isimi. Just as
Park Cheomji destroyed the monastery he built with much effort, there is no reason why all the characters
are bitten to death by the monster Isimi. The repeated act of destruction, and repetition of death urges
are only left as symbol. However the stage with dissolving, collapsing, breaking scenes is grouped
into one symbolic sign and transmitted to the performers as various groups of potential meaning. It is a
process where the fantastic world inside the unconscious mind is expressed outwardly, like the dream in
psychoanalysis. The symbolic staging of this destructive instinct provides an opportunity to the audience
to participate in their personal experience in a more uncertain way. Because it is an expansion of ones
own experience, the presentation of repeated death drive engendering derivative open meaning becomes
the basis for understanding the symbol of Kkokdugaksi noreum as a therapeutic tool.
In talchum, metaphor is created especially when another persons identity is involved. In the Yangban
espisode in Suyongyaryu, Su Yangban describes the bachelor of the head family saying the bachelor
standing there is like a well-built swallow. When he sits, he is like a peony, and when he stands he is like
a wood opal. He expresses his pride of being a yangban by beautifying the bachelors appearance. In
the Ogwangdae episode of Goseong ogwangdae, Malttugi portrays the yangbans, who are standing, as
and making fun of yangbans. In Miyalchum episode of Bongsan talchum, the old woman remembers the
separated old man as having a handrail forehead, a scoop-like chin, dog-like nose, broad cheeks and beard
like a lacquer brush, expressing her resentment. Therefore, the bachelor of the head family, yangbans, old
man and other characters that represent original concepts, is spoken of in a roundabout manner compared
to swallows, puppies, handrails, etc. that are familiar areas and complementary concepts. By doing so,
a new cognitive image is formed and strong emotional involvement is formed. The creative process of
24 For more on the therapeutic effect of metaphor, refer to Jeong Seongmi. Metaphor, the language of emotion and humanities
therapy. Inmun gwahak yeongu 24thedition. Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon University. 2010, pp. 201-220.
25 Kim Ukdong. Op. cit., p. 111.
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puppies gathered in an empty lot and turtles gathered in a pond, associating them to puppies or turtles

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metaphorical reality contributes in setting a special relationship between the talchum performers with the
objects, so it provides another process of therapy of self exploration and transformation.
In addition to the above, many symbols and metaphors can be found in talchum. The creation of symbolic
and metaphorical situations probably made it possible for associative meaning and emotional value to
communicate in the stage of performance. That process associates the performers to the uncertain meaning
of the performance stage and allows them to expand the individual self, another therapeutic process.26
3.5 Role Playing: Deconstruction and Growth of Identity
When discussing a persons identity, usually the essence of the person is brought forth. Identity is defined
as something that forms the inner basis, thought, personality, and emotion that is stable and continuous,
predictable and unchanging. However, from when discussing roles, the assumption that a person has
only one identity would not be correct. During the early stage of human development, we receive the
initial role of infant, then, as we grow older we acquire secondary roles decided by social relationshipsphysical role, cognitive role, definitive role, and socio-cultural role. Then we act the received and
acquired roles according to context, and create an acceptable personality. These acted roles form
various collective roles, and only when these role systems are healthy, can the human be mentally and
physically free from illness. A healthy role system refers to having the flexibility to expand and retract
ones self portrait to fit the endless role changes. In this view, a persons identity is not found in a fixed
actual essence. Rather, the deconstruction and rebirth of the self following the expansion and reduction,
intersection and separation of role system, in other words, the self that exists in a fluid relationship found
in transformative flexibility is the true meaning of identity.27
Therefore, the act of a performer wearing a mask that is different from his usual role, and it is an
experience trying to skillfully act the possibility of transforming and shifting existing roles within the
role systems where various roles are grouped together. Then, what are some scenes where the therapeutic
meaning role playing of talchum is clearly shown?
In the Yonggam and Halmi gwangdae chum (literally translates to old man and old woman dance), the
jangu player suggests to the old woman to sing the ibyeolga, or farewell song. The jangu player advises
26 For more on the use of symbol and metaphor as techniques of drama therapy, refer to Jones. Op. cit., pp. 241-269.
27 Related to the human development stages, Robert Landy emphasizes the dramatic development of role receiver, role acquirer,
and role player. According to the role approach, an important purpose of dramatherapy is to gain the health of role system.
Randy. Op. cit., pp. 68-84.
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her that if she sings the song well, then she might be able to find the old man easily again. So the old
woman takes his advice and sings the ilbyeolga in the jinyang rhythm. One of the therapeutic methods
related to role playing in drama therapy is to take fictitious matters like story, song, sculpture, art, and
make the patient play the role of the storyteller, singer. In this scene, the jangu player is the therapist and
the old woman is the patient. And the old woman singing a fictitious matter is a type of reenactment of
role training to get in touch with the suppressed inner self.
In the Pungja tal episode (literally translates to satire mask) of Tongyeong ogwangdae, there is a scene
where the yangbans tell Malttugi, who had been making fun of them, to talk about himself. Then the
servant Malttugi reveals that his ancestors family is of a prestigious line and goes on to brag about his
grandfather and fathers high posts. He rebukes the yangbans saying that you are not even worthy to be
servants in my household. Rebuked, the yangbans call Malttugi Park Saengwon and beg him to spare
them, but Maltuggi dismisses them because he does not even want to look at them. The reenactment of
this scene is Maltuggis fantasy acted out in dramatic reality. Malttugi is a yangbans servant, so the scene
of being higher than the yangbans and rebuking them is something that is only possible in his imagination.
Another therapeutic technique related to drama therapy role playing is to make the patient act themselves
in the context of past, present, future, and fantasy situations. Therefore Malttugis loud rebuke is the
expression of another role in a fantasy situation that was suppressed.
In the monk episode of Gasan ogwangdae, unlike the other nojang (old monk) talchum episodes that
are silent, the old monk in this episode says the dialogue let us rid of monkhood. Then he takes off his
monk hat, throws away and breaks the wooden block, tears off the Buddhist rosaries necklace, breaks
the bamboo cane he was using, and throws off the broad-sleeved Buddhist robe he was wearing. As
mentioned above, the monks fall process is partially a criticism of society. However, when viewed from
the process of true seeking, just as the monk Wonhyo drank rotten water from a skull, the old monks fall
the old esteemed monk destroys his monkhood has therapeutic meaning. In drama therapy, the patient is
asked to separate his identity and to act out a special aspect of himself, which forms the basis of playing
a creative role in everyday life. For example, playing ones arm or leg, or separating the roles in life
that one would like to sabotage and acting it out. Performing oneself has therapeutic functions that will
form the potential identity. Therefore, the old monks fall should not be seen only from the satirical aspect.
Rather, it is a sufficiently worthy task to view the monks fall as a performance of the role that is denied by
the self, and a method of self exploration through expressing lifes experience and problems.28
28 For detailed information on how to take on roles, refer to Jones. Op. cit., p. 193.
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includes dialectics of the sacred and the profane. In this sense, we cannot deny that the episode where

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As such, talchum provides the opportunity to play the roles that had been suppressed by other roles that
had priority, and that could not be expressed in the reality of life even though they were roles that needed
to be expressed. That is why in the talchum stage, unconsciousness actively comes alive, and the talchum
stage has meaning as a therapeutic space for the dynamic flow of identity that is deconstructed without
fixed essence and grows, changes.29
4. Conclusion
This paper interprets talchum performance process as a therapeutic process itself. The assumption is that
the gwangdae and audience are not distinguished as the healer and healed. I explained in the body of this
paper that all performers participate in talchum and recover their health.
It was explained in the first part of the body that the therapeutic factor in talchum, from a macro
perspective, can be found in the cheongsin osin songsin process. The cheongsin osin songsin
performance structure corresponds to the warm-up focusing main activity end of main activity and
deroling completion process. Through this basic process, performance participants identify with real life
experience in a dramatic way and actively participate in the experience. In the second part of the body,
I highlighted the therapeutic techniques reviewed in each of the performance episodes. In talchum, the
embodiment of dramatic body creates the time and space for therapy. This created time and space serves
as the external world where the performing actors internal status is projected. The freedom of disorder is
formed through play/game and the controlling sense of order is formed through ritual. The competition
between play and ritual provides the rehearsal status which is the driving force behind the self changing
to another existence in talchums dramatic world. The symbolism and metaphor that induces associative
thinking during talchum, also goes beyond simple function of expression and serves as an awareness
method to expand the concept of self. Talchum shows the process where identity is deconstructed and built
while going through the role practice where the above various techniques are combined.
I briefly summarized the therapeutic process and techniques of talchum. The meaning of this therapeutic
process or technique actually depends on how the related health and illness are conceptualized. I will not
go into depth about them as they are beyond the scope of this paper, but this paper explained that some of
the illness that call for talchum performance are, as the talchums therapeutic process and technique imply,
the rigid mental, physical and social system that does not allow for transformation. That is the main illness
29 On the stage of therapeutic space, fantasy before more fantastic, and as such, reality becomes more realistic or special. David
Read Johnson. trans. Kim Sejun et al. Current Approaches in Drama Therapy. Sigma Press. 2011, p. 448.
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talchum tries to overcome. Reversely put, as the root of the term gwangdae () implies, to make
vast, the health that talchum pursues is not one that stems from biological strength, mental normality,
or social stability, but from denying ones existing self, exploring, and expanding to result in how much
potential a person can have to make a new qualitative transformation to a new life.
Of course, there is no way to tell if the participants of the performance are ill or not. Neither is there any
concrete data that can be used to objectively compare how the participants life changed after the performance.30
However, could it not be thought that being able to assess the state of illness and health based on the
possibility of transformation, a factor of humanity or the essential human pattern, is the virtue that
talchums therapeutic buds gives us?31 The enthusiasm mixed with han, or sorrow, of the talchum
gwangdae is the aged old essence of humanity and an essential factor that needs to be recovered.
References
1. Basic Reference
Lee Duhyeon. Korean Mask Plays. Gyomunsa. 1997.
2. Korean Reference
Kang Sinik. History of Literature on Illness, Health, Healing. Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon
University. The New Challenge of 21st Century Humanities: Discussion the Therapy. Sanchaek.
2011. pp. 33-54.
Kim Yeolgyu. Talchum in the Context of Reality. Finding Classic Literature. Kim Yeolgyu et al.
Kim Ukdong. Aesthetic of Talchum. Hyeongamsa. 1994.
Park Miri. Study on Dramatherapy for Disabled Childrens Development: Based on Communication
Skill Development. Gongyeon munhwa yeongu 11th edition. Hankguk gongyeon munhwa hakhoe.
30 For more on the relationship between illness, healing, and health, refer to Kang Sinik. History of Literature on Illness, Health,
Healing. Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon University. The New Challenge of 21st Century Humanities: Discussion
the Therapy. Sanchaek. 2011, pp. 33-54.
31 That is why study on dramatherapy should not stop short at explaining about the techniques, but also look into the human therapy
and recovery from humanities therapy perspective. For more information on the general explanation of humanities therapy, refer
to Choi Byeongwook. Background and Establishment, Definition and Target of Humanities Therapy. Research Center of
Humanities, Gangwon University. Theory and Principle of Humanities Therapy. Sanchaek. 2011, pp. 11-36.
509
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Munhakgwa Jiseongsa. 1976. pp. 383-407.

Proceedings
2005. pp. 313-345.

Park Jintae. Study on Korean Mask Play. Saemunsa. 1985.
Park Jintae. Study on Hahoe byeolsingut Formation and Structure. Dissertation of Department of Korean
Literature, Korea University. 1988.
Bae Heesuk, Lee Seonhyeong. Effect of Group Language Therapy using Play has on the Language and
Social skills of Children with Language Disability and Lack of Social Skills. Drama yeongu 34th
edition. Hanguk drama hakhoe. 2011. pp. 223-252.
Seo Yeonho. On Site Study of Korean Handed down Performance. Jipmundang. 1997.
Shin Eungyeong. Pungryu : Source of East Asian Aesthetics. Bogosa, 1999.
Yu Minyeong. Koreans Beauty as shown in Korean Traditional Theater Focused on the Bongsan
talchum and Kkodugaksi noreum. Dosoleomun 1st edition. Department of Korean Literature,
Humanities, Danguk University. 1985. pp. 45-61.
Lee Gyeongmi. Phenomenological Approach to Dramatherapy Focused on the Expansion of experience
through Drama and the Role of Therapist. Hanguk yeongeukak 45th edition. Hanguk yeongeuk
hakhoe. 2011. pp. 269-292.
Lee Duhyeon. Korean Talchum. Iljisa. 1981.
Yun Ilsu. Effect of Therapy and Intervention of Psychodrama. Drama yeongu 37th edition. Hanguk
drama hakhoe. 2012. pp. 85-116.
Jeong Seongmi. Metaphor, the language of emotion and humanities therapy. Inmun gwahak yeongu
24th edition. Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon University. 2010. pp. 201-220.
Jo Dongil. History and Principle of talchum. Hongseongsa. 1979.
Choi Byeongwook. Background and Establishment, Definition and Target of Humanities Therapy.
Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon University. Theory and Principle of Humanities Therapy.
Sanchaek. 2011. pp. 11-36.
3. Foreign Reference
Carlson, Marvin. Performance : a critical introduction. Routledge, 1996.
Jennings, Sue. trans. Lee Hyeowon. (Sue Jennings) Dramatherapy. Ullyuk. 2003.
Jones, Phil. Drama as therapy : theory, practice, and research 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007.
Johnson, David Read. trans. Kim Sejun et al. Current Approaches in Drama Therapy. Sigma Press. 2011.
Landy, Robert J. trans. Lee Hyeowon. Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama,
Therapy, and Everyday Life. Hakjisa. 2010.
Maiese, Michelle. Embodiment, emotion, and cognition. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011.
510
The 2nd
Proceedings

Diseases, Pathology and Social Healing
1. S
ociety as a Patient: Metapathology, Healing and Challenges of
Self and Social Transformations
/ Ananta Kumar Giri (Madras Institute of Development Studies)
2. Princess Bari, Answering the Conundrum of Sufferings of the

World
/ Kang Ha Yu (Kangwon National University)
3. Displacement as Disease: Exploring the Links between

Traditional Healing and Well-Being in the Context of a
Relocation Crisis
/ Ronel P. Dela Cruz (St. Paul University Quezon City)
4. Treatment of Hwabyung in Traditional Medicine with Four

Elements of Non-Violent Communication
/ Young-Wan Kim (Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine)
Society as a Patient:
Metapathology, Healing and Challenges of Self and Social
Transformations
Ananta Kumar Giri
Madras Institute of Development Studies
In order to speak of a social pathology [...] we require a conception of normality related to social
life as a whole. The immense difficulty involved in this project has been made evident by the
failure of social-scientific approaches that have sought to fix the functional requirements of
societies solely through external observations. Since what counts as a developmental goal or as
normality is always culturally defined, it is only by a hermeneutic reference to a societys selfunderstanding that social functions of their disorders can be determined. Thus we may have a
defensive possibility of speaking of social pathologies within a culturally contingent notion of
normality, since we can limit ourselves to an empirical description of what a given culture regards
as a disorder. [...] A paradigm of social normality must, therefore, consist in culturally independent
conditions that allow a societys members to experience undistorted self-realization. [...] The
question then becomes crucial whether it is a communitarian form of ethical life, a distancecreating public sphere, non-alienated labor or a mimetic interaction with nature that enables
The patient of our time is less concerned with the state of his morals than that of his finances
(Victor E. Frankl, 1967, Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, p.
112) .
A dynamism would have been the norm and routine of our life. To tell you the truth, that
spontaneous dynamism is the health of our life [...] With our sacred conservatism if we bound
ourselves only to what is there then there would be lots of mud in the pond of our life. So there
should be a continued process of cleaning up mud which means we would have to continuously
widen the paths so that new streams of waters can enter there (Chitta Ranjan Das, 2010, Yoga
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individuals to lead a well-lived life(Axel Honneth, 2007, Disrespect, pp. 34, 35, 37).

Proceedings
Samanyaya: Prabeshika, pp. 2-3).

Introduction and Invitation
Health and healing are perennial challenges of life but in modernity our approach to it is predominantly
atomistic, reductionisitic and one-dimensional. We reduce the problems of health, ill-being and disease
to individuals and do not relate to the wider environments of culture and society. We adopt a bio-medical
approach to health and do not realize health as a multi-dimensional journey of wholeness which includes
body, mind, soul, society, nature and cosmos. As Hans-George Gadamer (1996) challenges us in his The
Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, we do not realize that health is something that
cannot be simply made and produced. Instead of being the result of manipulation or forceful intervention,
our health is something that each and everyone of us take care through the way in which we lead our
lives. Our life is a journey of wholeness even when for existential reasons it is lived in parts. But when
parts do not realize the integral connection among themselves, it creates a condition of pathology at the
levels of self and society.
A holistic engagement with health challenges us to realize that health is not just a matter of the individual.
The health of an individual depends upon the health of a society as the illness of an individual is crucially
shaped by the pathology of society. Unfortunately in sociology, social work and social welfare the
discourse of social pathology has been replaced over the reigning discourse of social deviance which
puts the blame squarely on the individual for his or her condition of disease and disruptive behaviour.
Fortunately for us there is the rise of the discourse of social suffering in sociology, anthropology and social
theorizing which seeks to relate social suffering and illness to wider systems of self, culture and society.
Society as a Patient: With and Beyond Social Suffering and Social Pathology
Recently scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and John Clammer have
challenged us to understand the work of social suffering (Bourdieu et al 1999; Clammer forthcoming;
Kleinman et al. 1997). Before we discuss briefly this discourse of social suffering, it is helpful to relate
this to the concept of society as the patient as it was articulated by Lawrence K. Frank a long time. In his
initial essay on the subject and then the book with the same title, Frank challenges us to realize: There is
a growing realization among thoughtful persons that our culture is sick, mentally disordered and in need
of treatment. This belief finds expression in many different forms and from a variety of professions. [...]
Anyone who reflects upon the present situation [...] cannot but fail to see that we have passed from the
condition in which deviations from a social norm were to be regarded as abnormal. Today we have so
many deviations and maladjustments that the term abnormal has lost almost all significance (Frank
514
1933; also see Frank 1948).

In his work, Frank challenges us to understand the shifting contours of social normality and abnormality.
He also challenges us to realize how a particular organization of society makes society a patient. He
suggests that the competitive system and distortion created by the ineptness of our practices for
socializing in the home and the school makes society a patient (cf. Frank 1933). A system of society
which produces large-scale poverty and impoverishment makes a society a patient. Without wholesale
apriori characterization and condemnation, it is helpful to keep the concept of society as the patient as a
work of investigation to find out what kind of organization and consciousness of society makes it a patient.
In the contemporary Indian context, the persistence of caste discrimination and caste-based violence
makes Indian society a patient. Similarly the reign of neo-liberalism with a brutal policy of extraction of
resources for profit making and accompanying cut of expenditure on health care and social well-being
makes many contemporary societies all over the world patients.
In their work on social suffering, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Societies,
Pierre Bourdieu et al. tell us how societies are being made patient under a neo-liberal regime. They also
present us other instances of social suffering in their own society, i.e. France. In their collaborative work,
The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues
tell us about different ways in which social suffering is produced. In his essay, The View from the State,
Patrick Champagne writes: The meditatization of social malaises has the effect of proliferating all
sorts of publications and reports to describe, explain and treat these malaises, so bringing them into
the open (Bourdieu et al. 1999, 213). About the way the school system produces outcastes, Bourdieu
and Champagne write: [...] the school system turns into a permanent home for potential outcasts (ibid.,
422). About the way social suffering creates wasted lives, Bourdieu writes: Malik is 19 and has already
lived a lot. When we met him he was doingwithout many illusionsan unpaid internship, giving him
suburban high school (ibid., 427). Bourdieu here points to institutionalized violence. He also speaks
about poisoned gifts: Superhighways that turn out to be dead-end streets (ibid., 511). How with social
suffering public streets become a desert street.
Such an articulation of social suffering can be related to related reflections on these by psychologists,
sociologists and philosophers. In his classic work on suffering and healing, Victor Frankl (1979) tells
us about the collective neurosis of our times which has following main symptoms: a) an ephemeral
attitude to life; b) the fatalist attitude toward life which misinterprets and misrepresents man as a product
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minimal training, he had to find for himself to fulfil a poorly defined path of study at a nearby, low-ranked

Proceedings
of environment (ibid., 115)1; iii) conformist or collectivist thinking (ibid., 115); iv) denial of ones
own personality. For Frankl, the neurotic who suffers from the fourth symptom, fanaticism, denies the
personality of others (ibid., 116). For Frankl, [...] all the four symptoms can be shown to derive from
fear of and flight from freedom and responsibility; yet freedom and responsibility together make a man a
spiritual being (ibid., 117).
Frankls pointer to issues of freedom and responsibility also remind us of the reflections of Eric Fromm
who tells us how escape from freedom constitutes pathology of our times. To this problem of escape of
freedom, we can also add the problem of escape from responsibility. Building a sane society challenges us
to realize both freedom and responsibility and create an institutional and personal context for this. In this
journey we can walk with both Gandhi and Emmanuel Levinas and strive to embody both freedom and
responsibility which contributes to building a healthy self and healthy society.
To these reflections on social pathology, we can also invite the insights of sociologist Richard Sennett and
philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. In his The Corrosion of Character and other works, Sennett tells us how
contemporary organization of work and time especially the valorization of no long term corrodes trust,
loyalty and mutual commitment (see Sennett 2000; also Sennett 2006 & 2012). Kierkegaard tells us about
despair which constitutes a Sickness unto Death (1842). For Kierkegaard, So to be sick unto death is,
not to be able to dieyet not as though there were hope for life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that
even the last hope, death, is not available. [...] So when the danger is so great that death has become ones
hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die (1848, 345). Kierkegaard very insightfully
links certain aspects of contemporary despair to the working of the state: The minimum of despair is a
state which (as one might humanly be tempted to express it) by reason of a sort of innocence does not
even know that there is such a thing as despair. So when consciousness is at its minimum the despair
is least [...] (ibid., 348). Kierkegaards pointer to the working of the state in creating despair and then
asserting that there is no such thing as despair can be understood the way modern state sees and ignores
like a state and do not shed tears for this (cf. Scott 1998). State creates large-scale displacement but its
conscience is least developed to acknowledge the pain and suffering created by the State.
But while state creates despair, this condition of despair can also be transformed. In fact, creative selves,
1 What Frankl writes here for depth psychology is relevant in all efforts in restoring health and healing in the face of such
neurosis: A depth psychology which considers its main task to be that of unmaking comes in most handy for the neurotics own tendency towards devaluation (1967, 114). Depth psychology here has a spiritual dimension which can also
become part of all work of restoration of generation of health and healing.
516
association and social movements do transform such conditions of despair. They seek to heal the wounds
of self and society. This is both social healing and social therapy which calls for a new realization of
meaning in the lives of individuals and societies. Frankl had spoken about logo therapy, a soulful therapy
which can contribute to healing. We need an accompanying social logo therapy which can contribute to
healing the wounds of society.
Social Healing and the Calling of Metapathology
Social suffering creates social pathology; society becomes a patient. But to transform social suffering we
need transformative social actions, institutional transformation and transformation of what Bourdieu calls
institutional bad faith. We also need creative suffering and voluntary suffering on the part of individuals
and social institutions for transforming conditions of suffering. As Goethe had said a long time ago: There
is no condition which cannot be ennobled either by a deed or by suffering (quoted in Frankl 1967, 123;
also see Murthy 1973, Toynbee 1948). While social suffering is produced by society, transformation of
suffering calls for voluntary co-suffering on the part of both self and society. Gandhi, Victor Frankl and
Chitta Ranjan Das have urged us to realize the significance of voluntary co-suffering for transforming
suffering in the lives of both individuals and societies.
The calling of voluntary co-suffering challenges us to transform an existent social distinction between
normal and pathological. We know social and cultural movements challenge the existing definition of
normality and pathology in the direction of dignity and co-realizations. Along with the work of sociocultural and socio-spiritual movements, we also need creative self who can undertake suffering for
the sake of realizing beauty, dignity and dialogues. Their work may be considered pathological by
others but this is not a normal and conventional pathology. This is metapathology as Abraham Maslow
challenges us to realize. Transforming social pathology and social suffering are calling for embracing
movements create a condition for fuller self, social and cultural realization on the part of participants (cf.
Honneth 2007). While existing distinction of normality and pathology blocks fuller cultural realization, a
voluntary embrace of metapathology creates a space and condition where self and society can fully realize
themselves.
This also creates condition for social healing. Social healing and social therapy calls for being together
in vibrant communication and deep meditations and helping each other heal our wounds, listen to our
stories and realize our potentials. It depends upon creating what Vygotsky had told a long time ago zones
of proximal development. Recently Louis Holzman has insightfully applied Vygotoskys insights and
creates performative circles of social therapy where the participants become each others therapists, which
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work of metapathology on the part of creative self, associations and social movements in a society. Such

Proceedings
goes beyond a dual model of the doctor and patient (cf. Holzman 2009). It is an instance of holistic and
collaborative social therapy.
Healing and the Challenges of Self and Social Transformations
In the context of a perfected of killing where we kill not only reality but also possibility, we need a new art
of healing which is multi-dimensionalpolitical, spiritual, medicinal as well as meditative. In our society,
the pursuit of a short-term time perspective and the work of what David Harvey (1989) calls space-time
compression. Our contemporary organization of time creates anxiety and stress which are produced by
structures of politics and economy so that we remain perpetually anxious and lose our spirit of creativity
and resistance. A new art of healing has to address this question of temporality and create a new pregnant
spatiality and temporality where we can breathe with ease and love and can give birth to each other and a
new being and a new society (Giri 2012b).
Health as a Journey of Wholeness
Health is not just absence of disease; it involves an all around development of individual and society.2
Good health depends upon a good life and good society. While healing is both noun and verb, health is a
noun. But for realization of health we need to realize it as simultaneously noun and verb. As a verb, health
is not only activistic but also meditative. Realization of health depends upon both appropriate action and
meditation. Action and meditation help us realize health as a continued journey of wholeness.
In his work on health and healing, Hans-George Gadamer challenges us to realize and restore wholeness
for the sake of health. Chitta Ranjan Das, a creative thinker from India, also presents us similar and added
challenges. For Das (2010), realizing health is a continued journey of climbing towards peaks of self
and society in the midst of disease, illness and ugliness of various kinds. For Das, to oppress others is a
disease as it is to tolerate oppression. So for a healthy self and society, we would have to resist domination
and oppression. A healthy person does not just adapt to society especially its systems of domination and
disease; rather she tries to transform such conditions (see Giri 2012a). A healthy person does not betray
himself and the potential of society which awaits a fuller realization.
Resonating with the spirit of Lawrence Frank, Das raises a number of questions about wider structures of
2 As the famous definition of health by World Health Organization states: Health is a state of complete physical, mental
and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
518
society and modes of thinking which produce illness and social pathology. For Das, caste system and a
sense of fatalism that one cannot change ones fate contributes to production of illness and pathology in
self and society. Similarly use of science and technology for profit making and warfare without concern
for human well-being and social welfare contributes to production of social pathology. Das does not
believe in an absolute distinction between health and disease as he challenges us to realize that every
diseased person has a deeper yearning within himself or herself for being healthy. Similarly he challenges
us to transform the one-sided hierarchical relationship between the doctor and patient. For Das, One is
not just either a patient or a doctor; it is not just the case that the doctor would prescribe and the patient
would obey. Both have to listen to each other.
The reflections on Das and Gadamer on health and healing also remind us about the classic work of
Alfred Korzybsky (1933) on science and sanity. For Korzybsky, Until recently we have had a split
medicine. One branch, general medicine, was interested in the body (soma); the other was interested
in the soul (psyche). The net result was that general medicine was a glorified form of veterinary
science, while psychiatry remained metaphysical. However, it has been found empirically that a great
many physical ailments are of a semantogenic origin (ibid.). Korzybsky pleads for an integration of
the body and soul for realization of health. This also calls for a new grammar of life in which we realize
health as simultaneously a noun and verb of action, meditation and transformations which includes both
the horizontal and vertical dimensions of our lives, intension as well as extension.3 It calls for a new art of
3 Earlier we have argued about the limits of the distinction between noun and verb. This also points to limits of existing
modes of defining things. Korzybsky here challenges us to realize the distinction between definition by intension and
definition by extension: If we orient ourselves predominantly by intension or verbal definitions, our orientations depend
mostly on the cortical region. If we orient ourselves by extension or facts, this type of orientation by necessity follows
the natural order of evaluation, and involves thalamic factors, introducing automatically critically delayed reactions. In
other words, orientations by intension tends to train our nervous system in a split between the functions of the cortical and
thalamic regions; orientations by extension involves the integration of cortico-thalamic functions. Orientation by extension induce an automatic delay of reactions, which automatically stimulates the cortical region and regulates and protects
the reactions of the usually over-stimulated thalamic region (Korzybsky 1933, lviii). Korzybsky further writes: I may
add that all existing psychotherapy, no matter of what school, is based on the partial and particular extensionalization of a
given patient (ibid., lx).
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integration (cf. Giri 2010).

Proceedings
References
Bourdieu, Pierre et al. 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Das, Chitta Ranjan. 2010. Byakti O Byaktitya [Person and Personality]. Bhubaneswar: Pathika
Prakashani.
2011 Yoga Samanyaya: Prabeshika. Bhubaneswar: Pathika Prakashani.
Clammer, John forthcoming. Culture, Development and Social Theory: Social Suffering and Alternative
Discourses of Social Transformations. London: Zed.
Giri, Ananta Kumar. 2010 Towards a New Art of Integration. Paper presented at the international
symposium on Learning across boundaries. Luxemborg.
2012a Beyond Adaptation and Meditative Verbs of Co-Realizations. In idem, Sociology and Beyond:
Windows and Horizons. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.
2012b Towards a Vibrant and Pregnant Spatial and Temporal Creativity Paper presented at Goethe
Institute, Chennai, February 2012.
Gadamer, Hans-George. 1996. The Enigma of Health: Art of Healing in a Scientific Age.
Frank, Lawrence K. 1933. Society as the Patient. American Journal of Sociology.

1948. Society as the Patient. Rutgers.
Honneth, Axel. 2007. Disrespect: Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Frankl, Victor. 1967. Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy.
Hammondsworth: Penguin.
Kierkegaard, Soren. 1989 [1848]. Sickness Unto Death. London: Penguin.
Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (eds.). 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Korzybsky, Afred. 1933. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General
Semantics. Lakeville, Connecticut: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co.
Holzman, Lois. 2009. Vygotsky at Work and Play. London: Routledge.
Murty, K. Satchidananda. 1973. The Realm of Between: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Simla:
Indian Institute of Advanced Study.
Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed. New Haven: Yale U. Press.
Sennett, Richard. 2000. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New
Capitalism. New Haven: Yale U. Press.

2006. The Culture of New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale U. Press.
2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven: Yale U. Press.
Toynbee, Alfred J. 1956. A Historians Approach to Religion. New York: Oxford U. Press.
520
Princess Bari,
Answering the Conundrum of Sufferings of the World
Kang Ha Yu
Kangwon National University
1. Rewriting Princess Bari in the 21st Century

In Korean shamanist rituals, or gut, there are those to lead the dead up to the heavens. These are Jinogi
gut, Ananpak gut, and Ogu gut. In these rituals, the shaman sings and dances a Seosamuga, or an epic
shamanist song, about Princess Bari. It is a shamanistic myth about a princess who was abandoned right
after birth, coming back with the water of life obtained from the afterlife for her parents.
Princess Bari is a song about a goddess, sung to pray for the souls of the dead and to comfort the living. It
has been orally transmitted for a very long time. The story is reborn by Hwang Sokyongs book, Princess
Bari (Korean title: Baridegi)1. The writer kept the basic structure of the abandoned princess going into
the afterlife, but added a new meaning of abandonment in the 21st century. The new version is unique and
different because it doesnt repeat the original version, but encompasses the writers perception of reality
Baridegi is a story about a girl named Bari. Regardless of her will, she travels from North Korea to China
and then to the UK. The story tells of a girls experience of forced immigration in the midst of haughty
capitalism and globalism, so the work has provided an important meaning in discussions regarding the
1 Hwang Sokyong, Baridegi, Changbi, 2007.
2 In Hwang Sokyongs Shimchung, the Road of Lotus Flower, Hwang stated that the perspective and the momentum of
my book Shimchung is different from the perspective of Chae Mansik, when he newly wrote Shimhakgyu Jeon. They
are both based on the realities of the times when they were written. (Hwang Sokyong, Preface: Publishing the Revised
Edition, Shimchung, the Road of Lotus Flower, Munhakdongne, 2011, p. 696). Baridegi will also be the deep and honest
thought on now and here that the writer is in.
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in this world.2

Proceedings
current issues of the side effects of capitalism, immigration, and the diaspora.3
In Hwangs book, Baridegi, all of the worlds sufferings caused by rapid globalization, such as violence,
forced immigration, prejudice, misunderstanding, antagonism, conflict, poverty, and discrimination are
included. The reason that this story is more than the sufferings of a girl named Bari is because the causes
and the phenomena that make the characters suffer are not just individual issues. They are all linked to the
human society and the social institutions in a complex and multilayered way.4 Therefore, the sufferings
experienced by Bari in Baridegi is an individual suffering, as well as the sufferings of all of us living in a
divided, hurtful, confusing, and ironic world. And furthermore, it is the pains of all of us, mankind, living
in a huge society. This is why we5 must discuss pain and healing. This paper is not about a logical and
scientific analysis on pain. It is about a story of a girls life, questioning the pains of human beings, who
are relational beings as well as social beings.
2. Bari, Traveling the Bitter World
There are various similarities and differences between Seosamuga and Hwangs Baridegi. Among the
differences, just looking at the amount written about the current life and the afterlife, descriptions of the
current life takes up a bigger portion in Baridegi. In the myth, Baris childhood, the ten or so years she
spent growing up with Birigongduk grandparents, is quite short. However, with the help of the writers
imagination, that period is reborn as a long journey across North Korea, China and the UK.
Unlike other studies, which mainly covers Baris journey in the current life, this paper aims to look over
the afterlife portion of the journey, which is comparatively shorter than the current life part of the story.
However, the afterlife that Bari travels is a rendition of what todays people think of the afterlife.6 So, even
if we cover the story about the afterlife, it is inevitably a story about todays world. Therefore, the journey
3 There are so many studies about Hwangs Baridegi with the words diaspora and immigration in their titles. This paper
will not list the studies.
4 Grouping human issues into groups make us realize that these phenomena cannot be regarded as psychological or
medical issues, therefore personal issues. On the other hand, it shows that in many cases, personal issues are closely
linked to social issues. Arthur Klienman, Veena Das, translated by Ahn, Jongseol, Social Suffering, Greenbee, 2002, p.
10.
5 The word we, is a concept that can be easily fabricated and falsified, from the closest relationships like family and
friends, to encompass states and companies (Seo Kyungsik, Can Sufferings and Memory Bond, Chulsoo and Younghee,
2009, p 53-54). The word we in this paper is a macro and inclusive term, which goes beyond the barriers of state,
ethnicity, and race.
6 Oh, it is horrible. Chilsung thinks. That is the hell that you built in your world. That is why the same hell is here as
well. Hwang Sukyong, Baridegi, p. 267.
522
into the afterlife is a recreation of todays world. So it could be a clearer method to look into the current
life.
As Bari in the Seosamuga did, Bari in the novel is born as the seventh daughter in a family living in
Chungjin, North Korea, and is immediately abandoned after birth. After being rescued by a white dog
raised by the family, Bari lived without any difficulties for a while. However, due to economic and
political reasons, the family is separated. Bari and her grandmother secretly crossed the river and went in
to China. In China, her sister, Hyuni and her grandmother suddenly die. After their death, thanks to the
help of a man named Miccuri, she goes to a massage parlor named Nakwon (Korean word for paradise).
In Nakwon, she befriends a girl named Shang. With the help of the Shang couple, she moves to Dalian
and seems like her happiness is just beginning. However, she comes across some money issues again, and
against her will, she is illegally smuggled into the UK. After working at a diner in Chinatown, she works
as a foot masseuse at Tonking Salon. She meets Ali, a muslim, gets married to him, and finally feels that
her life will be happy from then on. However, her husband Ali goes to look for his brother who is involved
in an international terrorist act and Bari has to raise her child alone.
Unlike the original story where Bari dramatically meets her parents who abandoned her, and goes to
the afterlife for her parents, Bari in the novel is abandoned repeatedly. She is abandoned at birth, again
with the death of her grandmother, and again when she is separated from Shang, her only friend, after
smuggling into Britain. After her marriage, she is abandoned again by her husband as he leaves her to look
for his brother Usman. She is tragically abandoned in the world again as her baby dies in an accident.
(1) The Road to the Afterlife, the Familiar Journey
She was named Bari because she was abandoned at birth. Like her name, she repeatedly suffers the
afterlife. In the myth, Princess Bari embarks on the journey after reuniting with her parents. She receives
much cheering and farewell as she goes,7 but in the novel, Bari begins her journey in a most painful
moment. She had cried herself to sleep after losing her daughter, Holiya, whom she gave birth to without
her husband. At her lowest, most humble and painful moment, Baris journey begins. After repeated
abandonment and pain, what awaits her is the most difficult journey: a journey into the afterlife.
7 The King gave Princess Bari huge jade, silk clothes, smooth bamboo hat, and a jar, shoes and a walking stick made out
of casting iron. Kim Taegon, Choi Unsik, and Kim Jinyoung, Korean Myths, Siinsa, 2009, p. 229. Moved by the reunion
with her parents and after reconciling with her parents, Princess Bari embarks on her journey receiving all the necessities.
However, the situation is exactly the opposite for Bari. She embarks on her journey without anything.
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pains of abandonment as if it were her destiny. At the end of increasing pain is the journey into the

Proceedings
In the myth, Princess Bari had to go though many hells.8 Likewise, Bari must go through multiple layers
of hell. With the help of grandmother and Chilsung, she arrives at the watchtower of a ship. From there,
she sees that she must go through three seas of hell, the sea of fire, sea of blood, and sea of sand, to get to
Mushei Castle, at the end of the western sky.9 The hell that reflects, projects, and compresses the human
world shows that the sufferings of this world are that much complex and multi-layered.
The sea of fire, which she crosses first, shows the worlds war and carnage through burning cities and
people. War is the most violent act. It is the act that destroys human beings, families, the world, and
civilizations10. That is the true nature of the sea of fire.
After the sea of fire is the sea of blood. It is where boats filled with the souls of the dead float by. It makes
us think of the meaning of pain and death. People who cannot enter the afterlife cry in pain on their way to
the afterlife. They are on different boats according to the different pains they have suffered. It is here that
Bari meets the most number of people. It shows that there are more than one or two different types of pain.
That there are a more diverse and complex causes and shapes of pain. At the sea of blood, symbolizing
both life and death, Bari meets the first boat passing by.
Scenes change relentlessly. It shows here and there inside the ship. Negroids, Caucasians, and
Mongoloids are all on the boat. It is a ship filled with souls who starved to death, fell ill to death,
harassed to death, worked to death, beaten to death, exploded to death, burned to death, drowned to
death, and overanxious to death (Hwang, 268).
A soul that died painfully asks Bari Please answer me quickly. Why are we in so much pain? Why are
we here? (Hwang, 268). However, Bari, even though she is a living soul, does not know the meaning.
Looking at the painfully dying souls, she does not hastily say or criticize that it is all their faults. This is
possible because Bari herself has been through so much pain. Bari has a special psychic gift of being able
to travel to the afterlife, but she does not have the power to save them. Listening to their painful cries and
questions, she continues her journey, only answering them that she will tell them on the way back.
On the second boat crossing the sea of blood, there are the lost souls of the people sacrificed voluntarily
8 There were blade mountain hell, fire mountain hell, poisonous snake hell, ice hell, pitfall hell, baeam hell, and gate hell.
Kim Taegon, Choi Unsik, and Kim Jinyoung, Korean Myths, p. 230.
9 First is the sea of fire, then the sea of blood. Last is the sea of sand, where even a birds feather sinks. After you pass
that, is the Mushei Castle. Where is that? The end of western sky. Hwang Sokyong, Baridegi, p. 266.
10 War is the biggest and most brutal violence of all. It is because it destroys human, families, nations, and cultures that
man made. Kim Chisoo, Wounds and Healing, Moonji Publishing, 2010, p. 36.
524
and involuntarily under the guise of world justice and peace. Alis brother Usman, who was involved in an
international terrorist act, is also on that boat.
On the boat are people lined up holding spears, arrows, swords and guns. There are also people
with their hair everywhere. Some lost their arms, legs, or neck. They wore bloodied uniforms, with
bandages, prosthetics, and eye patches. Their arms are outstretched, flailing.
Usman in a white and round hat with beard yells at me.
Bari, tell me why evil prevails in the world, and why we are with our enemies (Hwang, 269).
On the boat are people with swords, spears, guns, and other weapons, and the people who have been
hurt by them. Also, enemies who fought against each other were on the boat together. They ask Bari
why evil always wins and why the enemies are on the same boat. Usman asks Bari a question, but Bari
only answers that she will give them an answer on her way back. The third boat crossing the sea of river
appears.
There are young and old men with beards and stern faces and women wearing hijabs with
concerned faces. There are also women with faces distorted from fire and with bodies filled with
bloody scars and bruises from flogging, women wearing loose clothes covering their faces with
burka, and strange men with bombs on their chests. They shake their fists and ask Bari. Tell us
what the meaning of our deaths is! [] I will answer you on my way back (Hwang, 270).
This is the pain of the victims of violence under the guise of tradition and justice. Women wearing hijabs
and burkas, women flogged for violating tradition, women who lost their lives from honorary killing, and
men who have killed those women due to wrong beliefs all cry out in pain. The cause of their pains is not
individual. It must be seen from a more macro perspective. It is caused by culture and tradition in a world
While seeing the boats pass by, Bari does not answer any of their questions. On the last boat crossing the
sea of blood, she sees the people who have hurt her.
In the quietness, Bari hears a creepy laughter. He he he, ha ha ha. Officials who took away her
father, men who drove her away from home, men who have sold and harassed Baris sister, Mii,
who crossed the Tumen River alone, gamblers from Dalian, and men from the boat that she
smuggled into the UK are all on the boat. [] Ah, most of all, the scary and ugly Shang is glaring
at me. On this boat are the things that you hate the most. When will we be free? [] I will never set
you free. [] When will we free from you? [] I will tell you on my way back (Hwang, 270-271).
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Session 4
that we shared for a long time. Bari still cannot answer their questions.

Proceedings
On the last question, Bari finally answers that she will never let them go. It is because even though she is
a psychic, she is also only a human, not free from the bonds of hate and resentment. However, to the next
question asking when they will be freed, she answers that she will tell them on her way back.
While crossing the sea of blood, Bari receives four questions. She is a psychic, but she is incapable of
solving her own pains, and answering others questions. Even though she can see the afterlife, in the
face of the universal, somber and solemn question of life and death, Bari cannot give any answers. To
the people who cry out in wanting to know the meaning of life and death, Bari does not act in a solemn
and domineering way. On the other hand, she listens and tells them that if she finds the answers, she will
let them know. Even to the people who have sold her and hurt her, she first cries out that she will never
forgive them, but in the end, she unconsciously tells them that she will let them know later.
Like so, hell is a familiar road, filled with people she has met before during her current life. Even though
they are already dead, the dead souls on the boats crossing the sea of blood do not know the meaning
of death. It must be because they did not know the meaning of life, which is connected to death. Where
would she find the answers to the souls questions?
(2) The Familiar Taste of the Water of Life
Bari promises the souls that she will find the answers to their questions and continues on her journey. She
is a psychic who knows the past and the present of a person by touching their feet. She is a being who
understands the unknown afterlife, but the writer holds off finding the answers in the holy world, or the
godly world. This is expressed in the novel by Bari being unable to see the future even though she can see
the past and the present. Also, it is expressed in the criticism on the religious leaders she meets on the sea
of sand.
There is something moving far away. They wear different clothes and hold up different scriptures.
The Protestant minister in black suits and tie, Catholic priest with a long black gown, a Hindu
Brahman wrapped in white clothing with one bear shoulder, a Muslim imam with long clothes and
a white hat, a Buddhist monk with shaved head and yellow cloth, and a Jewish rabbi with a black,
round kippa hat all barely standing on the sand and screaming in undistinguishable words. []
They are screaming at the top of their lungs, but because they are trying to out scream each other,
the words are all mixed, and do not mean anything (Hwang, 272).
The writer criticizes all religions fallacy in that they all speak solemnly about life and death and proclaim
salvation, but in the end, they do not accept one another and repeat division and quarrels. All the religions
526
in the world that sink into the sea of sand and rises back up again do not have any answers to the worlds
conflict and pain. By putting the religious people, filled with fallacies, hypocrisy and arrogance but
pretend to be solemn, on the sea of sand, on the way to hell, the writer draws a line to religious salvation
and holy salvation.
Bari, a psychic, is no exception. Bari has the ability to talk to Sook, who is a mute, and to her dog,
Chilsung, and can see the past of a person by touching their feet. However, she does not know her future,
or give answers to the questions asked by people crying out in pain. Instead of sermons, advice, and
proclamations of teachings, Bari stands at the other end of the line. Bari reads the low points and the pains
in a persons life and mind by touching their tired and dirty feet as a foot masseuse. She does not rule or
stand in front of people. With that ability, she stays at the lowest, the dirtiest place. Therefore, Bari does
not act as if she knows everything about human pain and salvation, but shares with people by exposing
her ignorance to the worlds pain.
Bari crosses the sea of fire, blood, and sand receiving heaps of questions about pain. Then, she reaches
Mushei Castle at the end of the western sky. She asks Satan, disguised as an old man, about the Water of
Life. He answers weakly, It is impossible that such a thing exists. We do have a well, but it is just water
to make food (Hwang, 280). That was the disappointing answer she received after going through all the
troubles to come to Mushei Castle.
Bari turns and walks out the back door of the room. At the end of the stairs, there is a small garden
and a small well. She ran towards the well and drinks up the water with her hands a couple of
times. It tastes cool and sweet like her well back home. But that is it. Disappointed, I get up
(Hwang, 280).
She had expected the Water of Life to be something special, but unlike Princess Bari in the myth, there
was no Water of Life that she could proudly carry back.
On her way back, she meets the first, grey boat. People ask her the question once again. Against her will,
a young girls voice answers the question. To the question asked by the bitter souls of all races, a voice
within Bari answers.
It is because of the desires of human beings. To eat better, wear better, and live better, they harassed
us. That is why the god riding the boat with you is also in pain. Forgiving them will be helping god
(Hwang, 282).
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Session 4
Bari stands up disappointed after drinking the water from the well that tastes like the water back home.

Proceedings
A girls voice comes out from within Bari, who drank the Water of Life, which is just normal water. The
voice says that the cause of the pain is desire, and forgiveness is the answer. On her way back, Bari meets
people on the second boat, including Usman.
Do you know why evil always wins? Why we are here together with our enemies? Nobody is a
winner in a war. The definition of the current life is always in half (Hwang, 282).
Wars began with a good cause: to eradicate evil and to pursue a just and peaceful world. However,
in trying to create a peaceful world with violence, they only created consumptive fights and victims.
No matter what just causes it has, violence only begets more violence, and it does not solve anything.
Usmans question of why only evil prevails in the world stems from a mindset of putting good and bad in
a conflicting manner. On the flip side, the enemy will repeat the same mindset from the opposite position,
so a solution seems far away. This is why Usman and his enemies are on the same boat. Identifying friend
or foe makes us to define each other as enemies, others, and evil. If friends are absolute good and foes
are absolute evil, all fights will end with evils victory. Baris answer that no one wins in a war and that
justice in the world is only an imperfect half and means that as long as inconsiderate and narrow-minded
division exists, there is no true victory in the world.
As dividing becomes more dense, pain grows and maximizes. Clearly dividing friend and foe might
dissect the world, but cant put the world back together. Human desire and greed that pry in that boundary
only make that line more distinct.
Next comes the boat with women in hijabs and burkas, women flogged to death, honor killed women, and
men with bombs on their chests. On that boat are many people sacrificed under the name of man-made
tradition and justice.
Tell us the meaning of our death!
Gods sadness is because of your despair. He will not be in despair with you (Hwang, 283).
Bari answers that it is because of the forced submission that has been going on so long that no one knows
it is wrong, tradition that does not change because sometimes it is similar to beliefs, and despair arising
from walls such as culture and prejudice. Bari learns from her daily life that they can be saved from
despair when they recognize and consider others.11 The wall that has been built for a long time is so strong
11 Mr. Tan from Tonking Salon believed in Buddhism. Mr. Lou would murmur a mantra-like prayer endlessly when he
was resting after cooking. Many people living in Chinatown went to Taoist temples to burn incense and pray. Luna and
528
that people give up. But if human beings give into despair, god will not be able to do anything and be
filled with sadness. It is because god can help man, but living is ones own job.
Next is the quiet fourth boat. On that boat are the people who have hurt Bari. Shang, who made Baris
daughter Holiya Sooni die is also on that boat. The boat filled with people who Bari hated is still tied to
Bari with hate. Inside Baris hurting mind, Holiyas voice answers for her.
The things you hate the most are on this boat. When will we be freed?
My mom is tied. When my mom untangles herself from hate, you will be freed (Hwang, 284).
Through the voice inside of her, she faces the truth behind hate.12 She is a psychic who can go from the
current life to the afterlife. But she realizes that even she is not a perfect being, and that she is only a
person consumed in hate and despair. The pain inside her is not reverted to her personal fault. On the other
hand, it is pain of an individual left in a world filled with global capitalism, racial hostility, and religious
conflict. Baris experience of human trafficking, the September 11th terrorist attack, the London subway
terrorist bombing, and even Holiyas death is not because of her own fault. In a world where we do not
live alone, we are all victims and perpetrators.
Pain is caused by personal faults as well as societal pain from war, religious conflicts and terrorism
arising from intangible things such as hate, conflict, and prejudice rampant all over the world. Therefore,
the faults of a man in a world cannot be blamed only on him, and the society that allows existence is not
innocent. Pain is both personal and universal.
Bari found the Water of Life at the end of the dangerous road that she went holding bells and tri-colored
sprays. The Water of Life was just normal water that we cook with and wash our clothes with. It is
encompassing healing power of the Water of Life is told by Baris grandmother.
When I asked for the Water of Life, the Jangseung (Korean totem pole) told me that the water that
we use to cook and wash clothes, that water is the Water of Life. [] When I sprayed the Water of
Life that I brought, my sick parents got well and the sick world was healed (Hwang, 81).
Mrs. Sarah were from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but they were born in Britain. They went to church and believed in
Jesus. They freely crossed over different manners and courtesies according to their traditions. Hwang, Baridegi, p. 225.
12 Shang, you bitch! I will kill you. I later realized that Shang had only provoked something in my heart. The grudge was
about everything that had hurt me throughout my journey. Hwang Sokyong, Baridegi, p. 262.
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Session 4
daily life itself. Water of Life is the water from the well of everyday life filled with pain. The deep and

Proceedings
The Water of Life that Bari drank heals not only her fathers illness and brings him back to life, but also
the Water of Life that heals the world. She could not bring back the Water of Life which creates bones
and flesh and lets the blood flow. But by drinking it and becoming one with it, she is able to answer the
souls questions. Could we say that the questions we ask during our lives and the sufferings of life are less
painful than the physical pain of bones and flesh falling apart and blood drying up?
The fact that the Water of Life was just normal water means that the answers to the questions on our pain
are not in books or learned from scholars. It is earned by ourselves, in our lives, while we ask the questions
to ourselves. The world we live in is painful like hell, but the water that brings back life to people and the
world is in our lives.
(3) Wounded Healer
Although the depth might differ, pain is indiscriminate to all beings. It is universal in the sense that all
people go through it, and it is the most unique emotion in the sense that it is an experience that we cannot
explain vividly to anyone.13 The people from all ranks and classes, races, and ethnicities that Bari met
were not free from pain. The pain is caused by individual fault, but pain is also our destiny in the sense
that we all live in complex relations and societies. Bari had experienced indiscriminate and merciless pain
since birth, so she gladly begs for others pain.
Help Mrs. Emily.
I said quietly. Becky answered in a hoarse voice.
You are not in a position to worry about others (Hwang, 239).
Deep pain and sorrow not only makes us fall into the depths of a bottomless pit. By experiencing pain
with all our body, we earn the healing power that can be understood and can console others, and we
become immune to pain. Immunity to pain is earned through pain. Why did the writer put Bari in the
epicenter of pain and sufferings? The writer said, Shamans sang the pains and sufferings that Bari, the
original shaman, experienced. By doing this, they considered themselves as tortured healer of pain or
suffering solver of sufferings.14
13 Suffering, in other words is experiencing life and death which means that we exist among people. It is subjective and
at the same time, far apart from the world of matters and men. Hannah Arendt, trans. Lee Jinwoo and Tae Jungho, The
Human Condition, p. 104. Experiencing physical pain that is so strong that it makes us forget about everything else it
the most intimate feeling. It is a feeling that we cannot tell anyone else. Arthur Klienman and Veena Das, trans. Ahn
Jongseol, Social Suffering, p. 25.
14 Hwang, Baridegi, p. 294.
530
Bari goes beyond the pains to console and embrace the wounds. But Bari is only a human being, filled
with scars herself. She gave birth to her only child, Holiya, without her husband in a foreign land. But
her daughter dies suddenly, and she is abandoned in the lowest depths of the world. It is then that Bari
asks, God, why are you making me suffer, when I have done nothing wrong? What difference does it
make when I have faith and is dependent? (Hwang, 263). The question that Bari asked, Why me?, is a
question we have all asked in our lives. It is the cry against repeating pain that we experience even though
we live diligently, hard, and have done nothing wrong. It is also the cries of the people living in the era of
pain.
After listening to Baris story, the old Abdul consoles Bari by telling his story. He tells Bari that after
seeing his innocent wife and children being shot to death, he resented god.15 He also says that misfortunes
and pains are the outcomes of our deeds.16 The pains and sufferings in life are there for us to lead
excellent lives.17 The answer that it is our fault means that not only individuals, but also the human
relations and the society all are responsible. At the same time, it is the writers request to widen our
perspectives from me to us. That is why the writer proposes global citizenship as the answer, which
transcends race, ethnicity, and nation. This work is meaningful in that it globalizes Korean literature,
but all the more meaningful is that it sees the world in a macro view, and it voluntarily joins in with the
pains of the world. Breaking down barriers and wounded healer Baris difficult journey to hell, are the
consolations and compassion for all the suffering people. It is also the writers hope that we who drink
the Water of Life every day, take on the role of the wounded healer.
3. New Identity of Global Citizen
There is no such thing as Water of Life
Ha ha ha. Stupid, the water that you drink is the Water of Life.
15 I resented god as I left Jammu and Kashmir after my wife and daughters were executed. How could he give so much
pain to such good people! But anyone with flesh, all throughout his/her life, already experiences hell. Hatred is the hell
that you build. Hwang, Baridegi, p. 263.
16 Continued human interest on each incident that arise among people shows us that in defining human, sufferings are
fundamentally social. Also, observing the diversity of human society conjures up an existential reverberation that all
pain takes up a part of our world. Arthur Klienman and Veena Das, trans. Ahn Jongseol, Social Suffering, p. 25.
17 Gods nature is to watch. There is no color, share, laughter, tears, sleep, oblivion, star, or end, but is everywhere.
Misfortune and pain is everything we have done. The ups and downs are there to teach us to lead excellent lives. That is
why we must overcome them and enjoy the beauties of life. That is what god wants from us. Hwang, Baridegi, p. 263.
18 Hwang, Baridegi, p. 280.
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Session 4
No one can bring back the Water of Life.18

Proceedings
When Bari is disappointed after knowing that there is no such thing as the Water of Life, the black crow
that showed her the way laughs and tells her that the water she drank and was disappointed in, the water
with the cool and sweet taste like the water home, that is the Water of Life. The Bari in the myth who
carefully brings home the Water of Life is nonexistent in the novel. The Water of Life goes inside Bari
and becomes one with her. The Water of Life that the writer writes does not exist apart from us. It gains
its meaning and strength when it becomes one with us. Bari is the psychic who connects the living and
the dead, and the current life and the afterlife. She became a true healer because she has experienced the
lowest points of life, been through the deepest, most excruciating pain, and cried for her and others.
They say that life is bitter. But is it only bitter? We need immunity in life. That immunity isnt brought by
someone else. Like Bari, it is earned by experiencing pain. Also, like Baris grandmother and the Satan in
the Mushei Castle said, the Water of Life is the ordinary water we cook and wash our clothes with. The
answers to our pain are in our lives. It is the endless questions, reflections, soul-searching, and insights on
our lives that make the Water of Life.
The endless pain that the North Korean defector Bari experiences on her journey from North Korea to
China and to the UK tells us that the fundamental cause of that pain doesnt bud from individual issues.
The writer says that the world that we must pursue goes beyond the barriers of nationalism and patriotism.
It is a world where all people are considered and cared for. The identity of the people living in that world
is Global Citizen.19
Hwang took out the traditional meaning of filial piety from the Seosamuga Princess Bari. In that
place, Hwang is proposing a new story of the birth of the global citizen. In traditional society, filial
piety goes beyond the unilinear perspective of saving a sick father. It has a bigger meaning that sustains
families and communities. The global citizenship that the North Korean defector Bari conveys also has a
similar meaning. She contemplates personal pain and understands the pain of others. This creates a more
expansive and flexible human community, world of reconciliation and forgiveness, and an orderly, whole
world.20
19 (Hwang Sokyong, interview) There is no such thing as a globally shared literary trend. Sharing the current life of
ourselves and the Korean peninsula with the people around the world is the writers road to become a global citizen,
free of national borders or nationalities. Hwang Sokyong, Overcoming Conflict and Antagonism, to find the Water of
Life in the 21 Century, Baridegi, p. 298.
20 In a persons life, the feeling that the world completes something whole with orders is a prerequisite for happiness.
Kim Uchang, Globalization and Universal Ethics: Acceptance, Rights, Cultural Values, The 1st World Humanities
Forum Proceedings, 2011, p. 3.
532
A society without alienation, discrimination, and pain was never realized. Utopia might still be a faraway
dream in the future. However, there are more humane and less humane societies.21 Whichever it is, if
it is the world where person, who are destined to be social and relational, must live in, pain is inevitable.
The meaning of global citizen proposed by the writer goes beyond the meaning of a citizen living in a
world. It is born in a world where the barriers of ethnicity, race, and national borders are broken down.
As societys civilization develops, the distinction between friend and foe takes place more often. As that
distinction becomes clearer, pain will increase. Breaking down the myriad of borders, differences, and
discriminations is not proposed by an individual. It must become a type of public opinion cultivated by all
global citizens.22 Only when an individual gains dignity as a human being, and not from the identity built
by gender, nationality, and ethnicity, he/she gains the ability to understand the pain of others, who have an
equal value of life as anyone.
It is not because Bari is a psychic with special talents that she crossed the river of pain. Baris psychic
ability is shown when she empathizes with and understands the pain of others. The answer to the pain
that we have because we are relational, social, and global beings is the dailiness of the Water of Life that
heals us. That daily life will become the world where the concept of we is infinitely expanded. Therefore,
we must earn a new identity of a global citizen, which transcends ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, and
age.
The pain and conflict of the people Bari met at the sea of blood are created by different causes, such
as conflict, desire, selfishness, and hate. From those emotions, war, terrorism, forced immigration,
discrimination and violence arise. They have different names and forms, but they are all pains. A bigger
problem is that this pain not only sickens an individual, but also sickens all social beings, societies, and
civilizations. Though it is true that we must try and seek social and scientific analyses, and ultimately,
solutions to the primal causes of pain and sufferings of humanity, we must always keep in mind that
and peaceful community is built upon; a humanity for reconciliation and healing.
What can the humanities do for the worlds pains? Literature is one branch of the humanities. It holds in
the stories of the people in the world. It helps people to have a wider perspective of the world by viewing
21 Kim Uchang, Freedom and Humane Life, Thinking Tree Publishing, 2007, p. 16.
22 Arendt, said that education, ingenuity, and talent cannot replace the compositional factors of public opinion. Public
opinion is the adequate place for human excellence. Hannah Arendt, trans. Lee Jinwoo and Tae Jungho, The Human
Condition, p. 102. Human excellence is not something that is individual. It must be agreed and understood by everyone,
something that can create cooperation.
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Session 4
reflection on the values of each and every human being should be the foundation upon which harmonious

Proceedings
the status and relationships of many beings in a macro way. It is a made up story, but there is truth about
the world and life in literature. This is why we read a fake, made up, imagined, and trivial story.23
References
Hwang, Sokyong, Baridegi, Changbi, 2007.
Hwang, Sokyong, Shimchung Munhakdongne, 2011.
Kim, Chisoo, Wounds and Healing, Moonbi Publishing, 2010.
Kim, Taegon; Choi, Unsik; Kim, Jinyoung, Korean Myths Siinsa, 2009.
Arendt, Hannah; translated by Lee, Jinwoo; Tae, Jungho, The Human Condition, Hankilsa, 2008.
Cassirer, Ernst, An Essay on Man, Chang, 2008.
Klienman, Arthur; Das, Veena; translated by Ahn, Jongseol, Social Suffering: Socialistic, Medical, and
Cultural Anthropological Approach to Human Suffering Greenbee, 2002.
Suh, Kyungsik, Can Sufferings and Memory Bond, Chulsoo and Younghee, 2009.
Kim, Uchang, Freedom and Humane Life, Thinking Tree Publishing, 2007.
Kim, Uchang, Globalization and Universal Ethics: Acceptance, Rights, Cultural Values, 1st World
Humanities Forum Proceedings 2011.
Park, Seunghee, Method of Bonding between Ethnicity and the World The case of Hwang, Sokyongs
Baridegi, Hanminjok Eomunhak (Vol. 77), 2010.
Yoo, Kyungsoo, Diasporas Imagination for Multifaceted Communication The case of Hwang,
Sokyongs Baridegi, Comparative Korean Studies (Vol. 17), 2009.
Kim, Heonseon, Comparative Research on Goddesses Travelling the Afterlife Princess Bari,
Tentyuhime, Inanna, Comparative Folk Culture Studies (Vol.33), 2007.
Park, Junggeun, Princess Bari-type of Vision in a Multicultural Society Caused by Diaspora The case
of Hwang, Sokyongs Baridegi The Review of Korean Cultural Studies (Vol.31), 2009.
Lee, Myungwon, The Lowest Paradise in a World Without Any Promises The case of Hwang,
Sokyongs Baridegi, Culture/Science (Fall Edition), 2009.
23 Kim Chisoo, Moved by Trivial Stories, Wounds and Healing, p. 22.
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Displacement as Disease: Exploring the Links between

Traditional Healing and Well-Being in the Context of a
Relocation Crisis
Ronel P. Dela Cruz
St. Paul University Quezon City
Contemporary works on the idea of place among cultural anthropologists have been looking at social
identities and well-being arising from a sense of rootedness in place.1 The growing scholarly interest on
the idea of place, albeit vary from distinct premises and diverse methodologies, indicates the importance
of place in human experience. Various literature provide essential insights into how places shape human
consciousness, how human beings understand themselves in relation to place, and how individuals and
communities respond to the changing conditions of place or to the experience of relocation or exile.2 What
is strikingly evident in the study of place is the way these diverse perspectives and fields have been seen
as related to one another. The idea of place seems to demand such interdisciplinary work; its complexity
requires the bringing of multiple perspectives to bear upon our understanding of who we are as placed and
displaced people. It also reminds us that while place has undeniably personal significance, ones sense of
place always touches upon and is shaped by larger social, cultural and political forces.
interpretations that people associate with a particular place. Anthropologist Keith Basso observes
that places are as much a part of us as we are part of them.3 The estrangement of people from places
1 For a helpful overview of recent trends in this area, see Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place (Santa Fe
NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), pp. 3-11.
2 J. Nicholas Entriken, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); John B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Yi Fu
Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Space and Place: The Perspective of
Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
3 Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1996). p. 4.
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The concept of sense of place has been employed to describe the attitudes, beliefs, meanings, and

Proceedings
personally and culturally important to them is widespread and alarming in the current phase of economic
globalization and cultural homogenization. Gradually, we are losing the sense of what it means to dwell
within a particular place, to become intimate with the landscape and be shaped by it. It is not easy to
calculate the costs of losing our sense of place on our sense of well-being. But as the ever-growing body
of evidence suggests, the costs are immense and a new form of suffering emerges from placelessness that
has detrimental effects to individual and communitys self-identity and well-being.
This study explores the link between the displacement and the communitys well-being in the context of
Fuga Island. It demonstrates how peoples sense of place is integral to their well-being and how the
situation of poverty, land insecurity, and human rights abuses in the island are causing disease in the
community physically or biologically, emotionally, and socially in the form of conflicts and violence. It
then explores the role of Fuga Islands traditional healers or herbolarios (as they are called by the locals)
in responding to this situation.
Guiding the project design is a qualitative approach in exploring and understanding the inhabitants sense
of place through the perspective of traditional healers in the context of an impending relocation and land
loss. Using participant observation and focused group discussions (FGDs) to gather narratives, the study
explored the link between traditional healing and the communitys well-being. Meeting the elders with
their kindred spirits were rare encounters that are intuiting, reflecting and introspecting. After gathering
the data, the narratives of the healers and other sources of data were encoded in NVIVO 7, a software
designed for qualitative approaches that helped in the analysis of themes, trends, and patterns from the
narratives.
Fuga Island: a cultural landscape
Fuga Island is one of the islands of the Babuyan Group in northern Philippines. With a total land area
of almost 10,000 hectares, the island is home to more than 2,500 Ilocanos (an ethno-linguistic group
inhabiting the northern Philippines). The island is surrounded with fine white beaches and has numerous
sites for scuba diving, snorkeling, and fishing. The villagers primarily rely on swidden farming and
fishing. The island is also constantly subjected to strong winds and typhoons. From August to December,
the villagers could hardly cross the sea going to mainland Claveria due to strong winds and treacherous
waves.
The Islands cultural heritage has been shaped by its colonial past. The Spanish colonizers who came
to the island named it Babuyan Chico. For the villagers, the old church Sta. Ursula de Isla Fuga is an
important historico-cultural legacy left by the Spanish missionaries. Related to this religious structure are
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the unique customs and traditions that are still practiced in the present particularly the Komedya, a drama
tradition which reflects the early Christianization of the local villagers. The local leaders recognize the
importance of these practices in order to rekindle among the youth love and appreciation of their cultural
heritage. Nowadays, villagers use the extant ruins of the church for their weekly prayer meetings.
Archaeologists discovered a burial jar culture among the islands early inhabitants. Prehistoric burial
jars are found all over the island. An archaeological mapping of the island reveals that the entire place is
encircled with burial sites considered sacred places by the villagers.
Suffering is the lot of majority of the people in the island. The history of the Ilocano community in the
island is a history of alienation. The arrival of the colonial masters significantly changed their way of life.
Freedom and abundance were altered with imposed restrictions and tight control of the island. The people
who farmed the island for many generations have to beg for a piece of land from Spanish authorities.
Others worked as helpers in the cattle farms of the Spanish civil authorities.
The situation barely changed after the Spaniards left and the Americans took control in the early 1900s.
Decade after decades, poverty marks the lives of the people of Fuga Island. They do not have a stable
source of income; they lack access to basic social services such as education, transportation, and
electricity. Due to its distance from the mainland, the island is practically isolated. Access to basic health
services is lacking as well. Infant mortality and cases of malnutrition are high. Villagers mostly rely on
their traditional healers for their health needs. For many generations, they rely on the expertise of these
healers aside from the fact that they are the immediate authorities to turn to in case a family member gets
sick. The continued destruction of the islands marine resources made life more difficult for the villagers.
The situation is worsened by a culture of silence. People are wary to share their experiences to outsiders
These social problems are rooted in the conflict over ownership of the island. When I interviewed elder
and traditional healer Enrique dela Cruz, he told me he was afraid that all the natives were going to be
forced to leave the island. He opened up and began telling how life deteriorated over the years. He shared
that the biggest problem in the island is hunger. There is not enough food. We are not free. The owner
controls us. The rules are extremely tough. If we disobey, we will be kicked out of the island.
Fuga Island is a contested land. A certain Alfonso Lim claims to have bought the island and sold it to
another businessman Tan Yu. He dreamt of converting the island into a word-class recreational facility, a
model city of the 21st century, without squatters. When his $50 billion fantasy island project began, a
new batch of guards was deployed in the island to monitor the villagers. The presence of armed security
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for fear that these will be used against them. Fear reigns in the island.

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guards and the atrocities they committed created constant fear and insecurity among the people.
After Tan Yus death, the guards abandoned the island and the natives experienced a brief respite from
their oppression and hardships. They are now temporarily free to expand their farms. They are allowed to
renovate and expand their huts which are now dilapidating for decades because they are not allowed to cut
trees. Their farm produce is not even sufficient for family consumption. The constant struggle to survive
is the main reason why many villagers, particularly the educated members of the communities, decided to
migrate to the mainland.
Contested Landscape
Today, the Burgundy Realty Corporation, one of the primary investors of Tan Yus multi-billion dollar
fantasy island, claims ownership of the island. It also deployed security guards to monitor the place from
illegal activities which for the corporation means the illegal settling of the villagers since the land is
privately owned. Moreover, the entire island is considered part of the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority
(CEZA). The CEZA was created by Republic Act 7922 and was signed by former President Fidel Ramos
in 1995. It envisions transforming northern Cagayan into an international city, a world-class center and
gateway for economic growth for the Philippines linking the dragon economies of Asia and the First
World.4 Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, who hails from Cagayan, pushed the CEZA Act of 7922.
The economic zone covers the town of Sta. Ana and the islands of Fuga, Barit and Mabbag in Aparri town.
It is intended to link up trade with Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and the United States. The development
of the Cagayan Special Economic Zone and Freeport involves the creation of a transshipment industry,
agro-industrial development, endowments of foreign technology, and development of tourism and leisure
facilities. According to its Master Plan for the period 2011-2016, Fuga Island, together with Palaui
Island and Cape Engao, will be sites for sustainable tourism and leisure development. CEZA intends
to make Fuga a haven for investors, including those from Taiwan and Hong Kong who are interested to
permanently reside in the country.
Even with claim of ownership by Burgundy Realty Corporation and the development plan of CEZA,
the people of Fuga Island believed that they have the right to live in the island as many generations did
before them. Their families have been living in Fuga before the coming of the Spanish missionaries.
Their claim to the island is also based on their conviction that they have taken care of the land and its
surrounding waters for centuries. The destruction of the islands resources and the poverty that came along
4 Cagayan Economic Zone Authority at http://ceza.gov.ph/development-plan/medium-term-development-plan-2011-2016
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with it are conditions created by outsiders claiming ownership of the land. The tight control imposed by
armed security guards prevented the people from protecting the island from exploitation and degradation.
According to the villagers, their strong connection with the island that spans generations have given them
a sense of responsibility to care and protect the island as one would treat a family member.
Sense of Place among the Villagers
At the most fundamental level, the villagers described their connection to the island across time and space
- where and when they were born, lived, and worked in relation to the island. Their spatial and temporal
relationship with Fuga Island served as the foundation upon which their experiences and knowledge were
built. Being connected to the island means developing historical and geographical ties to the place.
Being connected to the island also means experiencing the island. Whether they grew up with their farm
or fell in love with its scenic beauty, their descriptions of their relationship to the place resonates with
accounts of firsthand experiences ancestral migration, childhood adventures, community events, wildlife
encounters, and work routines. For many villagers, the island provided the perfect backdrop for social gettogethers. Altogether the villagers have had a variety of meaningful experiences throughout their lives,
each contributing to their connection to Fuga Island.
Being connected entails knowing the island. Born and raised in Fuga Island or having made the island a
home, the villagers had acquired a certain familiarity with the islands landscape and the community that
strengthens their connection to the island. Every place in the island has its story and this story is passed
on from generations. The stories which connect the lives of each family and which in turn connect each
family to the island is a source of meaning-making for the community.
adapt in the changing environment. They know the types of crops to cultivate. They know how to cope up
with the typhoons that frequent the island throughout the year. They know how to protect the island from
forest fires. They are familiar with the terrains of the island: coral reefs, hills, forests, cliffs, caves, springs,
and beaches. They are aware of the various changes in the islands landscape - wildlife, burial sites and
caves, vegetation, ethnobotany and zoology. The villagers emphasized the value of direct experiential
knowledge and knowledge passed down to family members. Many of them described how learning about
the island, especially its ecological significance, has influenced what Fuga Island means to them.
The island held a range of meanings to community members. The peoples various connections to
the island are expressed symbolically. Fuga Island is referred to as ina or mother, a special place,
a sacred place, a gift, our life, our heritage, our home, our roots and where we can be
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The rhythm of life in the community revolves around such knowledge of the island which enabled them to

Proceedings
ourselves. The people are aware and appreciative of the many benefitstangible such as the land on
which they can grow their crops and build their houses, as well as intangible benefits, such as spiritual
connection, cultural and historical identity and psychological well-being.5 Fuga Island is seen by its
community members as endowed with abundant resources and biodiversity sustaining their families for
generations. Overall, the meanings articulated by study participants reflected broad dimensions: the island
as a gift, as a mother, as source of identity and the as nature. The four dimensions and their underlying
categories and properties comprise the web of shared meanings local community members ascribed to the
place.
Villagers often describe the island as having healing effects. The men proudly speaks of gazing at islands
beauty as a way of restoring wearied bodies after working the whole day in the farm. Enjoying the cool
breeze along the beach of Fuga had become a communal ritual providing rest and serenity after a days
struggle. Villagers expressed a strong emotional bond or attachment to the island such as these statements
that came out of my interviews: This is my home and I will die here, My ancestors lived here for many
generations and I cannot imagine abandoning this place. It is like abandoning ones family, ones root,
Fuga has been so much part of our lives and my childrens lives. All my memories of my family and
children are here.
Peoples accounts of what Fuga Island means to them clearly illustrate that the social construction and
expression of meanings are not static processes. Meanings evolved, as new experiences and knowledge
were gained. Some villagers acknowledged that before they became aware of its uniqueness and
ecological significance, they need to suffer from the harsh rules and restrictions of outsiders. A few
villagers articulated a change of meaning. Local politics, management restrictions, and the ongoing
development in the island had affected their relationship to the island.
Healing in the Midst of Suffering: The Vocation of Traditional Healers
Health is an important concern of the people of Fuga Islands which in turn explains the prominent
role played by traditional healers in the community. The role of the healers is perceived as crucial in
maintaining harmony in the community. Villagers regard their healers as the keepers of the communitys
well-being. Much of the peoples beliefs of the sacred, of good and evil, of order and harmony, of the
cause and meaning of an illness, of suffering and death, are derived from the articulation of their revered
5 Ronel P. Dela Cruz, People and Space as a Factor in Community-Based Development in Fuga Island, SPUQC Journal.
Vol. 1, no. 1 (2008): 1-30.
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healers. Claiming a mandate from God through dreams and their great ancestors, the healers shape and
influence the lifeworld of the community. Involving the community in their rituals, they facilitate the
healing process through meaningful explanations of the causes of their illnesses thus influencing their
behaviors and reinforcing cultural values of the community.
There are fifteen traditional healers (herbolarios) in the island. Each village has its own herbolario where
people go to when they are sick or suffering. The vocation of these herbolarios stems from their desire to
help people which according to them, appear in their dreams. Becoming a herbolario is a vocation which
is passed on from generation to the next. They tirelessly serve the community and would willingly respond
at any time of the day that they are needed. They cannot resist people knocking during wee hours to attend
to their sick relative. People often told them that with the poverty and exploitation they have, they are their
constant refuge.
The healers are committed to the well-being of the community as manifested in their rituals and practices
which bring forth healing and wholeness both physically and socially. The sick are not restored to their
physical health but his or her relationships with others including spirits present in nature. With their
presence, communal values are reiterated; difficulties are shared and transcended, solidarity is fostered as
the villagers are confronted with various forms of struggles. With the lack of basic social services in the
island, these healers are the peoples resource and refuge in many aspects of their lives. With their help,
the villagers create a common vision and draw strength to face the challenges of living in the island. The
traditional healers regard faith as a source of inner strength to build a community that is just, caring, and
trusting. They live out a spirituality that celebrates community, that is oriented to seeking and promoting
well-being of all, and inspires hope in the midst of sufferings and powerlessness.
The traditional healers believe that Fuga Island is home to many spirits. The place is inhabited by ancient
spirits, both good and bad. Traditional healers regard bad spirits as banbanig, spirits who can change into
various forms to deceive and frighten the people. With the insidious presence of spirits in the island, the
healers see the interaction between the spirit-world and the material-world. What distinguishes traditional
healing from medical treatment is the strong emphasis on spiritual healing as an inseparable component
of all healing; healing that has as its objective the relief of intra-familial, interpersonal and communal
stressors at the same time and on an equal level of importance as the relief of the symptoms of physical
illness.
When members of the community bring their sick members, the healers assume that they encountered
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Ethnomedicine: healing traditions

Proceedings
spirit(s) (nakadalapus). The healer begins the diagnosis after reciting his/her oraciones (prayers said in
Latin). There are familiar diagnostic methods employed by the healers. First is the talado, where the healer
asks the members of the family to butcher a chicken and scrutinize its entrails. When the liver has wounds,
the healer assumes that the patient encountered (nakadalapus) a bad spirit and then describes what kind
of spirit, where the encounter was and what remediation is to be made. The other method is the tako, a
diagnostic ritual using rice grain (sometimes they use ginger) to determine if the patient encountered a
spirit. The healer gets nine grains and put them in a white plate with water. After the orasyon is performed,
calling the help of the spirits, the healer interprets the formation of the grains. If the grains form a crooked
pattern, the patient is assumed to have encountered a bad spirit. Other diagnostic method is santiguan,
where the healers used candles and a plate with water. The candle is placed around the plate, Latin prayers
are recited and then followed by the healers interpretation and explanation of the cause and meaning of the
illness.
Unlike scientific medicine, the healers way of treating an illness involves members of the family and
the community. Families are required to pray together and to prepare the things to be used for the ritual.
Offering advice and admonishment to families is part of the entire process of healing. Given the credibility
of the healer in the community, s/he facilitates the healing processes through meaningful explanations of
their illnesses as well as the ability to influence behavior and reinforce cultural values of the community.
They provide culturally relevant explanations of immediate and ultimate causes of health problems in
the island. Moreover, the healer draws on symbols to help the sick person understand the cause of his/her
illness and how s/he can be restored to health. The healer persuades the sick person that the problem can
be related to some part of the mythic world. In this community, the healer, the sick person and the family
usually agree on these core meanings.
After their diagnosis, the healers initiate the process of dialogue with the spirit-world. Communicating
with the spirits, the healer performs the atang, a ritual compose of prayers, food and dialogue. Before
the ritual, the healer requests a sumptuous meal. Food includes rice cakes, eggs, tobacco, and wine. The
content of the dialogue details the encounter of the patient, reparation for trespassing the spirits territory
and food to appease the angry spirit. Herbal medicines are prescribed after the ritual for the patient to fully
recover from his spirit-encounter.
The foundational element in traditional healing is cosmic religion - the spirit world. This system of
meaning has structures and functions that reflect human psychological, social, and biological needs for self
and others. Spirits reflect a personality model and a theory of the fundamental aspects of consciousness.
These healers use spirit constructs to represent personal and social dynamics. Spirit beliefs produce
psycho-physiological manipulations through their meanings and attachments, including the management
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of emotions, construction of relations between self and others, and the use of these systems to alter
emotions. Healers mostly recommend herbal medicines that abound in the island. During the interview,
the researcher identified almost twenty herbal medicines in the island being used by these healers. The
author took plant samples for identification of its other biological uses and photochemical contents.
Some healers prescribe taking a pilgrimage (suknal) to religious sites outside the island (Our Lady of
Piat, Our Lady of Manaoag, Apo Baket in Sinait Church in Ilocos Norte) and procession (libot) around
the island. This is done if the diagnosis requires the entire participation of the villagers. The social healing
processes derived from group participation and the telling of stories of illness. Winkelman6 describes
pilgrimage as a form of personal and popular empowerment produced by a journey to a site with religious,
historic, and mythological significance. The pilgrimage may begin as an individual quest, but it is
typically part of a collective physical movement which brings the social dimension of the pilgrimage to
the experience, where one recounts ones story of illness and search for cure with fellow travelers. These
connections provide significant personal meaning and emotional release from guilt, shame, and promises.
These experiences induce healing through a realignment of self-concept, status, and identity with the
other, both cultural and divine.
Fuga Island is frequently visited by inhospitable weather and typhoons. If they are not able to win Gods
favor and blessing (mapatangan), the healers summon a week-long procession from the east point
(Kiking) to the west point (Mudoc village) of the island. Villagers start their procession in the month of
February. They offer flowers, prayers and their produce during the procession. At the end of the ritual
ceremony, they will place their offerings in a float and allow the waves to carry them away to the sea.
Villagers practice this gift-giving and offering so that life will be easy and bountiful for them. During the
procession, they will also make a halt to every farm (kaingin) and pray. The procession is usually led by
the elders and the cantors in the island. In every sitio, the patron saint will be met by the villagers as they
middle of the procession. This religious practice in the island fosters communalism and bayanihan among
the villagers. These practices are tied up with their relationship with the land. Invoking Gods blessing for
a bountiful harvest is very much part of their annual religious practices.
Do these healing practices and strategies really work? Do really cures happen? These questions were
asked during the interview and group discussion. Efficacy is the perceived capacity of a given practice
to affect sickness in some desirable way.7 Fuga healers assert that they are credible in their practice
6 Michael Winkelman. Culture and Health: Applying Medical Anthropology. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). p. 337.
7 Allan Young. The Anthropology of Illness and Sickness, Annual Review of Anthropology, (1982) 11: 257-85.
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pray and sing. According to the elders, once they win Gods favor (mapatangan) rain will pour even in the

Proceedings
since the community continues to bring their sick to them. They were able to alleviate their pain and treat
their illnesses. From the perspective of medical anthropology, healing is efficacious when biomedical
changes take place; curing is efficacious when the villagers who seek it say it is. In the island, healing
is effective if the sick person is socially restored to the community. This is one of the responsibilities of
the healers of the island. Efficacy is always a cultural construct.8 This means that the healing process is
considered effective when the bonds between the individual sick person and the community, weakened by
disease, are strengthened, social values are affirmed, and the notion of social order no longer threatened
by illnesses and death. Healing is effective when the individual experience of sickness has been made
meaningful, personal suffering shared, and the individual leaves the marginal situation of sickness
and is reincorporated back into the social body. In other words, healing boils downs to meaning and
the transformation of experience. The change or transformation is created by all who are involved and
effectively enact culturally authorized interpretations. When bad spirits (aplaw) are exorcized, the patient
believes the cause of the problem is gone. This conviction is affirmed by the healer and encouraged by the
social circle. The life problems may or may not still be present but their perception is no longer the same.
Traditional healing and peoples health care
Primarily, people go to a traditional healer seeking healing for their illnesses which is understood as both
having physical and spiritual dimensions. In medical anthropology, effective health care and wellness
requires an understanding of the patients perspectives: their views of his/her illness; and how the patient
and family view the origin, significance, and implication of the condition for their life. The healers
interaction with all the members of the sick family is important as s/he attempts to elicit explanatory
models that connect or explain their system of meaning within which their maladies and treatments are
understood. These members were recognized as healers because of their commitment to the well-being
of the community as manifested in their practices like free healing services, family counseling during
sickness, advocates the community to respect the island, keeper of their cultural traditions, and consultant
in matters related to the life of the island.
In general, the people in the island believe that it is God who heals them and their community. Every time
the healer performs his ritual to cure a sick member of the village, the family members and their neighbors
are requested to join the ritual. This is a form of social healing for the community every time they perform
the healing ritual. Winkelmann affirms the healing effects of communal ritual: Ritual practices heal by
8 Arthur Kleinman. Towards a Comparative Study of Medical Systems: An Integrated Approach to the Study of the
Relationship of Medicine and Culture, Science, Medicine and Man, (1973) 1:55-56.
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meeting fundamental human needs for belonging, comfort, and bonding with others. Rituals integrate
and bond people, enhancing social support systems, group identity, and self-development. Community
bonding elicits biologically based attachment processes, facilitating adaptive change and healing for
individuals and groups.9
The traditional healers are perceived as community members with an expanded kind of identity. They are
publicly seen as persons called to serve the community; serving a larger social reality than their personal
life. Their vocation is a call that one attributes to a superior source. It is always a call from a social reality
that is deemed greater than the mere individual self. The call is to participate in social movements working
to reconstruct society in a way that better serves its members.
Personal and Communal Transformation
Called to heal the community requires transformation in both the life of the healer and the community.
The healer is a man and woman of faith whom the community emulates. Common among their vocation
stories is the element of faith which strengthens them in their healing ministry. They recognize God
as the healer of the community and believe that they are the instruments in their roles as healer, father,
mother, public servant, and elder. With this multi-pronged role, faith is shared with the community while
recognizing the need to cultivate it as they mature in their healing vocation. It is their faith that strengthens
them as they wrestle with spirits in order to restore their patients back to health. As the healers mature in
their calling, they gained confidence in their faith and works. They acquired and developed tibay ng loob
(inner strength) and tiwala sa sarili (self-confidence) as they practice their calling.
The healers of Fuga perceive their work as a form of solidarity, a way of partaking in the social burden
of the community. Here, the healers recognize their bigger role outside their families and are challenged
overcome because of the expression of solidarity or the bayanihan spirit encouraged by the healers when
s/he performs healing ritual. A significant component of the healing ritual is the exhortation of the healer
to gather all the members of the family and discuss the prognosis of their sick member. This is also the
time to be together as a community sharing their struggles, problems, community needs, aspirations for
the future and the like. The ritual brings community healing both physically and spiritually. Sickness,
illness and disease in the island are moments to reflect as a community, hence, communal relationship is
also restored.
9 Michael Winkelman, Culture and Health: Applying Medical Anthropology, p. 342.
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to be a model to the community by promoting good relationships. Difficulties in the community are

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Majority of the villagers demonstrate a strong trust in the healers of the island. With their presence,
communal values of bayanihan and damayan are strengthened and affirmed. They serve as a uniting
force in the village particularly in times of hardships and distress, a situation that has become a normal
way of living in the island. Sometimes communal quarrels are pacified through their intervention. In
times of difficulties, they admonish the people to help one another by sharing what they have order to
survive. The villagers learn the value of solidarity because of their healers who are always with them,
accompanying them in the struggles and difficulties.
The Traditional Healers and the Well-Being of the Community in the Midst of Displacement
The traditional healers play a critical role in the transformation of their communities. Gifted with special
skills and talents to heal, these healers are regarded by the community as wisdom keepers, interpreters
of traditions, performers of communal rituals for healing and memories, looked by the community as
guardians and respected elders who provide vision for the community members. While the community is
deprived of basic social services, the presence of traditional healers, including their indigenous knowledge
systems, can improve the quality of life for all the villagers through the development of indigenous
healing and traditional medicines.
In the midst of the ongoing relocation crisis, these healers exhibit their commitment to the well being of
the community in myriad ways. Violence and conflicts constantly arise in the community because of the
situation of insecurity and worsening poverty. Respected for the wisdom and concern for the community,
the traditional healers are the ones to whom the community go to in order to mediate and to settle disputes.
Communal issues that threaten the villages like illegal cutting of trees, dynamite fishing, use of cyanide,
illegal pebble poaching, desecration of burial sites and decimation of exotic flora and fauna of the island
are raised by these healers to the local barangay for communal action. For instance, the villagers sought
the counsel of one healer Agapito Balbag about the ongoing pebble poaching in the island. After a couple
of dialogue with him, the villagers made a collective stand to protect their coast from poachers and
outlined some course of action including reporting to higher authorities. Elder Agapito reiterates that the
island is a gift to them, a source of their daily existence. We are the island. If they will take away from
us, then we all die, he said. Some traditional healers proposed a local ordinance to protect the old church
ruins and penalize those who illegally cut trees.
The wisdom of these healers influences the worldview of the villagers in terms of their sense of place and
commitment to protect the island. Elder Claro dela Cruz aptly puts it:
We are blessed with plants/herbs that we can use for various illnesses and ailments. The entire
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island is our medicine while it is also a source of sickness. When people get sick, I always remind
them to treat the island with respect and care. People look at our healing activities as a form of
solidarity (damayan). We help ourselves in times of difficulties here in the island.
The role of the traditional healers as keepers and interpreters of their island traditions can be best seen
in the practice of Komedya de Isla Fuga, a drama tradition originally based on the Christianization of
the Muslims but is now reinterpreted by the healers as a way of training young people to be responsible
members of the community through inculcating the values of discipline, prayer and devotion. This drama
tradition, according to the healers, asserts their identity and history since they have been performing this
during for several decades. It becomes a part of their life; celebrating life in the midst of unfreedom and
fear and rely on the generosity of God for a healthy and bountiful harvest free from typhoons, pestilence
and calamities.
The life and stories of these healers attest that wellbeing is lived in the island amidst internal and external
economic threats. As wisdom keepers, they are in touch with the lifeworld of the people: their troubles
and ailments, their conflicts and struggles, their hopes and dreams. They live out their vocation in the
context of samahan that practical experiences of illness, chaos in social relations and personal problems
are interpreted and given new meaning. Furthermore, they involve the community in their rituals thereby
facilitating the healing process through meaningful explanations of the sickness, influencing their
behavior, and reinforcing cultural values of the community.
The community recognized these healers beyond their role as healers of their illnesses. Their vocation
to heal extends to their commitment to uplift the lives of the people of Fuga Island, accompanying them
in their struggles and in celebrating their hopes and joys. The healing rituals and practices bring forth
restored relationships and wellness in the community. With the relocation crisis, these healers are the
common vision and draw strength to face the challenges of living in the island.
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peoples refuge and leaders who are committed to their well-being. With their help, the villagers create a

Proceedings
Treatment of Hwabyung in Traditional Medicine with Four

Elements of Non-Violent Communication
Young-Wan Kim
Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine
1. Introduction
The development of information society in the 21st century and complex living environments have
increased the level of stress among contemporaries and given rise to various diseases. Hwabyung (anger
illness) is one of the more notable diseases that have surfaced amidst various interpersonal relationships
in modern society.
We go on living our lives forging various interpersonal relationships with others in various environments.
The type of relationships we form with others as a member of society becomes one of the deciding
factors of our quality of life. These relationships have a mutual impact on people both on a conscious and
subconscious level, and a social consensus is formed when ideas are exchanged through dialogue.
Non-violent communication (NVC), also called compassionate communication, or the language of life,
was developed by Marshall B. Rosenberg. NVC helps see the world in terms of accepting existence in
itself, mutual respect and contribution, co-prosperity and integration, cooperation, and peace.
Based on observations, feelings, needs, and requests, NVC seeks to discover strategies that allow
everyones needs to be met through mutual respect and bonds. The aim of NVC is to maintain ones
determination while still being empathetic, and to listen to the ideas of others while continuing the
conversation.
When expressing ones feelings in a conversation, specific language communicates the emotional state
more clearly and accurately than when using vague or abstract language. The stage where ones feelings
about an action are verbally expressed has been written into a Feeling List comprising of feelings that
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are felt when ones needs are met and unmet.

When peoples needs are met, they feel a sense of satisfaction in the easiness of their lives. On the other
hand, when a desired need is not met, their minds are filled with self-anxiety and agony, and unmet needs
accumulate over time to become stress.
Thus, exchanging ideas through conversations will reduce emotional conflict and needs while enhancing
the sense of satisfaction. In modern society, however, the lack of communication relatively decreases
opportunities to meet needs and causes an increase in mental stress.
The concept of stress was first used in the 1850s as a means to explain the repressive pressure and tension
occurring in the mental domain, not just in bodily organs, and it has been studied through a scientific
approach of orthodox medicine in modern times.
Stress is caused not only by physical stimuli such as noise, the cold, and unfamiliar environments, but
also by feelings and thoughts such as love, hatred, rage, and joy. Stimuli that cause stress in people can
be categorized as either external or internal. External stimuli are events that take place in the surrounding
environment and can include various problems that arise in interpersonal relationships, parting, death, and
physical exhaustion. Internal stimuli are all the needs of the internal body such as sexual needs, need for
dependency, and aggressive instincts.
Thus, stress occurs when a persons ability to cope with external or internal stimuli is weakened or
lacking. If these circumstances persist and stress accumulates over time, stress becomes chronic and
causes mental instability and conflict, eventually leading to hwabyung (anger illness).
extreme stimuli impact changes in the physiology and causes stress.

2. Four elements of non-violent communication applied in healing hwabyung in traditional
medicine
hwabyung occurs in the heart, or the mind, and is related to emotions such as rage. It is a symptom that
occurs while such feelings are left undealt with (and needs are left unmet) and is expressed in the form of
anger.
Hwabyung has long been referred to as ulhwabyung (depression anger illness) in Korea and defined
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In oriental medicine, hwabyung is deemed to be caused by changes in the seven emotions, where

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as the disorder where your body temperature rises due to emotional anger caused by depression
and frustration. The American Psychiatric Associations DSM-IV lists hwabyung as a culturebound syndrome and describes it as a Korean folk syndrome, which is an anger syndrome caused by
suppression of anger.
In oriental medicine, hwabyung has been studied both clinically and philologically as a disorder that
displays the state of anger, and also studied in the context of stress and psychosomatic disorders. In
western medicine, efforts have been made to understand hwabyung as a culture-bound syndrome unique
to Korea through numerous studies of clinical developments, but they have yet to discover a correlation
between hwabyung and the seven emotions ().
Although the seven emotions are often used interchangeably with the seven energies (), Renzhai
zhi zhi defines the seven emotions as normal states whereas the seven energies are conditions leading to
disorders. Euhak Ipmun defines the emotions as occurring in the mind, whereas the energies occur in
the spirit. Thus, the seven energies refer to the symptoms that arise when the spirits of the seven emotions
are damaged, and are usually the cause of mental stress or hwabyung.
Upon an overview of current studies on hwabyung, its main characteristics can be summarized into the
following:
- It begins with a sense of dejection that is suppressed and eventually progresses as a chronic disorder.
- Its cause is mostly psychological problems arising from interpersonal relationships and emotions that
are left undealt with due to personality.
- I t is not an innate illness. Rather, it is a type of adjustment disorder caused by the patients suppression
of his emotions over time.
- Due to its fiery dynamism, the emotional elements of rage are carried over to the mind.
- I t results in a feeling of pressure on the chest and a rise in body temperature from sustained stress of the
same type.
- Its physical symptoms include migraine, facial heat, dizziness, dehydration, beating or swelling of the
heart, the feeling of a lump in the chest and neck, and stuffiness.
- Its psychological symptoms include depression, anxiety, nervousness, irritation, discouraged attitude
toward life, futility, surprise, and outburst of anger.
Taking the above characteristics into consideration, hwabyung is indeed a medical syndrome with
different stages of development, specific symptoms, and a known cause , a disorder caused by suppression
and unsettlement of a number of events one faces in everyday life.
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Conventional strategies to cure hwabyung begin by identifying the disorder, followed by treatments from
oriental medicine and folk remedies based on medical experience and knowledge accumulated over time.
In orthodox medicine, hwabyung is not seen as an illness resulting from invasion of a supernatural being
in our body. Rather, it is considered to result from recognizing problems that occur in social relationships
and thus, appropriate methods of treatment are sought accordingly.
The following are excerpts from Donguibogam and Samguk Saki on the treatment of hwabyung in
orthodox medicine.
Upon hearing about his fathers death at the hands of an enemy, Siksungsahu cried from a deep sense
of sadness. When he stopped crying, he learned of a pain in his chest. The pain grew with each day
without subsiding, and after a month, there was a lump that felt as if a cup had been placed upside
down. Though the pain was unbearably agonizing, no medicine was effective in curing it. A shaman
was called to say nonsensical things to make the patient laugh. Unable to hold his laughter, the patient
turned his back and faced the wall for days. Afterwards, the lump in his chest had disappeared.
Nokjins real name was not known for certain [] Gakgan was a government official in charge of
electing people to positions, but he became ill when he was removed from his position. A physician
was called in to diagnose the illness, and he said there is an illness in his heart, so he must take some
medicine. Moreover, Nokjin said Your health is not well because you begin working early in the
morning and come home only late at night. Thus, your body has been taken over by a cold energy and
lost the warmth of its blood, which has caused a discomfort. Gakgan responded It is not so serious.
I was just a bit dizzy. Nokjin replied If that is the case, I can cure you not with medicine or needles,
but with words. Will you hear it? Gakgan said Since you have come all the way here, please cure me
is an excerpt from Donguibogam on using shaman treatment on a patient who is coping with
his fathers death. Rather than treating the patient through exorcism, the shaman gives the patient
something to laugh about so that he can express his suppressed emotions outwardly. Such can be one
method of treatment for patients suffering from hwabyung, where those around the patient can console
him and share an enjoyable experience with the patient while helping them feel better by quietly
listening to their complaints in conversations.
In this case, empathizing with the patient and saying words of consolation and encouragement is a folk
remedy, the result of the patient expressing his psychological needs in language.
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with your words.

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is an excerpt from Samguk Saki on Nokjins treatment of Gakgan. Nokjin uses persuasion, advice,
and suggestion to appeal to reason and knowledge of the patient. In particular, the expression giungoroen,
through which the patient Gakgan was able to anticipate his treatment, is a representation of linguistic
treatment methods applied to patients.
What is notable here is that Nokjin, the therapist and counselor, used conversation as a method of
treatment on the patient. Using giungoroen to treat hwabyung as done here allows the patient to control
his emotions and achieve mental stability through the words of the therapist. In other words, it relieves the
patients suppressed emotions and depressed mood to stabilize his emotional state, using persuasion and
advice techniques by expressing it through request, one of the four elements of NVC.
In the case of Nokjins patient Gakgan, he was suffering from a level of stress unbearable for a person
with a sound personality. Thus, giungoroen was used as a temporary emergency treatment during his state
of emotional disturbance.
The records of Nokjin written in Samguk Saki are considered to be the first conversational treatment
used in Korea. Since the past, this treatment was used with an empathetic approach to meet psychological
and mental needs through conversations. In particular, giungoroen used in Nokjins sessions uses highly
logical insights, and is thus a form of psychotherapy consisting of logical conversation using high level of
knowledge.
Giungoroen is a method of treatment that stabilizes the patients mentality, and thus improves their health,
through dialogue. It is a form of psychotherapy wherein the therapists sense of interest, sympathy, and
compassion enables the patient to relieve their suppressed emotions.
Since the conversation between the therapist and patient help build mutual trust and achieve a better
understanding of the disorder, giungoroen is often seen as a form of supportive therapy in oriental
medicine. Moreover, the therapist uses his position to indirectly suggest improvements in the condition
and the therapists words are used to induce abreaction, purification, and ventilation from the patient.
The therapist identifies and understands the patients condition as he listens to the patient. He creates
an environment where the patient can feel comfortable talking about topics he would normally hesitate
to discuss. After explaining the symptoms to the patient, the therapist gives the patient confidence to
overcome them, and encourages and supports their active participation in the treatment.
The patient is able to come open about his situation and bodily state, and find relief thanks to the support
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and encouragement gained from talking to the therapist and forming a bond. Thus, he is able to overcome
his delusions of unmet psychological needs and better adapt to society. The reduction of mental pressures
cures hwabyung and the patient becomes healthier both mentally and physically.
The stories of Siksungsahu and Nokjin are two representative cases of curing hwabyung through
talking. Supportive psychotherapy was used so that the patient can face his problems and overcome it by
supporting his weakened self. This method of treatment recovers and strengthens the patients damaged
defense mechanism, and is centered around rapport between the patient and the therapist, enabling patients
faced with problems derived from everyday life to overcome them and move on.
Thus, the techniques mentioned in Table 1 can be used to reassure, persuade, or give suggestions to the
patient, and create an environment of encouragement, advice, and explanation. The patients tension and
anxiety are reduced by the therapists warm, empathetic attitude.
<Table 1> Conversations for Treatment in Supportive Psychotherapy
Ventilation
Therapist maintains authority and remains neutral to reassure the patient

Help the patient discuss various things he cannot share with others
Verbalization of problems reduces tension and dissatisfaction
Abreaction
Reducing accumulated stress or tension by expressing suppressed thoughts and

emotions without realization
Support
Reducing anxiety and conflict and thereby enhancing social adaptability of the patient
by listening with an open attitude
Persuasion
Suggestion
Strengthening the patients weakened self by appealing to a sense of reason,

determination, and moral ethics using authority as therapist
Strengthen sense of self and help self-critique through recommendation and
explaining, using mutual trust instead of force
Suggesting reduction of symptoms and improvements in condition as a means of
treatment
From the above table, we can see that the treatments used in Donguibogam and Samguk Saki are
utilizing the same psychotherapy techniques used in modern oriental medicine. At the same time, the
conversational treatments to cure hwabyung make use of the four elements of NVC.
Non-violent communication is a method of sincere communication using peaceful language used in
everyday life that enables people to maintain character even in difficult situations. Thus, it is likely that
NVC was naturally a part of the traditional treatment methods of hwabyung.
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Reassurance

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- Observation of situation in its true context

- Expression of feelings upon observation
- Verbalization of how these feelings are related to internal needs
- Expressing through request what is wanted from others
These four elements of NVC allow clear communication of ones ideas to exchange information required
in a conversation. In the traditional treatment of hwabyung, this information allows observation of the
patients condition and its treatment by learning the patients specific needs and possible solutions through
conversation. Each of the four elements of NVC are applied flexibly depending on the circumstances of
the individual and society.
<Table 2> Feeling List
Feelings when needs are met
Feelings when needs are not met
impressed, touched, moved, thrilled, overwhelmed,

ecstatic, exuberant
worried, distant, dismal, fearful, concerned, distracted,

withdrawn
grateful, thankful
amused, pleased, delighted, jubilant, happy, glad,
blissful
warm, tender, loving, comfortable, sheltered, loving,
sentimental, cordial, friendly
enlivened, rejuvenated, satisfied, refreshed, appeased,
rested, renewed, reassured, revived, carefree
rested, soothed, composed, intimate, friendly, relaxed,
relieved, equanimous, light
comfortable, calm, quiet, mellow, tranquil, still, serene
interested, intrigued, fascinated, entranced
energetic, thrilled, elated, valiant, invigorated, vivacious,
sanguine, lively, ardent, confident, encouraged,
excited, aroused, expectant, giddy, optimistic, eager
afraid, terrified, petrified, appalled, frightened, scared,

petrified, timid
uneasy, nervous, tense, jittery, restless, anxious, distressed

uncomfortable, disturbed, abashed, perplexed, flustered,
self-conscious, displeased, distressed, unpleasant,
frustrated, troubled, unsettled, awkward, unnerved
sad, mournful, longing, yearning, sorrowful, wistful,
pining, moody, miserable, appalled, regretful, dismal,
pitiful, doleful
hurt, disheartened, remorseful, coldhearted, discouraged,
indifferent, disappointed
lonely, solitary, empty, alienated, dejected, desolate,
dreary, weak
depressed, helpless, listless, gloomy, melancholy
tired, burnt out, exhausted, weary, lethargic,
annoyed, tedious, devastated, frustrated, beat, dull,
agitated, worn out, bored
disgusted, repulsed, horrified, contempt
confused, dazed, embarrassed, bewildered, mortified,
baffled, ashamed
angry, furious, upset, aggravated, enraged, incensed,
indignant, resentful, livid
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As in the case of Donguibogam and Samguk Saki, descriptions of occurrence of hwabyung from the
seven energies caused by accumulated unmet needs use similar language to that used in the Feeling List.
Similarly, language used to treat hwabyung is similar to the feelings used to describe when needs are met.
Moreover, the objectivity and neutral attitude required of therapists when treating patients with hwabyung
is similar to the precautions of using the four elements of NVC distinguish observation from evaluation
to see things as they are, distinguish feeling from thought to see as one actually feels, distinguish
needs from means and methods to see the actual cause of the feeling, and distinguish request from
coercion to see concretely and positively.
<Table 3> Need List
Autonomy
Celebration
Mourning
Interdependence
Integrity
Play
Spiritual Communion
Physical Nurturance
freedom to choose ones dreams, goals, and values,

freedom to choose plans and methods to fulfill ones dreams, goals, and
values
celebration for birth of life or realization of dream
mourning for loss of a loved one or a dream
gratitude, empathy, community, consideration, love,
contribution to enrich life, acceptance, trust,
security, warmth, understanding, mental stability,
honesty, respect, support, intimacy, communication
sincerity, respect for individualism, creativity, significance, reward, selfconfidence, self-respect
laughter, fun
beauty, inspiration, harmony, order, peace
air, water, food, free movement, exercise,
protection from life threats, rest, sexual expression,
habitation, physical contact (affection)
described in Table 3.
The treatment of hwabyung through conversation in orthodox medicine begins from the understanding of
various problems in the patients life through communication and bond between humans. This requires
a completely objective observation of the patient. Treatment of hwabyung rooted deep inside the mind
through mutual communication means to reduce various psychological factors arising from stress in
modern society.
The Giungoroen treatment, used as a form of supportive psychotherapy in orthodox medicine, treats
hwabyung by conversation based on true communication focused on the patients condition, mental state,
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The therapists job is to help the patient cure hwabyung, or in other words, fulfill basic human needs as

Proceedings
and current emotional disturbance.

Here, conversation is used as a means to reduce the mental factors that cause hwabyung and to adjust the
mental state and emotional activity of the patient.
Conversational treatment as used in orthodox medicine utilizes each of the four elements of non-violent
communication to reduce unmet needs that ultimately cause hwabyung.
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The 2nd
Proceedings
Session 5
Parallel Session 3
Organizers Session
Parallel 3-1. UNESCO: Narratives of Change
Parallel 3-2. MEST/NRF: Healing Humanities in Korea
Parallel 3-3. Busan City: 20C Busan, its Scars and Healing
The 2nd
Proceedings

UNESCO: Narratives of Change
1. Narratives as Healing: Perspectives from Environmental History

/ Gregory Quenet (University of Versailles-Quentin-en-Yvelines)
2. T
iger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans: A Historicized Account
/ Ranjan Chakrabarti (Vidyasagar University)
Narratives as Healing: Perspectives from

Environmental History
Gregory Quenet
University of Versailles-Quentin-en-Yvelines
Narratives have the power of engagement and transformation. Bringing together people in a common
pattern, narratives can coalesce them around shared values and representations, interpretations of the
past and projections toward the future. Past natural disasters proved that a group struck by a catastrophe
and unable to produce narratives will have great difficulties to recover. A narrative is a powerful tool to
describe human acts within a network of relationships, processes and systems. The configuration of events
into a plot is as meaningful as the mathematical models and algorithms built by the natural sciences. This
literary form also provides us with intensive education opportunities about the meaning of change by
taking us into the heart of the human value system.
However, this reflexive approach needs a careful methodology. By writing stories about change, we
divide the causal relationship of an ecosystem with a rhetorical razor (William Cronon) that defines what
is included and excluded, relevant and irrelevant, empowered and disempowered. In the act of separating
a story from non-story events, we wield the most powerful, yet dangerous, tool of a narrative. A narrative
succeeds to the extent that it hides discontinuities, ellipses, and contradictory experiences that would
undermine the intended meaning of its story. Whatever its overt purpose, it cannot avoid a covert exercise
of power. It inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others.
Without a plot to organize the flow of events, everything happening on the planet will be much harder
even impossible to understand. Two main plots are possible in relation to environmental change. On the
one hand, we can narrate history as a story of improvement that is somehow more positive. On the other
hand, we can tell stories in which the plot eventually falls toward an ending that is more negative. These
places. Placed in a particular historical or ideological context, neither group of plots is innocent: both have
hidden agendas that influence what the narrative includes and excludes. So powerful are these agendas
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plots are cultural constructions, so deeply embedded in our language that they resonate far beyond local

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that not even the scholar as author entirely controls them.

What distinguishes stories from other forms of discourse is that they describe an action that begins,
continues over a well-defined period of time, and finally draws to a definite close, with consequences
that become meaningful because of their placement within the narrative. Completed action gives a story
its unity and allows us to evaluate and judge an act by its results. The moral of a story is defined by its
ending. As Aristotle remarked, the end is everywhere the chief thing. Narrative is a peculiarly human
way of organizing reality, and this has important implications for the way we approach the reality of
climate change.
Some non-human events can be said to have properties that conform to the Aristotelian beginningmiddle-end requirement of storytelling, as when an individual organism (or a species or a mountain or
even the universe itself) is born, persists and dies. One can tell stories about such things geologists
and evolutionary biologist often do but they lack the compelling drama that comes from having a
judgeable protagonist. Things in nature usually just happen, without raising questions of moral choice.
Many natural events lack even this much linear structure. Some are cyclical: the motions of the planets,
the seasons, or the rhythms of biological fertility and reproduction. Others are random: climate shifts,
earthquakes, genetic mutations, and other events, the causes of which remain hidden from us. One does
not automatically describe such things with narrative plots, and yet environmental histories, which purport
to set the human past in its natural context, all have plots. Nature and the universe do not tell stories; only
we do. Nature is unlike most other cultural subjects in lacking a clear voice of its own.
Future narratives face another important constraint in that scholars do not tell stories by themselves. They
write story as members of communities, and they purposely or unconsciously take those communities into
account as they work. People tell stories with each other and against each other in order to speak to each
other. Stories are made by intercommunications between tellers and readers.
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Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans:

A Historicized Account
Ranjan Chakrabarti
Vidyasagar University
The aim of the present research article is simple. It gives a rounded historicized account of the humantiger conflict in the Sundarbans, the mangrove tiger land in the Bengal delta. In the Sundarbans, the tiger
had always been at the centre of economic, social, cultural and religious life of the people. This was the
case in the past and it still is. The people of the Sundarbans had been considering the tiger as a vermin
since times immemorial. Here the local jungle deities like Dakshin Roy, the tiger god, and Banbibi are
worshipped by both the Hindus and Muslims.1
I. Human-wildlife conflict
The structure of human-wildlife conflict has undergone a qualitative change in the post- Second World
War era. Modern conservationist ideas have done away with (at least theoretically) subsistence and
defence hunting or hunting as sport in South Asia. Indiscriminate slaughter or lethal control of animals
does not take place in modern times.2 What bothers us in recent times is not so much the direct killing or
lethal control of animals by the humans but the continuous expansion of human settlements, industry and
1 The local people of the Sundarbans always give the tiger a very reverential treatment, they never utter the word bagh
(the Bengali word for tiger) instead they call the tiger Baramiya (senior headman) and the crocodile chhotamiyan (junior
headman); see Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar, The Sundarbans: Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals, New Delhi, 2010, passim;
also Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans, Delhi, 2009, passim.
2 The animal right activists and the animal liberation movements have played a significant role in this context. Peter Singer,
a leading spokesman for animal rights, bears the dubious honour of having made popular the term speciesism as an epithet to describe those most of us, he says who believe the differences are in kind, not just degree. The evocation of and
comparison to racism is explicit, see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation : A New Ethics For Our Treatment of Animals, New
York, 1975, passim. In the opening sentence of the volume Singer writes: This book is about the tyranny of the human
over non-human animals, p. ix.
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agriculture with the support of modern sophisticated technology. This is continuously eating up the habitat

Proceedings
of wild animals causing food shortage or threatening their lives in various ways. Elephant-train collision,
bird-aircraft collision, deer-automobile collisions symbolize this fundamental human-wildlife clash. Large
carnivores require larger habitats for their survival and with the shrinkage of the corridor their roads are
now crossing with the humans more frequently.3 It is against this backdrop that the history of the problem
of human-tiger conflict in the Sundarbans has to be understood. We shall see that apart from the shrinkage
of the corridor there are certain unique bio-geographic factors behind the human-tiger conflict in the
Sundarbans.
II. A Brief History of the Sundarbans
The Sundarbans has a unique history, nature and landscape4. It is half water and half land. It is a terrain
where land making has not yet come to an end. It is a place that had been alternately inhabited and
deserted. It is perhaps the only place on earth that is threatened by cyclones, tidal waves, lack of fresh
water, an unfriendly terrain, tigers, crocodiles and poisonous snakes. It is a unique tigerland where tigers
are usually described as confirmed man-eaters.
The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest and the only mangrove tiger land in the world where the
tiger occupies the pinnacle of both aquatic and terrestrial food web. The area lies south-east of the city
of Kolkata (Calcutta)5 in the 24 Parganas District of West Bengal and forms part of the Gangetic Delta
which borders the Bay of Bengal. Shared between two neighbouring countries, Bangladesh and India,
the larger part (62% of the total mangrove ecosystem) is situated in the southwest corner of Bangladesh.
The western boundary of the Bangladesh Sundarbans follows the Harinbhanga Raimangal Kalindi
river system and joins with the Indian Sundarbans.6 The total land area is 4,143 square kilometer and the
remaining water area is 1,874 square kilometer.
The Indian Sundarbans is one of the tiger reserves under the Project Tiger launched in 1973 to save tiger
3 See M.R.Conover, Resolving Human-Wildlife Conflicts: The Science of Wildlife Damage Management, New York, 2002,
passim.
4 The nearest equivalent of the Sundarbans, in more ways than one, is the Everglades National Park in Florida (USA), see
Michael Grunwald, The Swamp : The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, New York, 2007.
5 The Indian city of Calcutta gave up its British colonial name with effect from January 2001 and came to be known by its
original name Kolkata, see The Telegraph, 2 January, Kolkata, 2001, also http://www.highbeam.com/doc/IGI-68590471.
html
6 India was partitioned in 1947 which resulted in the creation of two independent nation states India and Pakistan. The
colonial province of Bengal was divided into East Pakistan and the Indian province of West Bengal. East Pakistan broke
away from Pakistan in 1971 and became another independent nation Bangladesh, see Willem van Schendel, The Bengal
Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, London, 2005.
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from extinction.7 In terms of biodiversity, the Sundarbans contrasts the other large mangrove forests for
its extraordinary diverse wildlife and designated as UNESCOs world network of International Biosphere
Reserves since 2001. The biosphere reserve programme in the Sundarbans originally started in the early
1970s and it was set up with the basic objective of conserving and developing a new knowledge base
about the biodiversity of a region to emphasize that humans are an integral part of the ecosystem and
that local communities should be actually integrated with and brought into the orbit of the conservation
programme. This is all the more necessary in view of the fact that some three million people live in this
biosphere reserve. They depend directly on forest and forest-based resources since agriculture is not
productive enough due to saline water. The core area of the Sundarban National Park has been designated
as a World Heritage site. Besides production functions of the forest, it provides natural protection to life
and properties of the coastal population in cyclone prone Bangladesh and southern West Bengal.8 This
unique natural zone has a unique history.
III. Tiger and the Raj
It is not difficult to reconstruct a rough sketch of the general history of the Sundarbans during the precolonial period but the detailed history of the tiger-human conflict in that region is available only after the
advent of British colonial rule. This limitation is applicable to the history of the tiger-human conflict in the
entire South Asian sub-continent.
While encountering the orient, the Europeans developed certain stereotypes in their own perceptions of
the Indian sub-continent which had an enduring legacy. The image of the tiger is one such stereotype.
The essential elements of the tigers image are cruelty, furtiveness and treacherous elegance. The British
response to the tiger is an amazing compound of fear, hatred and admiration. The British saw the tiger as
7 Mahesh Rangarajan, Indias Wildlife History, Delhi, 1998, pp. 95-107. The Project Tiger initially started as a task force set
up within the Indian Board of Wildlife chaired by Dr Karan Singh, minister for health and family planning. It was precisely at this time that global voluntary groups made their way into the Indian environmental scene. Most important among
them was the World Wildlife Fund or WWF.
8 Rathindranath De, Sundarbans, Delhi, 1990, pp. 1-4. Recent experience of cyclones and storms shows how important
such natural protections are in neutralizing the impact of storms or cyclones. Haiti was hit by deadly tropical storms in
May and September 2004. Nearly 5,000 Haitians lost their lives and homes during these severe storms. The cleaning of
trees in the Haitian highlands had aggravated the tragedy that shook Haiti. Destitute and lacking alternative sources of
fuel, Haitis poor have cut down most of their trees for fuelwood and charcoal. In doing so they have lost a valuable service provided by forested watersheds-the moderation of local flood runoff and the prevention of massive mudslides. Interestingly the same storms that devastated Haiti had less impact on neighboring Puerto Rico, where highland watersheds are
mostly forested. For further details see Sandra Postel, Safeguarding Freshwater Ecosystems, in State of the World 2006 :
A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, New York and London, 2006, pp. 41-60.
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a magnificent animal who establishes its overlord ship of the Indian jungle. The craze for tiger-skin and

Proceedings
skins of other big cats spread far beyond India. The art of taxidermy9 developed to amazing proportions.
The lifelike taxidermised tiger heads in the drawing room wall of the sahib was made to look alive, scary
and fearful. The practice of displaying shikar-souvenir as drawing room show-piece came to be intimately
associated with the culture of the ruling race or class and with the memories of the Raj. The cost of a
medium size shikar expedition in the nineteenth century would be around Rs.500.10 The amount included
the cost of sending the railway parcel of the skin to Vaningen and Vaningen of Mysore for finally dressing
up the tiger for the sahibs drawing room.11
As British power in India expanded the information as to the deaths caused by tiger began to pour in.
By the second half of the nineteenth century it was estimated that 1600 people were killed by tiger each
year.12 Again, it was estimated that each tiger was capable of killing cattle worth between 300 pounds
and 600 pounds in a single year.13 This was precisely why the tiger was defined as a vermin. This status,
shared with the other big cats, was emphasized by the fact that they were such successful and prolific
animals, inhabiting a great variety of habitats, from the far south to the mountains of the north. It became
imperative from the point of view of the British colonial rulers to order the bad tiger in particular. This
resolution to order the tiger was actually an integral part of a much broader strategy of power which
sprang from the spirit of European enlightenment and the urge of the colonial rulers to superimpose new
cultural patters and sensibilities on the dominated society. The tiger, therefore, had to be done away with
to ensure the security of individual life and property which was one of the most publicized aspects of the
ideologies of Raj.14
9 Taxidermy is the technology associated with processing of animal skin. It is the art of preparing, stuffing and mounting
animal skin used to decorate the homes of the richer classes. Contemporary newspapers and handbooks on shikar featured
regular advertisements by the taxidermists. Cuthbertson and Harper were well known taxidermists of Calcutta. They ran
their regular office at 10, Government Place, Calcutta.

Y.
D.
Gundevia, In the Districts of the Raj, Bombay, 1992, pp. 205-6.

Ibid., p.
206.

J.M.Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, Manchester, 1988, pp. 168-98.

Ibid.,
p.
180.

Any number of documents can be cited to substantiate the statement. In the colonial accounts we find the image of the
man-eater or the bad tiger. The contemporary literature on hunting, authored mostly by white shikaris, the forest department proceedings, the government gazette notifications - all seemed to be somewhat obsessed with the image of the
man-eating tiger and the probable causes of the change over from animal to human flesh. The tiger, if it was a man-eater,
had to be ordered, the wild orient had to be disciplined and brought under reason. This is the voice of enlightenment and
this voice comes in very clearly in Kiplings Jungle Book: The law of the jungle, which never orders anything without
a reason, forbids every beast to eat man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt
outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe, the real reason for this is that man killing means, sooner or later; the arrival of white men on elephants, with guns []. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest
and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.
It deserves mention here that Shere Khan, the villainous character in the Jungle Book, was lame or physically crippled
and inclined to man-eating. Thus the tiger shot would have to be preferable a man-eater. The tiger, whose behav-
566
IV. The Royal Bengal Tiger of the Sundarbans

Hundreds of Europeans on board the Calcutta bound vessels cruising through the waters of Hooghly,
keeping the Sagar Island on their right, hardly noticed the Sundarbans, they were mere passengers
who looked yet did not observe. Those who attempted to describe the landscape did so carelessly, and
rather indifferently as the site appeared to be discouraging and grim. The passengers, who arrived in the
eighteenth century unenthusiastically, recorded the mud-banks, flooded low lying jungles, sandbanks
and the reddish brown waters of the surroundings through which they passed. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century however colonial knowledge about the Indian landscape had advanced and generated
a new curiosity among the Britons. There are two major threads that run through the texts relating to the
Sundarban landscape penned by these voyagers 1) it was viewed as a dangerous terrain, a place of deadly
fever, of ferocious tigers and crocodiles, 2) the region became identified with the barbaric practice of
infanticide practiced by the Hindu devotees in the Sagar Island.15
The earliest concrete reference to the notoriety of the tigers of the Sundarbans is to be located in the
writing of Francois Bernier who visited the Sundarbans in 1665. Here is a passage about the beast from
the Travels in the Mogul Empire:
Among these islands, it is in many places dangerous to land and great care must be had that the boat,
which during the night is fastened to a tree, be kept at some distance from the shore, for it constantly
happens that some person or another falls prey to tigers. These ferocious animals are very apt, it is said, to
enter in to the boat itself while people are asleep, and to carry away some victim who, if we are to believe
the boatmen of the country, generally happen to be the stoutest and fattest of the party.16 Colonial records
are packed with tales of European deaths when people were seized by tiger on journeys, on picnics,
iour does not conform to reason or to the supposed Law of Jungle may well be the target of the shikari; Cf. Rudyard
Kipling,Jungle Book,Mahwah (New Jersey),1985, pp. 4-5. If man-eaters could not be found, they could be manufactured. Even normal tigers, if killed by the shikari by mistake, could be constructed as man-eaters! If shikar-texts are
minutely examined, we find that many of the shikar expeditions against the man-eaters clearly conform to a recognizable paradigm-the white shikari responding to the call of the helpless villagers and taking charge of the bad tiger. Percy
Wyndham, who was the Collector of Mirzapur, the district with the reputation of being a first-rate shikar district, and
later the Commissioner of the Kumaon Division, was more popularly known in the district as Bagmaroo sahib. He was
ever ready with his rifle when the villagers complained to him about a tiger harassing them or playing havoc with their
cattle in the village, Cf. Y. D. Gundevia, In the Districts of the Raj, Bombay, 1992, p. 167.

Some of the earliest observers like Buchanan Hamilton who had traveled and botanized on the eastern shores of the Bay
of Bengal, however, found the area full of luxuriant vegetation, Cf. David Arnold, op.cit., p. 84.

Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, London, 1914, p. 24.
567
Session 5
or out hunting, as many graves in European cemeteries would testify. The most famous such incident

Proceedings
was the death of Sir Hector Munros son in the Sundarbans in 1792.17 Munros seizure by a tiger was
a commemorated in Staffordshire ornaments and may well be the origin of the remarkable mechanical
toy Tipus tiger, taken at the capture of Seringapatnam in 1799 and displayed in turn at the East India
Companies offices, the Indian Office and since 1879 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There are certain
marked differences between the Sundarban tiger or Bengal tiger and his cousin the Indian tiger. The
unique mangrove swamp and the special ecological effects of the tidal waters of the sea undeterred by
any flow of fresh water have turned the Bengal tiger a born fighter and survivor. A special feature of the
mangrove habitats is that its entire land mass gets submerged during a cyclone and the land animals have
to play amphibious role. Here the tiger swims and swims very well.
V. Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans in the Colonial Period
The British colonial authorities were quick to grasp the point that the Sundarbans, if reclaimed, could be
transformed into a revenue yielding area. We shall now turn to see how this motive to maximize revenue
triggered off a period of tiger-human conflict in the Sundarbans. The history of reclaiming the Sundarbans
forest is fascinating. At the time of British East India Companys acquisition of political power in India
the forests of the Sundarbans extended to the vicinity of Calcutta. The initial attempts of reclamation in
the eighteenth century were unsuccessful. The reclamation work took off in full swing from the second
decade of the nineteenth century. It was indeed a very difficult task. One of the major challenges came
from the tigers. The land reclamation project achieved very little success due to the depredation of tigers.
The coolies (workers) had to be accompanied by shikaris (hunters) who fired their guns occasionally
to frighten away the tigers that abounded in the forest. The tiger often attacked the forest clearers and
committed such fearful havoc that work had to be temporarily postponed at times. L.S.S. OMalley
recorded in the Bengal District Gazetteer:
The writer has come across a well authenticated instance where such a man-eater charged into a line of
some 6 or 8 men, working along a bund, at about 8 or 9am carried of a man in their midst.18 On many
occasions the project had to be completely given up in the face of hostile tigers and the land already
reclaimed would eventually again turn into jungle.19

Mackenzie,
op.cit.,
p.
179.

L.S.S. OMalley, Bengal District Gazetteer, 24 Parganas, Calcutta, 1914, pp. 19-20.

Thomas Bacon, First Impression and Studies from Nature in Hindustan, London, 1837, pp. 2-3. Bishop Heber arrived
on the mouth of river Hooghly in 1823. Thomas Bacon reached the fringes of the Sundarbans on his way to Calcutta
in 1831. Bacons account too confirms this trend. He noticed that though the adventurers had cleared small spaces and
erected a few shabby houses, but tigers, more than once had driven out the enterprising settlers. He too found a flat and
swampy shore with scattered tall trees and thick jungle. With a large glass he spotted something like deer grazing amid
568
W.W.Hunters representation of the Sundarbans as a fearful place a sort of drowned land, covered with
jungle, smitten by malaria, and infested by wild beasts - brought the earlier emergent descriptions of
the area to its culmination. In his 60 page seminal essay, published in 1875, Hunter endorsed the earlier
accounts and portrayed the Sundarbans as a sort of drowned land, broken up by swamps, intersected by
a thousand river channels and maritime backwaters, but gradually dotted, as the traveler recedes from
the seaboard, with clearings and patches of rice land.20 The tract is one vast alluvial plain, where the
process of land-formation has not yet ceased, he noted. The forest in the Sundarbans is very dense and
walking on the jungle is difficult due to the swampy watery land, he opined. For a visitor every moment
of his journey through the vast watery wilderness, with the tigers and crocodiles lurking here and there,
was an exploration of the mystic tropical jungle. Some parts of the interior of the Sundarbans, in the
past, were impenetrable (the southern interior). With trees and brushwood intertwined and dangerous
looking creeks running into the darkness in all directions, the shimmering tidal waters bordered by the
mangrove trees, it appeared to be a world of fantasy to Englishmen like Hunter.21 The Sundarbans was
yet another space where the European selves and the Indian other started interacting as entities that
remained fundamentally the same at the end of the road. They have dialectically constituted one anothers
understanding or ideas of a given space. Thus the colonial constructions of the Sundarbans were hybrids
that were partly colonial and partly indigenous and often neither of the two. The Raj in nature was neither
wholly empire nor entirely native. The indigenous people of the Sundarbans too considered the terrain
as difficult and dangerous, a place full of banda (bushes) and kada (mud) and infested with tigers and
crocodiles.22 Thus there were occasions when the indigenous and foreign perceptions were in tune with
each other. The combinations often resulted in the creation of new ecological or environmental ideas
relating to management and exploitation of the then little known natural world.
To ensure smooth collection of forest revenue from the Sundarbans, it became very urgent to protect the
lives of woodcutters. The woodcutters and honey gatherers entered the forest at a particular time of the
year. A party of woodcutters usually consisted of 15/20 men and 1/2 fakirs.23 None of them would go
into the forest to cut wood unless accompanied by the fakir who is supposed to protect them from the
the swampy grassy place. He was told of instances of tigers swimming off from the coast to a considerable distance.

W.
W.
Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol. I, District of 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, London, 1875, pp. 28790.

Ibid.

Sibsankar Mitra, Sundarbaner Arjan Sardar (in Bengali), Kolkata, 1955, pp. 3-5.

It is widely believed in the Sundarbans that the fakirs have the power to tame the tigers and thereby protect the people
whom they would accompany.

Hunter, op.cit., pp. 311-12.
569
Session 5
tigers.24 They would start their work only after making an offering to the jungle deities like Ban Bibi or

Proceedings
Dakshin Roy.25 The forest revenue from the area continued to rise though at a heavy cost. The Baramiyan
was taking a heavy toll. Between 1881 and 1912 more than 2500 people were killed by the tigers in
the Sundarbans. 26The actual number was higher as only 50% of such cases were actually reported to
the authorities. Moreover, the figure does not include the cases which were brought to the notice of the
District Administration alone and not subsequently reported to the Forest Department. In 1885 alone,
116 woodcutters were carried away from a single para or station and the work came to a standstill.27
The matter had reached such an alarming proportion, that the Secretary to the Government of India,
Department of Revenue and Agriculture wrote to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal (No. 430 F,
Dt. Simla, 1913):
Apart from the loss of life, this state of affairs interferes greatly with the proper working of the
valuable Sundarbans forest and the Government of India trusts that no efforts will be spared to
reduce the number of these pests.28
The government was convinced that all or most of the tigers of the Sundarbans were man-eaters and the
destruction in them of as many tigers as possible appeared to be the only way of lessening the number of
casualties. But, the encounter with the beast, on the ground, was mostly left to the indigenous shikaris,
who were always looked upon as incompetent, unskilled and effeminate. The government adopted
a policy of rewards to induce the indigenous shikaris to destroy the tigers. Under the sanction of the
government, in the notification dated the 16th November, 1883, published in the Calcutta Gazette, the
Rangers and Foresters in charge of the 8 chief revenue stations in the Sundarbans reserved forest, were
authorized to pay rewards for killing tigers. In 1883 the amount of the reward was Rs. 50 for each full
grown tiger and Rs. 10 for each tiger cub. The shikaris were required to produce the skin and skull of the
animal to the forest officials to receive the reward.29 The value of the reward was raised from time to time
and any such increase in the value of the reward was intimately associated with fresh depredation by tigers
in the jungle. In 1906, the amount of the reward was raised to Rs. 100 for each full grown tiger and Rs. 20
for each tiger cub. Again in 1909 the amount was further raised to Rs. 200. This was done in view of the
fact that more than 500 people lost their lives in the 36 months between 1906 and 1909.30
There took place a large scale slaughter of this magnificent animal in the Sundarbans. This researcher

Ibid.

PRF, 1868-1921.

PRF for 1884-85,
p. 57.

PRF for 1911-12,
p.
9.

PRF for 1883-84,
p.
92.

PRF for 1881-82 through 1912-13.
570
has compiled a figure to demonstrate the magnitude of this large scale massacre of the tiger population
with the direct patronage of the colonial government. Between 1881 and 1912 more than 2400 full grown
tigers were killed in the Sundarbans.31 As a part of the flat out attempt to wipe out the man-eaters of the
Sundarbans, free tiger shooting passes were distributed to almost everyone who applied for it without
paying any heed to the ability, skill, experience or even identity of those self-styled shikaris. According
to one available estimate between 1918 and 1926, 298 free tiger shooting permits were issued to native
shikaris.32
This policy of mass slaughter of tigers had only a moderate effect on the number of casualties. In fact,
annual statistics of casualties at times showed an upward trend, though there can be little doubt that the
tiger population in the Sundarbans continued to dwindle. By 1928 the Forest Department itself came to
acknowledge that tigers have become comparatively scarce in the Sundarbans Division33 and it decided
to reduce the number of free tiger shooting permits. The authorities did not realize however, that, what
was at issue was not the number of tigers in the jungle but the prey-predator gap which accounted for
the attack on the woodcutters. The crux of the problem and the man-eating behavior of the animal could
be attributed to the fast declining deer population, the natural prey of tigers. The shikaris ostensibly bent
on shooting tigers for reward were unable to resist the temptation of shooting deer whenever they got
a favourable opportunity. The official reports testify to the fact that deer poaching in the Sundarbans
reached an alarming proportion between 1915 and 1940. In 1919, when there was a remarkable decrease
in the number of persons killed by tigers the Conservator of Forest acknowledged this point in his annual
report and emphasized on the necessity of keeping down deer poaching in the Sundarbans.34 The Annual
Report on Game Preservation for 1939 informs us that the permit holders were allowed to shoot one
deer per trip and the number of deer killed in that year was 448. It was discovered later that the shooters
wounded about 896 deer. The majority of which most probably, died in agony from maggot infested
wounds.35 Instances like this can be multiplied. Thus, the permit holders did shoot for meat or profit in the
Sundarbans. The forest officials acknowledged in their reports that the number of guns licensed, in the
village bordering the forest, was very considerable and that it was one of the root cause of deer poaching.
One forest official lamented in 1919:

Ibid.

PRF for 1918-19, 1926-27.

PRF for 1928-29.

PRF for 1916-17.
35 Annual Report on Game Preservation in Bengal for the Year Ending 31st March 1939, Calcutta, 1940, p. 9.
571
Session 5
It is now certain that had guns never been allowed so freely in former years, there would have been

Proceedings
sufficient game to ensure that the tigers did not take to man-eating and all loss of human life and
revenue of previous years would never have occurred.36
Another factor which frequently contributed to the periodic enlargement of the prey predator gap was
tropical cyclonic storms which bring tidal waves and floods in the Sundarbans. The monsoon in this
part of Bengal consists of a series of cyclonic depressions, which follow each other in more or less close
succession up the Bay of Bengal. The October cyclones are examples of the most intense tropical storms.
Such cyclonic storms occasionally resulted in the flooding of the Sundarbans, thereby dwindling the deer
population.37 Such floods occurred in the Sundarbans in 1909 and again in 1919. The cyclone of 1919
features prominently in the forest department records. In 1919, the authorities attributed the increase in
the number of men killed by tigers to the cyclone which made natural food scarce.38 The report states
two incidents in which tigers climbed into sleeping shelters built on machans and the lifting of one of the
inmates on each occasion. This aggressiveness, the report recorded, is attributed to the fact that enormous
number of deer was killed or drowned in the storm wave which accompanied the cyclone of October last,
which upset the balance between tigers and their natural prey, and induced them to attack men.39
VI. Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans in the Post-colonial Era
Today the Sundarbans is primarily known as a tiger reserve. Interestingly, the setting up of a tiger reserve
and its maintenance in this unique mangrove swamp involved the handling of a whole range of unknowns
and the production of new knowledge. It was imperative to find answers to a series of questions like how
many square kilometers would be assigned to per tiger, what kind of plants would be preferred, how to
ensure the availability of tigers natural food without causing any harm to the biodiversity of this unique
zone, and so on. The Sundarbans Project Tiger itself was a project of managing an uncharted territory, but
this endeavour, in turn, triggered off new problems, which were not anticipated.
Politics, capitalism and science all function on global connections. Each enlarges its sweep to satisfy
universal aspirations. But, as they move on they change and reshape themselves in the face of the onground local encounters.40 In this section I will try to demonstrate how the post-colonial Sundarbans
reserve can offer an excellent opportunity to test this encounter between the global and local and how the

PRF for 1918-19.

OMalley, op.cit.,
p.
133
.
38 Annual Report on Game Preservation in Bengal for 1909-10, p. 20.

Ibid.,
p.
1.

Anna L. Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, 2005, pp. 1-2.
572
unpredictable effects of the global encounter across difference lead to the construction of new objects of
knowledge which in its turn again call for management and investigation. 41
Environmental awareness and environmental politics would be an ideal space to draw up a balance
sheet of the achievements of the universal. It is in this particular domain that a rudimentary structure of
globalization first started to surface in the post-Second World War era. The concept of ecology originated
in the nineteenth century and was intended to cover the study of the supposed equilibrium between
organisms and the external world. Ecology, however, was not considered as a very important science until
after World War II. The emergence of the post-war North American urban industrial complex brought
forth the large-scale development of ecological and environmental knowledge. In the 1950s and 1960s
environmentalism had primarily remained as a social movement of the North. It made the North aware
of the ongoing degradation of global environment and of the fact that the United States manufacture
and sell across the globe a pesticide like the DDT that can eventually end up in the bodies of penguins
living innocently at the South Pole. Environmentalism gradually adopted trans-boundary approaches in
the 1970s and 1980s drawing recognition to problems like pollution, climate change, species loss that
could not be contained in a single country. One of the earliest global manifestations of this environmental
concern was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972
and the subsequent launching of the United Nations Environment Programme.42 When this campaign
reached the South, the Northern conservation priorities like saving tigers, rescuing elephants or protecting
biodiversities were superimposed on its environmental agenda.
It was strongly urged by the European wildlife biologists that only in the forests of India and the mangrove
swamps of Bangladesh were there tigers in sufficient numbers to warrant an effort to save this endangered
species. At its Tenth General meeting in New Delhi in 1969, the International Union for Conservation
of Nature resolved that the estimated 2000 members of the South Asian sub-species (Panthera Tigris)
in India, East Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan were a viable breeding population. The Indian political and
scientific opinion too proved to be favourable. India imposed a ban on tiger shooting in 1970, the Wildlife

This issue of the engagement of the universal with the local has been approached by a number of scholars from various
standpoints. Michael Adams (Beyond Yellowstone Conservation and Indigenous Rights in Australia and Sweden, in
Garth Cant et al (eds), Discourses and Silences, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005) saw the problem in terms of an interplay between the two fundamental aspects: human-nature relationship and western-indigenous relationship. He shows
the two are linked. Other recent works like Gunnel Cederlof (ed.), Ecological Nationalisms, Delhi, 2006, too saw the
problem as a contest between issues and spaces within and beyond the nation. Anna L. Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography
of Global Connection, op.cit. saw it in terms of friction resulting in dialogues across difference, between the local and the
universal.

Donald Worster
(ed.), The Ends of the Earth, Cambridge, 1988, Introduction.
573
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Protection Act was passed in 1972, the Indian Board for Wildlife was set up in 1972 and the Project Tiger

Proceedings
was launched in 1973 in 9 reserve forests. The Project Tiger initially started as a task force set up within
the Indian Board of Wildlife chaired by Dr Karan Singh, Minister for Health and Family Planning.43 It was
precisely at this time that global voluntary groups made their way into the Indian environmental scene.
Most important among them was the World Wildlife Fund or WWF. 44 The tiger proved to be good choice
because of its existence in different regions across India. It helped to broaden the ecological scheme in
various ways. Its protection also involved the protection of tigers natural food supply and it thereby
helped to broaden the project in multiple directions in the future. Preserving Indias wildlife was integral
to a nationalist project to save its emblem. Project Tiger played a key role in broadening ecological
perspective. It was clearly a single-species scheme to start with, but the position accorded the tiger in the
food chains generated a logic that took the scheme further and started flashing new light on other species
like deer, lion, monkey, rhino and on water resources and vegetation as well.
The implementation of the Project Tiger involved human displacement as many villages were removed
from the buffer zone and people were allowed to remain only in a few buffer areas. Hundreds of people
were removed for each tiger being protected. The ideal size of the reserves as suggested by international
wildlife biologists would be 3000 square km, but India with an ever increasing population had no other
option but to opt for less than 1500 square kilometers for each of these reserves on an average. In the
case of Sundarbans the size is even smaller. The task force predicted that with the increase of the number
of tigers they would eventually start roaming outside the core and the buffer zone.45 In the case of
Sundarbans and other reserves the prediction has come true. Clashes between Forest Department staff and
the local villagers in the Sundarbans are very common. The root of these clashes range from poaching,
fishing to human deaths caused by the intrusion of tigers.
The conflict between humans and tigers in the Sundarbans also originates in the socio-economic condition
of the local people and the man-eating habit 46 of the tigers. The per capita income in the Sundarbans is
estimated to be less than half that of the state average. In the struggle for survival thousands of people
enter the forest braving the crocodiles, sharks and tigers in order to gather honey, cut woods and catch
fish. This brings them face to face with the tigers. Sometimes the tigers enter the villages near the buffer

Paul Greenough, Pathogens,
Pugmarks,
and
Political Emergency, Paul Greenough and Anna L.Tsing

(eds),
Nature in
the Global South, op.cit., pp. 201-230, also Mahesh Rangarajan, Indias Wildlife History, Delhi, 1997, pp. 94-107.

Mahesh Rangarajan,
op.cit.,
pp.
94-107. The WWF pledged over a million dollars to help save the tiger in Asia. Established in the early 1960s, the society was a major catalyst for governmental action in India, where the Indian Prime Minister readily agreed to personally supervise the project.

Paul Greenough, op.cit.,
p.
211.

This man-eating habit has been evoked by the periodic shortage of natural food-chain. The man-eating habit of the tigers
in the Sundarbans, therefore, can be attributed to the unique biogeographic environment.
574
zones and take away men, women or their cattle. It is a place where tigers kill hundreds of people a
year, but since they are a protected species, killing a tiger that has been preying on a village brings in the
government authorities to mete out punishment. Getting killed by a tiger was a terrifying prospect for the
near and dear ones of the dead. The new widow and the victims children are forbidden to cry and taught
to say their father had died of diarrhea because if exposed the family members are forced to pay for the
dead trespasser and are treated like criminals.
Amitav Ghosh in his remarkable prize-winning book Hungry Tide gives a graphic account of this conflict
between the indigenous people of the Sundarbans on the one hand and the tiger on the other. He describes
how a tiger was accidentally trapped in a livestock pen while trying to take away a calf. An angry mob
quickly gathered and the incapacitated animal was attacked with sharpened staves. At first one of the
boys thrust a sharpened bamboo pole through a window and blinded it. Piya, the American cetologist, the
central character of the novel, tried her best to save the animal but in vain. She was helpless in the face of
a hostile crowd. Even her associates Horen and Fokir sided with the mob and participated in the killing.
Such occurrences are very common in the Sundarbans. The incidence described in the novel is illustrative
of a fundamental and yet delicate issue that continues to surface prominently in the global debates relating
to management of nature. The setting up of the tiger reserve led to the creation of a host of new unknowns
including the human-tiger conflict. The conversation between Kanai and Piya regarding the killing of the
tiger that followed later brings out the essence of the several flashpoints of this complex problem.47
The issue of the tiger-human conflict in the Sundarbans, depicted in the above story, has its roots in the
policy pursued by both the colonial and the post-colonial state in India. The colonial forest policy, geared
by global capitalism, led to the dislocation and degradation of the local people and the post-colonial
project of tiger conservation further contributed to their misery. The forest policy of the post-colonial
state has excluded the indigenous people from the Sundarbans tiger reserve. They have been deprived
of the right to use the forest and it has preserved the forest only for the animals. To avoid the hostilities
of the local people towards the state policy of conservation, the involvement of resident people in the
management of resources has been recommended by global agencies. The biosphere reserve programme
and the conservation of tigers in the Sundarbans are based rhetorically on a highly participative approach
of the local communities. But the on-ground implementation of the tiger conservation had neglected the

Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, Delhi, 2004, pp. 289-295. The issue of tiger-human conflict in the Sundarbans is wellknown and an important issue in the debate relating to conservation. Amitav Ghosh, though a fiction writer, has undertaken extensive field-trips to the core area of the Sundarbans and there is ample evidence to show that it is an accurate
depiction of reality. The present researcher has verified this during his field trips to the Sundarbans.
575
Session 5
enormous local knowledge about ecosystem and wildlife the people of Sundarbans have. Thus the gap

Proceedings
between the universal official rhetoric of conservation and the actual formulation of policies aimed at
empowering local communities has widened. The forest officials congratulate themselves on the rapid
increase of tiger population but all is not well in the Sundarbans. Smugglers and poachers, supported by
political and business interests and sheltered by local communities, raid the protected forests for valuable
exports.48 As the local people are hostile to the official conservators, the poachers operate with ease. State
surveillance in the protected forest is mainly through the Forest Department, whose officials were known
to exploit their position for private gain. They played a pivotal role in poaching timber, deer meat and tiger
skins. The Sundarbans also provided shelter for those who lived off river robbery and who exploited the
existence of the border to develop two new specializations: kidnapping and piracy.49
Conclusion
In the Sundarbans, the tiger has always been at the centre of the problem of managing this unique natural
world and the problem of ordering the frictions between the local and the global has been essentially a
problem of managing the tiger-human conflict. I have tried to demonstrate in this essay that this project
of managing the tiger-human conflict has a long history. The structure of tiger-human conflict in the
Sundarbans has undergone a qualitative transformation in the postcolonial era. In early British India
the Sundarbans remained as a mystic drowned land, dangerous, unknown and difficult to manage
or order. In course of time however, the Europeans realized its potential as a hidden natural resource and
took necessary measures to transform it into a revenue yielding forest. This job led them to embark upon
the project of taming the tigers. But the task of taming the tigers was left in the hands of the indigenous
shikaris (hunters). The British rulers were convinced that the local people armed with sound indigenous
knowledge and would be better able to combat the man-eaters in this dangerous terrain. The postcolonial state, on the other hand, had excluded the local inhabitants and their knowledge in their project of
conservation. To the locals, managing the tiger threat could have been simpler than facing intrusions of the
colonial or the modern state at different points of history.

Contemporary Indian newspapers like Anandabazar (Kolkata, India), The Statesman (Kolkata, India) and The Telegraph
(Kolkata, India) are packed with relevant information regarding lawlessness and tiger poaching in the Sundarbans National Park. In the 1990s, the trade in the skin of Royal Bengal Tigers, was extremely lucrative as the Bangladeshi and
Indian elites were prepared to pay large sums of money for this exclusive item of interior decoration. The situation in
Indian and Bangladesh Sundarbans is more
or
less identical. Big cat is big business. China functions as the manufacturing hub for medicines made from tiger body parts. The poaching boom in the Sundarbans can be attributed to this
international Chinese medicine trade. After adequate processing in China, they are exported to UK, USA, Australia and
Japan. According to one report, it may be possible to kill a tiger with the help of poachers by spending only 5,000 Indian
rupees, which would fetch $50,000 from the international market; see The Times of India, October 12, 2005.

Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, London, 2005, p. 274.
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The shortsightedness of official conservation policy in independent India has reflected the disrespect
for the enormous indigenous knowledge of the local communities in managing the tiger-threat. This
indigenous knowledge is used by the officials when convenient and then discarded but never stored for
use in the future. The relevance of traditional knowledge of biological resources needs to be understood
in the context of the social and cultural milieu of the entire community including the surrounding habitats.
But unfortunately, the local communities have never been asked to be a part of the decision-making
process. The universal rhetoric of conservation and its implementation created new complexities which in
their turn have alienated the local communities. This alienation of the indigenous people from the official
project of conservation has made the new unanticipated crises more unmanageable in the Sundarbans.
Professional foresters, wildlife biologists and other experts, who were involved in the policy making that
led to the final implementation of the Project Tiger had failed to foresee the pervasiveness of the tigerhuman conflict in the Sundarbans in the long run. The general impression that can be gathered from the
official literature relating to the size and extent of the reserve may appear to be comprehensive in terms of
classification or quantification. But the realities on the ground are different. The forces of industrialization
in a globalised world have been continuously threatening this reserve in recent times. Ever increasing
human settlements have occupied a large space in the buffer zones of the Sundarban National Park. The
decrease of fresh water flow has increased the salinity of water and seriously disturbed the ecosystem of
the region. The increasing in flow of city effluents from the nearby city of Kolkata is further contributing
to the problem. Its magnitude has become alarming, as a large number of water bodies in nearby urban
areas that previously acted as natural filters, have disappeared as real estate promoters convert them into
housing estates. As a result the city effluents are now directly received by the biosphere reserve and are
causing great harm to the mangrove forest and the natural food chains. This is exerting some impact on
the already existing man-eating habit of the Sundarban tiger and the consequential intensification of the
tiger-human conflict in this mangrove forest. Species of fishes and other water lives may soon disappear
in both Indian and Bangladesh Sundarbans. Even 150 years ago, the Sundarbans was the home to the one
horn Indian rhino, the Javan rhino, wild buffaloes and river dolphins. All are now extinct. Interestingly
enough, the problems like tiger-human conflict, species loss or the general degradation of the unique
biogeographic environment of the Sundarbans took place under the ideological umbrella of the global
projects like biosphere reserve, project tiger, or eco-tourism.
Thus the interior of the Sundarbans and the ongoing changes therein, still remain unmanaged. The
intrusion of the colonial state, the implementation of the Project tiger by the post-colonial state or the
kind of misery on the local people of the Sundarbans and further aggravated the problem of tiger-human
conflict. As far as the state responses to the issue of forest use were and are concerned, there seems to
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introduction of the biosphere reserve programme under the forceful international pressure inflicted a new

Proceedings
be little fundamental difference between the colonial and post-colonial state. To the locals, managing
the tiger threat could have been simpler than handling the intrusions of the state at different points of
history. During the Raj the slogan was kill the tiger but with the coming of the Project Tiger the slogan
had changed into save the tiger, but the saving of the tiger was to be carried out again at the cost of a
renewed tiger-human conflict in a far greater magnitude than ever before.
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The 2nd
Proceedings

MEST/NRF: Healing Humanities in Korea
1. T
he Humanities Policy and Their Social Contributions in Korea
/ Kidong Song (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology)
2. H
umanities Therapy: Theory and Practice
/ Young E. Rhee (Kangwon National University)
3. T
he Division Trauma of Koreans and Orality Healing
/ Jong Kun Kim (Konkuk University)
4. D
eficiency, Expression and Mind Healing: Focusing on Selective
Mutism
/ Sunmi Hong (Wonkwang University)
The Humanities Policy and Their Social Contributions in Korea
Kidong Song
Ministry of Education, Science and Technology
I. Introduction
1. Crises Facing Korean Society and the Humanistic Healing
In December 2011, a fourteen-year-old boy jumped out of his apartment veranda, leaving behind a note
describing vividly the horrible violence he had suffered for the previous nine months at school. Since
then, Korean society has been undergoing the year of 2012, as before, in the turmoil of school violence.
In addition, sexual crimes against children and youths have steeply increased in number from 857 in 2007
to 2,053 in 2011. Sexual violence, where there was a case at Gwangju Inhwa School for the HearingImpaired in 2005, was reignited as a hot social issue by the film The Crucible, which was watched by
about 4.6 million people. In addition to the direct violence, a number of socio-structural contradictions
such as high rates of suicide and divorce as well as the polarization between the rich and the poor have
caused sufferings to us all. How can these sufferings be healed?
Billions of people in the world live a bustling life as they are born, grow old, get sick, and die. Although
they are all mortal after a short span of life, the fact that they exist in this world for a certain period of
time is undeniable. Whether high or low in social status, rich or poor, or even good or evil, each and every
person has an equal right and valuable worth as human beings. In this sense, we have to give a warm
helping hand constantly to the socially weak around us.1 However, the reality is so formidable that a lot of
1 Jeonju University News. 19 September 2012. Cited from a column written by Kim Seung-jong, Dean of the College of
the Humanities: The humanities are based on the spirit of love and care for the socially underprivileged, which ultimately
leads us toward the road to true happiness.
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people drop out of the social competition and become hostile to the society which frustrates them. They

Proceedings
never admit to their own lack of ability or regret their own faults; on the contrary, at every opportunity
they undertake a bigger retaliation against those who are presumed to forsake them. How can our society
control them? Can they be changed if we take such strong and harsh measures of punishmentssuch as
electronic anklets, disclosure of offender profiles, life imprisonment, death penaltyor if we issue vouchers
for households with low-income and in absolute poverty to guarantee the minimum cost of living for
them? How can we change people? The answer lies in the humanities.
The humanities are academic disciplines which aim at understanding human beings.2 They enable us
to reflect on ourselves, then to care for others around us, and finally to accept their sufferings as our own.
Experiencing others sufferings as our ownthis is the true spirit of the humanities; it is also the only
way to the fundamental solution of the contradictions of our society.3 Since this virtue of sympathy is a
capacity which is absolutely necessary for a meaningful human life not only for the underprivileged, but
for ordinary people as well, a humanistic approach for all the people around us should be adopted on both
social and governmental levels. The key to the fundamental change of Korean society is in the hand of the
humanities.
2. The Crisis Facing the Humanities
The humanities enable us to reflect on our own life and to realize what it is to live with self-respect as a
human being. However, the socially weak who are caught up in living have almost no opportunity to be
in contact with the humanities and think of themselves as having nothing to do with it. Ordinary people,
who have a need for humanistic knowledge, also cannot afford to be engaged in the humanities because
of the urgent problems of reality, such as improving grades, finding a job, and so on. In particular, the
neoliberal logic of the market, which has expanded ever since the 1997 financial crisis, drastically altered
the landscape of universities in Korea. Professors have been driven to so-called achievement-oriented
methods, which hinges on the quantity of papers, while the presumably unprofitable disciplines, such
as philosophy, history and literature, have gradually been turned away in society as college students have
crowded to profitable majors.4 This fact was demonstrated by a recent researchAn Analysis of the
Actual Conditions of the Humanities Education and Its Promotion Measures conducted by professor
Hong Byung-sunwhich analyzes the results of a survey of 2,000 high-school and college students on
2 The notion of humanities is known to come from the Roman political thinker Ciceros words, the inquiry into man, the
study of man.
3 Jeonju University News. 19 September 2012.
4 According to statistics provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in 2010, the average rate of
enrollment in doctoral courses in the humanities and social sciences was 12.6%, compared to 21.3%-23.4 % in natural
sciences and engineering during 2005-2008.
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the actual conditions and demand of humanities education. According to this research, although most
high-school and college students in Korea recognize the necessity and importance of the humanities
education and want to receive it, they hesitate or neglect to participate in it due to preparations for the
college entrance examination for high-school students and grade management and job preparation for
college students.5 Given its fundamental quest for the essence and root of man, society and the world,
the humanities is powerlessly turned away as being unable to promise immediate material rewards in
the rapidly changing society of today despite its potential to bring about fundamental change in Korean
society.
3. A New Move of the Humanities for Social Change in Korea
In recent years, new light began to be shed on the importance of the humanities among corporations
and CEOs. According to a diagnosis done by Samsung Economic Research Institute, in dealing with
phenomena such as the global financial crisis, which are difficult to predict with statistical analysis
techniques, humanistic insights have been the focus of attention as an alternative. The humanities, which
inquires into human nature and stress a historical perspective, is a very powerful tool which can be used to
predict future business environments. In particular, the global financial crisis has made people reconsider
the management system focused on financial engineering and technology and has increased the need to
have a balanced humanistic thought. This kind of diagnosis explains why CEOs and executives of so
many corporations are now absorbed in humanities studies. In fact, the humanities craze is becoming
popular again; various humanities courses have recently been opened like the Supreme Leader Course at
Seoul National University, the Advanced Program for Culture and Arts at Korea University, and so on.6
In addition, the online revival of the humanities is also remarkable. About twenty online communities
and websites are active and accompanied by offline discussion or reading studies. There are also other
communities sponsored by book-related companies or operated by voluntary groups. Among the examples
presented below, KB Rainbow Humanities provides a variety of humanistic contents including philosophy,
films, and documentaries through a website and runs a series of columns on aesthetics, documentaries,
philosophy, happiness study, architecture, cinema, etc.
5 Humanities Education Neglected at High Schools and Universities: Because of University Entrance Exam and
Preparation for Jobs. Newsis. 14 February 2012.
6 Samsung Economic Research Institute, Future Management Alternative is Nothing But the Humanities, Korea Herald
Business. 23 February 2012.
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Now with the social need for the humanities revived, the development of the Internet and other IT

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technologies broadens opportunities for academic content to be digitalized and shared by the general
public as well as builds an environment in which consumers participate actively in the academic
production through social media. With such a social atmosphere and technological advances, it is
necessary to disseminate the humanities, which constitute the essence of human life and has been handed
down to us by our ancestors. At the present moment, when the neglect of life and the blind pursuit
of materialism prevail and social conflicts rapidly grow with the increase of the aged, early retirees,
naturalized citizens, North Korean refugees, etc., the humanities is greatly needed as a forum in which we
can explore some implications that different humanistic traditions from various cultures can have for the
impending tasks facing the twenty-first century.
Humanities-Related Online Communities and Websites
1. Humanities Cafe: http://www.thinkntalk.net/
2. Yes24 Humanities of Hope Campaign: http://inmun.yes24.com/main/index
3. KB Rainbow Humanities: https://otalk.kbstar.com/quics?page=C025580
4. POD CAST Choi Jin Gis Humanities Lectures: http://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/id459005831
5. Art and Study: http://www.artnstudy.com/
6. Moontak Network: http://moontak.cafe24.com/
7. Humanities Museum: http://www.kmoh.org/kmoh_pro02a.html
8. Book Academy Renai21: http://www.renai21.net/
9. Bookstore Indigo: http://www.indigoground.net/
10. Foundation Academia Platonica: http://www.platonacademy.org/HumanitiesSpread.php?method=spreadinfo&P
HPSESSID=e3ea259b63133aad9dc07b9463e15e59
11. The Humanities on the Street Campaign by the National Library of Korea: http://www.nl.go.kr/tour/
12. Jeongdong Art and Culture Academy: http://blog.daum.net/sangsangculture
13. Inmun Cast: http://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/id493859279
14. ePhilosophy: http://ephilosophy.kr/
15. Community for Alternative Studies: http://www.ecoleerasmus.org/
16. The Greenbee Publishing Co.: http://www.greenbee.co.kr/blog/
17. Daejeon Cultural Action: http://www.djca.or.kr/djca_new/intro.htm
18. Logos School: http://www.logosschool.co.kr/
II. Policies for the Promotion of the Humanities in Korea

1. The Objective of the Promotion of the Humanities
Policies for the promotion of the humanities, which are carried out by the Ministry of Education, Science
and Technology, are based on the Sciences Promotion Act (former Sciences Promotion and Credit
Guarantee, Etc. for Students Loans Act) and related regulations. The promotion of the humanities is part of
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the academic research promotion project. Its objectives are as follows: first, to foster world-class institutes
of humanities and regional studies which perform socially relevant, interdisciplinary researches; and
second, to expand the extent of the humanities by enhancing the communication between the humanities
and the public and to lay grounds for a cultural nation by strengthening the social role of academics.
2. The History of the Promotion of the Humanities
After 1963 when the Ministry of Education (now called the Ministry of Education, Science and
Technology) implemented the system of academic research assistance funds based on the education
act, the support for research by professors in the fields of the humanities and social sciences began. The
launching of the Korea Research Foundation (now called the National Research Foundation of Korea)
in 1981 in particular marked a moment when the current research support system in the fields came into
existence.
The year of 2007 was also a historical turning point for the promotion of the humanities. At the opening
ceremony of Humanities Week in 2006, deans of humanities colleges from around the country declared the
crisis of the humanities and announced their determination to promote them. After this, the Humanities
Promotion Program, estimated at 40 billion won a year, began in 2007. The representative projects are:
support for the Humanities Korea (HK) project, support for humanities writings, and the popularization of
the humanities.
3. Budgets for Supporting the Humanities by Year
The humanities-related budget provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (including
support for humanistic research as basic studies) has continued to increase after 1963. From 2002, the
budget for the fields of the humanities and social sciences has rapidly expanded: during the following ten
years, an average of 91.6 billion won was funded annually through the project for fostering and supporting
basic studies, while as of 2012, a total of more than 150 billion won is being invested for the promotion of
Session 5
research in the field of the humanities.
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Proceedings
Budgets for Supporting the Humanities by Year

(Unit: 100 million won)
Promotion of Basic Studies
Promotion of
Humanities
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
940
920
920
940
861
858
867
916
891
1,107 1,101
200
326
394
394
404
414
15
28
43
53
53
53
35
27
27
27
27
29
Humanities
Korea
Humanities
writings
Popularization
of humanities
Total
940
920
920
940
861
2012
1,108 1,248 1,380 1,365 1,591 1,597
2 002-2005: Budgets for the promotion of basic studies in the field of the humanities and social sciences
(Basic Plans for Academic Research Support Programs 2005 and Report on the Achievements of the
Projects for Fostering Basic Research 2004).
2 006-2011: The total amount of all the budgets for supporting next-generation human resources,
general research, outstanding academic books, basic research, the Korean Research Memory (KRM),
and university curriculum development.
However, given that only two to three percent of the total government budget for research and
development are invested in the fields of the humanities and social sciences, the need for the expansion of
government support is being raised.
Government Budget Funded for R&D and for the Humanities and Social Sciences
(Unit: 100 million won)
Years
Years
Government Budget
Funded for R&D (A)
Government Budget
Funded for R&D (A)
Budget Funded for Humanities and Social Sciences (B)
Ratio (B/A)
Humanities
Social
Sciences
Combined
Studies
Arts and
Sports
Total
Ratio (B/A)
2006
89,096
582
840
212
200
1,834
2.06%
2007
97,629
893
1,028
394
330
2,645
2.71%
2008
110,784
886
1,594
182
305
2,967
2.68%
2009
123,437
1,023
1,857
255
391
3,526
2.85%
2010
136,827
939
2,051
308
331
3,629
2.65%
1. The government budget funded for R&D is estimated on the basis of 2011 Report on the Survey and
Analysis of the National Research and Development Programs.
2. The budget funded for the humanities and social sciences is the total amount of research funds invested
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by the government in universities. The National Research Foundation of Korea, Report on the Analysis
of Research Activities at Universities (November 2011).
4. The Effects of the Humanities Promotion Policy in Korea
Owing to the sustained implementation of the humanities promotion policy, quantitative achievement in
research in the fields of the humanities and social sciences has continued to increase. A case in point is
that compared to 2004, the number of research papers in the fields increased by 65.2% in 2009 (23,334 in
2004, while 38, 568 in 2009).
Increasing Trend of the Number of Research Papers in Vnd Social Sciences7
(Unit: Piece)
In addition, as shown in the changing rates of the publications of research papers in international journals,
the international research capacity of Korean researchers has also risen.
Distribution of Research Paper Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences during 2009-20118
Humanities & Social Sciences
2009
2010
2011
SCI
104 (2.7%)
79 (2.3%)
245 (6.8%)
Total
428
non-SCI
3,380
3,335
3,341
10,056
Total
3,484
3,414
3,586
10,484
By fostering human resources in the humanities and establishing world-class institutes of humanities, the
Humanities Korea project in particular has created a turning point for humanities research at universities
7 National Research Foundation of Korea. Making the Knowledge Map of Academic Research in the Humanities and
Social Sciences. Policy Research Report (2010), p. 8.
8 Data gathered from the research supporting systems of the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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to be expanded from department-centered to institute-based research. This project has set up the centers

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of gravity for research by taking the lead in research in the fields concerned. It also has changed the
paradigm of research support and achievement in the humanities field: that is, the existing individualcentered academic research system has been transformed into a joint research system to solve problems in
humanities through communication with society. The following diagram shows the achievements of these
policy efforts in terms of the increase in humanities-related research papers and the cultivation of excellent
future researchers.
Achievements by the Humanities Korea (HK) Project during 2007-2011
Achievements by the
Humanities Korea
Participating Researchers and

Manpower Training Results
The projects for the popularization of the humanities are intended to enhance communication with
ordinary citizens by calling on humanities scholars at universities and research institutes to provide
various lectures for the general public, including Lectures by Eminent Scholars in the Humanities9 and
Humanities Lectures for Citizens,10 and by publishing a collection of humanities books. This project has
raised citizens concern and awareness of the humanities and provided opportunities for them to have
access to the humanities in their daily life. The Humanities Lectures for Citizens in particular has become
the Korean version of the Clemente Course11 by conveying academic achievements in the humanities and
9 Humanities lectures by eminent scholars are intended to enhance the publics concern and understanding of the humanities
by providing a series of open lectures and writings by Koreas top-level humanities scholars. For four years since 2007,
this project offered a total of 200 high-quality lectures with over 300 participants per lecture. It also provides digital
content services through the Korean Research Memory (KRM), the website of the Lectures by Eminent Scholars in the
Humanities, and the Korean Open Course Ware (KOCW) of the Korea Education and Research Information Service.
10 Humanities lectures for citizens are designed to open and operate humanities lectures for a variety of socially
underprivileged people including the youths, the disadvantaged (the homeless and prison inmates), and so on.
11 The Clemente Course in the Humanities is a unique educational institution founded in 1995 to teach the humanities at the
college level to the most disadvantaged in society including the homeless, the poor, prisoners, etc. Instead of mobilizing
them for a job training, this course helps them reflect on their own life for themselves. By doing so, it seeks to enable
them to gain self-respect, raise the quality of their own life, live an active life, and ultimately establish themselves as
authentic citizens in society.
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social sciences to all walks of life, from general citizens to the disadvantaged. In addition, other various
programs in the fields of the humanities and social sciences, including Humanities Week and the World
Humanities Forum, have expanded opportunities for the general public to enjoy the achievements in the
fields.
The Number of Participants in Humanities Week by Year
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
Total
Organizations
14
22
16
15
33
100
Individuals
30,000
34,000
38,000
40,000
55,127
197,127
The Number of Participants in the First World Humanities Forum (November 2011)
(Unit: Person)
Invited Advance On-Site Academic

Speakers Registrees Registrees
VIP
Invitees
by the
Organizer
PCO
Staff
Volunteers
Total
Domestic
29
366
1,017
87
15
15
40
1,571
Foreign
27
48
Total
56
375
1,024
91
15
15
40
1,619
III. Healing and Humanities

1. Selection of the Subject
As mentioned above, the humanities are academic disciplines which search for ways in which we live
as authentic human beings by understanding ourselves and others. Therefore, there is an inseparable
relationship between the humanities and the notion of healing. In particular, in 2012 we can find around
us a lot of people who get hurt. At the background against which we suffer from violence, isolation, and
failures lie: conflicts caused by excessive competition; selfishness with little regard for others and the
community; the unreasonable gap between the rich and the poor; poverty in abundance; maladjustment to
rapid scientific and technological advancements and the consequent social divide; the crisis in the global
environment; psychological unrests arising from ill adaptation to the rapidly changing social environment;
and the isolation of individuals and discord between them as a result of the dismantlement of traditional
Science and Technology is planning to hold Humanities Week from 29 October to 4 November and the
Second World Humanities Forum from 1 to 3 November 2012. By reflecting on contemporary society
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communities. In this context, under the theme of Healing and Humanities, the Ministry of Education,

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from the perspectives of the humanities, these projects are designed to search for alternatives that can
heal the sufferings and wounds of individuals, society, and history. It is expected that these efforts will
contribute to fostering deliberative individuals and a community of dignity through the humanistic
reflection on self and the world.12
Under the theme of Healing and Humanities, we can think of the following questions:
What are the characteristics of contemporary society which gives us sufferings and wounds?
How can the sufferings be overcome and the wounds be healed?
What can the humanities do to heal the wounds of youths and give them hopes?
How do I have to live to achieve a harmonious coexistence between my neighbors, the community, and me?
What contributions can the humanities make to a meaningful life and the nation of dignity?
What can the humanities do for the setting and development of world-historical agenda?
2. Cases of Putting Healing and the Humanities into Practice: Humanities Lectures for Citizens
Recently, there was a report in the Dong-A Ilbo regarding a philosophy class at a middle school. The
uncontrollable behavior of middle school students in Korea are so notorious that there is even a joke that
the North Korean military does not invade South Korea for fear of them. The students attend lectures on
12 The Committee for the Popularization of the Humanities. The Rationale for the Selection of the Theme of Healing and
Humanities in 2012.
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human violence and raise hands competitively to present their opinions about how to eliminate violence.
Considering a survey result which shows that the primary reason for school violence is just for fun, the
most important task now is to teach our children how to understand and sympathize with others. In 2011,
this task was being put into practice by Philosophical Lectures for the Caring and Healing of the Middle
School Students Living in Vulnerable Areas, one of the Humanities Lectures for Citizens projects for the
popularization of the humanities. This project was carried out by professor Huh Woo-Sung of Kyung Hee
University.
The Humanities Lectures of the Gayagol University of Hope for Happy Village and a Happy Life
was undertaken by Dong-Eui University for the residents of Anchang village, a representative slum area
located between Dong-gu and Jin-gu, Busan. In order to promote the participation of local residents,
the project adopted a hands-on training method combining lectures, discussions and field trips under the
themes of the local community, myself, life, and happiness. It was reported that this project contributed
not only to enhancing the self-respect of the participants but also to making an atmosphere of consensus
and communication between the university
and the regional society. For example, a
woman, who has always had a difficult life as
she was a recipient of the governments basic
living subsidy, disabled, and a breast cancer
survivor, said that she applied for the lectures
to become happy and gained hope for life
through them. This heartfelt statement makes
us realize once again why the humanities are
so urgent in our life.
In addition, other cases, including Humanities Therapy by the Institute of Human Sciences of Kangwon
National University, Humanities for Unification by the Humanities Research Institute of Konkuk
University, and Mind Humanities by the Institute of Mind Humanities of Wonkwang University, are also
good examples illustrating how the humanities can heal our mind.
IV. The Future of the Humanities Policy and Its Tasks in Korea
In order for the humanities to meet the demands of social responsibility through its contributions to
if it stayed in an ivory tower without communicating with the public. The point is for the humanities to
be humanities for all, which tends to people and embraces them. While the popularization project for
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society, it must seek ways to communicate with the general public. It would not be authentic humanities

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the humanities has hitherto been focused on creating social demand for it and supporting spontaneous
activities in various areas, from now on, an emphasis should be put on publicizing the importance and
implications of the humanities rather than on providing humanities content.13 The evaluation of existing
projects and some directions toward which future projects should be implemented for the popularization
of the humanities can be summarized as follows:
The Medium and Long-Term Policies for the Popularization of the Humanities
Period
Project Direction
2006-2010
The Trial Period for Popularization

(Creation of Social Demands for the Humanities and Support for Spontaneous Activities in Various
Areas)
2011-2013
The Settle-Down Period for Popularization

(Expansion of Social Demands and Systematization of Support)
2014-2016
The Flourishing Period for Popularization

(Active Responses to Social Demands)
Social Networking Services (SNS) in particular will allow for various methods of communication and
for the spread of information on the humanities. In order to facilitate close communication between
the humanities and the masses and the dissemination of information on the humanities, the Ministry
of Education, Science and Technology has operated websites, blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook
accounts since October 2012. The ministry is now introducing humanities lectures, providing information
on the humanities and holding various public participation events including the contest of essay reviewing
lectures.
SNS Websites for the Popularization of the Humanities
- Website: inmunlove.nrf.re.kr
- Naver Blog: blog.naver.com/inmun_love
- Twitter: twitter.com/univinmest
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/inmunlove
* The Humanities Popularization Logo
13 Choi Hwan-jin. Evaluation of the Humanities Popularization Project and Some Suggestions for Its Directions in the
Future (National Research Foundation of Korea, 2011).
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In addition, it is necessary to extend video services, which are provided only for the Lectures by Eminent
Scholars in the Humanities, to the Humanities Lectures for Citizens in order to allow everyone free access
to humanities content. Consider the case of the singer Psy, who rose to the rank of global star with the
song Gangnam Style through YouTube, and the case of TED14 through which a huge number of people
throughout the world can enjoy high-level lectures for free anytime and anywhere. Given the powerful
influence of free digital content, it is time to devise ways to utilize them.
In order to make integrated use of humanities assets (including persons, cultural properties, lectures,
hands-on programs, festivals, etc.) and to strengthen ties with local governments through a linkage
between regional cultural programs and academic activities, the Humanities City project was launched
on a pilot basis this year. This project can be said to be a Korean version of the European Capital of
Culture series by the European Union and the U. S. project We the People designed by the National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to explore significant events and themes in the American history.
It is expected that Suwon and Tongyeong, designated first as humanities cities this year, will provide
opportunities to excavate local humanities assets and allow citizens of the regions to be healed through the
humanities.
After its inception in 2011, the Second World Humanities Forum will proceed in a more developed format
in 2012. While the first forum was a ground on which distinguished scholars from around the world
discussed the philosophical foundation and social role of the humanities under the theme of Universalism
in a Multicultural World, the second forum will deal with the practical contributions of the humanities
under the main theme of Humanities and Healing. It is also expected to discuss the establishment of
a system of cooperation between nations at the roundtable on the promotion of the humanities in each
country. In the future, the World Humanities Forum will require a multidimensional approach which
combines both academic and popular traits. Also, in order for Korea to be a key player in the international
14 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling
Foundation, formed to disseminate ideas worth spreading. TED was founded in 1984 as a one-off event. The annual
conference began in 1990, in Monterey, California. TEDs early emphasis was technology and design, consistent with
its origins in the Silicon Valley. The events are now held in Long Beach and Palm Springs in the U.S. and in Europe and
Asia, offering live streaming of the talks. They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science
and culture, often through storytelling. The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the
most innovative and engaging ways they can. Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al
Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Rodney Mullen, Bill Gates, educator Salman Khan, Google founders Larry
Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners. TEDs current curator is the British former computer journalist
and magazine publisher Chris Anderson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference)
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initiative in the field of the humanities, it is worth attempting to designate a World Humanities Week by

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the Korean government in cooperation with UNESCO. Along with International Arts Education Week,
which will be jointly undertaken by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and UNESCO, this
effort will contribute to creating Koreas world leadership in the field. In addition, since a high-level of
participation from around the world is essential for the World Humanities Forum to build up recognition
as an international event in the field of the humanities, it is necessary to actively taking advantage of all
the official diplomatic channels including UNESCO, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology,
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, overseas Korean embassies, and so on.
Recently, the international credibility of the Korean economy and its future is rising rapidly. In the
uncertain global economic environment of today, Koreas real ability to perform a leading role in the
world comes from the Korean people. In this sense, we can expect that the spirit of the humanities will be
able to help us enrich our soul and enhance the dignity of our country.
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Humanities Therapy: Theory and Practice
Young E. Rhee
Kangwon National University
1. Introduction
Various statistics show that there is a correlative relationship between national income and happiness
index, which stands true only until a certain critical point of national income but beyond that point they
do not affect each other. According to World Bank statistics in 2011, Korea ranked 14th in terms of
GDP. According to 2012 OECD health statistics, the average Korean lived 80.7 years as of 2010, which
was 0.9 years longer than the OECD average of 79.8 years. However, Korea ranked first in the world in
terms of death by suicide, with 33.5 people out of 100 thousand taking their lives, which was 12.8 more
people than the OECD average.
Keynes explained the phenomenon of poverty midst plenty as being a phenomenon where
productivity increases but inventory is accumulated due to lack of demand, resulting in higher
unemployment. Modern governments seem to have succeeded in overcoming the structural poverty
Keynes pointed out but are now faced with another more serious form of poverty, which is mental
poverty midst materialistic plenty. The gap between materialistic abundance and mental abundance
cannot be resolved with Keynes policy of overcoming poverty. This shows why modern man is
suffering from various mental problems despite living in unprecedented abundance. The first version
of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published in 1952 listed 106 types
of mental disorders, but DSM-IV published in 1994 categorized as many as 297 types. We face
the paradoxical situation in which the types of mental disorders are increasing as more scientific
development is made and civilization progresses.
amidst material abundance. Material abundance may be achieved through revolutions in science,
technology, social institutions, but mental poverty cannot be healed through those ways only. How can
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It is clear that the quality of human life cannot be improved without resolving the mental poverty

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the imbalance between mental and material be solved? Mental poverty and the disease of mind are
human illnesses and existential illnesses which are unrelated to materialistic abundance, so they must
be understood, explained, and healed from a humanities perspective. Then, how can humanities achieve
this goal?
The purpose of this paper is to provide my answers to those questions. I shall introduce humanities
therapy as a powerful way to heal depression and other diseases of mind now spreading throughout
the world across generations, races, and nations. I shall review the theory and methods of humanities
therapy, thereby suggesting its identity (what) and method (how). My discussions will go as follows.
First, in section two, I shall introduce the origin and agenda of humanities therapy and Kangwon
National Universitys Humanities Therapy Project. In section three, I shall explain the diseases of
the mind as the object of humanities therapy, and examine their types and characteristics, and a brief
diagnosis system. Sections four and five shall discuss the methods of humanities therapy. In section
four, I shall introduce the teleological model as a specific model for humanities theory, and in the
following section five I shall describe a specific case of how humanities therapy was applied clinically.
2. Humanities Therapy
Humanities therapy is a reaction to the global problem of the mental poverty among material abundance
and also a product specific to contemporary Korea. Korean humanities scholars were alarmed by the
phenomenon that traditional values of humanities were slowly and steadily disappearing in the worlds
leading global IT environment. In 2006, Korean university professors announced the crisis of Korean
humanities. Following this announcement, various diagnostics were suggested on how humanities
came to the point of crisis, and the Humanities Korea project was started in 2007 as a governmental
solution.1
Against this background, the notion of humanities therapy was introduced in 2007 through the
Humanities Therapy Project in Kangwon National University. The Humanities Therapy Project
introduced humanities therapy as an academic discipline with theoretical foundations and not as just
a technique to treat the disease of mind. The official agenda of the Humanities Therapy Project is
Humanities Therapy for Promoting Humanities. The Humanities Therapy Project suggested the
following normative rationales for our society to study humanities therapy.2
1 Refer to Young E. Rhee (2011) for more information on how humanities therapy was created in Korea.
2 Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University (2007).
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Personal mental crisis and the growth of pathological phenomena in modern societies
Isolation from society and crisis of humanities
Misunderstanding of humanities
Academic closing of humanities
Minor role that humanities takes in the plan of regional and national development
As seen above, humanities therapy was first suggested as a study not only with a purpose of healing
mental diseases rife in modern society, through this kind of activity, but also with a secondary purpose
of reviving and recreating the value of humanities to overcome the humanities crisis. It will not be easy
to establish humanities therapy as a new academic discipline, so that much preparation will be needed
for its establishment as an academic area.
The Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University defines humanities therapy as the
following:
Humanities therapy is a new discipline that aims to develop practical humanities therapy contents by
integrating therapeutic parts of literature, philosophy, language, and art in order to achieve the final goal
of mental well-being.3
Following the definition above, the Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University
is composed of philosophy therapy, literature therapy, language therapy, arts therapy, and history of
therapy. The projects task is to unite the studies done in five parts and to create humanities therapy as a
discipline.
An academic field with therapeutic purpose gains specific identity through making its target and
method concrete, so the more unique its target and method, the clearer its identity is. The term therapy
appeared in humanities therapy does not exactly correspond to the term used in medical treatment,
but the theory and method may be specifically applied to reality through practical activities and its
effectiveness will be proven. From this perspective, humanities therapy is a good example of practical
humanities. For the past five years, the Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University
has, through its research and practice, successfully spread the significance and necessity for humanities
therapy both at home and abroad. As a result, the Humanities Therapy Project is planning to set up a
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humanities therapy course at the graduate level and the Humanities Therapy Agency of Kyungpook
3 Ibid.
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National University plans to set up an interdepartmental course at the undergraduate level. As such,
humanities therapy will soon be officially taught in Korean universities.
The Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University has hosted annual international
conferences on humanities therapy. During the 2012 conference in particular, it hosted the 11th
International Conference on Philosophical Practice (ICPP).4 The 11th ICPP was opened under the
theme of The Multiplicity of Therapeutic Practice in Philosophy and Humanities for four days and
45 scholars from 24 countries abroad along with 30 Korean scholars. There were four keynote lectures
and 80 presentations made to discuss in depth the therapeutic role which philosophy and humanities
have in modern society. The conference not only provided a venue in which humanities therapy and
philosophical practice could be combined, but also an opportunity to review the theories and methods
of humanities therapy developed so far.
The Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University used theories and methods developed
in various therapeutic activities in elementary schools, local welfare centers, military camps, prisons,
and North Korean Refugee Centers. The materials collected through these practical activities provided
the basis to confirm and revise those therapies, methods, and models. During the third stage of research
started from 2013, the Humanities Therapy Project will categorize the humanities therapy contents by
humanities studies and complete the task of establishing a humanities therapy discipline.5
I have so far briefly explained how humanities therapy was first created and developed so far, around
Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University. Below, I will discuss the object and
method of humanities therapy.
3. Disease of Mind
The object of humanities therapy is people suffering from disease of mind. Then, what exactly is
disease of mind? The disease of mind discussed in this paper is different from mental illness or mental
disorder and is used more broadly. This broad concept of disease of mind stands opposite to the broad
concept of health, which can be found in the World Health Organization (WHO) Charter (1946).
4 For more information on the 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice & the HT2012, refer to website www.
ht21c.org.
5 For more information on Humanities Therapy Project, Kangwon National University, refer to website http://www.humantherapy.
co.kr.
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Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of
disease or infirmity.
Let us define disease of body as a state where physical well-being, as written in the WHO charter, has
been disturbed; and disease of mind as a state where the mental and social well-being has not been
fulfilled.6 We know from experience that mental diseases have many different aspects. Youngjin Kim
(2004) classified diseases as physical disease, mental disease, and philosophical disease.7 According to
his classification, mental disease may be approached from psychiatric aspect and philosophical aspect.
For example, depression is a representative mental disease of modern man. Scientists say that severe
depression occurs when dopamine, a kind of neurotransmitter, is secreted less than the average amount.
If this explanation is correct, then drugs like Prozac may be used to control dopamine secretion and
control severe depression. Albeit obvious, not all mental diseases may be subject to humanities therapy,
and people who secrete small amounts of dopamine by nature, should get psychiatric help. However,
it does not mean that all depression patients are in need of psychiatric help. Marinoff points out that
depression has the following four aspects:8 (a) problem with the brain, (b) side-effect of amphetamine
and alcohol, (c) trauma during youth, (d) severe moral or financial dilemma. According to Marinoff,
(a) and (b) are cases that need psychiatric help and (c) is subject to psychological treatment and
philosophical counseling and (d) can receive philosophical counseling. If depression has such diverse
aspects, then we would not be able to treat that disease by emphasizing just one aspect. The main object
of humanities therapy is philosophical disease as defined by Kim and (d) as classified by Marinoff.
Here we find the justification and need for humanities therapy.
The disease of mind as the second level, that is, philosophical disease, is an existential disease that man
suffers from having to live as a human. One must understand its causes in order to treat philosophical
disease. Philosophical disease may be classified as the following:9
Ontological cause: loss of purpose in life, confusion in world view
Epistemic cause: error in perception, error from ignorance, misuse of knowledge
6 I am not saying that body and mind can strictly be separated just because the disease of body and mind can be distinguished.
The notion of disease of mind in this paper is based on the theory of embodied mind that is actively being discussed in cognitive
science recently. For more information on the theory, refer to A. Clark and D. Chalmers (1996), F. Valera, E. Thompson, E.
Rosch (1991), Young E. Rhee (20008a, 2010b).
7 Kim Youngjin (2004), pp. 36-37.
8 L. Marinoff (1999), pp. 32-34.
9 Young E. Rhee (2010), p. 40.
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Logical cause: formal fallacy, informal fallacy

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Moral cause: loss of morality, lack of moral judgment standard

Aesthetic cause: loss of aesthetic sense, lack of aesthetic judgment standard
The system introduced above incorporates the traditional fields of philosophy in order to classify and
diagnose philosophical disease. Other humanities disciplines including literature have their own system
of understanding human life, so they might suggest different classifications from the above one. Some
might be concerned about the conceptual confusions that could occur if every humanities discipline
introduces its own classification, but that is an unfounded worrying. Considering the fundamental and
comprehensive nature of humanities, we should think of the variety in classification as an advantage
and not as a weakness. In this case, we need to remember that humanities is not science (this does
not necessarily mean that it contrasts with science either). In order to explain human life, diversities
found in theoretical level and methodological level are essential conditions to understand and heal
philosophical disease.
Philosophical disease is a disease suffered by the average man. Therefore, we cannot call it a disease or
disorder in ordinary meaning and we should not call a person with philosophical disease a patient. A
person suffering from philosophical disease, on the one hand, is not clearly a patient, but on the other
hand he is ailing from an existential disease, so conversely speaking, he is a true patient. Kim states
that philosophical disease is more value-oriented than physical disease or psychiatric disease, and
causes more suffering to others rather than the patient himself. From this perspective, philosophical
disease appears as a social pathology. Kim lists Koreas unique examples of philosophical diseases
as chauvinistic nationalism, filial piety egoism, gang activities, distorted Juche ideology, loyalty,
ostracism, etc.10
From this perspective, objects for philosophical disease can be societies as well as individuals. We have
seen through history how a specific society lost social health for a certain period of time and showed
pathological phenomena, for example, Hitler-led Germany from 1933 to 1945 and American society
from 1950 to 1954 swept by McCarthyism. Many scholars have diagnosed the cause of philosophical
disease of modern society. For example, Marcuse pointed out in One-Dimensional Man (1964) that
Western society had developed an overconsumption disease. The public in a consumption-centered
society were dazzled by advertisements and promotions and pursued objects that could fulfill their
unnecessary needs, and gave up their dream of a better society that could have been achieved otherwise.
Meanwhile, Byung-Chul Han stated in Tired Society (Mdigkeitgesellschaft, 2010) that modern man
10 Kim Youngjin (2004), p. 37.
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was living in an achievement society where endless positivity was acknowledged. Whereas traditional
society produced lunatics and criminals, achievement society gave birth to depressed patients and
loser due to the pressure to achieve. How could the disease of Korean society that has played a role in
ranking Korea first in terms of suicide be explained? As Marcuse diagnosed, the cause of our societys
disease might be due to economic, mental bankruptcy from overconsumption. Or, the primary cause
of suicide might be depression, and as Han diagnosed,11 depression cannot only be analyzed from the
perspective of economy of self, but be seen in the context of society. What has become clear through
Marcuse and Han is that the causes of philosophical disease lie in social structure and that an effective
way to heal philosophical disease is to approach it at both the individual and social levels, and that the
focus should be on prevention rather than treatment.
4. Teleological Model
Until now we have examined the disease of mind and in particular philosophical disease as the object
for humanities therapy. With this, we have answered the what-question. Now, let us take a look at the
how-question. How can we treat philosophical disease?
The therapy model that I will introduce in this paper is the teleological model. My model is based on
two theories, which are the theory of embodied mind and the teleological explanation on action. I will
briefly go over the two theories, and then discuss the teleological model.
The theory of embodied mind understands the mind in relation to the body and the environment
where the body lies. The argument that the mind is embodied must be understood ontologically and
epistemologically. The mind is embodied ontologically means that the mind is made in the biological
base of brain and nervous system, and therefore, this implies epistemologically that the bodys
function must be considered in order to fully understand the mind. Because of this characteristic, the
embodied mind theory contrasts with the substance dualism, which strictly separates the body and
mind, or physicalism that considers the two as equal, but it can be compatible with property dualism
or functionalism.12 The embodied mind theory also emphasizes the role of environment where the
11 Han Byung-Chul (2010), p. 26.

12 There are different versions of embodiment. For example, Damasio (1999, 2003) and Edelman (2004) bases embodiment on
non-reductionist property dualism but Clarks embodiment is closer to functionalism. Cognitive science has been dominated
by symbolism and connectionism since the 1970s. The embodied mind theory is fast rising as a third research program in the
field of cognitive theory since the 1990s. The embodied mind theory is also called the embodied cognition, extended cognition,
distributed cognition, situated cognition theory.
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mind and body function. If the body plays an important role in the process of cognition, then the

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environment in which the body is also plays an important role. For example, the human, a biological
being, has evolved by dispersing the information processing process because it has limited cognition
capability. The primary function of the human nervous system is to process perception and kinetics
and most of the cognitive activities have evolved from immediate interaction with environment. The
embodied mind theory focuses on how the sensory movement capability successfully interacts with the
environment and explains how the mind, body, and world interact and mutually affect each other and
increase the adjustment as life forms.
The embodied mind theory provides a frame for understanding health and disease. That the mind is
healthy means that the mind is in harmony with the physical environment and social environment
through the body. The disease of mind occurs when the harmony between body, mind, and environment
is broken. This explanation about the mind is why we must consider the physical, mental, and social
aspects of health, as stated by WHO.
Next, lets consider the second base for teleological theory, the teleological approach to action. There
are two traditions in explaining human action scientifically: the causal explanation and teleological
explanation. The causal explanation tradition uses causal relationships to explain the occurrence of
explanandum. For example, suicidal attempts are explained in the physical causal sequence: insufficient
excretion of dopamine depression suicide attempt. The assumption here is that there is a law
regulating each causal sequence. Though the causal explanation may be successful in explaining the
motions of non-life objects scientifically, but it is fundamentally limited in explaining human actions.
The primary reason is that humans are beings with intentionality. Many people criticized causal theory
by pointing out that the human intentionality cannot be captured by the causal law.13
The teleological explanation on action explains human action using the purpose (telos) that agents
intend. The teleological tradition subsumes various theories of Aristotle and other scholars, and the
basis for my model is von Wrights practical inference (PI) scheme. According to von Wright, human
acts are analyzed to have the following scheme:14
A intends to bring about p.
A considers that he cannot bring about p unless he does a.

Therefore, A set himself to do a.
13 W. Dray (1957), R. Collingwood (1956).

14 G. H. von Wright (1971), p. 96.
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PI scheme can be applied to explain suicide in the following way:

Tom intends to save his reputation.
Tom considers that he cannot save his reputation unless he commit suicide.
Therefore, Tom attempts suicide.
If someone asks why Tom tried to commit suicide, the proper explanation for it is that Tome tried to
save his reputation by committing suicide.
Von Wrights PI scheme was proposed to explain action, but we may apply it as a therapy model. When
the embodied mind theory and von Wrights PI scheme are combined, we get the frame for teleological
model of therapy.15 The teleological model has the following four therapy steps:
Step 1: Write the world one is in.
- Physical environment
- Mental environment
- Social environment
Step 2: Identify ones purpose, intentionality, and intention.
- Is p a real purpose or intentional object?
- Is p a mid-point purpose and not the final one?

- Is p worth pursuing?
Step 3: Write ones moral principles or virtue system.

Here therapists task is to help the visitor to start from the specific world written and reflect on the path
to achieving purpose using the moral principle and virtue system. For the therapy to be successful, not
only therapists skilled experience, but also the wisdom and willpower of the patient are also required.
Step 4: The visitor determines if the path he had thought of in the previous step is the true solution,
and shares the results of the therapy with her society.
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One of the common and fatal problems that occur in counseling is that counseling ends when therapist
15 Young R. Thee (2012).
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thinks that visitors problem has been resolved, and that visitor herself also acknowledges that. But
philosophical therapy may be not be terminated at that point, mainly because the solution that visitor
thought of might be temporary or superficial, and not a real solution. With time, visitor may realize that
her problem still remains. This occurs when visitor did not go through sufficient reflections in each step.
Therefore, visitor must always go through the process of reflecting whether her problem has been truly
resolved. When visitors problem has been truly resolved, she is obliged to share her experience with
other people, and in this sense, visitor who has completed therapy, is already a humanities therapist. By
sharing her experience with others she participates in increasing the health of her society.
There are worksheets used in humanities therapy with the teleological model. Below is a basic
worksheet used in the beginning stage of counseling.
Worksheet
Physical Environment
Psychological Environment
Social Environment
_______________________________________ / reason (principle, virtue)
_______________________________________ / reason
_______________________________________ / reason
-
Purpose
5. Case Study
For the past five years, I have applied the teleological model to military soldiers and prisoners, and
tested its validity and efficiency and updated the model. Below is a therapy case report of a soldier
who experienced serious difficulty in adjusting to military camp life. I have not used his real name,
following counseling rules.
***
When I met Corporal Kim Cheolsu, he was 23 years old. He was of small stature and dark complexion,
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and looked nervous. I held 13 counseling sessions with Corporal Kim over the course of one year.
The first three sessions were spent understanding Corporal Kims situation, and with the exception of
the last session, nine sessions were allocated to exploring a path from Corporal Kims situation to his
purpose.
Corporal Kim received boot training and was assigned to an infantry division artillery regiment in the
frontline. Corporal Kim said that he and everyone at camp faced serious problems from the day he
arrived at there. The first problem was that Corporal Kim had a weak physique and could not adjust
to the artillery regiment. Corporal Kim weighed 59kg, so it was difficult for him to carry artillery
weighing 20-80kg. His weakness was often pointed out during military training. His low training score
gradually made him an outsider to his comrades. Fellow comrades who shared barracks with him
stopped talking to him, and Corporal Kim started to become more stressed. When the problem became
severe and evident, his battalion commander moved him to administrative division, but he could not
adjust there either. Having dropped out of high school, he did not know well how to do administrative
work and people ignored him, making it difficult to do work. The battalion commander then assigned
him to ammunition management team, but he was detained at the guard house because he smoked near
the ammunition storage during his duty. Lastly, he was assigned to the kitchen, but he got into many
fights with lower ranking soldiers who ignored him, so in the end he was assigned to miscellaneous
tasks without a specific position. Corporal Kim told those around him that he was deeply hurt by this
and that he felt suicidal urges. That is when I met Corporal Kim.
Through counseling I learned about Corporal Kims family situation and his childhood. Corporal Kims
father had worked in a big company, but he continued to fail in stock investments, went bankrupt, and
became an alcoholic. He was violent towards his family and tried to poison himself several times. When
Corporal Kim was in fourth grade, his mother ran away from home because of the repeated violence of
his fathers, and his father remarried six times. When I asked Corporal Kim if he had any girlfriends, he
answered that he had several before entering military service, but now he had none. The longest he had
been in a relationship was six months. What I found out from many soldiers with adjustment problems
was that they had an unhappy childhood and no girlfriends. Corporal Kims time in school was rocky.
He could not pay for school fees oftentimes and missed classes often. He only had three or four school
friends who grew distant from him when he complained that they did not come often enough.
Physical environment: weak physique

Psychological environment: about to attempt suicide
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Corporal Kim filled out the worksheet as following:

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Social environment: treated as an outsider

Purpose: none
My primary goal in counseling was to guide Corporal Kim to find a purpose, at least, in his military
life. Corporal Kim said that he had never thought about what he wanted to become. He thought that
having a dream in his life was a luxury he could not afford. Corporal Kims philosophical disease
seemed to be due to ontological cause because he suffered from a loss in purpose of life or did not
consider one. Viktor Frankl called this type of the disease of mind existential vacuum,16 where its
primary symptoms are ennui, disinterest, moral and mental confusion. Through two sessions Corporal
Kim said that his current purpose was to safely complete his military service without causing any
trouble.
The therapy method that I used was to help Corporal Kim achieve his purpose in a way he enjoyed.
Corporal Kim said that he had never voluntarily read any poem or novel by himself other than fantasy
novels. I proposed that he tell a story pretending that he had been stranded in an uninhabited island by
himself when his ship sank. At first, Corporal Kim was hesitant in speaking, but with time he started to
use his imagination more freely. He would sometimes draw pictures on paper or write brief writings.
Starting from the fourth session, he searched and printed out a picture of two men adrift on the island
and said that one of them was himself. He said that the other man was his father, and as the story
unfolded, he thought of situations where he could punish his father, such as making him starve.
When he became tired of telling stories about the island, I told him the summary of Robinson Crusoe,
read him a few excerpts and asked him what he would have done in that situation, and whether he
agreed with Robinson Crusoes actions. When I asked him What would it be like to live in an island
alone? he answered that At first, it would be inconvenient but I would get used to it. Corporal Kim
did not feel the need for anyone else. I asked him to write down what he did after work in order to find
out about his life in the barracks. Because he was a senior soldier he did not have to clean the barracks
or do other miscellaneous work. He said that when everyone in the barracks watched TV, he alone read
fantasy novels. When I asked him why he did not watch TV like the other soldiers, he said Its no
fun.
I needed to encourage Corporal Kim to form relationships with other people. We watched the film
Yes Man starring Jim Carrey and talked about the movie. In the beginning of the film the protagonist
16 V. Frankl (1969), pp. 44-45.
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continues to say no to everything and lives a timid life, cut off from friends. Then, his life changes
after participating in the Yes seminar that states that positive thinking brings good luck. We talked
about which life was more ideal. Corporal Kim acknowledged that the latter was more. We agreed
at this point to devise a strategy to improve his social environment. I talked with the instructor and
officers at camp to form an encouraging atmosphere. The first strategy was to make one friend. I
asked Corporal Kim to think of one person he could befriend among any of the higher or lower ranking
officers, and he pointed out sergeant Park Ilsu. Sgt. Park had sometimes spared some kind words to
him. We talked about how Corporal Kim could approach Sgt. Park. Two weeks later he tried talking
to Sgt. Park and they watched TV together at the barracks. I encouraged Corporal Kim to continue to
try holding conversation with Sgt. Park. However, his efforts were crushed because Sgt. Park spoke ill
of Corporal Kim in the bathroom to another person, not knowing he was there. There were difficulties
along the way, but before Corporal Kim completed his military duty, he improved up to the point of
playing soccer with Sgt Park and others and snacking with comrades at the store.
The second strategy we planned was to write to family. Corporal Kim had a father and older sister.
At first, he reacted negatively to this strategy, writing to his father in particular, because he thought
that it would mean succumbing to his father. He had sometimes called his older sister over the public
phone to ask her to send necessities to the camp, but once she sent the wrong materials, and they had
a big fight, and he had not contacted her afterwards. I asked Corporal Kim to start by writing to me so
that he would get used to writing letters. I said that he could write about his thoughts on the counseling
he was receiving and any requests he had to me. The letters he wrote were sent to me through a
noncommissioned officer. The first couple of letters were awkwardly written, but he thanked me for
listening to him and suggested that we watch more entertaining films like Yes Man. I wrote back to
Corporal Kim and not long afterwards he started writing to his father and older sister. His father did not
write back to him but sent a message that he had received the letters through his older sister who came
to visit him.
I continued to counsel Corporal Kim for three months after he left army, but it had to stop when he
found employment at a logistics company in Busan. My counsel to Corporal Kim was not able to reach
the fourth and last step, but using the typical humanities methods of imagining, story-telling, writing,
and reflecting, Corporal Kim was able to reach his goal in the army and return to society safely.
I examined the identity of humanities therapy through its theory, method, and case report. Humanities
therapy heals the disease of mind, in particular philosophical disease, with the spirit and methodology
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of humanities. The concept of philosophical disease, its classification, and teleological model are
philosophical, but they belong to the scope of humanities therapy because they use the spirit and
methodology of humanities. The teleological model used here will be developed into an integrated
model afterwards by adding phenomenological, literary, and artistic factors.
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610
The Division Trauma of Koreans and Orality Healing
Jong Kun Kim
Konkuk University
1. What is Reunification Humanities?

Academic discussions on reunification in the reality of the still-divided Korea usually take place in the
social science field. It is true that humanities studies on reunification lack system and have only been
sporadically conducted in the fields of literature or history. There are a few reasons humanities has been
unable to think in earnest the issues of division and reunification. First, there is the tendency to view
reunification as a physical process. That is, people tend to view reunification as the political and economic
transition from the present system or structure where one ethnic race has been divided into two states into
a single, ethnical state. Second, there is a division habitus1 working behind the familiarity of reunification.
While the overcoming of division and reunification is a familiar and widely-accepted concept, the
accumulation of the division habitus deriving from state violence and self-censorship based on the mutual
hostility between the South and the North and the competition between the two states has inhibited focus
on the problem, induced oblivion and obstructed academic research. The third reason is a simplistic and
romanticized understanding of reunification. Discussions on reunification in humanities have so far been a
return to the myth of recovering homogeneity based on the sentiment of ethnical homegeneity or based on
the ideal of building a homogeneous nation.2
1 Division habitus is the system of tendencies and beliefs when the ruling dynamics of a division order or division structure
consisting of the relations among bodies, objects and places created by the history of division are enchased in bodies.: Park
Yeong-gyun, A Philosophical Reflection on the Habitus of Division, The Epoch and Philosophy, Korea Society of Philosophy,
2010, pp. 378-379.
2 Kim Seung-min, Division, Reunification and Koreas Humanities, A Humanities Paradigm of Reunification, Seonin
Publishing, 2011, p. 17.
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Because of such reasons, academic discussions on reunification has until now been usually considered

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exclusive property of the field of social science, and humanities has been unable to present a systematic
and long-term vision on the issue of Koreas reunification. Reunification humanities is an answer to the
demands of the times and the academics, and it is an approach to the issue of Koreas reunification using
humanities research methods aiming to overcome division and reach reunification through a humanities
mindset. As such, we have set Reunification Humanities of Communication, Healing and Integration as
our agenda.
The viewing of reunification as the building of a homogeneous state or the restoration of an ethnic races
homogeneity has led to extreme violence between the South and the North. The South-North reunification
issue turns to violence when the desire for homogeneity leads to the unacceptance of the other sides
differences. Therefore, humanities that ponders on how to overcome division and achieve reunification
should first attempt to comprehend the others.
Communication in reunification humanities is based on the premise of the otherness of others and points
to a teaching and learning relationship. Communication that acknowledges such otherness aims not for
a return to primordial home in the past but for the building of a new reunification community in the
future.
The division of North and South has seen a history of the libido of a people desiring to achieve the dream
of building a homogeneous state dashed in the process of modernization in the context of Japans colonial
rule and leading to a clash between the left and the right which accumulated in a tragic civil war. Because
Koreans have gone through a division trauma, we need to identify the hurt and go through a process of
healing. Another task that reunification humanities must pursue in its efforts to overcome division and
achieve reunification is to find the direction of healing the division trauma.
Reunification is not merely a merging of two systems or a political and economic merger. It is a
sociocultural integration and the merging of the bodies of South and North, a merger of social bodies. It
is a process of leaving the divided social body and building a new social body in a reunified society. From
this perspective, transforming the division habitus into a habitus of solidarity and fraternity means not
only tearing down the walls of division but ultimately transforming the two different societies of the South
and the North and creating a united ethnic community as a future society. This can be achieved through
communication, solidarity and overcoming differences with the power of creation.
Reunification humanities aims to achieve the challenges of communication, healing and integration
through a creative reinterpretation of values and ideologies based on commonness and differences, a
healing process of the division trauma and the transformation of the division habitus into a shared life
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culture based on ethnicity. Not only does it aim for such systemic integration, reunification humanities
hopes to create a sociocultural commonality that could act as an actual foundation for reunification, a life
as a ethnic community and a social body of a reunified society.3
Reunification humanities presents such a future-oriented vision of reunification and sees not only the
South Koreans as the main agents of reunification but includes the 8 million Korean diaspora, equivalent
to 10 percent of the domestic population. Humanities research enabling communication, healing and
integration among Koreans all over the world is the essence of reunification humanities.
As found in the concept of reunification humanities explained above, this paper also focuses on the
humanities of healing and aims to discuss the concept of division trauma, which forms a critical point of
concern in the issue of reunification and explores ways of healing the trauma. In order to further grasp the
realities of division trauma, this research conducted interviews with members of a group that retain trauma
and tried to present aspects of actual trauma while also pondering the effects of healing discovered in the
process of interviews.
2. The Concept and Aspects of Division Trauma
In this paper, division trauma refers to the negative effects that Koreas division, the Korean War, the
killing and violence that took place in the duration of the division structure and the control of the state had
on individuals.
Division trauma is a linking of trauma, the psychological term generally used for post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), to the historical event of division. This is done because when using terms such as
division wounds or division scars to describe the negative effects caused by division, the magnitude
of the issue is attenuated. It is hoped that by applying the term trauma, people would understand that
wounds from the division are real and that they should be healed.
When viewing the formation of communication and integration among people as the essence of
reunification humanities, the first issue that needs to be solved is the healing of the emotional wounds of
the Korean people caused by the division. Unless the division trauma is healed first, there can be no true
3 Kim Seung-min, Division, Reunification and Koreas Humanities, A Humanities Paradigm of Reunification, Seonin
Publishing, 2011, pp. 27-32.
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integration or reunification.

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The concept of division trauma can be discussed by categorizing its collective and individual natures.
There is the collective trauma of having our desire for a national state being thwarted in the history of
Japanese colonial rule and division. There is also the trauma from the Korean war when conflict rose to
a climax. Also the mutual hostility and sense of fear in society generated in both South and North Korea
as the political powers tried to use the conflict to their advantage led to a division trauma of a collective
nature for our people.4
On the other hand, there are individuals who live with post-traumatic disorders. There are those who
personally experience the trauma of war and fear such as war veterans, people who witnesses massacres,
those who came South during wartime, those who went to the North or were kidnapped and taken to
the North against their will, their family members and those who defected from the North after the war.
These are division traumas of an individual nature. When these division traumas on an individual level are
categorized into types, one can discover aspects of a collective trauma in them.
The division trauma has continued with the systematization of state violence and the narration of division
that has penetrated the peoples minds and their relationships with one another. The division system and
narration of division ironically had the trait of using the division trauma and reproducing it. The division
trauma exists to the background of the division system and division narration influencing our daily lives
extensively.5
The incidents of conflict between the South and the North while the division system continued on after
liberation from Japan and the Korean war are almost too numerous to list. Incidents, big and small,
that could be seen as historical and having widely influence society have taken place, from the Jeju 4.3
Incident and the Yeosun Incident from before the Korean War to present day. Although detailed statistics
on such incidents were not included in this paper, the following chart briefly outlines some of the most
important incidents.
4 Kim Seong-min Park Yeong-gyun, A Contemporary Reflection on the Trauma of Division, The Epoch and Philosophy 21-1,
Korea Society of Philosophy, 2010, pp. 173-174.
5 Lee Byeong-soo, The Characteristics and Ethics of the Division Trauma, The Humanities Paradigm of Reunification, Seonin,
2011, p. 195.
614
Period
Incident
Region of Occurrence
April 3, 1948
-Sept 21, 1954
Jeju 4.3 Incident
Throughout
Jeju Island
- First recorded massacre on a national level

- At least 25,000 to 80,000 victims
- 300,000 Jeju residents affected
Yeosun
Incident
Honam southern
seacoast and
vicinities of
Mount. Jiri and
Mount. Baekun
- Civilian massacre by rebels

- Damages caused in battles with rebels
- Plundering during the suppression of rebels
Oct, 11, 1948
Aspect and scale of division trauma6
June 25, 1950
Breakout of
Korean War
Throughout the
Korean Peninsula
- 1 million killed in South Korea

- 1.13 million killed in North Korea
- Civilian massacre by US army7
- Civilian massacre by South Korean army
- Civilian massacres by Peoples Court
- 6.5 million war refugees (as of March, 1951)
Oct 25, 1950
Chinese
Communist Army
join the war
Ethnic Koreans in
China
- 55,000 to 60,000 deployed prior to the Korean War8

- 20,000 participated in the war against the United States9
Dec 14, 1950
Pulling out of
Heungnam
North Korea
July 27, 1953
Truce Agreement
Throughout the
Korean Peninsula
Truce Presentday
Kidnapping of
South Korean
fishermen
Coastal areas
After 1999
Surge of North
Korean defectors
- 10 million family members separated

- 450,000 war veterans
- 200,000 war widows
- 100,000 war orphans
- Among 3,796 abducted South Koreans, 3,316 were
able to return home
- 427 kidnapped fishermen (as of Nov 2008)10
- Over 23,000 North Korean defectors
The tragic trauma experience during the Korean War did not end with the war. Both South and North
Korea punished people for guilt-by-association and caused trauma to the surviving family members.
Even when restricting the range of guilt-by-association to immediate family members, such punishments
6 Statistics on scope of casualties and damages were taken from online encyclopedias.
7 Information on civilian massacre by US army were taken from http://www.koreanmassacres.com
8 Kim Jung-saeng, The Secret Entry of Joseons Voluntary Army and the Korean War, Myeongji Publishing, 2000, requoted
from p. 159.
9 The Compilation Committee for Footsteps of Ethnic Koreans in China, Foundation, Beijing: Minjok Publishing Company,
1994, requoted from p. 77.
10 Eum Gyeong-seonJang Jae-hwan, The Truth about the Kidnapped Fishermen of East Sea Coast, Sorak News, 2008,
p. 56.
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increased the number of those affected by trauma four- to five-fold.

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Another point to consider is the torture that South Koreans abducted by the North (mostly fishermen)
after the truce had to endure. As shown in the chart, almost 90 percent of the abductees were able to return
home and it may seem their trauma was limited. However, because they had spent some time in the North,
albeit against their will, they were stigmatized by the South Korean government. They were kept under
surveillance and their freedom was restricted even after returning home. Even their family members had
to suffer because of guilt-by-association.
Whether the incident was big or small, the point of focus is that there are always people who are
traumatized at the scene of incidents. Although not shown in the chart above, there were numerous local
incidents involving war casualties, victims caught between pro- and anti-communist campaigns. Indeed,
the division trauma thats happened since the division can be seen as being nationwide.
South Koreans have a tendency to talk about the damages done to South Koreans when we talk about the
trauma of division. However, the Korean War was fought by both the South and the North, and the trauma
that the North Koreans endured must also be considered. One must not forget that the guilt-by-association
that family members of those who went North suffered in South Korea was probably similarly, if not more
adversely, experienced by family members of those who went South in North Korea.
In addition, the division trauma is often found in overseas Koreans as well. Many ethnic Koreans living
in China had to join the North Korean army once the Korean War started and others were forced to fight
in the Chinese Communist army once China decided to join the war to counter the US presence in the
Korean Peninsula. Their trauma could also be seen as division trauma and included when considering
the issue. Seen from this perspective, the geographical scope of the division trauma deriving from the
division of the Korean Peninsula far exceeds the boundaries of our territories, signifying that this is a
comprehensive issue indeed.
According to recent statistics, the accumulated number of North Korean defectors was only about 1,000
until 1999. This rose to 23,000 by March, 2012. Most of the later cases were those who crossed over to
China to find food as the economic situation in the North got worse. Many of them had to live some 3
to 4 years or even 7 to 8 years wandering around China before being able to come to the South. They go
through much suffering during this period in China. Those who are fortunate enough to come to the South,
again go through the painful process of assimilating into South Korean society. Their trauma could also be
seen as trauma caused by division. Therefore, division trauma is a nation-wide, race-wide and on-going
issue.
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3. Methods of Orality Healing

The diagnosis and treatment of trauma takes place through psychiatric counseling programs. Parallels for
the diagnosis and healing of the division trauma could be found here. As such, life interviews are widely
used and evaluated to be the most appropriate as the method of approach to division trauma.11
Counseling programs to treat trauma in psychiatry takes place over several sessions so that the progress
of treatment can be observed. Similarly, in order to diagnose and heal the trauma that the interviewee has,
the life interviews should be conducted over several sessions. The interviews should be conducted in such
direction that the interviewee can talk about his or her life experiences. While inducing the interviewee to
talk naturally about his or her life, interviewers will be able to detect the symptoms of trauma in the words
and by analyzing this, verify the effects of the diagnosis and healing.
Healing through interviews is similar to already existing storytelling or writing therapy but there is a
difference. While orality healing and storytelling therapy are similar in that they both use speech as
the medium, storytelling therapy usually takes the form of counseling and short interviews asking for
fragments of memories. This is different from the narrative of life story that is found in life interviews.
Also, while writing therapy might have the advantage of the final result being a well-structured narrative,
there is the considerable difference that it uses writing, not speech. In oral interviews, interviewees have
to reconstruct memories and tell their story on the spot. Writing assignments, on the other hand, give
writers the opportunity to review their writing and express their memories in refined language. Also
oral interviews are possible even with subjects who remain at the elementary level of oral culture are
uncapable of expressing themselves in writing.12
Theoretically, trauma treatment and recovery should be conducted in three stages: the stage of establishing
a sense of safety for the victims, the stage of remembering and expressing condolence for the situation in
which the trauma occurred and the stage of connecting all this back to reality. According to this theory,
oral life interviews pertain to the second stage. Remembering the situation in which the trauma occurred
and expressing ones feelings about it is a form of story recounting and this is what oral life interview is
11 Kim Jong-gun, The True Nature of Trauma as Seen through Orality, The Journal of the Humanities for Unification 51st Issue,
Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2011, pp. 39-41.
12 The elementary level of oral culture is an important concept in Walt J. Ongs Orality and Literacy. It is a cultural level of
perceiving the world through narrative and speaking based on memories when one is unable to read or write.
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This is the process of persuading victims with trauma to reach deep within and draw out complete and
detailed accounts of the trauma. Such reconstruction process transforms the memory of the trauma and
integrates it into the life story. General memories are easily formed and easy to talk about. However,
memories of trauma are not expressed in language and are static. First accounts of trauma are usually dull,
stereotypical and unemotional. Untransformed trauma accounts are said to be in the pre-narrative stage.
The story doesnt progress with time and the speaker doesnt express any emotions or opinions. Memories
of trauma are often compared to still pictures or silent movies. Trauma treatment is like trying to add
music and language to this.13
Human memories are formed as explicit memories once a person acquires language skills. Memories of
trauma are cases when excessive shock leads to the memory remaining in the level of implicit memory.14
Treating such memories of trauma consists of transforming an implicit memory, in which physical senses,
emotions, images are separated, into an explicit memory. It could be called the process of integrating
pieces of emotional and sensory memories into a new coherent memory.15
At this point, we can once again verify that life interviews are an appropriate method for oral therapy.
A short interview might provide some insight into the present state of the subject, but it has limits to
understanding the subjects innermost pain.
A historial recounting of past experiences in chronological order is insufficient for healing trauma. Life
interviews, because they have the traits of being fiction in that the interviewee reconstructs his or her own
identity in present tense by expressing his or her experiences, might sound like rambling or grumbling, but
because they include emotional memories, they are appropriate for diagnosing and healing trauma.
13 Herman, Judith Lewis (translated by Choi Hyeon-jeong). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse
to political terror, Planet, 2007, p. 292.
14 There are two memory systems in the human brain. One is the implicit memory and the other, explicit memory. Implicit
memories are of a subconscious level and activated immediately after birth. Having to do with the gray matters of the cerebral
cortex, these include non-language memories such as emotional, sensory and behavioral memories. Explicit memories are
formed at around the age of three when a child acquires language. Having to do with hippocampus, these include language
memories such as narrative memories, autobiographical memories, memories of experience, and memories of vocabulary.
Experience a trauma can induce a great shock that paralyzes the brains information system and oppress the function of the
hippocampus which controls the storing of day-to-day memories. Instead, the gray matters are activated and made to store the
negative memories and emotions. That is why memories of trauma are usually stored in form of implicit memories in the gray
matters of the right-side brain. The memory of the trauma is scattered into pieces of strong sensory, imagery and emotional
memories and stored without becoming an integrated and coherent memory. That is why it is difficult for victims of trauma
to talk about their memories of trauma, making it difficult for them to unburden the suffering they feel (Kim Jun-ki, The
Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009, pp. 82-83).
15 Kim Jun-ki, The Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009, p. 83.
618
The steps to reconstructing a story at the stage of trauma recovery are as follows:
Begin by reviewing the circumstances before and leading up to the trauma.
R
ecount the trauma incident by telling the facts in detail. The victim and the therapist should work
together to slowly gather the pieces of frozen emotions and senses.
T
he completed story must contain complete and detailed accounts of the trauma imagery.16
Such process of story reconstructing can be applied to the oral life interviews. The first step is when the
interviewee reconstructs his or her lifes events and reconnects with the past. A narrative conversation
format is necessary in an oral investigation, in order to guarantee that the interviewee feels free to initiate
an account, rather than rely solely on the questions of the interviewer. Actual cases of investigations
have led to the conclusion that asking the victim with trauma to only talk about the memory of trauma in
narrative often leads to unsatisfactory results. That is why it is necessary to give the interviewee enough
time to open up naturally by leading him or her to talk about circumstances before the trauma event. This,
in short, is what life interview is about.
The second step requires background information and subtle consideration on part of the interviewer.
Fragments of memories do not serve much as healing material and not much healing can be expected
by utilizing them. A story with a timeflow and history is organized in details and expressed in language.
The story holds not only details of the event itself but the reaction of the victim and of those who had
significance in her life. The interviewer will realize that the closer the victim gets to the part of the trauma,
he or she will have a hard time finding the words to say. In actual investigations, this interviewer was
able to draw the complete story out by capturing the point that the interviewee was trying to avoid talking
about and then asking about the point again once the interviewee finishes talking.
The third step is crucial to diagnosing the symptoms of trauma and finding the key to healing. That is
why a story without imagery and sensory memories about the trauma is insufficient. If the victim merely
narrates the facts without displaying any emotion, there is no healing effect. The account should include
not only a reconstruction of the events that occurred chronologically but what the interviewee felt at the
time. While the process of narrating emotions might be painful, it should nevertheless be done in as much
detail as the narration of facts.
to political terror, Planet, 2007, pp. 294-302.
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Such reconstruction of story on itself will not eliminate trauma. The purpose of recounting the trauma is to

Proceedings
integrate it, not to exorcise it. The basic premise of psychological therapy is that truth holds the power to
restore and recover once its spoken outloud.17
Ultimately, through the reconstruction of the story, the trauma becomes a new story and no longer a
source of shame and insult but rather, a medal of dignity and value. Reconstructing the event helps the
victim recover a lost world,18 in the words of one actual interviewee. As such, it can be said that a life
story containing the memories of trauma and the process of telling the story has healing effects.
Some of the specific methods in reconstructing stories that various case studies have shown to be effective
in healing trauma are direct exposure, flooding and testimonies. The flooding method is a conversion
method such as role-playing. The testimonial method involves recording the interviewees account and
going over the recording to connect the fragments into a cohesive testimony. The subject is then asked to
read the testimony aloud, which has the effect of alleviating the aftereffects of fear.
This author also witnessed similar cases in the process of publishing contents of interviews. After
recording four sessions of life interviews with a female North Korean defector, I met with her and
asked her to read the transcript of the recorded interviews and tell me if there were any corrections to be
made. While reviewing her interviews, the interviewee showed signs of great pride that she was able to
accomplish this task. She seemed impressed with herself that she was able to give such a detailed account
of the trauma that she herself had until now been afraid to talk of.
The testimonial method of trauma healing shows how the act of telling ones story, or orality, can alleviate
major post-traumatic disorder symptoms in the stage of trauma recovery. In conclusion, life interviews in
which victims are asked to recount in detail their past experience and the shock and hurt that they felt, are
in themselves a process of trauma healing.
4. Diagnosis and Possible Healing of Division Trauma through Orality
As seen above, the division trauma that has taken place inside us can be expressed through various
symptoms. Interviews that diagnose the individual division trauma symptoms and find ways to heal
them can lead to direct and tangible healing effects but such work takes much time and effort. Therefore,
the task of typing and categorizing the aspects of division trauma found in sample interviews in order
to political terror, Planet, 2007, pp. 301-302.
18 Herman, 2007, p. 302.
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to explore ways of healing is necessary. In this paper, we would like to present the most relevant and
authentic cases of North Korean defectors as found among various division trauma types.
This author has previously published a book based on records of life interviews conducted with North
Korean defectors.19 The interviews were not single events but conducted throughout four to five weekly
sessions.20 In a first-time interview, the interviewee was asked to share any oral literature that she had
encountered while living in North Korea and her overall life experience in the North. However, within the
first 30 minutes, the interviewee professed that she couldnt think of anything more to say about North
Korean folklore or culture. The interviewers then cautiously asked her about her experience of defecting
from the North. After a pause when she seemed to be organizing her thoughts, and the interviewee started
talking. Once she started, she talked extensively about her defection and the life she left behind in North
Korea. She said she had started going to church since coming to the South and that she found much solace
in religion. It seems that she has had experience giving testimonies in church about the tragic situation
in North Korea and her defection. In the testimonies, she talked about memories she had about certain
traumatic experiences she had gone through. However, the memories she shared were only sporadic and
they seemed not have reached a heart-felt level of story-telling. Because life interviews ask the person to
narrate his or her entire life, the person reconstructs the memories of trauma as he or she talks about major
life elements such as families and marriage.
The interviewee first tried to defect in 1997 when North Korea was going through a food shortage,
often referred to as the March of Suffering. She was caught and sent to a concentration camp for six
months. Her husband died during imprisonment and on her second attempt to defect in January 1999, she
succeeded. She went into hiding in China for eight years. In 2007, she came to South Korea and was able
to find work as a live-in housekeeper for a female professor at a theological seminary.
The information obtained during the interviews were shocking and the interviewee herself had much
to say, so the interview was conducted over five sessions. The interviewers were able to see the trauma
that the interviewee harbored as she talked about her life. This author has used the term North Korea
19 Kim Jong-gun Jung Jin-ah, March of Suffering, Stories of North Korean Defectors, Pakeejeong Publishing, 2012.
20 The interviews were conducted as following.
Dates and number of sessions : 6 weekly sessions beginning from April 9, 2010.
Venue: Konkuk University Humanities Building Room 611
Interviewee: Han Yeong-suk (pseudonym, 60 years old at the time of interview)
Interviewers: Kim Jong-gun, Kim Ye-sun
Main Topics: Life in North Korea including the experience of defecting, lifestyle in North Korea, adapting to South Korea
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defection trauma when categorizing the traits of trauma found in North Korean defectors. The traits of

Proceedings
trauma found among North Korean defectors as a group can be largely categorized into separation trauma,
state violence trauma that they endured while in the North and in China and social violence trauma that
they experienced after coming to the South. However, the diagnosis of each individuals trauma should
be conducted in detail and as the diagnosis can be found in the interviews themselves, they will not be
referred to as particular types in this paper.
This paper aims to present examples that could count as major symptoms of post-traumatic stress
disorders such as the repeated mentioning of a subject or exaggerated expressions of emotions as found
in the interviews. By diagnosing these symptoms as trauma, this research hopes to find the possibility of
healing them.
< Case Study 1> The painful memory of getting separated from a son because of hunger
[Interviewer: What was the hardest thing you had to go through when you were in the North?]
The most painful days of my life were.. In the 1970s and 80s, they gave out rations, what little
they gave, once every 15 days. Only workers could get rations. Farmers got their entire years food
supply once a year in the fall. Workers included university professors, school masters, you name
it. You got your rations twice a month and that was it. So when I was keeping house in the 70s
and 80s, we at least got rations. But we had to live 15 days on the rations. But sometimes theyd
only give enough for 13 days and you were still expected to live 15 days on it. Theyd do that
sometimes when the state was running short on food supplies.
So we didnt have things like snacks in North Korea. My child never saw snacks being sold in
stores when growing up. He was born in 1971 and he lived without ever having seen a snack. If he
never saw a snack, it means it was worse for children born after him. Things got much worse.
So, in North Korea, eating rice for us North Koreans was unimaginable, something that only
happened once in a blue moon. Thats how rare rice was. So, we got corn for our rations. Thats
what we lived on all our lives, rations of corn. So, at least we got that in the 70s and 80s.
But starting from 1993, I was unable to get any rations. Since 93, no, since 91 and 92, you only
got rations if the ration distribution center got any food from the state. If the distribution center got
food that day, you got rations. If it didnt get any, you didnt get any. Thats how we lived. And
then in 94 Kim Il Sung died and we didnt get any rations whatsoever in 95 and 96. No food
whatsoever. So, in North Korea, we dont have anything like private property. You dont have your
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own house, your own savings. There is no you. So if the state doesnt give, the entire country has
to starve. And still the state didnt give any rations out, and that time, 96 and 97, were the hardest
for me.
And Im saying this... if only my son was still here... I wouldnt be saying this and bringing up
my son... there is a reason Im saying this. The reason this was the most painful to me was that in
January 1997, my son left home to defect. He left in January 1997, and 1997 was the worst year
ever in North Korea. In the summer of 1996, there wasnt a single healthy person walking in the
streets of North Korea. Everyone was starving.21
In order to make the interviewees story more comprehendible, the interviewers divided the story into
chapters according to the subject and titled the chapters. Stories about hunger, food shortage, economic
hardships accounted for 30 percent among 84 chapters. The excerpt included above is about how her
eldest son had to cross over to China to escape the hunger. This is the story that she started with when
asked about the hardest thing that she had to go through while living in North Korea. The late 1990s was
called the age of the March of Suffering, when the earliest of defectors made their way over to China
to escape starving to death. The interviewee herself defected to escape hunger. The hunger that the
defectors felt at that time didnt stop at the level of simple hunger. It was so severe that it was inevitably
accompanied by fear of death by starvation. Therefore, one can conclude that the fear of death by
starvation has left a traumatic imprint on this interviewee. To the interviewee, hunger is inextricably linked
with death. Her husband died in prison of starvation and a neighbor to whom she was close with and who
attempted to defect with her, also died of hunger. That is why she expressed sympathy towards a woman
she recounts having met in prison, who was imprisoned for having killed and eaten a human. I would
have done the same, she admitted. Hunger made her experience separation from her son, and this led to
the fear of hunger that she experienced herself.
One of the major symptoms of trauma is repetitive re-experience, and the interviewee clearly showed this
symptom in her interview. From stories of her own experience to accounts of what she saw or heard from
others, the keywords hunger and death were constantly repeated. She expressed strong anger towards
the North Korean government, commenting that it should perish for having made its people starve to
death like this. She even said that she wished the United States would send bomber planes to bring the
21 Kim Jong-gun Jung Jin-ah, March of Suffering, Stories of North Korean Defectors, Pakeejeong Publishing, 2012, pp. 48-49.
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government to a quick end. This could be seen as a state of hyper-arousal.

Proceedings
The fear of dying of starvation was an ongoing fear for the interviewee. On the first day of the interview,
at mealtime with the interviewers, the interviewee barely ate anything. She said she had gotten so used to
starving in the North that even now, she couldnt eat much. Even after eight years in China and two years
in the South, she was holding on to a rigid perception that food was only necessary to alleviate hunger.
This could be seen as another traumatic disorder.
The interviewees trauma deriving from having experienced hunger became a major theme during the
series of interviews conducted, manifesting through various subject matters. However, at the fourth
interview, interviewers could sense that her hard-line tone had somewhat begun to soften. Although this
softening came when she was talking about how difficult it is to adapt to South Koreas overly competitive
society, she repeatedly stated that she wouldnt have left the North had she only been given a decent
amount of corn and salt rations.
If they would only not arrest me for having run off to the South and if they would only give me food, Id
go back to North Korea. These words showed how her perspective of North Korea, the land of hunger,
was changing. It was changing from being an object of fear to an object of longing. Her psychological
state, repeatedly talking about the fear of hunger and expressing pent-up anger, became alleviated with
the repeated interviews and she relaxed her rigid view of North Korea and now saw it has a livable place
if it only had food. Such alleviation of fear and tension is the result of having repeatedly recounting the
memories of fear that the interviewee experienced herself and the beginning of a healing process.
< Case Study 2> Protesting the perceived prejudice that female North Korean defectors are promiscuous
Our professor, the professor that we are working with here, told me something when I had just
arrived here two years ago. One evening she said to me,
We need to educate North Korean defectors on relationships and teach them the virtue of chastity.
So many North Korean women have husbands back home and still find men to live with when
staying in China and then go on to find new husbands here in the South. This is shameful behavior
for Korean women. So many North Korean women seem to be unaware of this.
Thats what she said. Now, our professor is a highly-respected person. But I immediately
responded,
Professor, dont say such things. Who are you trying to teach about chastity? You should try
walking in their shoes. How dare you say such things without having gone through what they did?
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Chastity is a luxury in situations of life or death. How could you teach women whod gone through
such situations without having experienced it yourself? Would they listen to you? Would they hear
your words? You would be insulting them.
Thats what I said. And our professor, shes a good person, she said,
Youre right
and she listened to me. Then she said,
Youre right. Youre absolutely right. I shouldnt have said that.
Thats how I stopped her from saying such things.
So I said,
How dare you try to educate people on ethics without having gone through the things they have
and lived in the environment they have? How dare you try to preach? Its preposterous. Am I not
right? Thats what I told the professor. Dont ever do that. Thats what I tell all South Koreans.
Dont you try to preach without knowing what youre saying.
Am I not right? Am I wrong? I am saying everything I want to say here. Im saying this because
youre listening and understanding. I heard about someone who had to live in a household where
there were several unmarried brothers and she had to sleep with all of them in turn. Thats how
women are being sold in China.22
The interviewers could perceive throughout the interview the respect and gratitude that the interviewee
felt towards this female theology professor who supported her after her arrival in South Korea. However,
in the excerpt included above, the interviewee showed an outburst of emotions. The professor was a
figure she respected and the person who gave her a job, but the interviewee could barely control her
feelings when she showed fierce, almost-furious resentment towards her for taking issue with the concept
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of chastity among female Northern Korean defectors. She was strongly rejecting the professor because

Proceedings
she felt the professor was taking issue with the human trafficking and sexual assaults that female North
Korean females become vulnerable to while staying in China. There is no evidence to point that the
interviewee or her daughter had been placed in such situations. However, in her interview, she mentioned
how parents would tell their daughter, who driven by hunger attempted to cross the Dumangang river, to
stay alive at whatever cost, even by selling herself. She went on to say how no parent would ever blame
their daughter if she was forced to sell herself to survive. The interviewee recounted in tears a story she
said she had first heard from a woman she met when hiding in China. A young couple escaped by crossing
the Dumangang river, leaving their elderly parents and four-year-old son behind. They pretended to be
siblings, and when the wife was sold to a Chinese man, she had to sleep with her new husband while
her husband could only watch in silence. Although it wasnt a trauma that she herself experienced, the
interviewee identified herself with the victims of sexual assault or at least felt a strong bond to them when
hearing their tragic stories.
The most common trait of post-traumatic stress disorder experienced after being sexually assaulted is the
repeated alternation between hyper-arousal (a state of increased tension marked by such psychological
effects as anxiety, anger and fear and physical effects as quickened heartbeat and breathing) and hypoarousal (a state of dulled reaction marked by a lack of emotions and slow heartbeat and breathing).23
When the interviewee, who was usually gentle-mannered, expressed explosive anger towards the female
professor, whom she had talked about with great respect until now, it could be understood that she was
experiencing a state of hyper-arousal. The interviewee continued in this state throughout the interview.
She would mimic the angry tones in her story while glaring at the interviewers and she showed shortness
of breath. The interviewee, while not having been sexually assaulted herself, had been directly impacted
by the trauma that the collective group of her fellow female North Korean defectors had experienced and
this had left imprints on her.
The point at the end of the interview when the interviewee appealed to the interviewers to agree to what he
or she said is a window into exploring the clues to healing trauma disorders. Am I not right? Do you hear
me? I am pouring out my heart here. I feel like I can say anything because you listen and understand.
Such an appeal could be interpreted as an expression of will by the interviewee that she wanted to unload
all the pent-up anger inside now that she felt a certain bond with the interviewers. This is similar to the
results of the healing effects of a testimony. The interviewee felt secure enough at this point that she
could talk about all the painful memories she was harboring inside. This could be recognized as a point of
healing in orality healing.
23 Kim Jun-ki, The Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009. p. 143.
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< Case Study 3> Discovering leisure after coming to South Korea
It was last summer. I went to the outdoor market as usual, this place called Gildong Market. Its
a marketplace with shops lined on both sides. I went to the market to do some grocery shopping
because every month, I hold a party for a group of fellow North Korean defectors at my place. So
I was walking around the market shopping for groceries, and there were these two middle-aged
women. They seemed to be in their forties and they were walking towards my direction. As they
were passing me by, one woman turns to the other and says,
Hey. Lets go to my house and share a bowl of cold noodles.
Thats all she said.
But when I heard those words, I suddenly felt numb. My head felt like it was swirling. And then, I
couldnt remember where I was or why I was holding this bag and which direction I was headed to.
I felt completely numb. All in the middle of the market, the moment I heard those words. I thought
to myself,
What am I doing? People are going to stare at me. I should get going but I dont know where I
came from and where I should go.
I was so flustered. But when I told this to the professor, she didnt seem to understand.
Why? she asked.
So I came [to the interview] and said,
I heard those words and it felt like my heart stopped beating all of a sudden.
And the professor asked,
Why?
Hey, lets go to my house and share a bowl of cold noodles.
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You know- we were never able to say those words all our lives.

Proceedings
How my heart froze at these words (sobbing). So I said to the professor today, I feel so wronged.
I am a good-natured person, I have a lot of friends. But in North Korea, in this country the words,
come to my place and share a bowl of cold noodles, dont exist. These words dont exist there.
So when the two women said those words and passed me by, I felt so emotional. You know,
professor, the two women said those words and passed me by and those words hit me square in my
heart and I couldnt remember which way I was supposed to go at the moment. I stayed stuck in
the same place for a long time, toing and froing.
Thats how it was. Thats how we lived. We did. If we ever got a bowl of noodle to cook, we had to
feed our children first. I couldnt possibly ask my friend while walking outside,
Come in and have a bowl of noodles before you go.24
The interviewee would often refer to the hunger she had felt in North Korea and talk about times when
she would suddenly feel dull while going about her day even after coming to South Korea. She talked
about a time when she had gone to the market and felt her senses go dull when overhearing a conversation
between two middle-aged women. It was a simple conversation in which one woman invited the other to
her home to enjoy a meal of a bowl of cold noodles. These words, however, had a flashback effect and
made the interviewee recall her days of suffering back in North Korea. She talked about the time when
she witnessed her neighbor die of starvation but wasnt able to share her measly portion of corn stew.
She also recalled how she had no money to go to the funeral of the elderly neighbor who had been her
midwife when she gave birth. The conversation between the two women in which one offered to share her
food with the other must have triggered flashback memories of the interviewees tragic past experiences.
When she overheard the two women, she suddenly lost her sense of reality and couldnt remember where
she was, what she was doing there and where she was headed to.
When considering that avoidance and numbness are two major symptoms of trauma disorders, one can
diagnose this situation as the manifestation of such symptoms. Ultimately, the interviewee, upon returning
home, appealed to the female professor who was conducting the conversation that she had no other choice
but to do what she did while her trauma remained. Such aspect can also be understood as an aspect of
trauma healing in orality healing. The act of recounting the injustice one is suffering at the time of the
trauma and asking for sympathy is a good example of how an orality situation can be used for healing.
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5. Remaining Problems
The above-mentioned examples are classical displays of the major symptoms of trauma found in an
interviewees oral account of his or her life experience. Such examples of trauma are manifested diversely,
differing from individual to individual. However, these need to be categorized if they are to be generalized
as the collective trauma of North Korean defectors instead of being seen as personal experiences of
individuals. This author has previously attempted to categorize the accounts of the North Korean defectors
into types.
The trauma that North Korean defectors showed could be categorized into dispersion trauma, state
violence trauma, social violence trauma, etc. Such categorization was overly broad and not adequate to
be applied in specific cases of healing. Further detailed categorization was required. For example, the first
case study dealing with fear of starvation could be typed as trauma of death by starvation. The second case
study could be typed as trauma of human trafficking. Other commonly-found trauma types found among
North Korean defectors were traumas originating from injuries sustained while being chased by the
Chinese security police, from the fear experienced when crossing the Dumangang river and when crossing
the Mekong River. It is this authors opinion that such categorization would contribute to formulating
methods of diagnosis and treatment of division trauma for orality healing.
Literature, which focuses on narration, captures a different point from the study methods of orality that
other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and history emphasizes. These disciplines focus
on recreating the narrative through the recollections that the interviewee experiences himself or herself.
However, in the actual practice of investigating orality, it was discovered that the interviewee talked
about other peoples experiences in almost equal amounts as about her own experience. Rarely did the
interviewee show objectivity just because it was someone elses story. As in the second case study, the
interviewee put in her own emotions and evaluations into these stories. There were also times when
listening to or recounting stories of those sharing her own tragic fate, she would experience similar or
same trauma symptoms. Further deliberation is needed on how to process this aspect.
References
Kim Gui-ok et al, Memories of a War: The Orality of the Cold War, Seonin, 2008.
Kim Gui-ok, The Life Experiences and Identity of Defectors to South Korea in Settlements-Based on
1999.
Kim Gui-ok, Separated Families, neither anti-communist warriors nor communists, Yeoksabipyeongsa,
629
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Sokcho Abai Village and Gimjae Yongji Farm, Seoul National University Ph. D. dissertation,

Proceedings
2004.
Kim Seong-rye, A Methodical Reflection of Feminist Orality, Feminist History Writing: Study Methods
of the History of Orality, Arche, 2012.
Kim Seung-min, Division, Reunification and Koreas Humanities, A Humanities Paradigm of
Reunification, Seonin Publishing, 2011.
Kim Seong-min Park Yeong-gyun, A Contemporary Reflection on the Trauma of Division, The Epoch
and Philosophy 21-1, Korea Society of Philosophy, 2010.
Kim Jong-gun, The True Nature of Trauma as Seen through Orality, The Journal of the Humanities for
Unification 51st Issue, Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2011.
Kim Jong-gun, The Memories of Ppalchisan as Seen in the Lives of Women from the Jirisan Vicinity,
The Journal of the Humanities 47th Issue, Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2009.
Kim Jong-gun, The Historical Trauma of North Korea Defectors and the Manifest Aspects of the
Defection Trauma, The Historical Trauma of Koreans, Seonin Publishing, 2012.
Kim Jong-gun Jung Jin-ah, March of Suffering, Stories of North Korean Defectors, Pakeejeong
Publishing, 2012.
Kim Jun-ki, The Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009.
Kim Jung-saeng, The Secret Entry of Joseons Voluntary Army and the Korean War, Myeongji Publishing,
2000.
Park Gyeong-yeol, The Relative Truth of the 4.3 Incident as Seen in the Lives of Jeju Women, The
Journal of the Humanities 47th Issue, Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2009.
Park Yeong-gyun, A Philosophical Reflection on the Habitus of Division, The Epoch and Philosophy,
Korea Society of Philosophy, 2010.
Park Chan-seung, The Korean War in Villages, Dolbegae, 2010.
Eum Gyeong-seonJang Jae-hwan, The Truth about the Kidnapped Fishermen of East Sea Coast, Sorak
News, 2008.
Ong, Walter J. (translated by Lee Ki-wooLim Myeong-jin), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of
the Word, Moonye Publishing, 1995.
Lee Byeong-soo, The Characteristics and Ethics of the Division Trauma, The Humanities Paradigm of
Reunification, Seonin, 2011.
Lee Im-hwa, War Widows, Breaking the Silence in Koreas Modern History, Chaekgwahamkke, 2010.
Herman, Judith Lewis (translated by Choi Hyeon-jeong). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence
from domestic abuse to political terror, Planet, 2007.
The Compilation Committee for Footsteps of Ethnic Koreans in China, Foundation, Beijing: Minjok
Publishing Company, 1994.
630
Deficiency, Expression and Mind Healing:

Focusing on Selective Mutism1
Sunmi Hong
Wonkwang University
1. Introduction
We intend to look for ways to apply humanitarian mind healing using psychoanalysis through explorative
research into deficient and hurting minds and into selective mutism, which manifests itself when the
deficiency affects self-expression.
The object of healing in this context is the mind hurting from the relations that are formed from the
moment when a human, a social animal, is born. A human being establishes not only organic but inorganic
relations; and the mind gets hurt when there is a deficiency of something when the desire, or what a
human wants, is not fulfilled from relations as relations fall apart or become distant. Therefore, the hurting
mind affects relation either causally or consequentially and influences a society where such relations are
formed.
When we heal the mind, the subject looks for a way of healing from the pain arising out of deficiency, in
other words the shortage that the subject experiences from the social relation. This takes into consideration
the nature of humans as social organisms and puts emphasis on the importance of social health of humans,
which is determined by relations. It is needless to say that social health is one of the preconditions to a
healthy state as the WHOs definition on health includes not only physical and mental health but also social
well-being.
1 This paper received 2010 government grant (Academic Research Project Fund of Ministry of Education, Science and
Technology) from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2010-361-A00008).
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From the moment when a human starts to exist, he is no longer alone but forms a relationship with an

Proceedings
object. Therefore, relations hold an undetectable presence to human being. From the linguistic perspective,
even when relations are terminated, it shall be described as severed relation or non-existent relation.
Health related to social relation is important especially for modern day humans who lead their basic
biological life through social activities - economic activities - evolved from primitive or outdated ways
of life. Such relations can be said to be ultimately founded on the relationship with family members. It
has already been proven by a number of scholars that someone who has healthy family relations during
childhood leads a healthier life in a society where many more relations are formed.
We intend to define the hurting mind arising from the relational deficiency from a psychoanalytic
perspective and to explore ways to address physical pain resulting from such a mind.
From Sigmund Freud, who, as the founder of psychoanalysis, provides the foundation for our study,
to the more contemporary Jacques Lacan, it has been pointed out that the unconscious experience of a
person with a family during his childhood has a widespread affect on his sexual instinct, personality,
social behavior as well as his creative activities or creation. If the unconscious experience is unfortunately
a traumatic one, sometimes from the etiological context, such experiences stay dormant in a child as
if a screen of memory and is expressed in a negative manner - for example, a neurotic episode.2 The
motivated trauma may represent itself in various symptoms; but it is also directly present or implies itself
as maintaining close relations with the event that caused the trauma. While various phenomena including
symptoms may confuse the investigation into cases, neurosis - for example, hysteria - always talks about a
specific event.3
In order to address neurotic symptoms, Freud suggested that when a patient is made to remember the
event causing the hysteria, to refresh the feelings associated with the event, to describe the event in most
details as possible and verbally express the feelings, the symptoms disappear and do not reoccur. In other
words, for successful treatment, psychological processes carrying the emotion at the time of occurrence of
the traumatic event should be verbally expressed.4 It is not easy, however, to recount the event, much less
to express the feelings of a traumatic event. Moreover, when the response or retaliatory feelings stay with
the patient over time, remaining in the memory, it is not easy to find the correct expression for the original
feeling. Therefore, it is difficult for the subject to completely know the feeling when the traumatic event
2 Sigmund Freud et J. Breuer, tudes sur lhystrie, PUF, 1956, pp. 1-2.
3 Un trauma est toujours suspect [] Vous ne pouvez jamais re s quun souvenir nest pas souvenir-ran. [] un
souvenir tel quil est imaginairement revu ce quest un souvenir-ran est toujours suspect. Une image bloque toujours
la vit. in Confences aux Universit nord-amicaines; Yale University, Kanzer Semina, Jacques Lacan, Scilicet n
6/7, 1975, pp. 7-31.
4 Sigmund Freud et J. Breuer, tudes sur lhystrie, PUF, 1956, p. 4.
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occurred. Lacan suggested that a trauma is a defective knowing (un savoir dfaillant) without knowing
what I think.5
Therefore, to Lacan, when a trauma that suddenly surfaces cannot be described with words, it no longer
is symbolic, and the trauma becomes a linguistic deficiency. You cannot say everything. As soon as it is
spoken with words, a gap starts to exist in the reality of the event. It is deficiency of signifiers in linguistic
structures. Structurally, a deficiency in others (S(A/)).6 While humans are speaking beings that create
fragments of trauma, they are traumatized with the words being said. When faced with practical functions,
trauma inherently becomes deficiency. The subject who does not wish to speak is born another way,
sometimes using a means called symptoms. Freuds Wolf Man had nightmares of wolves and trees due to
his complex relationship with his father, but the trauma prevented him from doing anything: Lacan pointed
out that in a situation where nothing can be done, there only was an act, not any behavior or action,7 which
in a Lacanian sense J. Miller expresses as suicide of the subject.8 Miller, however, stressed that the subject
is born in a different way. That is, to be born again in others, put linguistically, you are. But the trauma is
not expressed with words or symptoms. The trauma goes through the process of suffering and suppression
coming from the situation that does not allow any movement or action, or is demonstrated as hysteric
symptoms. For example, trauma results in physical symptoms as paralysis of face, and/or limbs, as well as
autism, or linguistic barriers as was evident in Freud where he spoke in Latin losing his mother tongue of
German.
They are kinds of neurotic symptoms, a responsive mechanism to a situation.
Here, we will apply the healing method of transitioning signifiers of deficiency which is demonstrated
as symptoms into expressions with images. This is to give an opportunity for fragmented images of
memories, which are hovering in the unconsciousness of a subject without finding the signifiers of
languages or the difficult system of symbols that fails to form a sound to be expressed not with language
but with other means.
Such images recreate the conditions of traumatic experience and represents cries of the hurting mind and
the earnest desires of a patient with trauma, going through the process of healing the mind by filling or
5 Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire, Livre XVI, Dun Autre lautre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p.274.
6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 818.
7 Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire, Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris,Seuil, 1973, p. 50.
8 Miller J. - A., Jacques Lacan : remarques sur son concept de passage lacte, Mental, Paris, avril 2006, n17, p. 21.
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removing the gap - deficiency - in the extension of the signifiers turned into words.

Proceedings
2. Childhood and Registration of Image

It is relations that cause motivation among the subject and works as a foundation. Under relations, desire
is created, and desire with the instinct for expression is demonstrated through creative activities or creation
itself. The relation between image and desire of the latter is mutual motivation and result. Symbolic images
are vivid memories of subjects focused with instinctive desires. Symbols with more vivid symbolism
are results of more vivid memories. The images, whether unconsciously or consciously, are recreation of
fragmented scenes from traumatic conditions and scars with traumatic traces. Images are spread out as
fragmented memory and give identity to the represented.
In the process, the gap of the deficiency links the fragments9 like welding, and it glides among the gaps to
allow the sound submerged in the sea of silence to vocalize. The sound will be verbalized. The meaning of
signifier and signified will be delivered to us more clearly. Along the process, we can expect a treatment
effect on selective mutism as a symptom of a hurting mind by using psychoanalysis and art therapy.
The traumatic period we choose is childhood. Both Freud and Lacan gave meaningful consideration for
both time and field in the process where unconscious desire becomes motivation. It includes implications
from the tragedy of the Oedipus complex. One is the childhood and the other is where there is a transition
from unconscious to Oedipus exit, or the family that creates the incestuous desire.
As image is related with desire, it can be a path leading us to unconsciousness. If the image maintains
expression of unconscious desire, signifies relations and is from the period when the childhood desire is
registered, it will not be difficult for us to find the trace of traumatic experience of childhood when we
analyze and interpret the drawings of the client.
Desire is destined to accompany deficiency. The desire is expressed through creation or creative activities.
The relation between image and desire is mutual motivation and consequence at the same time. It is the
period when a person feels deficient in linguistic ability and in expression as well as experiences the reality
where deficiency and the bulging desire for expression is oppressed. It is also a childhood where a person
has such unconscious and traumatic experience as to feel that the unconsciousness does or tries to castrate
oneself. It is also a period where the unconscious mental mechanism of the superego is being created: as
restrictions and taboos are learned without clearly knowing the interpretation, analysis or logic of the cause
and effect and reasons; guilty conscience is experienced; and oppression starts to kick in.
9 Michel Lapeyre, Clinique freudienne, Paris, Anthropos, 1996, p. 15.
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According to Antoine Vergote, the analysand who returns to his childhood during the process of creation
- the event reoccurs to the analysand and he draws his childhood - dreams of a child through a drawing.10
In the process, whether it is something that exists or a vehicle to lead, many surrounding aspects are
interpreted as signals for the relationship between a child and a mother. What is created into an image
can be interpreted as symbol of mother. For example, the image of a house that is being recollected along
with ones childhood is a memory of old and recent relationship with ones mother. The image is filled
with the value of affection created from the history of the relationship. But at the same time, the image
may carry significance through such various experiences as departure to unfamiliarity, return, internal
closure and opening. It is like a door being opened for lost time, and it starts to let its presence known as
if something completely new has taken the place of the existing which was there meaninglessly without
being recognized.
Therefore, the image drawn by the analysand provides a style and an implication from a distant childhood.
The image drawn reflects his current feelings and the history that he experienced. The feelings from all
relations and the mood of relations are being visualized into the image. That is why interpreting a childs
drawing is like interpreting the mother who is significant to the child. It is like interpreting the family
relation.
3. Deficiency and Creator
When a subject loses something that he desires or has some deficiency, the subject will represent the object
of desire or the deficiency as vacant. If the subject is still at the stage of linguistic deficiency not to mention
the stage of recollection, the place of object will be a gap or a pit like a black hole, instead of being an
aesthetic emptiness. The gap/pit must be the consequence of desire and obsession coming from ones own
deficiency as if the empty space in the image.11 In her paper In Work of Art and the Leap of Creator,
Melanie Klein took an example of the absence of a mothers image to infer that the subject launches a
vicious attack and destroys the implication of the shape of his mother. Of course this case involves hatred
accompanying the love for his mother. To a child, the metaphysical world of the mothers body represents
hostility or paranoia. In Melanie Kleins theory, a premature oedipal desire gives rise to the obsession
of fear of castration in boys and girls who are terrified of stealing the implication of the fathers penis or
mothers body. The obsession will come from the fear of being alone from the loss of love and loss of the

Antoine Vergote, La Psychanalyse lpreuve de la sublimation, Paris, Les Editions du CERF, 1997, p. 167.

Mlanie Klein, Essaie de la psychanalyse 1921-1945, Paris, Payot, 1968, pp. 259-261.
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object of love.

Proceedings
The lack of the image of a mother is like a stage where an image of a mother is not expressed due to
obsession with the mother. Avoidance from mentioning the mother may represent advanced obsession
with the mother. When a girl who is afraid of her mothers physical attack does not look at her mother, the
obsession is being emphasized. The existence of true loving mother is diminished by the fear of an awful
one. Such implied image stays at the childs current existence, at the present state of a child with symptom.
At a later state, the implication of fear evolves. Instead of fearing for maternal attack, change occurs due to
the loss of a true mother and what the girl is truly fearful for is being left alone, abandoned. At this, Melanie
Klein gives an analogy that the most spectacular painting on a painters wall is sold. It is the loss of a space
formerly filled. It was made empty. But the space has not disappeared. The space is still there. What has
disappeared from the subject is an entity that has moved to a different place instead of expiring. On the
other hand, didnt you want the wall to be made empty? How can you describe the empty wall with words?
In the inner side of a female subject, the meaning of the empty space is like herself with some deficiency.
But wasnt the empty space formerly filled? The empty wall cannot be filled with emptiness and it may
return despondency to her. The empty space was a space in itself and therefore is an existence. A space
inside the owner may be the feeling as if something is missing from ones body. The empty space, which
was once felt as something that cannot be made whole, is filled. When you look at the wall and imagine a
painting on it, even if you want to get rid of it again, the act of imagining refills the wall. It is the intention
of the reaction that follows the destroyers desire to recreate. This is how a painting is a means for
recreation. Therefore an empty space becomes a space for correction, desire to transform into something
good, psychological bias toward mother, recreation of such bias, and the recognition of a need to draw.
Clearly, the action of a creator has the function of corrector to a subject. The correction, however, is
dependent on intervention of ego as well as instantaneous and relative correction of an object - even when
without the impulse of instinct. And the object, in this instance, is the narcissistic self that loves oneself that
forms a part of the subject. In the end, correcting an object is to correct the subject himself.
4. Deficiency and Desire Conspired with Image
To speak about Lacans image of desire, the image is explained through its relation with the object that
induces deficiency or castration. The image carries the relations where deficiency causes desire and desire
gives rise to deficiency. To a psychoanalyst, human desire is desire for the others.12 While to Freud, the
object of desire is from the lost object; to Lacan, petit a. The desire holds libido and becomes libidinal desire.

Jacques Lacan, Introduction la structure de langoisse, L Angoisse, Sminaire X, PUF., 1982, p. 32.
636
The desire we hold on to only has meaning in the libidinal economy, namely, in the relations with sexual
desire.13 Lacan places desire under clear forms of object such as shapes of mouth, anus and penis. As
libidinal desire was inevitably petite a, it accompanies the object that it is being held on to. In the forms
being exposed, the desires are connected to reproduction instead of forming the subject of the other (A).
Especially during the phallic phase, it reaches to various levels of objects. The function of a is reproduced
from clear deficiency, that is, the deficiency of penis.
Ironically, the imaginary restoration of penis may come from deficiency. This is where we call it a,realistic
image. Physical image works only in the substance of the subject, purely and imaginatively. In other words,
it works by libidinization. And the penis appears to be white - as if it is empty.
During the Oedipal period, deficiency is combined with the symbolic penis, and imaginary penises are
recorded( ). ( ), in the imaginary structure, is like a gap that is created in the approach to libidinal
image, similar to special imaginary dramatization. In the scene where we say traumatic, however, the
subject is excluded. In place of ( ), the place for experience, in Unheimlichkeit, obsession is (a) in
the others (A) related to non-existence or existence as if the present state of the word castration. The
image is that the others (A) do not exist anymore to a traumatic Oedipus. The image is characterized with
deficiency. Therefore, the deficiency in desire appears like an essence of the trauma, and it is the trauma
from imaginary castration originating from castration complex.
Therefore, we know that the study of psychoanalysis describes the relationship between the desire and
the object a as follows. That is the relation acting to arouse the function of motivation in a subject. The
dominant form of motivation is motivation of desire. The a is known as a fascinating form just like ($a)
that supports desire. As the subject lacks an object, $ desires a.
When the subject lacks an object a that has relation with oneself, in other words the object of ones
desire, the reaction of surrender or endeavor from the subject will begin. The reaction often uses silence
which sometimes is much stronger than the sound or shout describing ones desire - what one wants - to
the outside world. Of course, the silence is on one hand punishment to the superegos guilty conscience
or inability represented by the subject who fails to allow himself any other reaction, and on the other
one of hysteric reactions. Whichever it might be, the selective mutism is evidently a kind of unconscious
13 Jacques Lacan, Introduction la structure de langoisse, LAngoisse, Sminaire X, p. 368.
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expression of a subject. Helping it find what it wants will be for our research - healing.

Proceedings
5. Selective Mutism from Deficiency

The author intends to focus on loss of words, especially selective mutism out of various reactions related
to traumatic experience. The research will begin by stressing selective mutism as a kind of reaction from
traumatic experience.
While temporary or selective aphasia in a child may represent serious neurosis of autism, an adult may
demonstrate pretend aphasia related to depression or autistic condition. Compared to the complete loss of
speech, or aphasia, selective mutism is loss of speech when faced with one or many particular situation(s)
combined. The psychoanalysis finds the period or location where such symptoms, which are still being
discovered, are established on childhood and family which is of the highest interest as the period and
location for forming unconscious experience.14 Moreover, selective mutism may be demonstrated in front
of a particular person. While the symptoms of selective mutism are not often recognized at home during
childhood, they tend to intensify when the child starts to attend a school, where the symptoms are identified
by teachers. This means that selective mutism is demonstrated in a way that a child with a good command
of language in front of family members or someone familiar does not or cannot speak temporarily or to a
particular person. Many people who experience mutism actually complain lack of speech in a particular
situation.
It can be viewed as a neurotic symptom and a kind of response mechanism toward a condition. While
temporary or selective aphasia in a child may represent serious neurosis of autism, an adult may demonstrate
pretend aphasia related to depression or autistic condition.
It is an exemplary demonstration of a theory on neurotic mechanism which helped establish Freud as a
prominent psychoanalyst. Selective mutism that entails such Freudian interpretation and Lacans linguistic
deficiency can be viewed as the mind hurting.
There are many causes for selective mutism from a number of clinical cases. Historical causes include
neurotic response of the childs family, namely unresolved psycho dynamic conflict with an overly
protective mother or stern and emotionally distant father. Also, early trauma or change in the environment
can be identified as a clear inducer for the condition. Recently, attempts have been made to connect selective
mutism in a child with social phobia in adults, and studies are under way to interpret it as a symptom or
subtype of anxiety disorder or social anxiety in childhood. Such hypotheses have the tendency to view
14 Judith A. Yanof, Langage, Communication, and, transfrence in child Analyse I. Selective mutisme: The Medium is the
message II. Is child Analysis really analysis?, Journal of the American Psychoanlytic Association, 44:79-119, 1996.
638
children as excessively shy and withdrawn and rigid in social context.

Therefore, there is a possibility to explore selective mutism on the basis of psychoanalytic theory. As the
study of psychoanalysis has interest on the subject and object (Object a), to put it differently, the relationship
between the subject and the object of desire, it can be an attractive methodology for the purpose of research
that values relations.
The intended approach is to apply the process of addressing symptoms that can be treated as a result of
traumatic experiences to the analytic process of psychoanalysis. That is, based on the theory of deficiency,
to apply to patients of selective mutism the analytic process of healing a hurting mind by encouraging the
patient to speak about ones traumatic experience where he cannot respond or intends to retaliate against and
to express the object of ones deficiency/desire. Expression of the object of deficient desire leads to treatment
of ones neurotic symptom. Art supplies will be used to utilize images in the process of leading deficiency
into expression.
The author intends to introduce the method of mind healing with a case of selective mutism. The case of P
(age 14, female, middle school student) is a classic example of the concept of DSM-IV that defines selective
mutism. Like many other cases, Ps selective mutism was identified by teachers whom she met when she
first entered nursery and elementary school. The initial treatment started 3 years from when the parents were
first notified of the problem. The treatment was resumed when P was in middle school. My encounter was
during the period of second treatment. P was diagnosed with selective mutism by a doctor. I intend to stress
the need for support and cooperative medical treatment from medicine to enhance humanitarian healing. I
started the healing process based on the medical diagnosis of a doctor. I intend to analyze the image shared
by P and identify the direction of the mind healing.
P did not speak during classes and was extremely shy. She has a grandmother, both parents and a younger
brother. There was no particular aspect in family relation that might have caused the social problem.
Therefore, healing just like any other analysis began ambiguously without knowing the reason. The only
prior information was from the mother that P could not talk out of shyness. As the case did not have any
consciously identified family problem, I decided to take the analysis process to first encourage P to use
15 The author intends to put strict restriction on detailed description on the healing process and personal details of the client
as the intention of introducing the case is to highlight the deficiency and inner world demonstrated by the image rather
than focusing on the actual research case.
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drawings without giving any keywords and afterward explain the drawing with words.15

Proceedings
The objective of healing was to improve the ability to respond spontaneously and to express herself by
providing P with a sense of security and trust as she complained that when she was asked a question during
class she felt terrified and could not speak. Healing in the cognitive perspective helped her to recognize that
various interpretations and responses are possible for a situation or an event and provided her with the sense
of security and confidence that her response could be right and that during the healing process any mistake
or fault should not be a problem. It was also recognized that at school a mistaken response or an error does
not bring about significant responsibility or shame, and discussions also accompanied to help P be aware
of the mistaken response or error among colleagues. In order to improve her ability to respond quickly, to
boost confidence, to choose the most relevant response by diversifying her response, we chose to apply such
a method, as thematic drawing test images of the suggested subject are drawn with various interpretations.
Behaviorally, I encouraged P to make big movements or loud sounds to infuse her with confidence and to
provide behavioral healing. They were done on P only without the help of parents or school.
The images from the healing process prove our psychoanalytic theory. Pic 1 shows that P was withdrawn
and lacking confidence as the size of the small house in HTP suggests. P refused to draw any person. During
the second session, when I encouraged her to draw a person, she drew characters (Pic 3). Next was to
prepare a name tag. P also drew a character, not a person, and wrote what are you looking at suggesting
high passivity in exposing herself and gave herself a comical nickname. The nickname demonstrated playing
with the signifier of her name by adding an o sound, which is like the middle syllable of ko-yang-i(cat).
In particular, the rather bold expression, what are you looking at, seemed to express her inner aggression.
The phrase and the satisfactory smile on the characters face were impressive. It was in stark contrast with
her speech pattern, which was so quite that special attention was needed to hear her, and her extremely
careful attitude, timid laugh or smile. Afterward, P asked if she could draw something she liked, and she
drew a cat (Pic 5) with her full name clearly under it. To gauge her sociality, I gave her paper and a medium
that only had symbolic representation. Also, inside the school that P created was a cat. Though small in size,
it was a cat that gazes down at her school. P said she thought about cats often at school. P also said that her
relationship with friends at school was at a level that did not give her any stress, stating that she could find
meaning and calm from gazing and observing them. When P did decalcomania to freely express her inner
world (Pic 7), she expressed the image as an Amazon forest with the sea and the sun circling around.
When given the theme of fishbowl utilizing the symbolic connection of the signified and asked to draw a
family of fish (Pic 8), P exposed signifier of fish family members with various facial expressions and of two
fish expressing love. Next, when presented with an apple tree with various shapes of apples, P expressed her
relationship with the family without any filter. Unlike before, P took the initiative in explaining her family
members and became more active and engaged. P was given an opportunity to express her idea on man and
woman, that is, the inner world of sexual value (Pic 10, 11). When given the idea of a room door being open
and the thematic image, P drew her cat (Pic 12). P explained that it was her cat that her grandmother killed
640
while P was away at nursery by feeding the cat some rat poison because it was too cumbersome for her to
take care of. P said she hated her grandmother for killing the cat she loved. P also said that the grandmother
yells at her mother but that P had a good relationship with her father. P said that her mother preferred her
brother. The family relations were explained with the death of the cat. When encouraged to bring a new cat
home, P refused, saying, my grandmother might kill it again. She said that she came back home one day
only to find out that her cat was dead. She felt sad but soon was shocked to find out that it was killed with
poison; so shocked to lose words. Her father and grandmother had a big argument over it. She said it was
her father and her who liked the cat the most. Then she said to mimic the sound of the cat and said mew
with such gust and valor that P had never shown before, as if inhibited sound was finally coming out. When
I said such a brave cat with a strong voice will escape easily from her grandmother, she was very happy.
I was able to understand that when P said her father only played computer games, she meant to say that
the relationship with her father felt distant after the death of the cat, which they both loved, for they failed
to find an alternative mutual pleasure. P visualized her brother in puberty and her with fish (Pic 13). As P
decorated the drawing with flowers unlike her frequent expression of jealousy to her brother, I encouraged
P to have confidence and recommended drawing therapy where she can draw bold lines (Pic 14). When
encouraged to make a creation to restore her sense of pride and emotional stability by completing a project,
P wrote the name of her favorite celebrity. She drew her playing in the ground with a boy that she had a
crush on and then fish (Pic 17). And P explained her drawing, saying that she liked the boy. And on the
theme proposed next, P said it was the staircase of an apartment she had to climb, and finished the drawing
with a lightening rod. As she became much more active, I conducted HTP and KHTP, which were the pretests on her before the healing process, and P was able to draw a person. She was much more confident
drawing bold lines, and she recreated the image of the person coming closer to the house.
Around that time, Ps mother suggested to end the session as there was improvement in Ps interaction with
friends, answering questions during class and responding to people in general.
6. Conclusion

The paper reviewed the theory on psychoanalysis regarding traumatic experiences that leave behind the
signifier of deficiency and the images applied to heal the trauma. In the process, we were able to witness
the replacement of desire as addressed in the study of psychoanalysis. The loss of an object of love and
discovery of its replacement helped regain confidence the celebrity that gives her pleasure instead of the
cat that was no longer present as well as a celebrity and a boyfriend as gorgeous as her father who played
Session 5
with the cat.
641

Proceedings
While experiencing the loss of her object without any proper response, without saying anything about
the loss though she cried she might have closed her mouth to stop speaking as if wanting to become
someone who could not speak. Whether silence or paralysis, all symptoms are like a signal to the outside
world. It is like what you want want you want to say or your guilty conscience. Or maybe, by
recreating your non-responsive response the response of not doing anything at the time when the event
happened, you might want to go back to when it happened and undo it. Our duty as provider of mind healing
is to interpret the signal correctly, let the client recognize the cause of hurting mind and the meaning of
deficiency, and ultimately strengthen the deficiency.
A human, due to his inability, often lives with losing the object with which he has relation. When it is an
object of love, he lives on with grief and the deficient object inside. When we say hurting mind, it refers to
the existence of deficient object in the mind. Sometimes, the deficient object can be found only with the
precondition of accurate recognition of the deficient object and when the problem was only due to not-soactive response of oneself. When such inappropriate response is recognized and expressed appropriately,
and if the object still exists, we can have it back. But how can we heal the mind hurting from deficiency of
an object that we cannot find or have back? This is when replacement or sublimation comes in while you
cannot accurately recreate the cat and the love of the father enjoyed with the cat, you can still find joy and
pleasure from your favorite celebrity or another object that excites you. Then, we need to know what the lost
object means.
The fragment from recollecting traumatic experience of loss does not only function as a signifier but also
as signified and symbol. The meaning that is correctly identified and replaced can compensate for the
deficiency and fill the gap created by such deficiency. The order of thematic drawings that goes between
symbol and imaginary world by means of association and provides signified and signifier is not different
from the psychoanalysis theories addressed earlier. Therefore, we can use the psychoanalysis theories which
are criticized and avoided due to the Oedipus complex, an unconscious trauma borrowed from the myth
more actively in art therapy and in healing the mind.
When the hurting mind from all kinds of relations is healed, restoration of the damaged or lost relation
means improved expression of the object like expression of loving the object. Therefore, in the process of
mind healing, as they have difficulty in expressing their minds with ordinary language, we should give them
the opportunity to express with works of art the desire or parts of deficiency being held inside and should
have the ability to accurately interpret the signified and signifier expressed in the image. As mind healing
with images promotes communication improved ability to express with the outside world in various
methods, social relations can be improved, and the subjects social wellbeing to recognize self-presence can
be advanced.
642
References
Badiou. Alain, Roudinesco. Elisabeth, Jacques Lacan, Pass Prsent, Paris, Seuil, 2012.
David R. Hawkins, Power Vs. Force : The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior, Hay House Edition,
February 2002.
Carton. Solange, Chabert. Catherine, Corcos. Maurice, Les silence des motions, Paris, Dunod, Paris.
Freud, Sigmund et Breuer, J., tudes sur lhystrie, PUF, 1956.
Greig. Philippe, Lenfnat et son dessin, Cahors, ERES, 2003.
Klein. Mlanie , Essaie de la psychanalyse 1921-1945, Paris, Payot, 1968.
Lacan. Jacques, Introduction la structure de langoisse, LAngoisse, Sminaire X, PUF., 1982.

-crits, Seuil, Paris, 1966.
-Confences aux Universit nord-amicaines ;Yale University, Kanzer Semina, Scilicet n 6/7, 1975.

-Le Sminaire, Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris,Seuil, 1973.
-Le Sminaire, Livre XVI, Dun Autre lautre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p.274.
Lapeyre. Michel, Clinique freudienne, Paris, Anthropos, 1996..

Royer Jacqueline, Que nous disent les dessins denfant, Paris, Hommes et Perspectives, 2005.
Miller J.-A., Jacques Lacan : remarques sur son concept de passage lacte , Mental, Paris, avril 2006, n17.
Schack. Juliane, Comprendre les dessins d enfant, Canale, Marabout, 2000.
Vergote. Antoine , La Psychanalyse lpreuve de la sublimation, Paris, Les Editions du CERF, 1997.
Yanof. Judith A., Langage, Communication, and, transference in child Analyses I. Selective mutisme: The
Medium is the message II. Is child Analysis really analysis?, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, 44:79-119, 1996.
Kwank Young-Sook, Play therapy of a six year old with selective mutism, Journal of Child & Adolescent
Psychiatry, Volume 3 Number 1, 1992.
American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, Fourth Edition
(DSM-IV), Korean translation by Lee Keun-Hoo, Seoul, Hanamedical, 1995.
Min S ung-Kil, Latest Psychiatry, Seoul, Aljokak, 2008.
Shim Eung-Chul, Psychology and Life, Seoul, Seohyunsa, 2008.
Lee Young-Shik, Nam Bum-Woo, Kim Jong-Bum, First experience of treatment of 15 old boy showing
selective mutism with Fluoxetine, Journal of Korean Neuropsychiatric Association, Volume 35,
Number 2, 1996.
Kim Tae-Ryun, Seo Bong-Yeon, Lee Eun-Hwa, Hong Sook-Ki, Korean Childrens Apperception Test
(K-CAT), Seoul, Korea Guidance, 1993.
Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 6 Number 1, 1995.
Cho Soo-Chul, Pediatric Psychopharmacology, Seoul, Seoul National University Press, 2000.
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Jung Sun-Joo, Hong Ka-Eui, Clinical feature of children with selective mutism and prognosis, Journal of
The 2nd
Proceedings

Busan City: 20C Busan, its Scars and Healing
1. Posie Dedicated to the Forefront of Korean History

/ Yol-Kyu Kim (Sogang University)
2. T
he Scars and Healing of the Korean War Refugees
/ Chulwook Cha (Pusan National University)
3. S
ansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National History: The Scars of Wounds
and the Current History
/ Man-joon Park (Dongeui University)
4. E
nvisioning a Modern Busan at a Corner of Sanbok Road
/ Dong Jin Kang (Kyungsung University)
Posie Dedicated to the Forefront of Korean History
Yol-Kyu Kim
Sogang University
1) Busan, the Status of its Topography

Busan is located in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula. The city has its back against the Korean
peninsula and proudly faces the sea. Its location and geographical features tell us that Busan is a vanguard
city that sits in the eastern end of the country.
In many cases, people liken the Korea peninsula to the shape of a rabbit and Busan to a tail of the rabbit,
but this makes no sense. Busan is not a tail of the rabbit, but is more similar to a mouth of a tiger that is
closed tight toward the direction of the sea.
And Busan overlooks both East Sea and South Sea, which tranquilly surround the city. In other words,
Busan proudly looks down at the sea where the sun rises at dawn and the sea is connected to the Pacific
Ocean.
From Haeundae Beach to Gwangalli Beach and Busan Port, and again to Nampo, Songdo, Gamnae and
to Dadaepo, the coastlines are endless across hundreds and thousands of meters, and they wrap their arms
around Busan. Reaching beyond the Straits of Korea, Busan overlooks Japan, China and countries in
Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. As illustrated above, Busan is located along the coast and facing
the ocean in front of it. It is truly a city that is located at the forefront or at the so-called cutting edge of the
Korean Peninsula, and thus can be called a vanguard city of Korea.
In addition, other topics can also be brought up in relation with the geographical location of Busan being
Session 5
at the forefront of the Korean Peninsula.
647

Proceedings
This region is like the neck of the country (Nam-Yo-In-Hoo:

the country (Seo-Moon-Swae-Yak:
) and like the keyhole of
The above-mentioned words are engraved on the monuments standing on both sides of Jaseongdae
(
) located in Busanjin.
Nam-Yo-In-Hoo means the neck of a remote country in the southern region while Seo-Moon-SwaeYak refers to the Door in the West is locked. The former describes the topological location of the city,
indicating that Busan is located in the region, which is equivalent to the neck of the Korean Peninsula.
Nam-Yo (
) literally means the remote area in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, which
highlights the topographical location of Busan in comparison with the entire Korean Peninsula. Since the
city is both the front and the end of the Korean Peninsula, it is liken to the neck of the country.
In other words, Busan is like the neck or the throat of the human body. As you are well aware, the throat
is like a lifeline for people. People eat food, breath in and out using their throat. It is the throat (
) that
acts as a gateway sending air into the lungs and food down into the stomach.
Located at the southern forefront of the country, Busan is like the throat that serves as a gateway of the
Korean Peninsula or the lifeline of the country.
Such a topographical location of Busan is highly symbolic because it demonstrates the roles and
responsibilities of the city in Korean history and culture and has highly symbolic and cultural worth.
Busan is indeed at the forefront of Korea not just in its topographical location but also in the countrys
history.
2) The History of Busan began as early as the Prehistoric Times
Busan is Koreas largest metropolitan city that includes Dongrae, Sasang and Gijang and its history dates
back to prehistoric times. Koreas No.1 port city, Busan, existed at the forefront of the Korean Peninsula
even at the beginning of the country back in the prehistoric times.
In the beginning, there existed the port with people. Its name is Busan.
Surprisingly, archeological ruins of the Bronze Age and the Neolithic Age as well as the Paleolithic Era
648
have been discovered in various parts of Busan.

Chungsapo of Haeundae Beach is one of the major ruins inherited from the Paleolithic Era.
Chungsapo is a small town located along the shallow shore of a long estuary at the end of Greeting the
Moon Hill of the small peninsula in the Southeastern region of the city. Chungsapo is overlooking the
vast open ocean and has fine sandy beaches as well as the port with the blue sand.
If you miss the scenery of Seokgurams morning,
You will regret it.
When you see the evening moon in Haeundae,
You will miss it more and more.
Hooray, it is so magnificent.
Hooray, it is so beautiful.
The countrys nature boasts scenic beauty.
The above is the lyrics of the popular song of the 1930s: The Eight Views of Korea. The more I see the
evening moon in Haeundae, the more I miss it is portraying the evening moon that shines more brightly
in the areas of Chungsapo located at the end of Greeting the Moon Hill. Chungsapo is the place where
the history of Busan originated and the remnants of the Paleolithic Era still stand today, and thus it is
rightly the very place to sing about the evening moon in Haeundae. Our ancestors in the Paleolithic Era
must have sung about the evening moon shining over the Moon Hill. Then, Gowoon Choi chi-won named
the place with a beautiful evening moon Haeundae to assign it a meaning.
There are other relics from the Neolithic Era (7,000~8,000 years ago) that have been found in Busan.
The shell mound from the Neolithic Era in addition to shell mounds from the Paleolithic Era
was discovered in Jwa-dong and Joong-dong. Other relics from the Neolithic Era were also found in
Beombang-dong, a Busan district located on the boundary of Busan and Gimhae and on the boundary of
Dongsam-dong and Yeongsun-dong.
The topic of the Prehistoric Busan may be able to be discussed separately because there are considerable
amounts of relics from prehistoric times. Of those relics discovered, particularly those remnants found in
Chungsapo, Jwa-dong and Joong-dong highlight the fact that the area of Haeundae was a central place in
Today, Haeundae is one of the most popular tourist attractions and popular beaches across the country.
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the Prehistoric Busan.

Proceedings
Way back in prehistoric times, it was a hub of the prehistoric culture that laid the foundation for its history.
As a matter of fact, people have lived, survived or enjoyed their lives in the area of Haeundae throughout
the course of the past ten thousand years.
Haeundae is not the only the place where the relics from the prehistoric times were discovered. Shell
mounds and dolmen from the prehistoric age were discovered in Dongsam-dong in Yeong-do, an area on
the right side of Haeundae as well as Oryukdo and at the end of the inner harbor of Busan. Shell mounds
from the Bronze Age were found in Dongrae, an inland area located far from the sea.
The coastline reaching Haeundae to Yeong-do and the land reaching Yeong-do to Dongrae account for
four-fifths of the entire land in Busan Metropolitan City. And it can be stated that Busan has historic traces
not just from the Neolithic Era and the Paleolithic Era but also from the Bronze Age, and it was already a
metropolitan city way back in prehistoric times.
In short, Busan is a city that preserves the site from the prehistoric times and is at the forefront of the
country not just in terms of its topographical location but also in terms of its history.
3) The Rich History that Shines Even More over Time
As explained above, Busan has long been a place for living for people throughout history, way back from
the Paleolithic Era, which dates back over 10,000 years.
Some academic researchers surmised that Busan underwent the Neolithic Era for approximately 4,000
years from B.C. 5000 to B.C. 1000 and argued that quite many people began to live in the city of Busan
since that time. Such a supposition was made based on the discovery of shell mounds found in a total of
18 sites in Dongsam-dong, Yeongsun-dong, Amnam-dong, Dadae-dong, Geumgok-dong, Gangdong-dong
and Noksan-dong.
The fact that many shell mounds from the Neolithic Era were found in Busan indicates that the city was a
place for living and a nesting place for people in the Neolithic Era. Way back in ancient times, Busan was
already a place for people living alongside the coastline of the region to make a living and to survive. It
may be no exaggeration to say that Busan was not merely an ocean city; rather, it was like the ocean itself
that provides people with the means of survival.
Entering into the historic period after going through prehistoric times, Busan continued to play a certain
role in sustaining peoples lives in the region and leave its trace in history.
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Dolmens found in Doogu-dong in Geumjeong-gu, Shin-ri in Gijang and Boonjeol town in Migeum-dong
tell us that Busan also went through the Bronze Age.
There are six dolmens or stone graves in Boonjeol town. To make a dolmen, people had to bury a
deceased person in the ground and lay a horizontal stone supported by several vertical stones. In some
cases, a horizontal stone was laid directly over the ground without being supported by vertical stones.
Stones used for dolmens are really large and make us wonder how people in the Bronze Age moved
such large stones and what kinds of devices they might have used to move stones. Dolmens, which used
extremely large stones, were obviously dedicated to some eminent figures of the Bronze Age. It is said
that only the heads of communities or leaders were buried beneath the dolmens. In other words, only
leaders of tribal societies had the honor of being buried beneath the dolmens during the Bronze Age.
As pointed out above, as several dolmens were discovered in the three sites of Busan, it is possible to
guess that the city must have been a residential area during the Bronze Age and large tribes lived in several
parts of the city during that Age.
However, the relics from the Bronze Age are mostly found on the mountain sides, areas far from the
ocean, indicating that the era when people ate clams for survival was passed by then and the agricultural
era must have begun sometime during the Bronze Age. Back then, people living in Busan were scattered
across both the coastline and the mountain side.
The ironware made of cast iron excavated from a shell mound in Nakmin-dong in Dongrae tells us that the
Iron Age followed the Bronze Age. In more than 10 ancient tombs found in Yeonnam-dong, iron knives,
iron tips and iron axes from the Period of the Three States were excavated.
In a shell mound found in Nakmin-dong, molten iron pieces were excavated, telling us that there must
have been a steel mill or smelting factory in the area back in the very early history of Korea. Considering
this fact, Busan is also a pioneering city in Korean history that is on the cutting edge of national history.
Of many ironware remains excavated in the region, the ancient tomb found in Bokcheon-dong must be
emphasized as one of the major discoveries. There were many iron hatchets, iron chisels, sickles and
As seen above, a series of discoveries of the remnants and relics from the Neolithic Era, the Pathologic
Era and from the Iron Age have continued in Busan. It can be stated that, since prehistoric times, the city
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arrowheads that are considered to be from the 4th century or 6th century inside the ancient tomb.

Proceedings
has experienced vivid details of Korean history from the Period of the Three States to the Gaya Period.
That is so true. As a major port city of the country, Busan has been shining throughout the long and varied
history of Korea. The older the relics get, the brighter the history of them will shine. Busan has long been
at the forefront of Korean history as a major port city throughout prehistoric times.
4) At the Forefront of Korean Medieval Times
Supported by its topological location and geographical characteristics, Busan has gone through a long
detailed history of the country. Rather than passively overcoming the rough waves of history, the city
undauntedly fought back the waves and built its own history. Haeundae and Dongsam-dong were the
places of origin for the prehistoric times and the city again underwent the ancient and medieval times
to reach the pre-modern and the modern period. Through a long and eventful journey of history, Busan
continued to build its own history in a highly proactive manner.
That is why the history of Busan is like an epic. The history of Busan itself is like an epic journey that
penetrates the entire history of Korea. In this sense, no other cities in Korea can match Busan.
Koreas international relationship during medieval times was limited to relationships with Japan and
China. Unfortunately, China was a suzerain country and Korea, as a vassal country of China, was in a
subordinate relationship to China. Therefore, there could be no conflicts or confrontations between the
two countries.
However, the diplomatic relationship with Japan was different. Japan was both a gateway to international
trade and a base camp for Japanese raiders (
). Japans position was very obvious in the regions along
the coastline of the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula, especially in Busan. The city served as an
outpost of Japanese invaders and thus it bore the brunt of troubled relations between Korea and Japan.
Japanese trading and living quarters on the Korean Peninsula were called Waegwan and, in Busan, there
was one of the major Waegwans in Busanpo. Japanese people first settled in Busanjin, the military base
in Busan, and later moved their settlement to the downtown of the city. The old settlement of Japanese
people in Busan was called Gogwan: Old Japanese Settlement or Googwan: Former-Japanese
Settlement. That is why the area in Sojeong-dong is called Gogwan or Googwan.
Due to the citys geographical and historic standing, Japan chose Busan as an outpost of the invasion into
the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592. Japan occupied the city and used it
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as its forces rear base during the invasion. That was the time when the Japanese forces built the Jaseongdae
Japanese Fortress in Busan.
Of approximately 20 fortresses built by Japanese forces during the Japanese Invasion of Korea in 1592
and the following invasion during the period from 1597 to 1598, the only fortress that has survived
throughout the history of the country is the Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress in Busan.
The Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress is in stark contrast to the Dongpeyonghyun (
in Danggam-dong. The Dongpeyonghyun (
) Fortress found
) Fortress was built to fight against the invading
Japanese forces sometime around the mid Goryo Dynasty whereas the Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress
was built by Japanese forces. In other words, Busan has two different kinds of fortresses that were built by
Japanese forces and by Korean people to fight against them. Having the fortresses of both the enemy and
friendly forces is a very rare case - even on the Korean Peninsula.
Meanwhile, there is another historic site (
) that could be compared in stark contrast to the Jaseongdae
Japanese Fortress. That is one located in Busanjin called Jeonggongdan. Jeonggongdan was built to
honor Cheomsa (
) General Jeong Bal who gave his precious life while fighting against Japanese
forces during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592.

After occupying Busan, Japanese forces stayed in the city for as long as 7 years, and during that time they
built Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress. Although Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress and Jeonggongdan are
located in Jwacheon-dong and Beomil-dong respectively, they are located very close to each other and
both are located within Busanjin.
As illustrated above, Japanese people moved their settlement (Waegwan) within Busan several times and
continued to live in the city during the Joseon Dynasty Period. That is, Busan local residents and Japanese
people lived close to each other in the same neighborhood.
Based on the above historical evidence, we can say that Korean people and Japanese people coexisted
in Busan during the Joseon Dynasty Period. However, there are other examples highlighting the
confrontational relationship between Korea and Japan during the Joseon Dynasty Period.
The relationship between the Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress and the Dongpeyonghyun (
the hostile relationship between the invading Japanese and the Joseon Dynastys defending forces.
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Fortress and the relationship between the Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress and the Jeonggongdan indicate

Proceedings
To sum up, Busan was an outpost of the Japanese invaders that bears the brunt of the confrontational
relationship between the Joseon Dynasty and Japan. As the Joseon-Japan relationship was one of the
important diplomatic relationships for the Joseon Dynasty, it can be argued that Busan was again at the
forefront of Korean history during the Joseon Dynasty.
5) At the Forefront of Korean Modern Times
Busan continued to act as a pioneering city that is at the forefront of Koreas pre-modern and modern
history and culture.
While Korea was under Japanese colonization, Busan served as a spokesperson for Korean history. The
portrait of Busan drawn at that time shows the vivid history of Korea while under Japanese colonization
(
) or under Japanese rule.
At that time, Busan was boasting its status as a major port city of the country where government (
ferries come and go. The #1 pier was dedicated to the ferries that come and go between Shimonoseki and
Hakwan (
) in Japan and Busan on a regular basis. To Japanese people, Busan was a gateway city to
Koreaa Japanese colonyand that is why Busan began to flourish during that time.
In the early days of colonization, Japanese people built a new town around Yongdusan, where Waekwan
was located. At the top of Yongdusan, Japanese people built the Yongdusan Shrine (
) to worship
their gods and turned the whole mountain into a sanctuary.

Considering the fact Yongdusan was a guardian mountain (
) of Busan overlooking the entire Busan
port and the new town alongside the ocean and was located in the central part of the city, it can easily be
guessed why Japanese people turned the mountain of Yongdusan into their sanctuary. Japanese people
obviously wanted to tell Korean people that Busan is a sacred land of Japanese people that their gods look
after the land.
In the areas around Yongdusan, Japanese people built their malls and residential units. The areas include
Daechung-dong to the north, Changsun-dong, Shinchang-dong, Bupyeong-dong, Bosoo-dong, Chochangdong, Toseong-dong to the west, Gwangbok-dong, Nampo-dong to the south and Choongang-dong
and Donggwang-dong to the east. Huge bustling new town areas located on the foot of mountains of
Yongdusan and Bokbyeongsan fell into the hands of Japanese people and resembled Japanese territory.
Japanese new towns and residential areas became the downtown in Busan and the streets around Japanese
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areas were well paved and clean, which was in sharp contrast to the residential areas for Korean people
located in Yeongjoo-dong, Choryang-dong, Soojeong-dong and Beomil-dong. The so-called downtown
in Busan was entirely owned by Japanese people during the Japanese rule.
As the downtown in Busan was inhabited by Japanese people, Korean people had no other choice but to
live on the outskirts of the city. The flatland in Choong-gu and Seo-gu used to be the downtown occupied
by Japanese people while the small and crowed towns located on the slopes of the mountains were where
Korean people were forced to live.
Ami-dong, the village name that was written in Chinese character Gokjeong (
) and read
Danimachi, Boomin-dong and Namboomin-dong were the poor areas of the city where Korean
people resided. Other Korean villages, located on the slope of the mountain in Dongdaeshin-dong and
Seodaeshin-dong, were no different. All the Korean towns are in such dire condition.
Considering such sharp contrast between the Japanese residential areas and the Korean residential areas
during the Japanese colonization, it may be no exaggeration to say that Japanese people occupied the
central part of Busan and forced Korean people to the outskirts of the city during the Japanese rule.
The ethnic composition of residential areas in the city highlights the sad reality of the Japanese rule when
the tyranny of oppressive rulers existed in the country. It also indirectly shows the plight of Korean people
who barely survived under the colonial rule. That being said, Busan was a symbolic city showing the
plight of Korean people during the Japanese colonial period.
In this regard, again, Busan was placed at the forefront of Korean pre-modern history during the Japanese
colonial period. The city is a representative example showing the harsh reality facing Korean people
during the Japanese colonial period where they had to live on the outskirts of the city in their own country,
as if they were living in someone elses houses, while Japanese people were living a well off lifestyle on
Korean land.
6) Busan, a Port City and Pier City
The status of Busan during the Japanese colonial period can be well illustrated with its title called the port
city or pier city. As pointed out earlier, Busan has been boasting its status as a major port city of the
) ferries come and go.
In addition to being the port for ferries, Busan was also the place where the Gyeongbu (Seoul-Busan)
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country where government (

Proceedings
Railroad Line began. When I was in the elementary school, the school even taught us the song about
Gyeongbu (Seoul-Busan) Railroad Line. The reason Gyeongbu (Seoul-Busan) Railroad Line is
emphasized so much is that it was highly important for maintaining the status of Busan.
In the early days of the Japanese colonial period from the 1930s to the 1940s, only a few Koreans such
as Korean students studying in Japan and those compulsory laborers who were forced to perform hard
labor in Japan were able to go aboard the ferries arriving on the #1 pier.
Crying and looking back Busan port,
there was a moonlight shining down on the railing of the ferry.
Saying goodbye is sad
Saying goodbye is depressing.
This song is sung by Nam In-Soo in 1939 to describe the sorrow and struggle those laborers who were
forced to go to Japan to perform hard labor through the compulsory manpower draft of the Japanese
government.
Then, there was another song about Busan introduced to Korea:
Spring flowers bloom on Camellia Island,
But seagulls at Busan port are still weeping for my brother,
Whenever ferries come in and turn around right beside Oryukdo,
I shout your name but there is no response.
Please come back to Busan port, my dear brother.
This song became very popular in 1975 when a large number of Korean compatriots in Japan visited their
mother country Korea via the port city Busan.
There was also another song about Busan:
Coming back, coming back,
To visit the mountains and rivers of my homeland,
How much I missed the rose of Sharon,
How much I yearned for the Taegeukgi (the national flag of Korea),
Chatter seagulls, waves, please dance with me,
There is a ray of hope shining down on the head of the returning ship.
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As shown in the above lyrics of the songs about the city, Busan was welcoming the returning ships
coming to Busan port amid much fanfare.
Busan became a pioneer in Korean history during the period before and after Koreas liberation from
Japanese colonial rule. Compared with other cities in the country, Busan was the city that rode the great
waves of change in Korean history. And Busan port was at the heart of the city.
The pioneering spirit of the city reached its culmination during the Korean War. As an outpost of the
South Korean forces, Busan ports especially piers in the northern side of the cityplayed a strategically
essential role in the battle against North Korean forces.
During the Korean War, the UN forces comprised of the forces of 16 countries such as the US, the UK,
French, Canadian and Dutch forces came and went from the #1 pier in Busan. Weapons and other war
supplies were transferred to the #2, #3, #4 piers and to the central pier. As the logistics base and the rear
base, Busan port contributed to the victory of the UN forces.
I was working as an interpreter for the UN forces on the #2 pier during the Korean War. And one
American General told me emphatically that it would be impossible to win this war without these piers
and ports in Busan.
What the American General told me still resonates with me today. At that time, the piers were full of
laborers who worked around the clock to deliver the weapons, munitions and war supplies to the front
lines of the war. On the center of the site where laborers worked on day and night shifts, 24 hours a day,
that American General uttered such words.
As the rear base, Busan port contributed significantly to the victory of the South Korean forces to end
the tragic war on the Korean Peninsula. In this regard, Busan port is standing tall in the center of Korean
history.
7) 40 Stairs, Yeongsun Hill and the Hillside Shanty Town
There is the UN cemetery in Daeyeon-dong, Busan. The remains of 2,300 war dead from 11 countries
are buried at the UN cemetery. This is why Busan became a place where people ruminated on the Korean
ravaged and had to endure the harsh twists of the countrys history.
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War, which began on June 25th, 1950 and ended in July, 1953. Throughout the war, Busan was horribly

Proceedings
As the sole logistics base in the rear, Busan was entrusted with tremendously important missions. At the
same time, Busan served as the shelter and food source for refugees, displaced people and North Korean
compatriots who defected from North Korea at that time. The currently widely-renowned port city (
Busan was back then called the shelter city Busan or the interim capital city as the city was packed with
refugees and displaced people whose number might surpass that of local residents.
Notably, the area on the slope of Bokbyeongsan and around Yeongsun Hill was especially crowded with
refugees and the 40 stairs were located at the heart of that region.
A wanderer crying while sitting on the staircase of 40 stairs,
Stop crying and tell me what is wrong,
A refuge girl from Gyeonsang Province living in a shanty town
felt sorry for him and asked what is wrong.
A wanderer in this song refers to not just a wanderer, but a refugee who fled to Busan during the Korean
War. He was one of 600,000 war refugees who fled to Busan where the number of local residents was
only about 400,000. North Korean compatriots who defected from North Korea were also part of the war
refugees who settled in the shelter city Busan.
While most of the 600,000 war refugees were scattered across the city, an overwhelming majority of them
settled in the area near Yeongsun Hill. Most war refugees were so poor and ragged and lived in crammed
shanties and shacks or the so-called Hakobang. The shelter town for war refugees in the area near
Yeongsun Hill was also called the Hillside Shanty Town.
When you go up to the 40 stairs, you may see Yeongsun Hill reaching to the south and north side and the
Hillside Shanty Town was formed there along the ridges. A huge bunch of war refugees settled there in
the Hillside Shanty Town, which was like the countrys wounds left from the Korean War.
Ever since the Joseon Dynasty, Yeongsun Hill has served as a highly important passage way and a
community of quite many people. For instance, when the high-level government official from Dongrae
had to come to Busanpo to greet the Japanese envoys, they had to go through Yeongsun Hill. The name
Yeongsun was created in the late Joseon Dynasty. Ironically, Yeongsun Hill or the important passage
way for people with the 40 stairs in the middle became the Hillside Shanty Town.
When you go down the 40 stairs and walk down the well-paved street in Choonang-dong, you may see the
Busan train station and piers. In the areas near the Busan train station and piers, war refugees living in the
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shanty town scraped their living day by day and lived from hand to mouth. Milk powder porridge supplied
by the US forces or by the relief organization was the only food available for them to alleviate their hunger
and those war refugees had to be engaged in all kinds of hard labor to scratch a living. They had to be
engaged in extremely heavy labor at the train station, but the situation was even worse on the piers.
They had to sweat profusely to unload and deliver various war supplies from the huge freight vessel.
Working as A-frame coolies and porters, they devoted themselves to the transportation of war supplies
because they had no other choice if they wanted to make a living.
Thus, those war refugees living in the Hillside Shanty Town had to endure various hardships. While
suffering from extreme poverty, they barely made a living day by day and had to go up and down the 40
stairs as well as Yeongsun Hill everyday to go home with difficulty and fatigue.
The suffering those war refugees in Busan went through shows the pain and hardship the entire nation had
to go through during the Korean War. It also shows the tragic history of Korea, which is presently divided
into two countries. Therefore, we can say that Busan especially the area near the 40 stairs and the Hillside
Shanty Town vividly shows the wounds or damage of inflicted on Korean people during the Korean
War from 1950 to 1953. During this period, again, Busan acted as a pioneering city in the country that
bore the brunt of the consequences of the brutal Korean War.
8) Busan Portrayed in the Poem
This is a gateway to this country
Where the spirit of the country is well preserved,
The range of mountains stretching from Baekdusan
Reaches the Pacific Ocean and blends amazingly with the blue wave.
The above is the first stanza of the Song in Praise of Busan Tower written on the stone in front of Busan
Tower in Yongdosan Park. The Song in Praise of Busan Tower is a eulogy (
paean (
) to Busan Tower and a
) devoted to the city of Busan.
There is another poem devoted to the city of Busan:

),
And the wind blowing from metrological observatory around the hill flows to the northwestern
side.
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The blue horizon is much higher than the city (

Proceedings
The lonely steamship (
) passes through the foreign land near the blackish tropic (
The dreaded empty desert (
) surrounds the crystal color wind tunnel (
A small protrusion in the east and the fine fishing port (

the streets are desolate as in the daydream (
(
).
).
) in the south of the peninsula,
) and like a big catch of fish from a distant cruise
).
Yoo Chi-Hwan portrayed the city of Busan like this in his poem the Drawing of Busan (
The part describing the city the blue horizon is much higher than the city (
) in 1939.
) captured my attention
the most as it depicted the scenery of Busan where the horizons are seen from any part of the citys
mountain slopes and the horizon is so high that you would think that the sea looks up to the horizon.
In 1947, Yoo Chi-Hwan again wrote the poem about the city of Busan under the same subject the
Drawing of Busan (
):
Poplar trees on this hill cannot grow further because they reached the blue sky. This is the port near
that hill.
The remote region (
) that is seen from far away appears like the horizontal line (
).
The view is tranquil and fine stars are twinkling.

Riding the black wave swells like the mountains,
The ships are resting at port and come and go again like the foals.
The trees along the city streets where I walked on create shadows on the ground.
The sea is shining like the silver light as they are washed by the vast (
(
) sounds of the waves
).
Yoo Chi-Hwan wrote the poem about Busan as described above.

The part poplar trees on this hill cannot grow further because they reached the blue sky. This is the
port near that hill touched my heart as it delicately described the geographical location of Busan, a city
surrounded by the mountains and overlooking the ocean. The mountains surrounding the city of Busan
are relatively high compared with other mountains in cities. And the poem described the high-altitude
mountainous terrain very well in the part poplar trees on this hill cannot grow further because they
reached the blue sky. This is the port near that hill.
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While depicting the high hills and mountains in Busan in such a manner, the poem the Drawing of Busan
(
) also described the scene of the waves rolling roar, the sounds of the waves (
), the sea
that is shining like the silver light as well as the topological location of Busan. The landscape of the highaltitude Mountains gives people a fresh feeling and inspiration while the vast sea opens out before people
in Busan. It is the very city that is located in a propitious site of the country.
9) Busan Presented in Korean Pop Song
Busan is a port city filled with the songs and the sea in the city is always rising with the songs about it.
The waves of the sea in Busan sing songs about the city sometimes in a quiet way other times in a more
expressive way.
How many K-pop songs (
) about Busan are there? Perhaps, 40 or 50? If not, over 50 or 60? No. That
is not the answer. There are more than 100 songs about Busan in Korea. It is unthinkable for other cities in
Korea to wish that as many as 100 songs would describe the city.
The songs about Busan cover every corner of the city ranging from Haeundae Beach and Camellia Island
to the east, Nakdong River to the west, the international market, Yeongdo, Yeongdo Bridge and Oryukdo
to the south to Dongrae to the north of the city. The lyrics talked about the citys sea, the new town and the
streets in the city. Busan is literally the voice, K-pop music and the song.
Busan chick is called and Busan aunt hums a song while Busan guy shouts and Busan man mutters.
It is like all the citizens of Busan sing together in chorus.
Of many songs about Busan, the song of farewell the song on goodbye- kept going round and round in
my head.
Crying and looking back Busan port,
there was a moonlight shining down on the railing of the ferry.
Saying goodbye is sad
Saying goodbye is depressing.
The above grief-song was sung by a man who was forced to go to Japan to perform hard labor through
(
), Japan forced Korean men to go to Japan to be engaged in severe manual labor during the colonial
rule.
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Japans conscription of mandatory manpower draft. Under the militaristic mandatory manpower draft

Proceedings
I cried, shouted and struggled.

Only a cold crescent moon is illuminated at Pusan port.
Who am I looking for,
Where should I go,
I just cried, gripping the railing of the Yeongdo Bridge.
In the song written above, the Nostalgic Yeongdo Bridge is also crying for the goodbye. There is another
song that portrays the Yeongdo Bridge as the bridge of goodbye where people bid farewell to their loved
one.
Im a trader in the international market.
I miss you, Geum-soon.
I miss my hometown.
Over the railing of the Yeongdo Bridge,
There is only a lonely crescent moon above my head.
Through the singers imaginative empathy with the crescent moon, the singers loneliness is seen through
the lonely crescent moon in the song. This song was sung by a man who fled his hometown in the North
to come to Busan in the South during the days of the 1.4 (January 4th) retreat.
On January 4th, 1951 while the Korean War was raging in earnest, the UN forces began to retreat from
Heungnam Port in South Hamgyeong Province in the North. Along with the UN forces, as many as
14,000 war refugees fled to the South on the US transport vessel or the so-called LST. During the days
of the 1.4 (January 4th) retreat, this man was forced to leave his lover in the North so he was weeping and
singing about the grief of goodbye at the Yeongdo Bridge.
As shown in the lyrics of the songs about the city, Busan served as the shelter for war refugees where they
gathered together to survive and sustain their lives. There was another song that appeared under such dire
circumstances:
I cried, shouted and struggled.
Only a cold crescent moon is illuminated at Pusan port.
Who am I looking for,
Where should I go,
I just cried, gripping the railing of the Yeongdo Bridge.
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This song was sung to war refugees and they all cried together. As described in the song above, more than
600,000 war refugees continued to endure and suffer through the hardships in Busan - the shelter city and
the city that was called the interim capital city of the country.
Busan port is stained with the tears and pain of people saying goodbye to their loved ones. The situation
was not much different at Busan train station:
A light rain is drizzling down quietly.
The sad Busan train station filled with people bidding farewell,
Good bye and good bye.
The whistle of the train is crying so hard.
Refugees lives are full of hardship
and still I dont forget the shanty town there.
A lady from Gyeongsang Province is crying so sadly.
The sad Busan train station filled with people bid farewell.
The song is about the period after brutal Korean War, which ended in 1953, when war refugees began to
go back to Seoul during the days of the Korean Armys recapturing of Seoul on Sep 28th, 1950.
In some cases, people who said goodbye to each other met eventually met again in Busan. In this sense,
Busan was a place of reunion for them.
Spring flowers bloom on Camellia Island,
But seagulls at Busan port are still weeping for my brother,
Whenever ferries come in and turn around right beside Oryukdo,
I shout your name but there is no response.
Please come back to Busan port, my dear brother.
This is the song describing the period around the year 1975 when a number of Korean compatriots in
Japan visited their motherland Korea. Having yearned for their returns, those Korean compatriots in Japan
visited their native country via the port city Busan (To be more accurate, Busan port).
The song shouts their long-cherished wish, Come back to Busan Port:
To visit the mountains and rivers of my homeland,
How much I missed the rose of Sharon,
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Coming back, coming back,

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How much I yearned for the Taegeukgi (the national flag of Korea),
Chatter seagulls, waves, please dance with me,
There is a lay of hope shining down on the head of the returning ship.
At last, Busan port was able to welcome the returning vessels. As people said goodbye to their loved ones
to come to Busan and settled in the city to bond with the environments and people there, the city became
their second home one day.
Until one day the closed road is opened to my hometown,
I may have to sell cigarettes here in the international market.
Try living in Busan, you will soon feel so attached to the city
And it will become your second hometown.
A lady from Gyeongsang province is holding my hands.
Busan, a city where people had to say goodbye to their loved ones and suffered from depression and
loneliness, became a place of reunion and affection. Such a changing status and history of Busan is also
well illustrated in the lyrics of K-pop songs.
The pain of having to bid farewell to their loved ones and their reunion after liberation are all right there in
the lyrics of K-pop songs. In addition to showing the history of Busan through the stories of people saying
goodbye to their loved ones and their reunion, the lyrics of North Korean K-pop songs also talk about
the lives of war refugees in Busan who fled their hometown to come to the city and the stories of their
returning home during the days of the Korean Armys recapturing of Seoul on Sep 28th, 1950.
K-pop songs about Busan show the pre-modern and modern history that this nation had to endure and go
through. In this respect, it can be stated that Busan has been at the forefront of Korean history, standing
tall as a major port city in Korea. The proud and unique status of Busan is well above other cities across
the country in Korea.
664
The Scars and Healing of the Korean War Refugees
Chulwook Cha
Pusan National University
Introduction
Many of the people living in Busan are linked to North Korean refugees. Busan was not a war hot spot.
It was the provision capital, and a safe place. Near the end of the war, some of the refugees moved to
Seoul or someplace near North Korea, but many settled down in Busan. Many success stories of North
Korean refugees were told in the Busan International Fish Market. Their will to survive was that strong. It
excellently shows the efforts made by the refugees in Busan, where they had nowhere else to go.
For me, the refugees were research subjects. Their refugee experience, settling down in Busan, and their
impact on todays Busan, were all materials for analysis. Refugees were easily found near Danggamdong, Ami-dong, Gamcheon-dong, Busan International Fish Market, and Uam-dong. As I gained interest
in the refugees, I realized that people around me, including my colleagues and college friends knew many
of them. They easily introduced me to them. Refugees were that close to us. As I met them, my prejudice
of seeing them only as research materials changed. I was amused and interested in their past, and they told
me of their past sufferings in tears. I felt sorry and realized a different meaning of interviews.
My research was still in preliminary stages. Research on refugees living close to the Northern border
was showing some progress,1 but I was not interested in refugees living in provision capital or around
us. In Busans history, refugee related studies are limited to studies on the settling down of refugees.
This is because refugees werent popular research subjects. It also means that there is a lack of effort
1 Kim, Gwi-ok, Experiences and Identities of North Korean Defectors Bottom up Research on the Defectors, Seoul National University Press, 2000.
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and necessity in creating a social consensus on the experiences and scars of the refugees. Today, many

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refugees have become old, and are passing away one by one. In order to understand todays Busan, and to
recreate and heal the refugees scars, a historical research must take place.
My research on the refugees was a mere effort to know simple historical facts. The materials I collected
also are limited. This paper also has a limit. I hope this paper sparks more studies on healing the scars of
the refugees.
1. Forced Evacuation and Abandoned People
1) Sudden Refuge
During the Korean War, individuals, rather than the state, had to look out for themselves. As of March
1951, Seoul ranked first in terms of origin of refugees (165,878), Kyunggi Province (32,599) ranked
second, followed by North Korea (33,891), Southern Kyungsang Province, and Kangwon Province.2
We can see that the whole country was filled with people fearing of the war. Among them, my research
focuses on the refugees from North Korea. Among those who settled down in Busan, some had come
to Seoul right after the liberation and then evacuated to Busan during the war, and some evacuated
to Busan after the Jan. 4th retreat. The latter divides into those who came directly to Busan, and those
who settled down somewhere else first, and then had finally come to Busan. Many of the former case
refugees were public servants or landlords during the Japanese colonial era. These people were called
rebels in the North Korean regime, and had to flee. In the beginning, most of them lived in Yongsan regions Haebangchon.3 After the Korean War broke out and the Chinese Communist Army took
over Seoul, they moved once again because they thought that they could not survive under Communist
Army rule.
My focus is on the second case of refugees. During the Jan. 4th retreat, refuge began with retreating
soldiers due to the intervention of the Communist Chinese army. According to my research, at the time,
public servants, such as workers of the railway system evacuated. Also, there were vigilantes from the
Korean and the UN troops occupied territory after the Sept. 28th recapturing of Seoul. However, most
of the refugees fled because of the rumor that the Chinese Communist army is flooding in from North.
Regardless of the refugees occupation or social status, the evacuation took place suddenly. Moreover,
2 So, Man-il, Inflow of Refugees to Busan and Government Responds during the Korean War Masters thesis, Dong-a
University Department of History, 2009, p. 53.
3 Lee, Moon-Ung, Research on the Formulation and Ecological Process of Islands-Looking at Haebangchon Yongsan-gu
Seoul City Seoul National University Department of Sociology, Masters thesis, 1966.
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the refugees thought it was a temporary fleeing, so they had to abide by the requests of the soldiers to
evacuate.
I just had to go because they said I had to go. I never thought of it as a refuge. People were saying
that they were coming down from north. I asked them why, and the people were saying that
the Chinese Communist army was coming. So people kept going. So I went down and down.
(inaudible) Back then, you followed other people. You cant decide the route, because you didnt
know the geography. So I kept going and going, and came all the way to Incheon (Shin, Ui-seop).
The sudden evacuation tore families apart, and brought about economic difficulties to the refugees. No
matter who you were, a vigilante or a person swept up by the armys retreat, you had to go to a safer place.
The refugees came only with the family members they were with at the moment of evacuation. Other
family members were lost. Yim, Soon-hee had to flee when her father was away on a business trip. Mr.
Cha fled to find his parents and siblings. Lee, Gi-hwal had to flee on his way to meet his father, who was a
vigilante. All of the refugees that I interviewed stressed that their evacuation happened out of the blue. All
of them didnt know that the evacuation will be prolonged. Their priority was to be safe. They all thought
that they would be with their families soon. Many of the refugees were only with one or two of their
family members because of the sudden evacuation. Lee, Gi-hwals experience of the evacuation moment
is as follows.
My father became a vigilante after the Korean army came. In my neighborhood, soldiers fought
from dawn till dusk, and the Chinese Communist soldiers finally fled at night. The next day, I went
to the tochka, and there were so many shell casings. Ten or more guns were thrown away. We gave
them to our neighbors. The vigilantes stuck knives in front of their guns. When I came back home,
my mother told me to find my father at the townhouse. On the way to the townhouse, people were
in a frenzy. There were no vigilantes at the townhouse. People were running out from the newly
built roads. I was fifteen at the time. I didnt go back home. I was swept up by the running crowd.
The sun set, and I climbed over a mountain and realized that I was in a place called Parkchun, 50 li
(around 25 kilometers) away from home.
This is a testimony made by Lee, Gi-hwal. He is from Nam-meon, Taecheon-gun, in Northern Pyungan
Province. His father was a vigilante. He was swept up by the fleeing crowd at the age of fifteen, on his
way to find his father. After then, he never reunited with his mother. Like this case, many of the refugees
Because it was so sudden, many of the refugees werent prepared to sustain their living. Some were
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did not know why they were fleeing. Most of them were alone, swept up by the crowd.

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fortunate to only walk short distances. However, others had to walk for days or months. They couldnt
keep much on them. They had to find food every day. During my research, I found out that some refugees
from North Korea brought with them small and valuable assets, such as gold. According to Kim, Jin-sang,
a realtor in the Busan International Fish Market during the war, some refugees paid in gold to buy good
places for their shops. It didnt happen often, but it is easy to assume that many refugees brought portable
valuables. However, most of the refugees didnt get to bring valuables. They had to sell the clothes on
their backs to buy food.4
However, during the evacuation, many realized that their evacuation was not temporary. In Hamgyung
Province, most of the refugees used LSTs or private boats. People from Pyungan Province and Hwanghae
Province walked, or if there were railway officers in the village, they took trains. Moving by ship did not
automatically mean safety. Families were separated on different boats. A family was separated because the
boat that his wife and children were on couldnt sail due to bad weather.5 Others on foot had to watch their
friends die. They went on south not eating or sleeping.
There were several routes that the hurried refugees took in coming to Busan. First is coming directly to
Busan from North Korea during the Jan 4th retreat. Second is going westward first to Gunsan or Incheon
during the Jan 4th retreat, and then coming to Busan around liberation. Third, refugees from Hamkyung
province were separated to East Sea coastal cities, such as Ulsan, or to Geoje Island. After the cease
fire, they moved to Busan due to shortage of government food relief and deteriorating living conditions.
However, these were not the only routes. There were other routes that the refugees took in coming to
Busan.
2) Difficulties in Earning Citizenship
The refugees were not allowed to settle down in Busan automatically due to government inflow
restrictions. The governments official reason was to prevent any social issues arising from the sudden
inflow of people to Busan. There was also the fear that unverified people might threaten the government.6
Despite the sudden evacuation, the refugees had to undergo ideology verification. There is a lot of
4 Kwon, Jeong-rim tells that after fleeing to Daejeon, they had to sell the clothes on their backs for food, because they didnt
have anything. Many refugees had to sell anything of value not to starve.
5 Kim, Jong-gun, The Truth of the Trauma of Division Seen Through Interviews, The Humanities for Unification 51,
2011, pp. 53-57.
6 Cha, Chul-wook; Ryu, Ji-seok; Son, Eun-ha, Migration and Living Space of the Refugees in Busan during the Korean
War, Collection on Korean Culture (Minjokmunhwa nonchong) 45, 2010, pp. 255-259.
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evidence pointing to the fact that many refugees who came to Busan were held in prison camps, screened
on whether they were members of the North Korean Labor Party. Kim Duk-sung remembers being
screened at Dongrae prison camp. Another more indirect method of ideology evaluation was joining the
army. Park, Young-aes husband was a vigilante back home. He voluntarily joined the army after coming
to South Korea because he believed that he had to show his will to crush North Korea to become a
South Korean citizen. All enlisting refugees had similar reasons. Lee, Gi-hwal worked the fatigue duty in
the army. He says that other soldiers called him a commie and beat him because of his short hair, so he
worked harder than anyone else.
Yes, my mother was quiet small but courageous. When we were evacuating after the Korean War
broke out, my mother slipped and fell while crossing the frozen Daedong River, and her arm broke.
So I found a handcart, put her on the cart and continued our journey. We walked all the way to
the Seodaemun Police Station. It took us a long time. It took us 29 days to come to Seodaemun
Police Station. When we arrived, we saw that they were sending all young men away to the army.
My father made one mistake. We had quite a lot of North Korean money. We should have left the
money back home, but my father hid the money in three pillows. So we were being investigated at
the Seodaemun Police Station, and they asked us what those pillows were. The policeman heard a
crackling noise, and told other officers to cut open the pillow. Commies money spilled out of the
pillow. The policemen reported it to their superiors, and they said to shoot us all unconditionally
because we were all commies. The young men were sent to the army, and the rest were executed.
There were two older sisters-in-law, my mother, my father, and my older brother. My older brother
was old. More than fifty, nearly sixty-years-old. They put us in a cell underground and said that
they were going to execute us. Because it was during a war, society had become lawless. So when
they said that they were going to shoot us, they shot us. So I saw my family being dragged away.
And I was sent to Inchon at night. After that, I rode the LSD to Jeju Island.
This is the unbelievable story of Hwang, Jong-yeop. Because of their North Korean money, they were
framed as commies. Adults were executed and he was sent away to the army. He tried to look for his
parents afterwards, but did not find them. So he believes that they were executed back then. In order to
prove that he wasnt a commie, he voluntarily joined the U.S. army and the guerrilla unit after deserting
the army he was forced to join. He worked so hard to prove his innocence.
Regardless of his will, he was forced to flee from home, separated from his family, and received ideology
and all of the responsibilities to pass the screening and to become a South Korean citizen were up to him.
The refugees accepted that fact. They blamed themselves for their separation, the refuge, and their poverty.
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screening according to national standards. It wasnt his will to evacuate, but the process, settling down,

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2. Forgetting the Refuge and Settling Down in Busan as a Replacement

The purpose of healing historical traumas is to heal or alleviate social illness to create a healthier society.
Many researchers mention oblivion as a method of healing. Yoo, Jae-chun cites Nietz and stresses that
For us to lead a healthier life, we need to know how to forget as well as remember. It is said that for a
human being or an ethnic group to sustain their healthiness, they must have the capability to heal their
wound, replace the loss, and to reproduce the broken parts.7 Therefore, they need something to replace
the loss to heal. And it is though this that they forgot their memories.8 The wounds that the North Korean
refugees bear must go through a healing process of their own. However, it can also be healed through their
resilience to replace their loss or the energy to recover. We will now look at how the refugees self-healed
their wounds.9
The refugees had to live on with unbearable memories. The energy that helped them live was oblivion and
adaptation. The hurt that they felt during evacuation did not stand out because of the circumstances they
had to face while settling down in Busan. They had to find a home and to live. That helped the refugees
from remembering. After the cease fire, they realized that they could not go home and reunite with their
loved ones. That resignation was also a method of forgetting. It was the settling down that allowed them to
forget and to resign. There were diverse means to settling down in Busan. Some got married and created
a family. Others found jobs to make a living, or made friends and formed relationships. Of course, these
were only temporary reliefs. When the effects wore off, the horrible memories came back.
The refugees themselves stress that marriage was a form of resignation and oblivion. Of the refugees in
their seventies that I could meet today, most of them got married in Busan before or after evacuation. To
the refugees, their partners were the separated families, homes, and the people to share their everyday
sufferings.
Most of the refugees married other North Korean refugees. They did so because they had hope that one
day, when the war is over, they could go back home. They were away from home, but to them, their
partners were like home. To the North Korean men, the North Korean food that their wives made, such as
7 Yoo, Jae-chun, The Role of Historical Studies in Humanities Treatment Studies the Case of the Efficacy of History and
the Issue of Healing Perception Conflicts, Humanities and Science Journal 26, 2010, p. 501.
8 According to the parties in need of oblivion (the victim and the perpetrator), it can heal wounds, and sometimes, it can act
as a stimulus that worsens the wound.
9 This is to distinguish the healing process between the self-effort to heal and healing with outside help. This chapter is
about the former, and the latter will be discussed in the next chapter to see whether the wounds of the refugees can be
healed through external relations.
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Bindaedduck and mandu, helped to forget the longing for their mothers.
Lee, Gi-hwal married a refugee from Kangwon Province. She had lost her parents during the war. When
Lee cried on national holidays thinking of his mother, his wife, who was enduring a much bigger wound,
would console him. His wifes consolation was the biggest source of comfort that helped him bear
through his difficulties. Fortunately, his wife earned money with him, so they were able to put food on
the table every day, and that also made him happy. His wife had stored the clothes that he wore during the
evacuation, which was handmade by his mother. To him, his wife was a person to share and empathize
with his wounds.
However, those replacements were like opium. It helped you forget the immediate pain, but it wasnt a
cure. Hwang, Jong-yeop who was framed as a commie for having North Korean money at the Seodaemun
Police Station came to Busan, and got a job at an iron bar factory. He remembers that the happiest time of
his life was when he met his wife through a friend and got married at the factory. He was so happy that he
forgot his past sufferings. However, after his wife passed away, all of the pain came back. The thought of
his hometown, parents, and siblings made him lonely.
Frankly speaking, I am too old to say this, but I am so very lonely. I sleep alone, and I wake up
alone. I constantly think of my hometown, my parents, and my brothers and sisters. I can never
forget them. After my wife passed away, I have no one to turn to. Of course I have my children,
but they are all grown up and living independently. So I cant turn to them now. The loneliness just
follows me around all the time (Hwang, Jong-yeop).
The pains that he had forgotten due to his marriage were creeping up on him again after her death. From
this, we can tell how much his wife had meant to him. In other words, his wifes presence had helped him
forget the wars scars.
Other than getting married and creating a family, the diverse human connection, such as neighbors,
colleagues, and hometown friends all became opportunities to share their emotions. The attachment to the
place where these relationships were forged also became opportunities to forget. During the research, I
found out that there were a lot of small gatherings (kye: a kind of traditional private fund, whose members
chip in a modest amount of money to create a fund for later use). Among the gatherings, there were those
who went to the meetings to meet North Koreans and share their sentiments. Others were those who
gatherings include Yibukdominhoe (North Koreans Association). Lee, Gi-hwal started to attend the
Associations meetings in his thirties. He says that meeting North Koreans and speaking in North Korean
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placed more importance in the new relationships they forged while settling down in Busan. The former

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dialect helped him lessen his yearning.

My research found that the refugees went to many meetings with the people they met in their
neighborhoods while settling down in Busan. In particular, there is a gathering in the Refugee Village in
Uam-dong, Nam-ku. The gathering has been ongoing for more than 40 years,10 and more than 60% of its
members are North Korean refugees. As time passed, different people came to the meetings. The meeting
could last so long because people came to the meeting to share their daily lives and to post job offers. In
Danggam-dong, there is a hometowners gathering, like the Shinmak-kye made by people from Shinmak
region in Hwanghae Province. However, most of the gatherings in Danggam-dong centered on those who
lived in the neighborhood. Most of the gatherings held regular meetings and parties, and when there is a
family event, the meeting gave gift money. It was very important for the refugees because most of them
didnt have many family members. The gatherings were the place to forget their loneliness.
The relationships the refugees forged while settling down were the replacements for the connections they
lost during the war and the evacuation. The awareness that they were all refugees and the relationship with
their neighbors all helped to self-heal their wound. However, the permanency of the oblivion made by
replacements and the conclusive effect of it in the healing process needs further research.
Another replacement that stands out during settling down in Busan is economic activity. Lee, Gi-hwals
wife said that she was happy that I was married and had food on the table. This shows that earning a
living was an important factor in forgetting pain. Among the interviewees, it was clear that the current
economic situation intervened in conjuring up past memories. Even though they led a happy life with
many friends and were successful in terms of money, if they were in economic difficulties now, they were
reliving their past sufferings. There is a difference between the refugees living in Danggam Market area
and Busan International Fish Market area. The former are in somewhat difficult situations now, and the
latter have achieved some success in the market. The two groups remember their pasts differently. It is
because the people living in difficulty think that their past sufferings are the reason for their instability
today.
Vendors at big marketplaces such as the Busan International Fish Market or Busan Market remember

Testimony by Kim, Young-ja (female, 76 years old, from Chungjin, Northern Hamkyung Province, recorded on Feb.
26th, 2012). This gathering takes place every fourth Sunday at lunch at a restaurant near Jasungdae. The members of the
gathering used to live in one village. Now some of them have moved to other communities. I attended their meeting and
observed. They spend a couple of hours conversing about daily lives and family issues and they part. The participation
rate is quite high. Even people who had to go to church tried hard to attend.
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earning money as a very pleasant memory. Lee, Gi-hwal, who was separated from his mother, looked
as if he had forgotten all of his sorrow while speaking about his experiences as a vegetable vendor, ice
flake vendor, and managing a manufacturing business. It seems that earning a lot of money was replacing
the loss. However, Park, Young-aes husband works in Danggam-dong. He worked in the back office of
Poongsan Metal. He earned bigger paychecks than others. He led a satisfactory life, leading the companys
volleyball team. However, after retirement, his business failed and the economic hardships conjured up
his past sufferings. It is from here that we can see that the current situation plays a big role in whether the
wound of evacuation can be replaced or not. Also, we can see that healing a refugees wound must not be
done in an individual level, but a societal level.
Family, houses, relationships with people around them, new friendships, and economic stability all
became opportunities to become attached to the area the refugees lived in.11 There are a lot of refugees
who think Busan as their base, and are attached to it. The attachment and settling down could also be
another replacement for healing the refugees wounds.
3. Refugees and Researcher: Sympathy and Limit
Yoo, Jae-chun proposed the recreation of the trauma and the process of sympathizing-healing-historicizing
as a method to heal historical traumas.12 He also proposed talking as a method of recreation and sympathy.
Therefore, he stressed that the roles of historians and the oral statements are very important. Through
oral statements, history of an individual or a group that isnt recorded in the documents can be restored.
This can be the beginning of healing an individual or a groups scar.13 Therefore, healing the scars of
Korean War refugees can also be done through this process. Some people argue that oral statement is a
method of cultural healing. They explain that human beings show their desires through words, and that
their emotions are relieved through words, so that it can heal wounds. While talking, the interviewee and
the researcher get to share their emotions. Also, the interviewee shows his/her emotions, so it is said to
have a healing effect. However, even though making oral statements is effective, there isnt any academic

Cha, Chul-wook; Kong, Yoon-kyung, The Settlement and Placeness of North Korea Refugees for the Korean War,
Journal of Sokdang Academic Research of Traditional Culture 47, 2010, pp. 293-298.

Yoo, Jae-chun, op. cit., pp. 508-509.

Kim, Ho-yeon; Um, Chan-ho, Seeking Humanities Treatment Using Oral History, Humanities and Science Journal,
24, 2010, p. 369.

Yoon, Taek-lim, Oral History Interview and Historical Trauma: Possibility for Combining the Task of Seeking Truths
with Healing Historical Wounds, Humanities and Science Journal, 30, 2011, p. 400.
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research on it.14

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Interviewee and researcher relations are different from forming relations with friends or spouses. Of
course this process can be understood as a socialization of an individuals memory, but forming a sense
of empathy takes more time. The socialization that takes place here is the relationship among people who
live in a same place, like family. Among the people in the relationships, some might not have experienced
the same traumatic events, but these relationships can help them forget and replace their scars. Their
empathetic bond isnt directly linked to the scars of the Korean War. A bigger bond comes from their daily
lives that they share with their families or neighbors. However, a relationship between an interviewee
and a researcher is somewhat different. The key point is whether they can form a bond and share their
feelings in a short period of time. It is inevitable that there isnt enough time to form a bond. However, the
interviewee realizes that he/she can earn something different from the researcher that he/she cant get from
his/her family or friends. The interviewee expects that a social consensus will be formed about what they
have experienced, and that it goes beyond just being an individuals experience to become recognized
as official history. This expectation helps to overcome the limitations in forming a bond between an
interviewee and a researcher. This paper will also look into the efforts that have been taken to form social
bonds with the refugees.
In a conversation with an interviewee with historical scars, historical researchers emphasize that their scars
are not caused by individual reasons, but a historical and a social one. In fact, based on my experience,
overall, interviews with the refugees went smoothly. They easily agree to the researchers persuasion that
they are important parts of Busans history and that their lives and history must be organized. During their
evacuation, living as refugees, and while settling down, the refugees have never thought of themselves
as the main characters in history. Or, they might have thought that what they have been through was
important, but because no one recognized them, they never had the chance to speak. But a researcher
gives them the chance to speak. This is why refugees and researchers form bonds easily.
Interviewees commonly say that they have never told the process of evacuation and their lives in detail as
they do during the interview. They have never told their stories in detail to their families or friends. Only
relevant parts were told in pieces. It seemed that the interviewees gained trust in the researcher because
the researcher listened to their stories, which did not receive much attention by others. However, the
content that they told the researcher was limited. The interviewees emphasized the process of evacuation.
How many days they have walked, how they evaded bombings, how they survived while others died,
and other facts to emphasize that they were the survivors. In these stories, they are proud that they have
accomplished something great. Also, they are proud of earning money in Busan. It almost feels as if they
are telling a story of a mythical victory when they say that they created their lives from scratch. On the
other hand, what the interviewees do not like to talk about is their failures. From this, we can tell that
they forgot their pains by remembering victories instead of scars. Stories filled with sorrow, buried deep
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in their hearts, were also not told easily. Stories about their families, ideologies, and brutal lives needed
more trust to be built between the researcher and the interviewee. There were some interviewees who
told their stories in tears. Kim, Jung-sook is not a North Korean refugee, but she came to live in Amidong during the Korean War. She showed tears saying that she suffered because her husband was addicted
to gambling, and that it was her fault that her children had the same blood as her husband, and was also
addicted to gambling. I confirmed that a researcher was meaningful as a listener and a person to empathize
with. Refugees thought that the pain that they experienced were their entire faults. It is up to the researcher
to understand their pain at a social and national level, not an individual level. This is the process of
historicizing, and that process will be helpful in healing the refugees traumas.
The biggest pains for the refugees are related to the family members they left back in North Korea. The
personal guilt that only they evacuated and that their family members didnt remains as the bigger scar.
Lee Gi-hwal, who I mentioned before, was born in 1936, in Taechon, Northern Pyungan Province. He
met his father by chance during the Jan. 4th retreat while evacuating alone, but he never reunited with his
mother. The pain of refuge life was more than words can say, but every national holiday, the memories
of his mother made his heart sick. His wife understood his pain, and stored the clothes that he wore while
evacuating, which his mother made herself, even till this day. The clothes were donated and are shown in
the Provision Capital Memorial Hall in Busan, which opened in September 20th, 2012. Lee feels relieved
that his experience has gone beyond an individual level to a level that can form a social consensus.
Their scars will be healed when not only the researcher, but also the nation, which is responsible for the
war, understand the refugees lives and create a bigger social consensus.
Conclusion
The Korean War that began sixty years ago is still ongoing. The divided nations seem far away from
reuniting, and the silent, deep sorrow of the people who sacrificed due to their nations violence is also
still ongoing. The refugees who were separated from their family and evacuated from their homes are not
hoping. They are giving up.
This paper is about the possibility of healing the scars of the Korean War refugees. I have not done
research on the actual healing of the refugees scars. So I hope this paper shows the need to heal the
there arent any proper efforts to historicize their experiences. There are so few references about the
refugees. Without their oral statements, it will not be easy to fill in the important gap in our history. What
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refugees scars, and works as its starting point. There are still many refugees living in Busan. However,

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is hopeful is that recently, intermittent research and analysis are taking place.
Recently, the Provision Capital Memorial Hall was reopened as a Korean War Museum. It is special in the
sense that prior museums showed experiences of a nation undergoing war, but this museum emphasizes
the lives of the refugees during wartime. Researchers and public entities must become the medium where
they can create a social consensus about the refugees experiences. The sufferings must not disappear,
untold in the refugees hearts. They must be evaluated as events that we all empathize. Researchers must
prove that the refugees experiences are not meaningless, but that they hold historical importance and
value. Therefore, the history created from these experiences must be taught and celebrated. And we need
to begin creating a celebrated culture through museums.
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Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National History:

The Scars of Wounds and the Current History
Man-joon Park
Dongeui University
1. Introduction
What does the past do for us? Is history referring to the narrative formulated to reproduce the stories of the
past in the order of time? The answer is no. History is not a mere reproduction of memories of people, yet
history is something that determines the reason for our being, our lives, our identity as well as the direction
of our lives. This paper is written based on the premise that history has a unique status and is something
that determines the reason for our being, our lives, our identity as well as the direction of our lives, rather
than the mere reproduction of memories of people about the past.
It is not difficult to ascertain such a status of history. Why did the Chinese government come up with
the Dongbei Project1 (Chinas history falsification project for the history of the Koguryo Empire, which
has the root of Koreas present identity and legitimacy)? Simply put, it is like declaring war over the
possession of memories about the past. Although it is not a war that is fought with guns and other weapons,
it is a diplomatic war claiming the territorial rights over a certain piece of territory. From the Chinese
governments perspective, it is a project to establish a uniform multi-ethnic nation theory to stabilize the
Northeast Asian region and build a strong historical identity of the country. If you look into the details of
the project, however, the Chinese government is obviously trying to falsify the history of the Northeast
1 Dongbei Project refers to the research project of the Borderland History and Geography Research Institute (
) under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on history conducted for five years since 2002. Dong-BookGong-Jeong is short for the research project on the history and current situation of the Northeast Asian region (
).
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Asian region in a biased and opinionated way.

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The ongoing dispute over territorial rights between South Korea, Japan, China and Russia is centered
on the same perception of history. Why is the dispute over territorial rights the same as the dispute over
history? The two disputes are the same in the sense that both are forcing the wrong outside understanding
of history and of our memories of the past. In addition, the two disputes are the same in the sense that they
both are trying to destroy the inner order of our memories of the past. The dispute over territorial rights
and the dispute over history have the same background and same intention. They are constantly trying to
falsify the history of our society and our lives. In other words, they are not merely attempting to formulate
the narrative of the stories of the past. The memories of the past and the truth about the past still have
historical value and significance in todays world. To people of today, history is another name for truth,
justice and the future outlook. As we were not able to heal the scars of the past, correcting the history of
the country is all the more important. Now, we get a clearer picture of the problem and have all the reasons
to correct our history.
The world has increasingly become globalized and smaller day by day. How close did the regions,
countries and ethnic groups get? As the world has become smaller through globalization, it may be natural
to think that the regions, countries and ethnic groups may have gotten closer and closer. However, that
is not the case. If you look beneath the surface of those relationships, exotic things (foreign and strange
things) and indigenous things and have simply coexisted while imperialism and national legitimacy
have been mixed in a globalized world. Such a coexistence of conflicting elements resulted in a variety
of hybrid cultures, changing the landscape of power and authority. That is why there have been strong
resistance and merger movements throughout history. The beautifully (?) conjured slogan the most
localized thing is the most globalized thing is created against such a background.
What matters here is a balance of power. Facing the globally-powerful movement to constantly reproduce
similar memories of the past in a systematic manner and to transform everything in the region, how
should we make resistance movements to leave our trace in history? The global movement to reproduce
history is so strong that it surpasses the special limitations and ethnic nature of people. Diverse opinions
on the interpretation of globalism conflict with each other in this region. South Korea is no exception. We
cannot turn a blind eye to the concept of nation and our national identity that is about to collapse due to
globalization.
Im not saying that we have to look for ways to look into and analyze the multilayered structure of
historical perception. What Im arguing is that we have to pay attention to the weakened national identity
that is losing its cohesive force as a historical theory.
It is the eyes or the perception that are paying attention to something. When we see and perceive
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something, seeing and knowing is the essence. Therefore, the problem is not the past itself, but our
perception of the past. History is history that is essentially perceived, which is again allowing us to draw
a clearer picture of the problem. We are not taking issue with the subjective composition of narrative in
history. What we are emphasizing is different from this.
First, it is urgent to free us from the arbitrary order that manipulates our past events that have no inherent
relationship. Freeing us from such an arbitrary order is called liberation. What we need is the attitude to
take the initiative to re-draw our history and autonomously take lessons from historical time.
Not all past events are absorbed into the uniform name of history. Our historical sketch of the past is largely
based on the current view of our identity and thus is bound to be different depending on the current view of
identity.
True, our past events are reproduced not merely based on memories and awareness. Reproduction of the
past is the realistic process of interpreting situations that are inherited from the past. In that sense, historical
time is current and practical, which makes it differentiated from natural time. From the perspective
of natural time, all regions across the world are in the same order of time. However, historical time is
different. It flows along the horizon of practical time. Natural time flows regardless of history whereas
historical time stops when the practical time is put to a halt. That is the reason that we cannot talk about
the past without having a clear outlook for the future. The mere reproduction of past events is distinct
from building a historical understanding of the past and putting the historical perception into practice.
Based on the premise and a critical awareness of the problems we have, this paper is to examine the history
associated with Sansoo (
) Lee Jong-Ryul (
, 1902-1989), a national historic man (
) of
Korea and to explore Busans scars of wounds from the past and the future outlook for healing such scars.
2. Why Lee Jong-Ryul?
The reproduction of the past events of Busan becomes very specific when it is associated with the special
nature of Busan. Busan was a symbolic space connecting us to the historical perception, and we store
numerous historical experiences and knowledge and call up and disseminate them whenever the need
arises.
Busan port is a symbol of the port city Busan. Busan port has a long and proud history that is said to have
the diplomatic relations of the Joseon Dynasty were centered on Waegwan (Japanese trading and living
quarters in Korea), especially Waegwans in Busan. Back then, Busan was a beachhead for establishing
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been the most flourishing port in the Northeast Asian countries of South Korea to China, Japan. In addition,

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and maintaining diplomatic relations with Japan. Economically, Busan was also a hub for merchant trade
between Korea and China and between Korea and Japan,2 and its trade surplus was high enough to cover
the total government expenditure of the Joseon Dynasty and to provide enormous boost to the domestic
economy.3
Busan had to endure and go through hardships and difficulties due to its reputation as a major port city
in Korea. During the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, which was understood as an international
war involving three Northeastern Asian countries of Korea, Japan and China, Busan had to suffer from
hardships since it was chosen as an outpost for Japanese invaders and as the base for the Japanese forces
for the following seven years, thus having to suffer from hardships for a long period of time. That is why
there are still clear scars in Busan that are left from our ancestors resistance and fighting back against
foreign forces.
Lets think about the 36-year history of the Japanese colonization. It was the first time when the country
was directly and completely occupied by foreign forces. The buzz4 words describing the Japanese
colonization period are culture politics, degeneration of politics and fraudulent politics. How frustrated
and furious must Korean people have felt? Our ancestors made their resistance and protests when they
were suppressed, discriminated and despised. And in Busan, an outpost city of Japanese colonial rule and
oppression, such resistance and protests were fiercely staged. In the city of Busan, a historical fruit that was
born as the citys geographical feature is combined with the citys traditional anti-invader national spirit.
The national independence movement, which was mainly led by Baeksansanghwae, led to the youth
movement since the protests of pier workers in the 1920s, Shinganhwae movement and the red labor union
establishment movement in the 1930s and other various national libration movements in Busan. In terms
of the strength and resilience of the protests and liberation movements, Busan stood out from other cities in
the country and showed an unprecedented fighting spirit.5 Koreas liberation and independence, which were
the results of resilient protests, then contributed to achieving the ideological independence and autonomy
2 Although the name of Waegwan has been changed from Sampo to Doomopo, Jeolyoungdo and to Choryang over time,
the history of Waegwan has always been centered in Busan. Kim Yong-Wook, The History and Spirit of Busan, p. 37.
3 It was in the fourth year of King Sukjongs reign in the Joseon Dynasty that Waegwan was relocated to the area near
Yongdosan in Busan. Since then, Waegwan has been in the same area for approximately 200 years. The size of Waegwan
in Busan was the largest among Waegwans in the Northeast Asian countries, reaching up to 110,000 pyeong. Kim YongWook, The History and Spirit of Busan, pp. 90~91.
4 These words were used by Korean people to criticize and ridicule the Japanese colonialism during the pupil politics period
(1919-1930). In the word culture politics, the Chinese character for culture also stands for mosquito ( ) and toad ( ).
The degeneration (
) of politics was uttered to ridicule and challenge the culture politics of the Japanese ruler.
5 The Korean Culture Institute of Pusan National University, The History and Culture of Busan, p. 171.
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of the country. The spirit of such resistance movements and protests continued in the social movements
of the city in the aftermath of Koreas liberation from Japanese colonialism and in the process of building
a foundation for an autonomous national country,6 which in turn paved the way for the growth of antiauthoritarian democratic movements afterwards.
Now is the time to answer the question. Why Lee Jong-Ryul?
Lee Jong-Ryul was chosen as a major historic figure who went through a series of historic events and thus
is a symbolic figure that highlights Japans colonial oppression, discrimination, contempt and Korean
peoples resistance, protests and fight against Japanese rule, the anti-foreign, anti-feudalism, and antiimperialism that emerged in Korea, the countrys liberation from Japanese colonization and autonomous
independence, national movements of liberation, anti-authoritarian movements and democratization.
3. Who is Lee Jong-Ryul?
Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul was born in Jookjang-myeon, Pohang-si, North Gyeongsang Province on Jun 6th,
1902. At the age of 21, in 1921, he joined Jeomgook Public Elementary School located in Jeomgookmyeon, Euisung, where he met with Park Myeong-Jin, a patriot who dropped out from Choongang High
School in Seoul. Meeting with Park Myeong-Jin became a meaningful turning point in his life as he learned
the pre-modern history of the country from Park Myeong-Jin and the existence of the interim government
of the Republic of Korea through the education on politics provided by the Hogyeong Physical Education
Institute.7
The Hogyeong Physical Education Institute was established by Park Myeong-Jin. Breaking away from the
conventional movement in support of a return to the monarchy, Lee Jong-Ryul established a whole new
approach to the anti-Japanese movements.
6 The social movement in Busan was focused on gaining autonomy and independence and thus had no other choice but to
fight against the authoritarian military government. Despite the continued oppression of the military government and its
use of force, the social movement to build an autonomous nation and independent economy continued to be staged and
became fiercer. In Jan 1946, the Busan Citizenss Rally was held in Busan with the enthusiastic participation of citizens.
The Korean Culture Institute of Pusan National University, The History and Culture of Busan, p. 171.
7 The Hogyeong Physical Education Institute was an association of young boys in the region established to promote antiJapanese sentiment among young people. Park Myeong-Jin was the Chairman and the Secretary while Lee Jong-Ryul
served as the Vice Secretary.
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Lee Jong-Ryul put the spirit of anti-feudalism into practice in Euisung and fought against the tyranny of

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feudal lords. Lee Jong-Ryul and Park Myeong-Yoka brother of Park Myeong-Jinvisited Baekjeong
Village and bowed, which was an astonishing incident in Euisung, a highly conservative region where
strict hierarchy existed between feudal lords and vassals. This episodehighlighting the personality and
character of a young patriot Lee Jong-Ryulhas become a legendary tale in Jeomgook Public Elementary
School.
After joining Dongmyeong School in Andong, Lee Jong-Ryul met Lee Hyung-Gook, Yoo Dong-Boong,
Lee Ji-Ho and joined other patriotic activities and was deeply influenced by them. Dongmyeong School
was a private school established to promote a mass-education drive in the late-Korean Empire period and
had strong anti-Japanese sentiments. Lee Hyung-Gook, Yoo Dong-Boong and Lee Ji-Ho, eminent antiJapanese patriotic activists in the Andong region became unforgettable teachers to Lee Jong-Ryul and Lee
Hyung-Gook. Yoo Dong-Boong and Lee Ji-Ho continued their teacher-student relationship with Lee JongRyul throughout his life.
In 1924, Lee Jong-Ryul entered Baejae Junior High School and became a founding member and a member
of the executive committee of Gyeongseong Youth Association,8 a socialist association of young people.
Back then, Gyeongseong Youth Association was considered a youth organization promoting relatively
systematic popular movements on unification compared with other youth associations.
As Lee Jong-Ryul began to participate in the activities of Gonghak Association (the students anti-Japanese
movement association) in 1925, he became more actively engaged in anti-Japanese movements. The
Gonghak Association was the students movement organization established with the aim of promoting
autonomous and independent social science research. Lee Jong-Ryul took the initiative and led the
foundation of Gonghak Association. The ultimate purpose of establishing the Gonghak Association was
to study social science with joint forces and to strengthen solidarity to fight against Japanese colonial
education. It was the first students organization on social science research in Korea and the organization
that opened a new chapter in the Korean students anti-Japanese movements by facilitating the students
secret activist activities. The Seongjin Association, which led the anti-Japanese movements in Gwangju
later, was a secret student association that shared fundamental themes with the Gonghak Association.
8 In the early 1920s, the youth movements were at the heart of the socialist movement. In 1924, young activities established
the United Joseon Youth Association. Hwayo faction, Seoul faction and Bokpong faction, the major factions in the socialist movements back then, attempted to seize the control of the youth movement in the country by organizing the New
Youth Association, the Seoul Youth Association and the Gyeongseong Youth Association respectively. At that time, most
socialist youth movements were associated with those young activists. The Gyeongseong Youth Association held its inaugural assembly on Dec 11th, 1924.
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Although the Gonghak Association was forced to dissolve by the Japanese rule, its themes were sustained
in the Joseon Students Science Research Institute, thus opening a new chapter in the student movement
and becoming a central organization that led to the Jun 10th independence movement (hurray movement)
in 1926. While preparing for the Jun 10th independence movement, Lee Jong-Ryul was arrested and taken
into custody by police in Gyeonggi Province, where he met Han Yong-Woon, who greatly inspired him to
pursue his activist movement.9
After the Jun 10th independence movement (hurray movement) in 1926, Lee Jong-Ryul was admitted
to Waseda University in Japan to pursue higher education. He organized the Federation of Joseon Youth
Associations in Japan. The Federation of Joseon Youth Associations in Japan was a united federation of
Korean young peoples associations in Japan designed to unify the youth movement across Japan.
In 1927, Lee Jong-Ryul led the establishment of the Tokyo Branch of the Shingan Association. The
Tokyo Branch of the Shingan Association protested against the tyranny of the Governor General while
not accepting the Japanese colonial rule as a legitimate government. It launched the Gwandong Region
Association opposing the tyranny of the Governor General in Korea in September 1927.10 While serving
as a member of the Shingan Association, Lee Jong-Ryul was able to build a firm belief in promoting
national independence through the efforts made by national associations and federations - such as the
Shingan Association - and began to recognize it as the essential element required to achieve the successful
revolution of Joseon. Lee Jong-Ryul devoted himself to the activities promoting the vision of the Shingan
Association and his endeavors whole serving in the National Gyeonyang Association and the National
Independent Unification Central Council showed his ideology and enthusiasm in the national independence
movement.
While being actively engaged in the anti-Japanese national independence movement, he was also serving
as a high-level executive official of the Confederation of Joseon Associations in Japan. The Confederation
9 The Jun 10th independence movement was a big project led by the Joseon communist party, Cheondoism followers and
other nationalists. Those engaged in the initial preparation of the independence movement were arrested right before staging the movement. Later, studentsled by the Joseon Student Social Science Research Instituteconducted independence
hurray movement. Lee Jong-Ryul was also arrested and taken into police custody in Gyeonggi Province together with
Han Yong-Woon and other leading patriotic activists. Kim Sun-Mi, The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee JongRyuls National Revolution Theory, pp. 247-8.

The Gwandong Region Association opposing the tyranny of Governor General was comprised of 14 relevant associations including the Confederation of Joseon Workers Union in Japan, Tokyo Branch of Shingan Association, the Students Association, the Federation of Joseon Youth in Tokyo and the New Science Research Institute.
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of Joseon Associations in Japan was a united confederation of major associations of Korean people

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organized in Japan.
In 1928, Lee Jong-Ryul also established the Joseon Student Strike Safeguard Alliance in Japan. After
Lee Jong-Ryul came back to Korea, he was arrested as a mastermind behind the national students alliance
movement under the Public Order Act. At that time, he was a teacher at a village school for children
of the disadvantaged in Seoul. Together with Lee Hyun-Chul and Jang Hong-Yeom, he printed slogan
posters which said Rise Up, Joseon Students in Japan and sent them to Korea via mail and distributed
them to stage nation-wide anti-Japanese protests in school strikes. Lee Jong-Ryul began to teach at the
village school in Seoul after July 1927 when he was expelled from Waseda University due to the Korean
Research Society incident and came back to Korea.11
In 1930, Lee Jong-Ryul, Hyun Joon-Hyuk and Yoo Jin-Oh established the Social Status Research Center in
order to analyze the reality facing domestic society and thus lay logical grounds for their social movements
and activities. In Jul of the following year, Lee Jong-Ryul launched the monthly magazine Leereota and
served as a publisher and editor-in-chief.12 Leereota mainly covered domestic issue articles denouncing
Japans policy to divide the country, its colonialism policy, analysis of various domestic social movements
and incidents, and international articles dealing with the political and economic status of other countries
around the world and analysis of international circumstances.
Around that time, Lee Jong-Ryul began to actively participate in the emancipation movement called the
equity movement to liberate the lowest class of society and also in the equity youth avant-garde alliance.
The activities of the equity youth avant-garde alliance were investigated by police in Gwangju in 1933 and
members of the alliance were severely tortured through the investigation process. As a result, the alliances
national network was revealed, and a total of fourteen people were put to trial. Thirteen people were
found not guilty but Lee Jong-Ryul was sentenced to three years and six months of imprisonment and was
imprisoned in Gwangju Prison till Nov 1936.
In 1938, he was again imprisoned and horribly tortured in Gongjoo Prison on charges of violating the
Publishing Act and the Public Order Act. Even after he was released from prison, he was placed on
probation by the Governor General. Since the 1940s, he disguised himself as a charcoal burner in

The village school refers to the Seoul Village School (
) that Lee Joon-Ryul established. After Lee Joon-Ryul
came back to Korea in Jul 1928, he began to teach at the school in September 1928.

The monthly magazine Leereota was launched in Jul 1931 and published 57 issues for a period of four years and seven
months until 1936.
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Gapyeong who burns and sells charcoal and lived in Gail-ri, Seolak-myeon, Gapyeong-gun, Gyeonggi
Province to avoid repression in the late colonial period. On Aug 10th, 1944, he again joined hands with the
Joseon National Foundation Alliance to continue his anti-Japanese underground activities.
Lee Jong-Ryul continued his activities to promote national revolution even after Korea was liberated from
Japanese colonial rule in 1945. He was actively involved in the establishment of the Joseon Academy of
Science, which declared nationalist ideology. He firmly believed that establishing a unified government of
the North and the South is the only way to avoid division of the country and national war and to achieve
national autonomy. Against such a backdrop, he established the National Geonyang Association to put his
firm belief into practice.
In January 1946, the National Geonyang Association was launched by Lee Jong-Ryul to provide support
to the process of building the national revolution party. As a matter of fact, the National Geonyang
Association was an organization that shows the essence of Lee Jong-Ryuls historical view that promoted
the national revolution movements to stage nationalist unification movements and promote a national
independent and autonomous country. The Association recognized such national revolution movements
as a historical challenge facing the country as it was about to take a step toward the establishment of an
independent country.
In 1947, the National Geonyang Association formed the organization of people to promote democratization
and independence movements. During that period, Lee Jong-Ryul was engaged in democratization and
nationalist movements to raise awareness of the public through publicity activities as an editor-in-chief of
Democratic Daily.13 Min-jok-geon-yang (
) is a word created by Lee Jong-Ryul, which means we
should build and promote a nation.

In the 1950s, Lee Jong-Ryul conducted the autonomous national unification movement as the country went
through the tragedy of the Korean War. He recognized the Korean War as part of the national revolution
movement and continued to pursue the establishment of an independent nation.

Kim Gyu-Shik was the president of Democratic Daily and Shin Ik-Hee, who ran for presidential election in 1956, was
the newspapers advisor. Lee Jong-Ryul tried to implement the unification policy by participating in the Shin Il-Hees
camp that promotes non-violent political negotiations and national unification based on the peaceful unification theory
of the National Gunyang Association. However, Lee Jong-Ryuls such efforts were aborted because Shin Il-Hee passed
away while campaigning in the presidential election.
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In 1951, Lee Jong-Ryul was asked by the then Vice President in the interim capital city of Busan to serve

Proceedings
as a professor at Pusan National University. At the Pusan National University, he taught political ideology,
Korean political history and the theory on political party and formed an academic and practical network
with other professors and students at Pusan National University and in the political science department
of Donga University. Together with his students, in 1954, Lee Jong-Ryul organized the National Culture
Association to support the establishment of an independent nation.
The National Culture Association was Busans leading organization to promote public activist campaigns
back in the late 1950s. A number of progressive intellectuals in Busan and other regions in South
Gyeongsang Province participated in such campaigns. The public activist campaigns continued until the
year 1960 when the National Culture Association handed over its roles and missions to the Democratic
National Youth Alliance. The Democratic National Youth Alliance served as the basis of the countrys
autonomous national unification movements, which was led mainly by the National Independent
Unification Central Council.
During the period from 1957 to the late 1950s, Lee Jong-Ryul was engaged in anti-foreign nationalist
independence movements together with like-minded people in Busan and served as an editorial writer to
Busan Daily and International Daily, writing articles to help the public build awareness of the national
revolution theory.14 He also served as an editorial writer and editor-in-chief of Yeongnam Daily, a leading
newspaper in support of the opposition party and progressive political forces in Daegu. Lee Soon-Hee,
the president of Yeongnam Daily, provided full support to the Democratic National Youth Alliance and
National Independent Unification Central Council. Through the process, Lee Jong-Ryul was the medium
for Lee Soon-Hee to provide resources and support to the Democratic National Youth Alliance and
National Independent Unification Central Council.
The national resistance movements in Mar. and Apr. 1960 served as an opportunity for Lee Jong-Ryul
to pave the way for full-fledged national democratic movements. In early May 1960, Lee Jong-Ryul
established the Democratic Nationalist Youth Council (tentative name) for young people in Busan to stage
new political protests for national revolution. The establishment of the Democratic Nationalist Youth
Council was proposed by 114 promoters and the title was later confirmed to be the Democratic National
Youth Alliance (hereinafter referred to as Min-min-chung). Min-min-chung declared that we should build
our independent history through peoples capitalist democratic and national revolution movements and
pursued the autonomous youth movement in pursuit of unification.

One of the major articles is The Political Science for Millions of Readers, a newspaper serial that ran 41 issues since
late 1958 in International Daily.
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The establishment of Min-min-chung encouraged Lee Jong-Ryul to establish the National Autonomous
Unification Central Council (hereinafter referred to as Min-ja-tong). After he established Min-ja-tong,
Lee Jong-Ryul concentrated on expanding the organization of Min-ja-tong based on anti-foreign national
autonomous movements in a broad endeavor to put his national revolution theory of pursuing autonomous
national foundation movements into practice. To him, Min-ja-tong was a medium for him to consolidate
forces to pursue both unification of the country and national revolution.
After Min-ja-tong became a national organization in 1961, Lee Jong-Ryul played a critical role in putting
together unification policies as part of Min-ja-tongs key projects. Lee Jong-Ryul was a person who
pursued large-scale unification movements for the first time in Korea since the Korean War.
In addition to participating in Min-ja-tongs activities, Lee Jong-Ryul took the initiative in establishing
Nation Daily in February 1961. The initial name of the newspaper was Public Daily but was later changed
to Nation Daily at a suggestion Lee Jong-Ryul made in a gathering in preparation for the newspapers
foundation. The name of the newspaper is deeply associated with the nature of this and highlights Lee
Jong-Ryuls political position during the period of the national resistance movements in Mar. and Apr.
Lee Jong-Ryul planned to turn Nation Daily into a newspaper dedicated to the national revolution theory
by integrating national movement forces and publishing articles to raise peoples awareness of the nation.15
However, in just three years since its very first issue published on Feb. 13th, 1961, Nation Daily was
forced to shut down by the military coup forces upon publishing # 92 issue. Lee Jong-Ryul was arrested on
charges of the activities in Min-ja-tong and involvement in the Nation Daily incident and was sentenced to
ten years imprisonment in Seodaemoon Prison.
Lee Jong-Ryul took over Gaewoon Junior High School in Yangsan, South Gyeongsang Province after he
was released in Dec. 1965. Since then, he continued to conduct national education campaigns and collapsed
from a stroke while he was coming back from his visit to the historical site dedicated to Ahn Hee-Jae, an
independence movement activist, in 1974. Until he passed away after years of struggle with the stroke, Lee
Jong-Ryul exerted his utmost effort to promote national revolution movements. On Mar 13th, 1989, Lee
Jong-Ryul left his final words Min-jok-geon-yang-sa-ro (toward national foundation), a slogan in pursuit

Refer to the following publication on Nation Daily and its founder Lee Jong-Ryul: Kim Ji-Hyeong, Nation Daily and
Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul, The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National Revolution Theory, pp. 314348.
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of peoples revolution and national revolution in history, and the Sa-cheak-dang: the avant-garde party that

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promotes national revolution and passed away at the age of 87.

4. Is Lee Jong-Ryul alive or dead?
What is the life of thought? It is a concrete and effective force that lifts up the generation in historical
crises and helps it move forward.16 This then leads to another question. Is Lee Jong-Ryul alive or dead?
Is his ideology and thought still relevant for people of today as we try to rescue our history and move it
forward into the future?
Lee Jong-Ryul stated that all social theories should be understood based on its historical time and
conditions and it is natural that Marx and Engels, [who were living in a different society at a different
time], were not able to speak for our countrys revolution in a logical sense.17 In short, academic theories
and ideologies cannot be understood in isolation and they should be considered together with their
historical and social background. We can apply this to Lee Jong-Ryuls theories and ideologies. How
about his theories and ideologies? Are they alive or dead? Our answer is that Lee Jong-Ryul is still alive
meaning that his theories and ideologies are still relevant for todays society in Korea. Why is that?
Let us first look into this perception of problems and methodologies for healing used in his Peoples
Revolution Theory. Drawing a clear picture of the problem is like making a diagnosis of problems facing
society, and it is essential to make an accurate diagnosis of problems in order to heal the wounds caused by
such problems. It is difficult to talk about healing and correcting the problems without having an accurate
diagnosis because it is possible to come up with correct and practical treatment methods for healing
problems only when we make a correct diagnosis.
1) Diagnosis of Problems and Methodologies for Problem Solving in the Peoples History18
Theories should be verified thoroughly to see whether they are based on falsified background knowledge
or on the historical truth in a critical and analytic manner.19 Only when we make critical analysis and
introspection of the past and history, can we move our history forward into the future. What does this
mean? This means there have been people who tried to distort our history, not looking at it as it is, and

Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 23.

Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 238. The phrase in [ ] is written by the author.

Peoples History (
) is a term created by the author to make a distinction between the Lee Jong-Ryuls correct
history and the general history.

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there are still those people who are trying to adjust and use history to their advantage. A case in point is the
conservative vested interests and those in power in current Korean society.
Introspection on the past is taking stock of the past and coming back to the current reality. However, the
eyes of the conservative forces are fixated on the past and remain there. That is why the conservative make
no introspection on the past. When someone introspects on the past, he or she is bound to come back to the
current reality. Without coming back to the current reality and applying the lessons learned to the current
reality, it is hard to say that the person has fully introspected on the past. The present reality is where the
historical lessons are being applied. Introspecting on the past means that the person is trying to apply the
lessons learned from the past history to the present reality. Through critical analysis and examination, we
can introspect on the past and determine our current history and accordingly pave a new historical path
(
) for the future.
Without having a correct understanding of history, we cannot understand what the current problems are
and analyze the historical truth behind the cause of the problems, which means it is all the more important
to accumulate historical references. Then, Lee Jong-Ryul asks us the following question: where is our
historical path headed? To which direction is our history moving forward? By asking such questions, we
will be able to draw a clearer picture of the problems in our history.
History marches forward on the historical path, which means that history is walking on the path of
history. Then, is history walking on the historical path spontaneously? The answer is no. If something is
moving spontaneously, that is not history but nature. History is not the same as nature. History needs the
right historical path, the right direction and the following movements. The order of building history is as
follows: historical path-route-strategy-practice-historical path. The forward-looking historical perception
paves the way for the historical path and route, which in turn determines strategies, tactics and practices.
In short, the historical path opens up when historical practices are implemented.20 People forces or the
general public played a role in the progress of history. That leads to another question: why does history
change its composition and nature? By trying to answer this question, we will be able to draw a clear
20 Park Man-joon, The Historical Philosophy and Ideology of Peoples Revolution, The Historical Re-examination of
Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National Revolution Theory, pp. 29~34. In the developments of historical path, the historical
path is the beginning and putting the theory into practice is the end. Then, is putting the theory on historical path the
completion of history? No. The historical route has a circular structure where practices again meet with the historical
path. That is why it is said that the historical path opens up with practices. Of course, the historical path before putting
the theory into practice and after putting the theory into practice is different. The historical path after putting the theory
into practice is a new historical path that is heading people progressively toward into the future.
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picture of the problems.

Proceedings
Lee Jong-Ryul called the society with people with many different interests a political society. In political
society, there exist constant confrontations between public forces. In Peoples History, political society is
the same as historical society. Is the history always going in the direction for promoting virtue or pursuing
new values, instead of the opposing direction? That is the third question Peoples History asks.21
2) Peoples Revolution Theory
We saw that Lee Jong-Ryuls theory is still relevant today by examining the perception of problems in
Peoples History. Based on the clear picture of problems as shown in the above three examples, Lee JongRyul asked and tried to answer the question: where should our history be headed in the future in Peoples
Revolution Theory? Peoples revolution is short for National Revolution and Peoples Revolution.
When we think of national revolution, Lenins national revolution instantly comes to our minds. On Jul.
20th, 1920, Lenin declared that People in China and Joseon should make national revolution not the
socialist revolution movements in his remarks made at the International Communist Party Convention.
His remarks emphasized that the historical events in the Northeast Asian regionsuch as Korea and China
should be understood and analyzed in a different manner and thus remedy or measures applied to those
countries should be different from the ones applied to the countries in other regions of the world. Also,
what he was trying to emphasize is that it is highly important to conduct scientific analysis of historical
facts in different regions in the world to build an appropriate understanding of the history of each region
and the differences.
Lenin, who lived in the era of financial capitalism, is living in a different historical time when compared
with Marx, who lived in the era of industrial capitalism. According to Marx, the confrontation between
laborers and capitalists is inevitable and unavoidable. In the process of promoting national revolution, it
is more efficient and beneficial for laborers to join hands with capitalists as one nation to fight against the
oppression of imperialistic foreign forces. Ignoring such possibilities of national movements and insisting
socialist revolution or communist revolution is just an anti-national and anti-revolution act,22 which were
well shown in the example of Hyun Joon-Hyuk, a leader of the branches of the Joseon Communist Party in
the five Northwestern Provinces, who insisted the three-step revolution theory (national revolution-socialist
revolution-communist revolution).

In Peoples History, the winner in the battle between the force of stepping forward exerted by the public and the opposing force of power is always the force of stepping forward. Is Peoples History a merely optimistic and idealistic theory?
The analysis of the cycle involving the historical path and practices demonstrates that it is not merely being optimistic.

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In this regard, national revolution can be divided into two kinds. The national revolution in Hyun JoonHyuns three-step revolution theory is completely different from the national revolution in Peoples History
and is also different from Lenins national revolution. Lenins national revolution is merely a step in the
two-step revolution theory. According to Lenins revolution theory, national revolution is followed by the
socialist revolution.23
In Peoples History, the path that history should be headed to can only be built through national revolution,
indicating that only national revolution is required other than other socialist revolution, communist
revolution and other kinds of revolutions relevant for the generation. Does that mean that history is
completed through national revolution? No. The national revolution is not a completion of history with a
clear beginning and end; rather, it is the initial ( ) process through which the history is built.24 In other
words, national revolution is the process to complete history rather that something that puts an end to
history. Then, what are the following ( ) steps required after national revolution? That must be peoples
revolution. In this sense, Lee Jong-Ryuls Peoples Revolution Theory is essentially in the same vein as his
slogan Min-jok-geon-yang-sa-ro (
): Historical Path toward National Foundation.
Min-jok-geon-yang stands for the movement that promotes national foundation. In other words, it is
referring to the high-level scientific socialist society movements to build a peoples country, force and
architecture of promoting peoples bourgeoisie democracy. In short, Min-jok-geon-yang is the movement
promoting both national foundation and peoples foundation, which doesnt mean that the nation should
be built first to promote peoples foundation. The national revolution is the process of revolution that is
implemented to build a nation and dissolve it afterwards. In this regard, Lee Jong-Ryuls national theory
stands out from other nationalism theories that view the national scheme as the ultimate alternative.
Then, what are the sequences of the stages of human revolution and national revolution? Is national
revolution following human revolution naturally and automatically? Not at all. The term Min-jok-geonyang-sa-ro (
) shows the answer. National revolution is the following step of the revolution
and also a prelude to human revolution.25 Human revolution is a following step of national revolution
23 The term national revolution began to spread after Lenin used it in The Thesis on National and Colonialism Issues.
National revolution refers to a revolutionary national movement that is different from advanced bourgeoisie movements in colony countries. However, Lee Jong-Ryul used the term national revolution as an abbreviation for ordinary
peoples capitalist democratization national revolution. Kim Sun-Mi, Lee Jong-Ryus National Movements and Political
Theory, Paragraph 2, Chapter 2.

25 The Memorial Foundation of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul, Collection of Publications of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul 1-2, p. 392.
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to complete the entire historical path, and thus it can be called a culmination of the true national history.

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That is, national revolution is an economical, social and historic revolution that rescues the history and
that contributes to the detailed contents of the human history. When history gets changed, the society the
historical place also gets changed and consequently people living in society also get changed. That is why
national revolution takes place at first, followed by human revolution and peoples revolution.
All the accomplishments of national revolution are likening to the root of human revolution while the
accomplishments of human revolution can be likened to branches and flowers of national revolution.
And although the root, branches and flowers have different characteristics, theyre are all part of a single
organic being.26 Here, organic being refers to the general status and theoretical meaning of peoples
revolution. In other words, it refers to the comprehensive process of peoples revolution that rescues people
from the historical crisis and puts them onto the new historical path.
Why is the revolution that rescues people from historical crises and puts them onto the new historical path
called peoples revolution? What is the reason? As demonstrated in the case of other names and titles
created throughout the history, the term peoples revolution was created to describe the unique essence
of what it refers to.27 Peoples revolution is focused on the direction of human history whereas citizens
revolution in the pre-modern era is centered on economical, political and social essence. The direction of
human history refers to the historical path toward achieving human values in a whole new sense.
Peoples revolution is the process of rescuing our people from historical crises and helping people move
forward on a new historical path.28 That is why it is considered both national revolution and human
revolution. Overcoming the marginalization of people or marginalization of humanity in the social and
human sciences is like peoples revolution when their ideologies are taken into account. That is because
such marginalization is caused in the political and social relationships of economic forces, and peoples
revolution is the only way to resolve such marginalization.
That doesnt mean resolving the issue of marginalization and rescuing people from the depths of despair
incurred by marginalization is not the same as the recovery of humanity. When we say we restore
something, it is about re-gaining something that we have lost. Then, from which period should we have to
restore our humanity? There is no exemplary humanity existing in the world, and we didnt have it in the
beginning. That is why people change accordingly as society changes.


The revolution that brought the history of the medieval times into the pre-modern era is called capitalist democratization
revolution or citizens revolution.

The reason Lee Jong-Ryul emphasized national unification is directly related to this. Without achieving national unification, our national identity would remain ragged, ripped off and fallen to the ground and the only way to restore the
falling national identity values is to unify the divided country. Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 117.
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Human revolution is the historical path that leads to the direction of contributing gradually to the formation
of personality. The direction is the ideological orientation of peoples revolution. What is the ideology
for peoples revolution? What does rescuing personality and helping people march forward on a new
historical path do? Although we have explored them to some extent, we need to see the changing status of
people in the history of humanity in order to have a concrete understanding of the ideology. To this end,
the research on history is important and essential29 since it is all the anti-human and inhumane incidents or
facts in human history that human revolution is trying to resolve.30
The ideological orientation of human revolution is part of the stage in human history. That is, human
revolution is designed to denounce all anti-human events or incidents of the past and to encourage the
gentle and kind nature in people that tend to help and support each other to become heroes and heroines,
thus achieving the noblest and most-urgent ideal of human history. What is noteworthy is the fact that
the problems facing people today become the problems facing all of humanity, which in turn spark the
problems facing the nation. That is because ordinary people are the protagonists in our history and history
cannot exist without them. Therefore, we should continue to build our truthful history by having a correct
understanding of the problems that were placed in front of them.
5. Conclusion
Now we know that the life of Lee Jong-Ryul is a manifestation of his thoughts and ideologies, and his
thoughts and ideologies were well present in his acts and life. We now also know that Sansoo Lee JongRyul is a representative person who highlights historical milestones and turning points in Busan - such
as the Peoples resistance movement against the oppression and discrimination by foreign forces, antiJapanese and anti-foreign movements, liberation and self-achieved autonomy of the nation, the national
movements to attain Koreas liberation from Japanese colonial rule, anti-authoritarian and democratization
movements.
As pointed out earlier, the problem is that his life and ideology is still relevant for us who are living in the
present day. His wounds are our wounds and healing those wounds would help heal our wounds made in
29 According to peoples history, history is drawn by the heroes of the history and they are the gentle and kind nature of
ordinary people who help each other while cooperating to make a living together in the production activities. Lee JongRyul, Lets Look into Gimi, p. 141. Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 151.

For more information on anti-human and inhumane events and activities in human history, refer to National Revolution
Theory, pp. 150~151.
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the current historical age.

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1) Ordinary Peoples Capitalism

Kim Jin-Sook, Koreas first female welder, was standing on crane No. 85 on Yeongdo shipbuilding yard on
Jan. 6th, 2011. Why did she climb on the crane? The place was where Kim Joo-Ik took his own life after a
129-day sit-in eight years ago. However, it is not the place where Kim Joo-Ik desperately cried for justice
and died alone, rather it is an icon for hope.
As ordinary citizens jumped on the hope bus, they let society know who Kim Jin-Sook is. That is how hope
comes to us.
Some say it is the bridge where citizens and laborers meet together, while others call it the solidarity of
marginalized and oppressed people. That is true. It is a voluntary alliance of solidarity that is free from
segmentation and isolation. Crane No. 85 and the hope bus are symbols of such solidarity. While sending
the 3rd hope bus, she said that when we are busy, we had to work day and night for a week. Many people
dozed off while waiting in line to get lunch, but we didnt dare to ask for a day off. I had blisters that
popped up on my fingers and my lack of skills with scissors made me damage the fabric. Every time I
damaged the fabric, I was hit on the cheek and kicked by the manager, so there were always bruises on my
calves. Still, I was able to endure all those difficulties waiting for payday on the 7 th.
Is this ordinary peoples capitalism? The answer is no. How could the historical path where ordinary
people become the protagonists under the social ideologies of capitalism and democracy look like
that? Im astonished at Lee Jong-Ryuls analysis of historical facts, capitalism and Peoples History.
A couple of decades ago, he already saw through the essence of capitalistic reality facing us the
reality of nothing ( ) in Peoples History - in todays world.31 What makes the reality nothing? In a
nutshell, it means society lacks democracy, autonomy, independence, ordinary nature, equality as well
as democratic productivity. That is why ordinary peoples capitalistic democratization and national
revolution can be an alternative, which is designed to build a democratic, autonomous, independent,
citizen-oriented, productive and equal national society.
Lee Jong-Ryul divided capitalism into centralized capitalism and ordinary peoples capitalism while
dividing democracy into bourgeoisie democracy (capitalist democracy) and proletarian democracy (labor
democracy). Then, he divided capitalist democracy into centralized capitalist democracy and decentralized

694
citizen-oriented capitalist democracy. Therefore, there is a fundamental difference between citizen-oriented

capitalist democratization national revolution and the citizens revolution of the western world (capitalist
democratization revolution). Considering the fact that both are based on the same political philosophy of
private property-based capitalism, citizens revolution is the same as national revolution. However, we are
in a situation to pursue citizen-oriented economic schemes in a neo-liberalism and imperialistic order, and
that is why our revolution is distinct from the revolution of the western world in nature.
2) Democracy
Citizens in the west and citizens in our society have been different and remain different as of now. Thus,
capitalism and democracy in the west and in our society have been different and remain different in
nature. That is why citizen-oriented capitalistic, democratic national revolution is proposed. When history
changes, society and people change. And when society is in a different age and has different historical
characteristics, capitalism and democracy in that society - as well as its nationalism - should change.
Busan has always been a place where democratic and nationalistic political activities take place. It was a
place where citizens were engaged in the movement to restore national sovereignty to fight Japanese forces.
Citizens in Busan have continued to be engaged in the movement to build a nation after Koreas liberation
from Japanese colonization. That is not it. Busan citizens were major forces behind the national resistance
movements in Mar. and Apr. The only problem is that such democratization movements still continue
these days.
Democratic Park in Busan, the symbol of the city and the citys national resistance movements in Mar.
and Apr. is not and should not be a place for beautiful rituals to heal the wounds of the city; it should not
be a memorial (the substitute of memory) where people merely recall ones mind and reflect on the past.
Fixating the past on the past and thinking the past is gone is leading to the death of history and the past.
Therefore, Democratic Park in Busan should not become a fancy park that is consumed like a cultural or
touristic product regardless of its historical significance. Rather, it should become a productive place to
create and promote history for democracy.
3) Nation Unification32

As our nation was not united in a single nation, the correct term is reunification - not unification.
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It is not easy to come up with a realistic alternative to our history and social revolution. One of the major

Proceedings
reasons can be found in the reality of our country being divided. What does that mean? When the nation
is divided, its autonomy and democracy are undermined and society becomes anti-autonomous and antidemocratic. The national division is a historical reality that shows anti-autonomous characteristics of our
society most vividly and is an existential foundation for anti-democratic forces. Therefore, unification
should be promoted in an autonomous and democratic manner. That is why Peoples History emphasized
Yeong-ou (
: controlling) foreign forces, autonomous route, min-jok-geon-yang independent route,
from which strategies and tactics for national unification come out in the form of national unification Sammin-non-check (three-step peoples strategies).33
Controlling (Yeong-ou) foreign forces doesnt necessarily mean expelling or driving out foreign forces.
Rather, it means we have to proactively adjust their presence on our own land. Depending on how we deal
with foreign forces, the responses of foreign forces and their effects would become different. Controlling
(Yeong-ou) foreign forces is about responding to the invasion and oppression of the foreign forces
without losing our autonomy and independence and implementing strategies to build an autonomous
and independent nation. In addition, peoples great ego tactics are also required to take control of foreign
forces.34
The process through which we achieve unification of the nation will determine the direction of the future
society after the unification. Unification by foreign forces is just a forced physical unification of the
country, which doesnt necessarily lead to the path toward a democratic and autonomous unified nation and
doesnt transform our society into the right direction.
Therefore, the division and unification of the nation is not a distant discourse that is far from our everyday
life. It is not something that is not affecting our lives. So we cant say it would be good to achieve national
unification, but it is ok if the country remains divided. Why did so many people give their precious lives for
the cause of realizing an autonomous and democratic world? As highlighted in the ideological orientation
of peoples revolution, unification of our nation will allow us to live more like human beings.

National unification Sam-min-non-check (three-step peoples strategies) (
) refers to Min-jok-geonyang independent route (
), peoples autonomous extraterritorial strategies (
),
peoples absolute ego tactics (
).

Being segmented and confronting with each other like children are like part of the nations unification tactics and strategies to control foreign forces and to promote Min-jok-geon-yang independent route. Unification is the resounding victory for our absolute ego that evolves and develops our national history.
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4) In-jong-seong (
) & In-eui-neung (
Peoples History provides a message of hope to the problems of oppression, isolation, marginalization and
hardships of people throughout history where ordinary citizens are not the protagonists in the historical
time. What is the message Kim Jin-Sook tried to convey standing on Crane No.85? That is Im also
human, and I want to be treated like a human being. Peoples History calls this In-jong-seong and Ineui-neung: people living and being treated like human beings. This refers to the idealistic term Seongneung, where all negative personalities are removed.
In the term Seong-neung, seong refers to the Chinese character that means the existential status and
meaning of human being, while neung refers to the status and meaning of practical activities. The
existential status in seong is combined with a practical neung to show that Seong-neung (humanity)
evolves over time according to social and historical conditions. Seong is influenced by neung and neung
is influenced by seong in a reciprocal interaction. That is why people change when history evolves over
time. That is what In-jong-seong and In-eui-neung means in peoples revolution. National unification
and revolution are required for people to live like human beings and to be treated like human beings and
In-jong-seong and In-eui-neung exist to achieve such revolutions.
In-jong-seong and In-eui-neung refer to people who exist and live in a democratic way, people who
exist and live in an autonomous way, people who exist and live in an independent manner, people who
exist and live like ordinary citizens and people who exist and are treated equally with other people.35
References
Gang Man-Gil, The Theory on Ethnically Homogenous Nation Establishment in National Independence
Movement, Korean Nationalism Theory, Chang-Bi, 1982.
Kim Min-Hwan, The Research on Nation Daily, Nanam Publishing, 2006.
Kim Sun-Mi, The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National Revolution Theory,
Doctoral Thesis at Pusan National University (Aug, 2008).
Kim Ji-Hyeong, Nation Daily and Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul, The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee
Jong-Ryuls National Revolution Theory, Seonin, 2006.
35 The existence and life is the same thing. That is why Lee Jong-Ryul called In-jon-seong and In-eui-neung the both
sides of one existence.
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Kim Yong-Wook, The History and Spirit of Busan1-2, Jeonmang Publishing, 2001.

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The Research Institute of National History, National Revolution Theory, Deulsam, 1989.
The Research Institute of Democratic Society, The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls
National Revolution Theory, Seonin, 2006.
Park Man-Joon, The Research on Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls Peoples Revolution Theory, The Region and
History 18, 2006.
Park Man-Joon, The Historical Philosophy and Ideology of Peoples Revolution, The Historical Reexamination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National Revolution Theory, Seonin, 2006.
Park Joon-Gun, The Historical and Philosophical Meaning of March and April Democratic Movements,
Analysis and Outlook of Korean Democracy, Hangaram, 2000.
The Korean Culture Institute at Pusan National University, The History and Culture of Busan, Pusan
National University Press, 1998.
The Busan Democratic Movement Publication Commission, The History of Democratic Movements in
Busan, 1998.
The Memorial Foundation of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul, Collection of Publications of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul
1-2, Deulsam, 2001-2.
Lee Il-Gu (Lee Jong-Ryul), Lets Look into Gimi, Moorimsa, 1979.
Lee il-Gu (Lee Jong-Ryul), The Current Political Issues, International News, 1960.
Lee Jong-Ryul, National Revolution Theory, Deulsam, 1989.
Lee Jong-Ryul, The Division of Country in History and National unification, Tongmoongwan, 1971.
Jang Dong Pyo, Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryuls National Movements and National Revolution Theory, Region
and History 10, 2002.
Choi Jang-Jip et al., Analysis and Outlook of Korean Democracy, Hangaram, 2000.
698
Envisioning a Modern Busan at a Corner of Sanbok Road
Dong Jin Kang
Kyungsung University
1. Introduction
Busan is the oldest modern city of Korea that has a history
of over a hundred years. For the past four to five decades of
rapid growth, Busan has been a place that has been below
average in terms of urban development patterns, which
makes the city look just like other cities.
This process that produces such likeness has caused the
city to lose its unique city identity. Amidst rapid growth,
the system for transmitting tradition to modernity in the
city was destroyed just because it was thought to be old and
meaningless. Many people feel deeply sorry for this reality.
<Picture> Cities Have Trends. They Look Alike.
Even at this right moment, Busan is losing

its past memories bit by bit. They are
vanishing for no reason, and the remaining
memories do not seem to mingle with the
present. Of course, new memories are being
made. But, still the dim old memories that
<Picture> Busan Customs Office destroyed during the Construction

of Busandaegyo Bridge (Destroyed in 1979)
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Busan should take its own path. No doubt,

the traces and memories of this place
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only Busan has are hard to meet.

Proceedings
made in the 20th century are the treasures representing the Busan identity. So, it is natural that we have
something meaningful to pass on to future generations in the 21st and 22nd centuries.
Busans modern history started with the sea. Without the sea, Busans modern time would have flown to a
different direction changing the modern history of Korea as a whole. Busan, that is, Busan Port, has a very
close relationship with the sea and mountains. It can be safely said that Busans modern history goes along
with the history of Busan Port, though it depends on how one determines the exact boundaries of Busan
Port. Some may limit the port area up to the wharfs and the seaside area. Others may cover the hinterland
of the port and the sea where maritime transportation is made. The latter would be the answer.
During modern times, Busan experienced
a series of constant plunderage, glory and
shame to and from the sea. This includes
Japanese plunderage since the end of the
Korean Dynasty, the opening of Busanpo
Port for friendly relations with Japan in the
beginning of the 15th century, war in Busan
during the Japanese invasion in 1592, the
utilization of Busanpo Port as a base to fight
<Picture> Center of Modern Busan: Busan Port Area
against the Japan, the forced port opening
by Japan, and the utilization of Busan as a logistics base by Japan to conquer the continent. Shortly after
Korea gained independence from Japan, Busan still stood in the middle of modern Korean history as
a destination for fleeing amid the Korean War and the following national rehabilitation and economic
development.
In the center of change in Korea in the 20th century lies Busan. Whether passive or active in the change,
Busan has been the backbone of Koreas development in the 21st century. This is an undeniable truth, and
this makes Busan stand out. This paper also focuses on the features of Busan in terms of space.
2. Modern Busan: Changes in Urban Space
Human settlements in Busan were first made in the Neolithic Age. Busan is still changing regarding its
space, having gone through the Open Port Period, the Japanese Rule, and Korean War. People consider the
first 100 years right after the Open Port Period to be the most influential period in Busans development.
But to be exact, we should go back 400 years from now.
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It was about the time that the Sea Blockade policy was implemented due to pressure from Myng Dynasty,
China. The policy blocked Korea out from other countries. For several hundreds of years, Korea could not
see beyond its seas and was eventually lost in envisioning its future.
Without insightful understanding and vision regarding the sea, Busans modern history was in continual
confusion. It was a land of Japanese plunderage and a site for overcoming of uncontrollable national
crises. Its weak ability to quickly overcome the situation shattered its modern history apart like an
unfinished quilted wrapping cloth.
However, as the cloth pieces come into one whole and are closely woven together, Busans fragmented
modern history, for sure, can be filled with past memories and traces so that they can cover and cure the
scars of the 20th century.
2.1.1 The Sea Blockade Period and the Open Sea Period (~1945)
In 1407 Jepo and Busanpo Ports were
opened as windows to Japan. Though
they served for trade with Japan, it was
a meaningful opening as it was made
independently. Busans port history began
around this time. After the Japanese
Invasions in 1592 and 1597, Busanpo
Port had been the port of Korean prisons
and of Korean envoys to Japan. For two
centuries, from the beginning of the 17th
century, Choryang Woigwan served as
independence-driven diplomatic and
exchange arena between Korea and Japan.
After that, the site provided the foundation
of Busans modern history.
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<Figure> Landscape of Woigwan in the mid19th Century (Re-designed Painting

based on the Original Painting by
Byeonbak from Daenaebu Art School
that is re-designed)
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The port opening in 1876 was made under pressure, but it was the first official port opening in Korean
history. Also, it made Busan the city of port for international trade and initiated the start of Japanese
plunderage of Korean land.
Until the 1930s, Busans modern history was a history of reclamation and flattening of land for space
expansion. In 1883, a port customs office was built followed by the constructions of piers and a bonded
warehouse (one wing), which were registered as Koreas first maritime projects. For three years from
1909, flattening of the mountain in what is now known as the Daecheong and Jungang-dong area were
implemented. In the flattened area (now Saemadang), large public facilities were constructed, such as
Busan Station and Busan Customs. Also, in the reclaimed area (now Jungang-ro), a neo-modern landscape
including cable cars was formed.
After that, two port construction projects were implemented (first: 1911~1918, second: 1919~1928)
changing the sea map of Busan. The first project erected two piers (now Pier 1), which formed a
transportation system for Japanese rule by connecting the piers to the railroad (that is, connecting Busan
Station and Busan Port). Upon completion of reclamation in the 1930s, a bridge (now Yeongdo Bridge)
connecting the islands to the mainland was built to expand the urban area. Near the bridge was Mt.
Yongmisan, which turned into a reclamation site to relocate Busan city government as the hub of politics,
public administration and economy.
2.2 Independence and Post-Korean War Period (1945~1962)
Koreas independence from Japan brought revitalization to modern Busan. Busan Port became the window
through which Korean expatriates returned to Korea after their forced duties under impressment and
draftings or from overseas independence movements. 1.5 million out of the total 2.5 million expatriates
settled in Busan, but the city suffered hardships due to the lack of infrastructure causing those people to
live in shacks or on streets (the population increased to 150,000 over two years since the independence,
and to 450,000 in 1947).
We can say modern Busan, with the influx of repatriates, had a history of filling towns and undeveloped
areas of the city. Such history went on throughout the course of the Korean War. The then-interim national
capital was Busan, and it was filled with people fleeing from elsewhere (refugee camps set up in what is
now Mt. Yongdusan, Mt. Bokbyeongsan, Daecheongdong, ports, Yeongdo Island, Jeokki, Choryang
and the hillside of Sanbok Road, Beomil-dong areas).
At that time the population was 900,000 (which includes around 500,000 refugees), and those who could
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not find space at the concentration camps hovered around ports, stations and bus terminals to earn a
living.1 Naturally, they were gathered up in what is now Gwangbok and Nampo-dong, which include Pier
1 and 2, Busan Station, Kukje Market, Bupyeong-dong Market, Jagalchi Market, and the bus terminal in
Chungmu-dong. The two areas were the backbones of Busans modernization back then.
Ironically, the two piers built for the purpose of plunderage during the Japanese Rule were turned into the
channel for providing of war relief goods from the US and for the refugees. Also, several large-scale fires
(in Mt. Yongdusan, the frontside of Busan Station, Kukje Market) gave rise to countless refugees and the
loss of Busan Station and Post Office Commission buildings.
<Picture> Birds-eye-view of Busan (1950)
Busan City Government
Throughout the Korean War, Busan became the largest port city in Korea. The first Korean cargo ship
Korea (6,819tons) embarked off to Portland, USA on October 21, 1952. In 1954, a dry dock where ship
repairs were available to 2,800-ton vessels was constructed though international aid (UNKRA). In 1957,
Koreas first deep-sea fishing vessel Jinam (tuna fishing) embarked, making Pier 1 the gate to Koreas
deep-sea fishing.
Between 1960 and 1962, various infrastructure projects were initiated (Suyeong Airport, Gudeok Stadium,
1 According to Chulwook chas research (2011), as of July 4th 1953, the number of temporary chacks amounted to 28, 619,
with most of them concentracted along the port area with the hillside at its back.
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Jaseong Overpass, Yeongju Tunnel), and they were the explosives of modern Busans expansion inland.

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2.3 Post-City Status Elevation to Direct Government Control (1963~1994)

In 1963, Busan was the second largest city in the country and was elevated to a city directly controlled by
the central government. The status change led to the expansion of urban planning areas. In the following
year, the construction of Sanbok Road was completed (now from Choryang and Maryknoll Hospital), and
stripped the refugees villages of the notion of illegal residence.
After that, projects improving the quality of life were put in place: notification to change Mt. Yongdusan
Park and Geumgang Park formed under Japanese Rule and other scenic spots (now Taejongdae and
Morundae) into public parks, apartments and Busan Department Mall in Yeongju-dong and Chungmudong. Korean troops were dispatched to Vietnam at Pier 3 for eight years starting from 1964; and the
bascules on Yeongdo Bridge were closed in 1966, both of which are very important in that they changed
the meaning of Busans modern history in the 60s.
In the 70s and 80s, abundant
government support for constructing
infrastructure brought in prosperity
in Busan. The opening of Gyeongbu
Expressway helped Busan Port
develop further into an international
trade gate. Other projects also
contributed to the development
of the port: Namhae Expressway,
<Picture> Sanbok Road, War Refugees Shelter (1971)
Sasang Industrial Complex, Gimhae
Airport, Busan Tower, Piers 5~8, Busandaegyo Bridge, Urban Expressway, etc. This period can be refered
to as the period of space renovation and expansion over the past traces. It was a period of infrastructure for
the industrial foundation of Busan.
2.4 Post-City Status Change to Metropolitan City (1995~)
In the 1990s, Busan experienced the construction of new ports and the relocation of the city government,
which caused the fall of North Port and the Gwangbok and Nampo-dong areas, and the core of modern
Busan. The fall was not properly managed and therefore, damaged Busans unique modern characteristics.
In 2004 then-president Roh Mu-Hyun ordered a water-friendly waterfront renovation project at the North
Port. People expected the project to keep the ports uniqueness as Koreas first open port, but it turned out
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to be the completion of the first phase only, which was the reclamation of Piers 1~4 with no hope for the
continuation of the project. The old city government complex could have been another modern Busan
place of the past, but it was sold to profit-searching large companies rather than serving as a means of the
modern time, changing into a restored Mt. Yongmisan or connecting Yeongdo Bridge. To sum up, Busan
between the late 90s and the mid-2000s seems to have made little effort to combine its modernism with
urbanism.
On the other hand, the once Japanese Oriental Development Company, which was later used as the
American Embassy, was transformed into the Busan Modern History Museum (2003). The Busan
International Film Festival helped Busan acquire a worldwide reputation as a filming location. These
changes provided a chance to re-acknowledge the value of space and landscape of modern Busan. At
the end of the 2000s emerged discussions on the concept of creative city and urban regeneration, which
reviewed the value Sanbok Road had. It was a time of reassuring Busans modern features as globally
differentiated assets.
<Picture> Film Locations in Busan (2000~2008)
Over the past century, Busan had gone through unique development. As of September 2012, it is hard
to put in one sentence the impression modern Busan offers. For one, there is a context which cannot be
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3. Space Features of Modern Busan

Proceedings
precisely defined. Generally, for a city to be recognized as possessing context, it should have a grand
landmark, but Busan does not have one. Moreover, Busan has similar things that are tangled but in not so
much an overwhelming fashion. That is Busan now.
I recently published a column in a cultural journal, saying that the modern image of Busan is the beauty
of groups gathered together. Modern Busan is certainly different from other cities in the West where
strong symbolic features are apparent. Rather, Busan has a narrow, long and multi-leveled topography, unplanned residential areas unprepared for the unexpected war, and ports and piers of different sizes, which
all form the modern image of Busan. Maybe a cultural landscape is closest to describing the citys image.
<Picture> Fascinating Gamcheon Village
<Picture> Silhouette at Seongbuk Market
Each feature does not stand out from one another but stay together in groups. That is the most prominent
and valuable difference of modern Busan. For example, there are groups of old houses on the hills,
various industrial heritages including warehouses on ports that support time-honored industries (logistics,
ship-making, fisheries), modern-style shops alongside streets throughout the old downtown area, one or
two-story houses and modern structures found along Sanbok Road and Yeongson Hill, stairways of up
to 186 steps and houses standing shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the stairs, thousands of alleys and
communities and the alley culture in them, infrastructure driving the worlds fifth largest logistics and
transportation industries (railroads, stations, overpasses, tunnels), conventional markets and streets that
have stories and themes of ordinary Busan citizens, large parks of up to 70-year-old history, just to name a
few.
All of them are time-honored assets interconnected with community life, geographical shape and
heights, and urban industries in Busan. They are not enough to be entitled as official cultural assets to be
preserved. They may be swept away under urban development.
The reason for this lies within. In the background of modern Busan lie the Japanese Rule and Korean War,
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all negative attributes.

The pre-modern period was forcefully accompanied by the Japanese Rule all through the modern period.
Everything was naturally in chaos. Things created during this time have been destined to be denied.
About 70 years have passed since gaining independence from Japan, about twice as long as the 36 years
of darkness. On the back of this period lies the time of today. If we pull away the previous periods just
because we do not like them in our time, the 70 years will stumble.
Unfortunately, the Korean War that broke out five years after the independence gave us no time to discuss
modern Korea. The impoverished shacks were turned into the urban space of Busan. At this point, no one
could deny the equation: out of poverty means into urban development. That way Koreans had to take
urban development solely for developments sake, not for the restoration to the former condition. There
were no other choices. They became aggressive, not giving a second thought to others and to their own
damage when it comes to urban spacing.
Space characteristics of Busan can be divided into two types.
3.1 Space Type
3.1.1 Ecologically developed urban organizations remain strong.
Busans geography is very much unpredictable. There seem to be no fixed frames. People give a mixed
description of Busan as a complicated city or fascinating city. That is especially true when looking at the
old downtown areas where Busan shows its strongest modern features.
Just like the filling and the warp threads in weaving, streets meet streets, and streets meet lands to create a
city. It is called urban fabric. Urban fabric also can be respectively referred to as infill, which means nonmovable infrastructure and other structures, and support which is the opposite of infill.
The old downtown and its vicinity have different space types: a rectangle plaid developed from Choryang
Oigwan; a block pattern developed along the long and narrow plain area; mirage-looking alleys developed
in the high lands; and large lands were developed along the ports due to transportation and industry-
Session 5
friendly environment.
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<Picture> Urban Design of the Old Downtown in Different Patterns and on Different Scale
<Picture> Topographic Pattern that Looks like a Wriggling Dragon
Those patterns were developed from 300 to 130 years ago. In the patterns, there is a harmony of different
spaces: space left by the Korean War, space of residential types and blocks made amid intensive urban
development, and space of un-renovated communities and their old memories.
The multi-leveled topography pattern provides layers of life in multi-levels. The rugged topography taught
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people compliance. Fragmented pieces of land along Sanbok Road and other little roads connecting the
pieces are stretched to the old downtown and ports. The winding lines of roads are the patterns of survival
and the joys and sorrows of the people of the city.
As such, from now on, you may not become emotional or romantic as visitors feel when they see the
alleys, slopes of steps, and narrow paths. Now, it is crucial that the renovation of these areas be geared
toward restoring the time-honored patterns focusing on each small patterns unique characteristics, not
toward large-scale block making after tearing down everything in the areas.
People often say, Three thousand stitches cannot beat guide rope and Nothing is complete unless you
put it in final shape. They point out the importance of the main stream or backbone. Instead, it could be
possible that people now hopefully say, Old alleys make money, Old steps remain and life gets better,
or If small old houses are well managed, life will turn prosperous.
3.1.2 Contours are alive.
When one has noticeable looks on his/her face or balanced volume on the sides of the face, we say he/she
has obvious contours of the face. The same applies to a city. If the contours of the city are alive, the city
has a three-dimensional effect. This effect is created not by efficient land use and the differentiated usage,
but by the multiple levels in its topography.
Two methods are used to make the three-dimensional effect prominent. One is to erect skyscrapers in
groups so that the skylines significantly fluctuate along the outlines of different sizes of buildings. The
other is to develop the city without damaging the time-honored structures and the original topography and
geography. In order to maintain the image of modern city, Busan shall take the latter method.
In order for the city contours not to be interrupted, other structures should not block the ridgeline of the
city, and structures should not stand out from one another. The steep-sloped hills have slowed down
the citys economic development pace. The economic crisis in the 90s accidentally contributed to the
maintaining of the current ridgelines of the city.
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<Picture> Contour of Modern Busan When Viewed from North Port Renovation Site
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Proceedings
The contours of the city based on its topography are also related to another value: silhouette. The old
downtown of Busan is fan-shaped, east to west. The sun rises and sets along on the same horizontal line.
The silhouette along the ridge of the hills or anywhere toward the west at dusk offers one fascinating
scenic view. Not many cities have widely recognized silhouettes, but Busan does.
<Picture> Multi-layers and Alleys in Modern Busan
2006 Master Plan of Busan Urban Landscape
3.2 Spatial Function

3.2.1 Modern production and living systems still work in the space of the present.
In recent days, culture is widely defined as a pattern of life which is commonly possessed by the public.
Among others, modern-style atmospheres and savours are considered living heritages, and much of the
heritages are cherished as precious local resources to unite the local communities and social bond.
Elements of living heritage can be limited to spaces and facilities directly or indirectly related to life
in modern times, means of nostalgia and memories from the 60s~70s economic boom (conventional
markets, tea rooms, narrows alleys in between houses, high-chimneyed public baths, barber shops),
and the food from the same period. However, ambiguity still exists as to how far the living heritage can
stretch, as such items are not significant in value enough be designated as heritages. That is why this
vague borderline had to succumb to various development projects in terms of their own preservation as
heritages. From one angle, they were just ordinary things easily found around us. Busan as a modern time
city is a rich repository of such living heritage, but the fast modernization-driven life-cycle has brought the
710
old alleys and hills to a fall as the need for vehicles (parking spaces) and spacious townhouses increased.
The living heritages defined in this paper cover the items that are far from todays life. Most of them are
viewed as uncomfortable, time-consuming, old-fashioned and narrow.
<Picture> Life in Mountain and on Hill
<Picture> Life at Sea and Port
The challenge we have to take now is to catch two rabbits at the same time. We need to preserve the
above-mentioned living heritage, and also, improve all the conditions of the modern time many people
have lived in. Sanbok Road has remained the same ever since its massive transformation back in the
90s when shacks (unregistered) from the past turned into fancy houses and townhouses. This is maybe
because the narrow and steep-sloped alleys do not go with profit-making economic principles.
Such background has changed the renovation of constructing taller and wider buildings into the idea of
regeneration for living together. As a result, Busan is undergoing various projects such as renaissance
in Sanbok Road, happy communities, construction of structures from the modern time in order to bring
modern Busan back to life.
Nonetheless, the end of such movement looks distant. The rigid and rigorous lifestyle of the past has
prevented us from changing from quantity to quality, from quick development of hardware to slow
development of software regarding the content and story based welfare and culture.
3.2.2 The history of Busan in the modern time matches that of Korea in the same period.
Cities are where people come to live together in harmony. Among others, port cities provide a
wonderful living base for people to live for an affluent future based on lots of resources both in land
Busan is a city of staple industries first developed in the modern time including fisheries and logistics.
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and in the sea.

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Although Busan yielded its ship-making and manufacturing industries to Geoje and Gumi, respectively,
it still is on the frontline in logistics and fisheries, which represent the industrial history of Busan and of
Korea.
From modern time Busans perspective, its
industrial history has yielded industrial heritage.
This heritage is the sites and facilities of Busans
many different industriesagriculture, iron
and steel-making, mining, fisheries, logistics,
manufacturing, ship-making, and more. Most of
the heritage remains in the old downtown and at
the ports. Plants and warehouses which are closed
<Picture> Closed Namseon Warehouse Should be Restored
still remain in their mega-structures. Rather than to

just destroy them, they should be considered as a
preservable industrial heritage, and therefore, renovated into structures that offer urban functions. That is
why they attract attention from home and abroad in terms of reusing and recycling of resources.
The modern period in Busan is also represented
by the worlds fifth largest logistics and fisheries,
which recorded a record trade volume of a billion
dollars. For the past ten decades, the industries
we remember enjoyed record prosperity, and
this growth happened where water and land
met. No doubt Busan has invaluable assets.
Learning from the mistakes made in the course
of the development of the North Port, Busan
desperately needs, though time-consuming,
careful decision and consideration in regard to
industrial heritage in logistics, fisheries and shipmaking at South Port.
<Picture> Closed Namseon Warehouse Should be Restored
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4. Conclusion
Busan is located at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Amidst the mountain ranges stretching south
from inland lies a network of roads and railroads in and around the city. At the end of the network is the
sea, making Busan the gateway to the world out there. Such a geographical fork has made Busan stand not
on the end but on the cutting edge.
As such, Busan does not feel afraid of the challenges coming from nowhere up front or behind. The front
blocked by the tangled mountains has given the city resilience to overcome unexpected challenges; the sea
has made the city dream of infinity. However, at the same time, the city often fell into self-complacency
and passiveness, and the lack of opportunities to be compared with others discouraged the city from
developing based on liberty.
Fortunately, the world is changing. The world now makes cities change to have self-management and
self-protection. Having an edge that differentiates a city from others is considered a great virtue in city
development. Busan also stands in line with this trend, gradually restoring its characteristics from its
modern time.
The aim should be to identify the roles Busan played for Korea in the 20th century and the memories and
traces Busan left so that they can regain their own space and original functions. They will push Busan
forward to entering the time of renovation.
As such, two suggestions can be made. First, it is necessary to establish the Busan Modernity Preservation
Foundation. Historical cities everywhere, not only in Korea but in other countries, are pleasant and
rememberable places to visit not only because they have many cultural assets, but because they have
the atmosphere and landscape that local people and surrounding nature make in harmony. Therefore,
identifying more means of memory and traces of modern Busan will transform Busan into a new modern
Busan.
In order for this to happen, Busans modernity should continue to be identified and preserved. The marks
and traces of the past modern Busan and its potential should be identified and listed. This should include
not only the current cultural assets but also many other small things: various worn-out historical structures,
old roads, souvenirs, sites, industrial heritage, peculiar cultural sceneries, figures and arts, monumental
renovation projects should follow to turn them into new traces and memories of the city. The projects
include restoration, preservation, improvement and maintenance, renovation, expansion, relocation and
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accidents, old forests and street trees-which should be archived. At the same time, multi-faceted

Proceedings
change of usage.
This is not an easy task. Things should be considered as to who should do it and how the needed funds
should be raised, because the existing public institutions and civil organizations alone cannot handle
it. That is why the above-mentioned foundation should be established. With the foundation, Busans
modernity will be viewed rightly.
Second, it is necessary to introduce the concept of Busan Future Heritage. Things change rapidly. It may
not be always viewed negatively. What makes Korea strong is the peoples driving force and unity, which
are rooted in the Korean culture of rapidity. One side effect of this culture is that sometimes, valuable
things are missed. Since the 1960s, things have been development-oriented. Change will continue, and
development trends will also continue to outpace preservation movements for some time.
On the other hand, what journalist Jane Jacobs and urban anthropoligist Lewis Mumford noted 50 years
ago is becoming a reality. Their statements have some keywords: local, small things, local culture,
cultural industry, creative cities, low-rise, old buildings, people, urban emotions, walking, borderlines,
multiple stories, low-rise and high-density, location features, semi-public space, regeneration, community,
neighborhood, alleys between houses, and urban history. All of them are directly and indirectly related
to what Busan is pursuing and should pursue. Among them, Busan Future Heritage will be one that will
preserve things which may possibly vanish and should be passed on to the future generations.
Though some of them may not be valuable enough to earn the title of heritage, possible candidates are
as follows: winding Sanbok Road, the site of crane groups at Jaseongdae Port, Sailo at Yanggok Port,
Yeongdo Bridge, Busandaegyo Bridge, Gukje Market, Gupo Market, an array of used books shops in
Bosu-dong, 40-step stairway and nearby stairs, 186-step stairway, alleys in the old downtown, Gongdong
Fish Market at dawn, docks of Hanjin Heavy Industry Co., Gudeok Gym, Jeroi Lighthouse, seawalls and
bonded warehouses at South Port, Pier 1, Pier 2, woman merchants in Jagalchi Market, port stew, dried
seafood stands in Jagalchi Market, sashimi, grilled mackerels, wheat noodles, Busan Tower, food stands
in Nampo-dong, Baekgudang Bakery, Halmae noodles, green onion pan-fries in Dongnae, Sanseong rice
wine, nuts pancakes at BIFF Square, sunset at Daedaepo Beach, sunrise at the sea near Songjeong, the
island full of camellia flowers, Nakdonggang River, Gwangadaegyo Bridge, closed sections of Donghae
Nambu railway, Gudeok Stadium, UN Park, Mt. Yongdusan Park, Taejongdae, Yigidae, Haeundae Beach,
Hongtipo inlet, Jangrimpo inlet, Cheongsapo inlet, Gudeokpo inlet, Jeungsan, Yeongju East Tunnel,
overpass in Munhyeon, Busan Civil Park (to be established), hot springs in Dongnae, Baeksan Sanghoi
(restored), Namseon Warehouse (restored), Baekje Hospital, cultural village in Gamcheon, Maejukjo
Village, Anchang Village, Mt. Bokbyeongsan, Gwannam-ro, Daebyeon Port, anchovies and seaweed in
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Gijang, etc.
The above heritages may not have significant economical effects, but will serve as a way to go back in
time to remember modern Busan many years ago. They remain to be evaluated and better appreciated by
the citizens of Busan.
Modern Busan in the past will no long be remembered negatively and as an inconvenience. Modern
Busan today will be attractive based on creativeness and grace. Future heritages will be the infrastructure
of blessing that gives meaning to the existence of Busan and its new prosperity in the future.
References
Jo Seong Tae Kang Dong Jin 2009. Analysis on Change of Shoreline of Busan Port. Urban Design
Institute of Korea Journal 10-4, pp. 249~265.
Cha Chulwook 2011. War and Busan People: What the War Left Behind. Lecture on studies on Busan:
studies on Busan, Meet on the road. Lecture material.
Session 5
Choi Hae Gun 2001. My Love, Sea of Busan. Busan: Busan Metropolitan City.
715

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Proceedings

The 2nd World Humanities Forum

The 2nd World Humanities Forum

The 2nd World Humanities Forum

/ Yersu Kim (Kyung Hee University)

Catharsis by Confronting the Past: Lessons of Germanys Double Burden of Dictatorship

/ Konrad H. Jarausch (University of North Carolina)

Regeneration by Complete Humanism

* La rgnrscence par lhumanisme intgral 53

1. Memories, Representations and Working through Genocides

/ Daniel Feierstein (National University of Tres de Febrero)

2. Nepal Searching for Democratic Soul

/ Narayan Wagle (Author/Journalist)

/ Kyung Sik Suh (Tokyo Keizai University)

4. Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian Epic in Modern War

/ Wai Chee Dimock (Yale University)

/ Hwe Ik Zhang (Seoul National University)

2. Becoming the Alien: Avatar and District 9

/ Andrew M. Gordon (University of Florida)

/ Peter L. Rudnytsky (University of Florida )

4. Illness and Art

/ Desmond Egan (Irish Poet)

/ Johan Hattingh (Stellenbosch University)

/ Yasunari Takada (The University of Tokyo)

/ Heisook Kim (Ewha Womans University)

/ Luca Maria Scarantino (IULM University)

Parallel 1-2. Who Should Be Listened To?

/ Tunde Adeleke (Iowa State University)

/ Yong-gyu Kim (Pusan National University)

/ Zhao Xudong (Renmin University)

Parallel 1-3. Healing Practices in the Humanities

/ Peter B. Raabe (University of the Fraser Valley)

2. Instances of Philosophical Counseling and Byzantine Philosophy

/ Kayama Rika (Rikkyo University)

4. Healing Practices in the Humanities: A Search in Progress

The 2nd World Humanities Forum

Parallel 2-1. The Humanities, Narratives, Memory, and Healing

1. The Humanities and Medicine: Narratives of Illness and Suffering

/ John Clammer (United Nations University)

/ Jung-Hwa Yun (Ewha Womans University)

/ Elizabeth S. Gunn (Morgan State University)

/ Myung-joo Kim (Chungnam National University)

Parallel 2-2. Language, Gender, and Senses

1. Healing Thought: Therapeutic Philosophy and the Critique of Metaphysics

/ Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University )

2. The Practicing of Feminism as Healing Humanities

/ Ra-Keum Huh (Ewha Womans University)

/ Wooryong Park (Sogang University)

4. The Healing Function of Talchum

/ Hyun Shik Ju (Sogang University)

Parallel 2-3. Diseases, Pathology, and Social Healing

/ Ananta Kumar Giri (Madras Institute of Development Studies)

/ Kang Ha Yu (Kangwon National University)

/ Ronel P. Dela Cruz (St. Paul University Quezon City)

/ Young-Wan Kim (Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine)

1. Narratives as Healing: Perspectives from Environmental History

/ Gregory Quenet (University of Versailles-Quentin-en-Yvelines)

2. Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans: A Historicized Account

/ Ranjan Chakrabarti (Vidyasagar University)

Parallel 3-2. MEST/NRF: Healing Humanities in Korea

1. The Humanities Policy and Their Social Contributions in Korea

/ Kidong Song (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology)

2. Humanities Therapy: Theory and Practice

/ Young E. Rhee (Kangwon National University)

2. Instances of Philosophical Counseling and Byzantine Philosophy

1 cf. Healing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing, accessed on September 22, 2012.

2 cf. Satisfaction with Life Index, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index, accessed on September 22,

7 Kim, op. cit., p. 172.

4. Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian Epic in Modern War